Road Closed

I can't tell you how glad I am to be sat at home writing this, but maybe by the end of this story you'll be able to work it out for yourself.

The A6024 is a road I've travelled many times, in all seasons and all weathers, as it leads from the A628 (the main Manchester-Barnsley trunk road) to Holmfirth, via Holme village where I once lived. It is regularly closed in bad weather, owing to being very steep, relatively high in altitude and quite exposed. Even so, locals know that the "Yorkshire side" - that is, the road from Holme village to the summit - will usually be kept open in all but the very worst weather, on account of engineers needing 24-hour access to the radio mast at the top. The "Derbyshire side," despite being slightly less steep, doesn't enjoy such luxury and is quite often heavily snow-bound. Even so, experience has shown me that there's a 50-50 chance it will be passable with care, unless the snow has already been compacted to ice.

With all this in mind, I set off for Holme yesterday fully expecting the road to be closed. After a week of bad weather, including 2-3 inches of snow, I knew it was likely. But I also "knew" that the snow wasn't recent, so there had been chance for the gritters to do their work, and if I could make it to the top I'd be OK going down the other side. So I drove past the "Road Closed" sign at the junction with the A628 and waited to see how much conditions would deteriorate as I climbed higher.

The road showed distinct signs of having been well gritted, and for a mile or so there were only a few small patches of compacted snow to negotiate. My confidence received a boost on the longest of the straight climbs from the sight of a white van heading in the opposite direction. The driver made no attempt to signal me to stop or turn around, which strengthened my presumption that he had made it over the top and there was no reason to abandon my route.

I didn't have to go much further before my resolve took its first knock. At the point marked "A" in the aerial view shown here, the road becomes noticeably steeper and was also much icier. A Volvo estate had failed to negotiate the incline and come to rest at a 45° angle, taking up three-quarters of the road. There was room to pass - just - and I hadn't yet lost either traction or speed, so I made the split-second decision to continue. I successfully negotiated the gap, but the road beyond the Volvo became icier still, and I'd reckoned without the chewing up of the grass verge caused by the white van I'd seen moments before. Within seconds my front wheels started spinning, while my back wheels became mired in the mud. I slipped backward, steered frantically to avoid connecting with the Volvo, and came to rest stuck in the shallow ditch.

I span the wheels a few more times, but it was clearly hopeless. I wasn't going anywhere. Luck, however, had not totally deserted me. Nikki had taken the afternoon off, and was at home. And I had my phone with me. It may seem strange (and it's a habit I now plan to lose) but mostly I don't carry my mobile around, especially at weekends. It's a work phone, and I hate taking work calls out of hours. But today, fortunately, a colleague was covering for me at a review meeting (so I could leave early to pick Blythe up) on condition that I was available to handle any "hard" questions by phone.

I called Nikki, and as I dialled my phone gave out its low battery warning. Boop-boop-boop. I've always thought it's a sad little chime, but right then it was terrifying! When Nikki answered I rattled off my situation, asked her to organise a recovery vehicle, and rang off as quickly as I could to conserve the battery. A few minutes later she phoned back with the news that it would be at least an hour as they had to wait for a 4x4 recovery vehicle, but they would definitely be there and I was to phone back if anything changed. I turned the engine off, and climbed out to survey the situation. The car was at a complementary angle to the Volvo, slightly ahead, so between the two of us we completely blocked the road. He had obviously been there overnight - the windscreen covered in heavy frost - and from the dangling passenger door mirror I surmised he'd endured a few knocks before giving up the climb. My offside front wheel stood on gritted slush but would bite into the tarmac if I tried to move. The nearside though, span freely on inch-thick ice. Without a shovel - or indeed any tools to speak of - I had no chance of digging down to tarmac on that side and I couldn't have opened the back anyway as it was wedged against the bank. I got back in, reached for a crossword puzzle, and settled in for a long wait.

Barely 15 minutes later the -7°C outside temperature had crept noticeably into the cabin. I fired up the engine for a few minutes. Steve Wright kept up his jaunty Christmas banter on Radio 2 and I wondered how long "at least an hour" would turn out to be, and whether there'd be any adverse effects of running the engine for long periods of time while stationary on a hill. "Boop-boop-boop," said my phone.

After another 30 minutes, the monotony was relieved by the arrival, from behind, of a Land Rover bearing flashing lights. I thought at first it was the police, and had begun composing an explanation as to why I was stuck on a closed road when I realised it was a BT Openreach vehicle. It pulled up behind the Volvo and two guys walked over for a chat. They'd been on their way to the radio mast (the "Y" shaped structure at the top of the hill just above point "A" on the map). A bit of human company was more than welcome - despite the embarrassing circumstances - and the guys, being typical engineers, began to cast around for a solution to the problem. They were in the wrong position to pull me out, but one of them took a hand shovel and a wire brush and collected a small amount of grit from the meagre piles on the road, and spread it under my iced wheel while the other one offered me the use of his BlackBerry to reassure Nikki I was OK, but still waiting. Having done all they could and confirmed that recovery was definitely on the way, they left me to it, offering a final word of advice to keep the cabin temperature up. By now it was after 3.30 and the sun was only just above the horizon. It was about to get much colder.

It wasn't very long before I'd finished the crossword and began to get bored with waiting. I took another look at the icy side and pondered whether the grit had done any good. Only one way to find out. I started her up again and attempted to pull forward. Success! Brief success, as the front wheels reached the next patch of ice. I span them, and they chewed their way down to tarmac again, lurching forward another couple of inches. I was stuck again. Another recce revealed that one rear wheel was carrying a wedge of sod from the ditch which was acting like a chock. I kicked it free and tried again. Another six inches of progress! By this time I'd gained a couple of feet on the Volvo. I was determined to get free. Surely I could make it the final foot to a less icy part of the road? I was only a couple of hundred yards from the summit and the well-treated side of the hill. A final check of all four wheels and I reckoned if I rolled back a few inches and straightened up, I'd have three wheels on (slushy) tarmac. With that manoeuvre completed, I span those front wheels for all they were worth, steered left and right to help the tyres find a purchase, and with a loud CLUNK I shot forward onto the next gritted section and began to pick up speed.

I made certain I'd crested the hill before calling Nikki to cancel the recovery, and drove confidently past the radio mast, and the vantage point car park (small white blob on the opposite side of the road above). But what's this? I've just passed the last place where it's possible to turn around and... the road on the Yorkshire side hasn't been treated. If anything it's even icier than on the way up. My attempts at gentle braking are successful - for a few seconds. Then the wheels lock and the car begins to slide. And pick up speed.

Like many of you, I've watched the YouTube footage of cars sliding down urban streets in the snow. Funny, aren't they? Unless you're driving. But on those videos the worst that usually happens is a slow-motion fender bender as the sliding vehicle connects with parked cars, or street furniture. Out here, on a rapidly-darkening hillside in the middle of nowhere, there are no parked cars and precious little street furniture. Only intermittent barriers. Nothing to stop me careering off the road and down the hill. I stood on the brakes. I pulled on the handbrake. And the car started to spin around.

I couldn't let that happen. I'd lose all control. I let the wheels turn again long enough to steer back to a straight course, and re-applied the brakes. I'd now picked up enough speed for the anti-lock brakes to kick in and this, combined with a fortuitous patch of slush, allowed me to bring the car to a stop, catch my breath, and wait for my heart to stop racing. By now it was almost dark and I faced a long descent. I could see that parts of the road were relatively safe - chewed-up snow, small patches of grit and even the occasional section of tarmac faintly visible. Other parts however, looked worryingly... glazed. Nothing for it but to proceed with extreme caution. I let the brakes off slightly, rolled forward an inch or two, and braked again. The car stopped. Again: release, roll, stop. After a few repeats I let the forward motion proceed without stops, but still at much less than walking pace. I knew I couldn't let the momentum build beyond where my limited traction could bring me to a stop again. Wherever possible I kept the wheels on snow, not letting my concentration waver for a second.

Headlights appeared behind me. Another car had crested the brow of the hill and started down, apparently making much better speed than I. I stopped and waited for him to pass at what looked like about 5mph. Either four-wheel drive, or over-confident, I suspected he would eventually wish he'd taken more care, but I wasn't about to follow his example, having neither 4WD or indeed much confidence left!

Headlights appeared in front of me. Soon I could make out the shape of a tractor coming up the hill. He noticed my slow progress and pulled onto the snow-covered grass verge to wait in case I lost it. I pulled level with him on the long straight stretch, at the mid-point between "Woodhead Road" and "A6024" on the aerial view (between markers "A" and "B"), and opened the window for a chat. It was the recovery man. He'd heard I'd got free and was on his way to collect the Volvo instead. I told him I was beginning to wish I'd waited for him. It would have been £150 (+VAT) well spent. He warned me of an abandoned van further down the hill and we set off again in opposite directions.

Progress continued pretty much as before until I reached the sharp bend at point "B". This is a steep, drifting right-hander with a nasty camber even in good weather. It was also the point at which the aforementioned van had been left, on the inside of the curve heading up. Fortunately it had at least been pulled partly off the road. Even so, I regarded the corner with mounting dread. The entire road surface shone dully in my headlights and for about 30 yards the road was significantly steeper than anything I'd encountered so far.

I didn't think it was possible for wheels to turn any slower than they had been and still impart forward motion, but I managed it somehow. It wasn't enough. Barely a yard into the turn the car started to slide, and since the camber wasn't in my favour the slide was sideways. Shortly accompanied by a slow and graceful pirouette as the back end started to overtake the front. There was nothing I could do but offer up a silent prayer of recognition that whatever was going to happen would happen, and attempt through a combination of rolling, steering and braking, to minimise the almost total loss of control.

The offside rear wheel hit the grass at the middle of the inside curve, which flipped the car forwards again. The straight stretch of road between "B" and "C" has a wide grass verge on the left and I managed, gathering pace at an alarming rate, to steer for this and get two wheels onto the grass. The drag from this, plus braking (with anti-lock) brought me to a halt a hundred yards further down the road. Without doubt the scariest hundred yards I've ever covered.

Once my heart rate had slowed to 500 beats a minute, I started off again, but since this is a very familiar road for me I knew there was another daunting hazard to come. Point "C". This time, a left-hand bend, so no verge would come to my rescue. And even sharper and steeper than the one I'd just endured. On the opposite side of the road, all along the outside curve of the corner, high concrete kerbs waited to cause extreme damage. I rolled up to the corner and considered my options, checking out the surface across the width of the road. It looked bad. I opened the door and put my foot out to test it. You know when people say "it was like a sheet of ice"? Well this wasn't like a sheet of ice. It was a sheet of ice. An alternative strategy to total loss of control  was most definitely called for.

The inside edge of the bend comprised a narrow concrete kerb set flush with the road, with a slightly wider grass/mud verge beyond. With careful steering and extreme slowness, I managed to keep both nearside wheels over the kerb around the whole corner, and thereby kept control. The remaining two bends - another right-hander but with a flat off-road passing place on my side; and another left-hander where the tall red-and-white plastic road block caused a minor navigation issue - were no problem compared to what I'd already experienced, and a few seconds later I was bowling along the flat, black, DRY tarmac into Holme village at a relatively normal pace.

Googlemaps tells me the distance from the top of the Moss to Holme village is 1.8 miles and should take 4 minutes. Yesterday that descent took me an hour and fifteen minutes and by the end my right leg was shaking with the sustained effort of controlled braking for every one of those 75 minutes.

For me, from now on, "Road Closed" will not mean "go on, I'll give it a go." It will mean that the road is closed.

Vinyl: Crosswinds

Artist: Billy Cobham
Owned on digital media: No
Want to replace: Yes

I may have mentioned before that I've never been especially pro-active when it comes to hunting down new music. Throughout my life what I've listened to has largely been dictated by direct recommendations from friends, or indirect ones - listening to stuff they brought into the sixth form common room, or played at home when I visited.

So I'm happy to acknowledge Stephen "Henry" Hallam as the suggestee in this case, and I well remember the Occasion of First Hearing. Our old physics teacher had invited his 'A' Level class round to his house for pizza (something which, on reflection, would probably be given a "dodgy" sticker these days, but was actually perfectly innocent - especially as there were about a dozen of us). I took along my ubiquitous portable stereo, and Henry brought some vinyl, of which this was one.

For many years this was the only Billy Cobham album I owned, but for more on this aspect of my old collection you'll have to wait for the next post in this series.

Book meme revisited

Last time I did one of these was way back in May 2008. This one comes, via Diane, courtesy of the BBC, who believe "most people will have read only 6 of the 100 books listed here." Which is very disdainful of them. Or are they just trying to make people feel better, in an age where - supposedly - fewer people are reading, and those who are, are reading less?

Anyway, the instructions say "Bold those books you've read in their entirety, italicize the ones you started but didn't finish or read an excerpt", so let's see how we get on. I've chosen to underline the ones I've read, rather than using bold. Bold formatting doesn't show up too well on this blog.

1) Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen
2) The Lord of the Rings - JRR Tolkien
3) Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte
4) Harry Potter series - JK Rowling
5) To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee (review here)
6) The Bible
7) Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte
8) Nineteen Eighty Four - George Orwell
9) His Dark Materials - Philip Pullman
10) Great Expectations - Charles Dickens
11) Little Women - Louisa M Alcott
12) Tess of the D’Urbervilles - Thomas Hardy
13) Catch 22 - Joseph Heller
14) Complete Works of Shakespeare
15) Rebecca - Daphne Du Maurier (review here)
16) The Hobbit - JRR Tolkien
17) Birdsong - Sebastian Faulks
18) Catcher in the Rye - JD Salinger
19) The Time Traveler’s Wife - Audrey Niffenegger
20) Middlemarch - George Eliot
21) Gone With The Wind - Margaret Mitchell
22) The Great Gatsby - F Scott Fitzgerald
23) The Scarlet Letter - Nathaniel Hawthorne
24) War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy
25) The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy - Douglas Adams
26) Brideshead Revisited - Evelyn Waugh (review here)
27) Crime and Punishment - Fyodor Dostoyevsky
28) Grapes Of Wrath - John Steinbeck
29) Alice in Wonderland - Lewis Carroll
30) The Wind in the Willows - Kenneth Grahame
31) Anna Karenina - Leo Tolstoy
32) David Copperfield - Charles Dickens
33) Chronicles of Narnia - CS Lewis
34) Emma -Jane Austen
35) Persuasion - Jane Austen
36) The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe - CS Lewis (um... this is part of the Chronicles of Narnia - see #33)
37) The Kite Runner - Khaled Hosseini
38) Captain Corelli’s Mandolin - Louis De Bernieres
39) Memoirs of a Geisha - Arthur Golden
40) Winnie the Pooh - A.A. Milne
41) Animal Farm - George Orwell
42) The Da Vinci Code - Dan Brown
43) One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
44) A Prayer for Owen Meaney - John Irving
45) The Woman in White - Wilkie Collins
46) Anne of Green Gables - LM Montgomery
47) Far From The Madding Crowd - Thomas Hardy
48) The Handmaid’s Tale - Margaret Atwood
49) Lord of the Flies - William Golding
50) Atonement - Ian McEwan
51) Life of Pi - Yann Martel (review here)
52) Dune - Frank Herbert
53) Cold Comfort Farm - Stella Gibbons
54) Sense and Sensibility - Jane Austen
55) A Suitable Boy - Vikram Seth
56) The Shadow of the Wind - Carlos Ruiz Zafon
57) A Tale Of Two Cities - Charles Dickens
58) Brave New World - Aldous Huxley
59) The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time - Mark Haddon
60) Love In The Time Of Cholera - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
61) Of Mice and Men - John Steinbeck
62) Lolita - Vladimir Nabokov
63) The Secret History - Donna Tartt (review here)
64) The Lovely Bones - Alice Sebold
65) Count of Monte Cristo - Alexandre Dumas
66) On The Road - Jack Kerouac
67) Jude the Obscure - Thomas Hardy
68) Bridget Jones’s Diary - Helen Fielding
69) Midnight’s Children - Salman Rushdie
70) Moby Dick - Herman Melville
71) Oliver Twist - Charles Dickens
72) Dracula - Bram Stoker
73) The Secret Garden - Frances Hodgson Burnett
74) Notes From A Small Island - Bill Bryson
75) Ulysses - James Joyce
76) The Inferno - Dante
77) Swallows and Amazons - Arthur Ransome
78) Germinal - Emile Zola
79) Vanity Fair - William Makepeace Thackeray
80) Possession - AS Byatt
81) A Christmas Carol - Charles Dickens
82) Cloud Atlas - David Mitchell (and God! Was it BORING)
83) The Color Purple - Alice Walker
84) The Remains of the Day - Kazuo Ishiguro
85) Madame Bovary - Gustave Flaubert
86) A Fine Balance - Rohinton Mistry
87) Charlotte’s Web - E.B. White
88) The Five People You Meet In Heaven - Mitch Albom
89) Adventures of Sherlock Holmes - Sir Arthur Conan Doyle (yes, I really have read the whole lot)
90) The Faraway Tree Collection - Enid Blyton
91) Heart of Darkness - Joseph Conrad
92) The Little Prince - Antoine De Saint-Exupery
93) The Wasp Factory - Iain Banks (review here)
94) Watership Down - Richard Adams
95) A Confederacy of Dunces - John Kennedy Toole
96) A Town Like Alice - Nevil Shute (one of my favourite books ever! - and not normally my sort of thing)
97) The Three Musketeers - Alexandre Dumas
98) Hamlet - William Shakespeare (another strange entry, given that it's included in #14)
99) Charlie and the Chocolate Factory - Roald Dahl
100) Les Miserables - Victor Hugo

41 read, and 6 partials. Many of the ones I've not read wouldn't interest me, or I haven't even heard of. There are also a few that I intend to read (some that I've intended to read for years!) and undoubtedly some of those titles will be on the book club list before long!

White Rabbits

This time, notwithstanding the tag, it's actually shit my Dad said. "White Rabbits," he'd say, on the first of the month, before he said anything else, allegedly for good luck. As with most things from my childhood this one has stuck with me forever.

No idea where it comes from, or how many other people are similarly afflicted, but even now - with my sane, scientific, logical, unsuperstitious head on, and happily walking under ladders and spilling salt all over the place (especially when I drop the salt grinder into my soup, but that's another story) - I still get an involuntary twinge every 1st of the month when I remember I didn't say "white rabbits."

I wasn't at all surprised to discover Wikipedia has quite a long diatribe on the subject. That entry has quite a few variations I'd never heard of, but strangely doesn't record our family variation, which declares months without an "R" in their name as rabbit-free zones.

Naturally, a common unwanted side effect of that is to ALWAYS forget to start up the rabbiting again in September, having had all of May, June, July and August off.

Where the bodies are

I love predictive text. I know a lot of people don't get on with it, but it's like any other technology - once you get used to trusting it, it's great. And not only quicker, easier, and - on my phone at least - intelligent (it learns my patterns), but it also occasionally and unintentionally comes up with some real howlers.

Like recently when I was sending a text about 'Andy', the first suggestion the phone came up with was 'Body'. Hardy har har.

Soapy fish

Part of a conversation we were having the other day triggered a childhood memory illustrating an almost-forgotten art in modern households. Thrift. For your own amusement, try explaining this to one or more young people between the ages of 10 and 25, and watch their faces as the disbelief and incredulity mounts at the realisation that anyone could have gone to so much trouble to save such small sums of money.

When I was a kid, soap was - relatively - expensive. Or at least, that's what my Mum told me (hence the tag). So it was important to make it last as long as possible. Naturally, that didn't involve NOT washing - being thought dirty was a crime (or even, a SIN!) even worse than being thought a spendthrift - but it did mean hanging on to each bar of soap until it was totally used up, and we had an ingenious method of using those last tricky little slivers that could slip out of your hand and hide on bathroom floor, behind the pedestal. A soap fish. Made of synthetic sponge in the shape of a fish - it had eyes, and fins, and everything - you could shove your soapy remains up its jacksie and use it to wash in the bath. And I did. Pretty much until I started big school. I clearly remember the frustration of not being able to actually play with the damn thing in the bath - it was a fish, after all - on account of that dissolving its soapy guts too quickly for True Thrift(*). No, it was for washing, not for playing. That was made abundantly clear.

The soapy sponge fish (or was it a spongy soap fish?) fell apart eventually, and my Mum was gutted to discover she couldn't find a replacement anywhere. It was OK though, because by then I was old enough to learn the trick of "gluing" the old sliver of soap to a new bar, carefully sticking down the edges all round so you didn't accidentally knock the parasitic little piece off its bigger, younger brother. Waste not, want not, as was constantly drummed into me as soon as I was old enough to hear.

Incidentally the "importance" of not wasting soap - engraved deeply as it was on my psyche as a child - stayed with me long after it should have done. I think I was in my early forties, stood at the bathroom sink gluing some soap together when I suddenly thought "what the FUCK am I doing?"

(*) Could be a good title for a movie. What do you think?

The Z Factor

I haven't written much about this year's X Factor. In fact, on checking, I haven't written anything at all about X Factor on this blog, ever. Which is strange for someone who used to write between 1 and 5 "TV critic" posts a day on TV Scoop. Why is that, I wonder? Well the title of this post might give you a clue. I honestly don't think I've seen such an array of total bollocks claiming to be singers in my life, and last night reached the absolute nadir of the dregs of the pit of Hades.

"Rock Night" it claimed to be, so you'll pardon me for expressing some surprise at the collection of bland ballads we were subjected to, all (naturally) greeted with effervescent enthusiasm by the four judges who are, apparently, increasingly losing the plot when it comes to having any discernable clue what they're listening to. Take, for example, Rebecca. One of the best of the bad bunch, I'd have to agree, but what's with Dannii's comments? The acts performed two songs last night, as we're getting down to smaller numbers now and they need to pad the show out a bit to maximise the ad revenues. So for her first song, Rebecca, as is her wont, stood rigidly behind the microphone and sang sweetly. "That was nice," Dannii enthused, "but I'd like to see a little more performance. You know, move about a bit." (I'm paraphrasing). So here's Rebecca's second number, where she stood rigidly behind the microphone and sang sweetly. And a couple of times, still standing on the spot, swayed her hips a bit. "Now THAT's the kind of performance I was looking for!" gushed Dannii. HUH?

But it would be wrong to single out Dannii in the stupid comments stakes. They're all just as bad as each other, trotting out the same old (and I mean... OLD) clichés time after time, making it their own, believable, relevant, true recording artist, with a liberal smattering of the usual "do you know what"s and "let me tell you"s added in to make absolutely sure that we all fall asleep.

If I didn't believe this show had jumped the shark before, I certainly reached that conclusion very early on in this series. The "vote for the worst" campaign has literally its worst contestant this year in Wagner, and while the thought of "sticking it to the man" is mildly amusing and diverting it doesn't make up for the pain of having to sit - sorry "fast forward" - through his performances week after week. The predictable stories of judges' in-fighting, vote rigging, and production hoopla to keep the most controversial contestants in the show as long as possible have verged on the disgusting this year, but above all the media hype towers the dark truth of an almost incredible lack of serious talent in the line-up.

Of all last night's dross only Matt Cardle's Nights in White Satin (or "Knights..." as the ITV X Factor home page has it this morning. LOL) came anywhere close to being what I would call a half-decent performance by a new artist and even that started off weak and ended up edging towards a shout. And yet after every screeching, out of tune, boring repetition of songs we've heard a million times before, we're treated to the spectacle of four "experts" telling us we're listening to pure gold, when it's clear to anyone who can be bothered to open up their eyes and ears that they're watching, at best, glorified karaoke without a shred of originality and only the merest hint of musicality every so often.

Come on, Cowell. Haven't you made enough money yet? Piss off to America with this worn out formulaic crap, and give us our Saturday nights and our traditional Christmas No. 1s back again.

Come, friendly bombs, and fall on Slough!

A long day yesterday, as I rose at 4.15am and left the house a little more than half-an-hour later to make the drive to Slough. When I think back to the time - not that long gone - when I used to regularly do this twice (and on rare occasions, three times) a week it gives me shivers.

I've been fortunate this year. The last time I made the trek South, back in April and with a different destination (Bracknell), was the only other time I've had to drive anywhere. A welcome change from the financial year 2003/4 when I did 22,000 business miles. If I had to do that now I don't think I'd ever be awake outside of the working day!

Anyway, enough waffle. The point of this post is the number of surprises that pop up when you haven't taken a once-familiar journey for more than six months. For a start, Cherwell Valley services - where I habitually take my breakfast - has disappeared. Well, not disappeared exactly, but when you enter the car park in the darkness of a late autumn morning before 7am, and the building is not where it once was, the first impression is definitely one of it having been spirited away.

Its replacement, on the other side of the car park, has a prefabricated temporary feel to it, which was explained when I returned to the car. Dawn having broken a bit, I could see the beginnings of a new steel skeleton where the old building used to be, along with a couple of cranes, so the owners clearly intend eventually to put it back where it was. Bit of a drastic and expensive solution to a leaking roof (the only problem  I recall being visible with the old place), but it shows there's still lots of money in the motorway services game.

Slough too held some surprises. The company is vacating the building but it's a slow process, made even slower when they realised how hard it was going to be to move the test rigs. Finding space for them in the new building, levering them out of their current position (where they've been for at least ten years to my knowledge), moving them without "dropping" any, discovering there's a percentage of them that won't turn on again when they arrive at their new home (always a risk when moving equipment of any age) and all this at a time when we're in the middle of a critical test phase. It didn't take long for the buttock clenching to kick in and delay the move.

But the building is half decommissioned. So the first thing to greet me was a sign on the door saying reception was no longer manned and I should telephone whoever I was visiting to gain access. Only he was late. Thankfully a passing pedestrian happened to know the door code so I made it inside and headed up to the floor I used to hot desk on. Stepping out of the lift I noticed the door of the gents had been adorned with a sign saying "this facility is no longer in use" and on entering the office I discovered serried ranks of empty desks devoid of phones, power, or LAN.

I headed down the stairs (which weren't lit) towards a friendly, but dim light below. It was coming from the 4th floor. The top half of the building is effectively moth balled, and that includes the restaurant. So no hot food, no decent coffee, no snack bar, half as many toilets as there should be, and desk spaces at an all time low. Betjeman was right all along!

Book Review: The Wasp Factory

I'm familiar with Iain Banks' work, but until now only in his guise as Iain M. Banks, science fiction author. This is the first non-SF work of his that I've read, and probably, since it was his first novel, the best place to start.

I have a long-standing ambivalence to reviewing very well-known works. What, after all, can I say that hasn't already been said a hundred times (or to be entirely accurate, in the case of the reviews on Amazon, one hundred and thirty-five times)? But in terms of being well known, The Wasp Factory is in a league of its own. According to Wikipedia: "A 1997 poll of over 25,000 readers listed The Wasp Factory as one of the top 100 books of the 20th century."

If I hadn't already learned this was a debut novel, I think I would have worked it out for myself. It has distinct echoes of another debut novel - much less famous (at least, outside his immediate circle of friends) - by an acquaintance of mine. It is however, much more accomplished in its characterisation, use of language, and plotting. Only the smallest hints of apprenticeship remain in odd little corners of the narrative. In the main, it's an impressive piece, even though the subject matter is not something I'd normally choose. Geographically, emotionally and physically, the overarching impression of the story for me was one of claustrophobia. Frank inhabits a small Scottish island - reached from the mainland only via a bridge - which he rarely leaves, since his birth was unregistered and he doesn't attend school. His rituals are rigid, many of the places he spends his time are small and inaccessible - the attic room, the dugout - and he is alone for most of the time.

His story is surprising, unpredictable, and told with total candour. A compelling clarity and absence of sentiment that is immediately recognisable as the innermost thoughts of an adolescent boy in all their brutality and horror. Unlike many of the book club books of recent months, while easily as weird as the weirdest of them, this held my interest right up to the last page. And on attaining that page there was a welcome lack of "so what?" in the ending. Not a book I would expect to read again, but definitely enjoyable as a one-off if you're looking for something different.

Saddle sore

Well I suppose I should get back to this blogging lark. Trouble is, over the past couple of weeks, there's been a decided shortage of blog fodder and, perhaps more important, enthusiasm. My urge to commit thoughts to the ether tends to come in waves, with an amplitude of about - well - two weeks. I can tune to a different frequency if there's a lot of material about, or if something spurs me to a rant, but otherwise I'll just let it drift.

My main sources of inspiration haven't been of much help during the most recent hiatus. The Large Decorating Project is at the preparation stage, and as it is... Large... this stage is taking a long time. And, being preparation, it doesn't lend itself to much in the way of excitement, visible progress, or anything much worth writing about. My small (but dedicated!) audience wouldn't thank me, I'm sure, for endless posts about sanding, filling, more sanding, priming, and the long and tedious task (which occupied several hours this last weekend) of cleaning the plaster, PVA, and primer splashes off the floor. A task which, with the current state of my knees, I can only attack in sessions of about two hours at a time.

The Main Writing Project is still stalled, waiting for one of my many queries to bear fruit. It's probably about time to send out a fresh crop, and also long past time to pick up another project, but distractions and displacement activities have had the upper hand for months and the notional "garret studio" is starting to look rather cobwebby and abandoned.

Such distractions as there have been, have proved very entertaining. With my birthday imminent, Nikki presented me with the Collector's Edition BluRay disk of Avatar yesterday, which we sat down all together to watch during the afternoon - all 170 extended minutes of it. Fabulous. Saturday night saw us in town (an extremely rare occurrence) to celebrate a friend's birthday in the beautifully salubrious setting of The English Lounge. A perfect choice for a relaxing few pints in the company of friends, some of whom we haven't seen for way too long, and catch up with news.

It's a slight overstatement to say that the past two weeks have been entirely devoid of bloggable stuff, and indeed notes have been taken for future posts which might be coming your way over the next few days, but in the main it is all sanding, filling and painting for the foreseeable, so if you were waiting for nuggets you'll have to wait a while longer I'm afraid. And what's more my enthusiasm for anything in particular is likely to take a hard knock tomorrow, when for the first time in I don't know how long I'll be taking the early road to Slough (a 5am start is traditional, to be sure of getting into the office by about 9) to help out with testing on our current project. I've been lucky this last year or so, to avoid travel. After several years of making the Slough journey up to 3 times a week, followed by a couple of years taking the train to Croydon, I've somehow managed to wangle an entire year of working at home. But as there's no remote access to the test rigs, and there are small pockets of the current system that only I know anything about, my presence has been demanded and I must answer the call. Doesn't mean I have to like it.

The Alcove

The impending massive decorating job that is now hanging over me, following the completion of a significant construction project, is causing some serious displacement activity. Case in point: this weekend, which saw me finally lining out the display alcove in Nikki's half of the study. This is one of those "finishing off" jobs that tends to get left (in my world) ad infinitum. Well, not quite infinitum, but approaching three years, which is long enough to feel infinitumish.

That alcove - in what was a fireplace - has been hiding behind a bird bedecked parasol and falling firmly in the "out of sight; out of mind" category since the study was replastered. Such is the quantity of painting now facing me (easily several hectares) that it seemed sensible to put myself in the position of being able to finish all the outstanding painting at the same time. I mean, if there's priming and undercoating to be done, why leave out the priming and undercoating that'll be required on any of the other parts of the house? It feels slightly uncomfortable, exposing quite so much of the way my mind works, but there it is.

Armed with a few sheets of 9mm MDF, some ogee architrave and a couple of lengths of 1x1 battening, I set to yesterday morning and by lunchtime today the alcove looked like this.

Ready to receive a coat of primer as soon as I've punched and filled all the nail heads and gaps in The Room Above, and can do all the priming in one go.

The woodwork will eventually be traditional satin white, but the shelves and lining - at Nikki's suggestion - will be tricked out in the accent colour that matches the walls. This used to be called Raspberry Something, but in the intervening three years the Dulux marketing department has renamed it and it's now Redcurrant Glory. I'll be painting round the wood-burning stove on my side to match too. Glorious.

Vinyl: Waterloo Lily

Artist: Caravan
Owned on digital media: Yes
Want to replace: n/a

Finally we reach the last Caravan album in my previously-extensive collection: Waterloo Lily. As any fule kno (read: Google will tell you), this release followed Land of Grey and Pink in 1972, but after keyboardist Dave Sinclair had left and been replaced with the jazzier Steve Miller. This was to be Miller's only album with the band and the result is something that is simultaneously less than, and in many ways also more than, any of their other works.

I've always had mixed feelings about this album. Bits of it are always enjoyable, but other bits I need to be in the right mood for. The traditional "ensemble" track this time round is The Love In Your Eye/To Catch Me A Brother/Subsultus/etc and it's pure Caravan genius. Some of the other stuff, as I said, I can skip or not depending on my mood. And on the digitally remastered CD, in common with all the others I've acquired so far, the "bonus" tracks are a complete waste of time. It's very obvious why they never found their way onto any of the original albums and if they are truly examples of more recent work then either they've lost their way altogether or I am now too old and inflexible to appreciate it (which I doubt, given my recent admission of appreciating, say, Scissor Sisters ^_^).

LOL

Who'd have ever thought - more than ten years ago when we were all chatting - that there would come a time when it was acceptable to put "LOL" in a professional email?

Or that there'd be a chat client available to everyone in the office, regularly used for ad-hoc enquiries (which we used to do by phone) and that we'd be happily LOLling away in there too, not to mention adding smilies and whatnot.

Funny  how things change. OK, we're not yet at the level of doing a ROFLMAOPMPTIME during the working day (thank God!), but surely it can only be a matter of time. Retirement beckons, I think, before all dignity is lost.

Kerreh!

After a month's absence from Curry Club on account of our unexpected trip to Toronto, I was determined not to influence the choice of restaurant this time round but we ended up at my favourite Ayo Gurkhali anyway.

I say favourite, but apparently there's a new kid on the block - a fourth curry house has opened in the centre of Wilmslow - which hopefully I'll get the chance to suss out next month. Sounds like an interesting place: it's open all day and serves Indian-themed food that varies to suit the mood, be it breakfast, lunch or evening dinner. It'll have to go some to beat the Gurkhali, but I'll give it a fair hearing. Er, tasting.

Starting the evening off in our traditional haunt - the Bollin Fee - was a revelation too. Not only is their refurbishment complete, providing an altogether plusher experience with its tasteful deep pile carpets, upholstered bar stools (replacing the previous bum-numbers) and subdued mood lighting, but their first-week-of-the-month beer festival continues to go from strength to strength. This month there were seven guest ales to choose from. Almost enough to make me wish I lived in walking distance!

Not sure whether my enjoyment of tonight's main - a return to the well-loved Himalayan Cham-Cham - was blunted by the exotic flavour of my Chicken Sukuti starter (which I had as a main on my previous visit), or whether their standards are slipping. I hope it's not the latter as this has firmly established itself in my top five favourite curry restaurants. Whatever the reason, the Cham-Cham didn't have as much flavour tonight. I'll have to revisit the menu the next time we "try the Gurkhas". There remain at least half-a-dozen appealing dishes on the Specials menu I've not yet tried.

Finding amusement in simple things

I wouldn't dare to claim that I never feel grumpy (at least, not on a post with open comments), but I have always been able to find amusement in small things. I think it's a gift, being able to find something to smile or laugh about in even the darkest times, and it helps to lift a humdrum day out of the ordinary and into the sublime, even if only just into. It's a small glimmer of the kind of spirit that kept the Chilean miners going, and helps most of us get through the boring work day. Without it, we would be that other kind of people. The kind who growl and scowl their way through life, determined to look on the black side and make everyone else endure that black side too. The kind you find on, say, the London Underground.

With one massive decorating project ahead of me, and about a dozen smaller "finishing off" jobs still hanging over from earlier projects, we've been to B&Q for the last two Saturdays on the run. Exactly the kind of mundane trip that provides the opportunity to exercise a finely-honed sense of the ridiculous.

First visit we were amused to notice that someone had been at the sticky letters (those you might use, for instance, to spell out your house name if you were pretentious enough to have a named house - although obviously not that pretentious if you were considering naming it with sticky letters) and had rearranged the first row of letters to spell C O C K.

On our second visit - last Saturday - one of the things on the list was a black bucket to replace the one I'd "lent" to the builders and never got back. It's the kind of thing that - being not electrical, or illuminatory, or woody, or decorative, or (particularly) gardeny - doesn't have a natural home among the labyrinthine shelves, so we scoured the aisles for several minutes looking for them... in vain. We then repeated our aisle-scouring activities in the hope of finding a B&Q operative of whom we could enquire the location of the buckets. Rounding a corner into the very last aisle, we spotted a group of three operatives enjoying a cosy chat. They were standing next to a large pile of black plastic buckets.

One Thing

I think I've discovered a natural law. One of those like Sod's Law, or Gunnersen's Law, or Sattinger's Law. I hesitate to name it Digger's Law, because I'm not certain it has remained undiscovered until now. But I could perhaps call it the Law of Single Omission.

It goes something like this. If there are a number of things to be done, where "things" can be any list of objects or tasks and "to be done" is the action you are performing on them, then if your concentration lapses at any point there will always be one thing left over at the end.

Thus there is always one thing left to wash up after you've let the water out of the sink. Probably sitting on the cooker behind you rather than on the draining board.

And after you've put that shopping list back in your pocket, assuming there are so few items left on it you'll be able to remember them all, you'll get home to find there's one thing left you didn't buy.

What is it with scaffolders?

We've had scaffolding up twice since we've lived here. The first time, when we had the roof replaced, it stayed up for several weeks after the work was finished, and wasn't taken down until we'd prompted and poked and urged and pleaded several times.

As I mentioned at the time, I find it hard to relax properly when the house is surrounded by scaffolding. First floor windows in older properties, inevitably, are not as secure as ground floor ones. They don't have to be. Opportunist burglars don't carry ladders, and even planned burglaries don't usually involve clambering in through an upper-storey window. So I prefer to get it down as soon as practicable once the work is completed.

Our second experience of scaffolding has, so far, been if anything even worse than the first. Admittedly it's not all round the house this time - we've had the gable end repointed - but it is full height and it has been here since the middle of August.

The work was completed before our recent visit to Toronto, so as we were gone for 12 days we fully expected to find it gone on our return. No such luck. A phone call to the builder revealed he was just as surprised as we were, since he'd spoken to the scaffold guy before we went away. After chasing him, we were promised it would be gone by the end of that week. Then by the following Tuesday. No, Friday.

By now the excuses were coming thick and fast. He'd been on holiday, and his men had let the jobs pile up while he was away. He didn't know why it hadn't been done but he'd chase them up. They'd been onto our road and taken down the wrong set of scaffolding from someone else's house (!).

Finally with dark talk of "repercussions" and penalty payments, we were finally promised - no, really - that it would come down on Friday last. And did it? Well when the clock had ticked around to half past two in the afternoon I did begin to lose hope. They eventually arrived just before 3pm. It was gone by 5.

See, as far as I can make out, the thing with scaffold is, you pay for it up front and they come and erect it when you say you need it. But from that point on, there is absolutely no incentive for them to remove it, until the scaffold firm themselves need it for another job. It's like your house is their storage yard, often with built-in advertising. Removing the scaffold takes time and effort, and they've already had their money, so it's time and effort they feel they're not getting paid for.

If we need any more scaffold in the future I think I'll be making sure the penalty clauses are written in from the start, or hold back some money until they take their gear away. Tch.

Movie Review: Paranormal Activity

Let's get one thing straight right from the start: this is not a film I would ordinarily have chosen to watch, for two reasons. Firstly it's a horror movie, and although I would class myself, generally, as a horror fan - I've watched dozens over the years - I have to say that recently (and we're talking the last ten years probably) there's hardly been a decent horror film made. At all. In my opinion. They're all either slick CGI'd gorefests, or sick CGI'd gorefests, or just plain boring. The only one I can think of right now, within that 10-year window, that I really enjoyed was Gothica, and I'm not even sure that counts as a horror movie. I just checked and What Lies Beneath just makes it into the ten years, having been made in 2000. So those two, then. Apart from that, no. I reckon the horror genre has lost its way bigtime.

Second reason: it's made in that Blair-Witch-Project, Cloverfield-esque way with the pretend hand-held home camcorder amateur video shtick which, frankly, doesn't work for me at all. If I wanted to watch home movies I could go to any one of a dozen friends' houses and watch their crap. And in many cases their "crap" would actually be way better than this stuff that only pretends to be hand made in some kind of false, arty way that is just irritating.

So I wasn't expecting much, as you've no doubt realised by now. So why did I go? Well, it's Halloween for one. It was a Chorlton Players fundraiser - their first movie night - for two, and I like to support their efforts. And it was a girls' weekend for three. I often feel like we don't "do" much, so when a convenient local opportunity arises to do something a little (only a little) out of the ordinary, I don't like to pass it up.

And why Paranormal Activity? Well there was a choice of movies on offer which was put to a web vote, and this one won. I'll come clean and add that it got my vote too, because it was pretty much the only one on the list I hadn't seen before (alongside such staples as Evil Dead, Friday the 13th, Halloween, and American Werewolf in London, all of which I've seen a thousand times), and I didn't know about the Cloverfield production thing at the time.

I called this a "movie review" and so far this post has all been set-up, so let's get to the review part. It was OK.

What, you wanted more? Oh, alright. For much of the first half I could hardly hear a word they were saying. I think that's another aspect of the faux-home made thing; that they deliberately muddy the sound and mess with the levels so it's sometimes too loud, sometimes too quiet. Or maybe I'm just going deaf. Anyway, that. And it took forever to get started. OK, OK, I get it: there's something weird going on in the house and you're going to try to get it on tape. Jeez, does it really take twenty minutes (or something) to get that message across? Yes, there's some spooky stuff that sets your head tingling a bit, but the hard core frighteners, such as they are, are all in the last quarter (of what is really a very short movie - 86 minutes). I guess it's an attempt to build up the tension, but it's a bit weak. So, on balance, a bit meh, slow and boring for most of the first half, approaching interesting for most of the second half, with some occasional high points.

But fair play, for a film that only cost $11,000 to make and was filmed over 10 days in the director's own house, not a bad first effort. Be interesting to see what this guy is making in ten years' time, when you think how Spielberg got started. At least he didn't go down the gorefest route. I think a slightly less predictable ending would have been better, but it wasn't all bad.

Bloody hell #2

Appropriate, perhaps, to be talking about blood on Halloween weekend, but in this case it's real blood rather than fake blood, and the lack of it rather than the gory surfeit so popular with many of the costumes you might be thinking of putting on at some stage.

I had a text yesterday from the Blood Donor service warning that stocks were low and asking for my help. So I popped along to their website (because I'm one of those shy retiring types who prefers to do things by typing and reading rather than talking to a real person on the phone) to see what was afoot.

As it happened I ended up calling them anyway because I had to register to use the site and their security procedures meant I had to wait to receive my login details through the post before I could do anything useful online, but that's not the point of this post.

No, the point is the headline text that greets you when you visit the blood web site:

96% of us rely on the other 4% to give blood.

What? Are they serious? Don't get me wrong I'm very proud to be part of that 4% but, really? Every single scheduled and emergency operation throughout the UK relies on just FOUR percent of the population for its blood? Crikey. Come on you lot, get off your arses and get on your backs and get donating! Wimps.

OB

I may have ranted about this before (although I've checked, and I can't put my finger on the post at the moment), but one edition of the evening news last week really brought it into sharp focus. The problem? Outside broadcasts as a way of lending faux "realism" to news items. It does my head in on a regular basis, but on this particular night we were treated to three in quick succession.

Coverage of the inquest into the London Tube bombings? Let's have the reporter standing outside Aldgate tube station.
Wayne Rooney possibly leaving Man U? Stand outside Old Trafford.
Reporting the latest on the Government Spending Review? Stand outside Number 10.

WTF? The BBC have just had a 5-year licence freeze imposed and are supposedly wringing their hands trying to work out how to save money. Well apart from the obvious - cutting the salaries of prats like Graham Norton, Chrisses Moyles and Evans, et al - you could start by bringing these reporters in out of the cold. It adds a sum total of zero importance, content, or gravitas to a news report to have a reporter on location if all they are doing is standing and talking to the camera. They may as well be in the studio. They'd be warmer, happier and more relaxed. The viewing public wouldn't be subjected to that annoying satellite delay between the anchor handing over to the reporter and the reporter hearing that handover and starting his/her report. And most importantly in these straitened times, the Beeb would save a whole bundle of cash.

I don't know who thought up the idea of OB as a generic news coverage staple, probably someone with a vested interest in increasing the number of OBs, but it was a bad idea right from the off and it should be stopped. Now.

Kindle Edition

November's book club selection, voted in last night, is The Wasp Factory by Iain Banks. Many thousands of reviews of this online, it was highly controversial and acclaimed when first published, it's been around for 25 years, and it was a runaway winner in our monthly poll, the other choices only managing one vote each. Sounds like it will be a cracking read, if a little... grim... in parts.

So here I am on Amazon first thing this morning, putting in my order, rather disturbed to discover the following...

Formats:
Kindle Edition £4.51
Paperback £4.75

Huh? You're telling me all that paper manufacture, typesetting, print run, ink, cutting, binding, packing into boxes, shipping to the distributor, storage, shipping to the store, that is no longer necessary because of "the wonder" of Kindle... all that... translates into a retail saving of 24 PENCE???

Good grief.

Not that saving money is the main reason for buying a Kindle, but I'd have expected a bigger differential. At that rate and assuming I went for the non-3G version, I'd have to buy 455 books before I'd made back the outlay. Something which, at recent rates of purchase, would take about 20 years!

Book Review: The Suspicions of Mr Whicher

The book club member doing the choosing for this month is a fan of detective fiction. I know this on account of the fact that every one of her three choices occupied that genre. I dunno where these fans of a certain genre get off, foisting their preferences on a largely unwilling membership. You'd never catch a science fiction fan doing that.

I think the voting went so massively in favour of The Suspicions of Mr Whicher because it's based on a true story. Personally I'd have preferred Wilkie Collins' The Moonstone. I saw it dramatised on BBC Children's telly when I was a boy but somehow never got around to reading the book. Anyway, this is what we were stuck with, and as it turned out "stuck with" is the right way to describe it.

I wrote "based on a true story" above but it would be more accurate to say the book recounts the true story. More or less verbatim. With just enough additional prose to tie all the pieces together, it assembles the facts from newspaper reports, police notes, eye witness interviews, court transcriptions and such other information as is attainable through research, and then presents them chronologically with minimal interpretation and virtually no embellishment. What I had thought would make the book interesting and unique - the fact that it represents itself as the first true detective story (at least insofar as it occurs fairly close to the formation of Scotland Yard, when detectives were first invented) and the beginning of a cultural icon that remains popular to this day: the mystery of a murder in a locked house with multiple occupants - actually didn't help to make the story compelling at all, for me.

The Kent family - a complex set up involving a large number of children and step-children along with the master of the house, his second wife (originally the nanny) and their coterie of servants - go to bed one night and wake up the following morning to the discovery that one of them - the youngest - has been taken from his bed and murdered.

So the book unravels as a series of events, observations on various character traits of the players, a little bit of history of each as far as it's relevant to the story (and, later, straying into aspects totally irrelevant), in a way that I found almost entirely unprepossessing and worthy of only the most marginal interest. I suppose it didn't help that I'd worked out who the murderer was by about halfway through the first chapter, and only the small question of finding out whether or not I was right kept me going. Once again the book's sleeve is full of reviews calling it "absolutely riveting", "brilliant" and "gripping" but naturally the publishers aren't going to print sleeve notes revealing it to be "boring", "tedious" or "terminally dull" are they?

The author makes no attempt to heighten the mystery, or represent the chief detective - the eponymous Whicher - as anything other than a methodically plodding introvert with about as much charisma as a bowl of porridge, whose previous "successes" as a detective uniformly arise from his habit of deciding who did it and then badgering them until they confess. I begin to see who the TV detective Columbo was based on.

The "revelations" about the private life of the Kent family are dreadfully predictable and once the murderer has confessed and been imprisoned the book degenerates into a chronicle of how that prison time is spent, and what happens subsequently to all the other detectives, lawyers and family members over the next (would you believe it?) hundred years. The whole work could easily have been shortened by a third, which might have helped the crawling pace of the narrative. In the end the only positive thing I can find to say about it is that I was surprised by the ending - but only because it came much sooner than expected, the last quarter of the book being made up of footnotes and bibliography.

Good morning! This is your early morning call

Sunday. 7.45am. Not the time of day (or even day of week) you'd normally expect to receive a phone call from your mother. Especially one that goes: "I tried to call you yesterday and got a message saying 'the number you have dialled is not recognised' so I thought you'd emigrated to Canada and not told me."

Closely followed by the recently popular "I thought I was going to have to change my will."

Not sure if this is deliberate, but there's been an awful lot of talk of changing wills lately. As if the spectre of the loss of my (almost certainly enormous - *koff*) inheritance will be enough to make me toe the line and behave in a more dutiful fashion (by her reckoning).

Sheesh.

First Scrape

It was a bit of a shock to have to scrape the car on the first frosty morning of the season last Thursday, but even worse this morning as temperatures hit -2°C and the scraping was correspondingly more vigorous and knuckle-numbing.

There's only been a few years of my life (I could probably work it out exactly... hang on... *stares at fingers* ... 7) when I've enjoyed the luxury of a garaged car in the winter (and then only after a massive clearout and shelf- and wood store-building operation) and the benefits of that luxury were more than outweighed by the drawbacks in the end (!) but on mornings like this I must admit that a small part of me hankers after structural automotive protection of some kind. Even a car port would be enough to keep the frost off. Probably.

Commercial-Time

I've been trying to work out why I found the adverts on Canadian TV so intrusive and irritating. Canadian Broadcasting limits advertising to 15 mins per hour on commercial channels, but "only" 12 minutes per hour on "Specialty" channels. However those numbers apply to real commercials - i.e. those advertising product. From my admittedly brief exposure, it doesn't cover trailers. And it doesn't excuse the extremely annoying habit - something we don't have in the UK - of running the same ad twice in the same break - sometimes only 30 seconds apart - or running very similar ads, such as hair care products for two different types of hair, which have almost identical wording, serially. The worst we ever get is a repeat of the last few seconds of an ad - these agency types have learned their lessons about the way memory works - to "fix" the product in viewers' minds, but these almost always run at the end of the ad break, separated from the original by up to three or four minutes.

One evening I finally managed to watch a movie from beginning to end. Aliens. It was scheduled to air over three hours, which given its posted running time on IMDb of 137 mins leaves 43 mins for ads - 14.33 per hour. But they're not evenly split. The first hour felt almost like UK television. The first break didn't come until 20 past the hour, and the next was twenty minutes later, each one showing only 3-4 minutes of ads. I should have been wise. As the film continued, the frequency of breaks increased, to the point where the last half-hour of the film suffered three breaks of five minutes each.

I have no idea how the law constrains the incidence of ads. My Aliens experience would suggest that rather than being a rigid per-hour limit, that "15 minutes per hour" is an average. Being allowed to relax the grip of ads in some hours only to tighten it fiercely later, destroys any enjoyment.

I used to think I'd be able to live in Canada. That I'd actually quite enjoy it. But if I ever had to, I don't think I'd be watching any live TV. I'd be PVR-ing everything and spending a lot of time with my finger on the FF button!!

Used Dust Collectors

One of the most depressing aspects of our recent trip to Toronto was discovering how devalued an extensive array of "collectible" plates can become over a period of 30 or so years. It's not the intrinsic value - or lack of it - that depressed me. I hardly gave a second thought to the money side of it. What I found much more upsetting was how easy it is for someone, even someone of above average intelligence, to be convinced by well-meaning friends that something is worth collecting, and will appreciate in value. And thinking how disillusioned he must have been as the reality of their value slowly dawned.

eBay is saturated with these things, more often than not being offered at around 5 dollars (for something that could have originally cost anything from 50 to 150 dollars) and with no bids. To be sure of a sale at the best price, collectors are forced to keep all the original boxes (I found three large cartons full of them in the garage) and paperwork. This paperwork, tricked out in full Reader's Digest or Franklin Mint stylee, declares their "certification" of being part of a "limited edition" the limit, in most cases, being a run of 150 firing days. Imagine how many plates a modern ceramics factory is capable of churning out in 150 days and you'll get an idea of just how limited these editions were. Or not. Even with all the appropriate certification and authentic packaging the value, 20-30 years on, is on average less than a quarter of what you paid, assuming you can find a buyer at all.

I did eventually find a dealer who advertised that they were prepared to take on plate collections from estate sales. I emailed them a list and received a reply a couple of days after returning home, to the effect that they were already "fully stocked" with those items.

I did enjoy one moment of delicious irony though. While I was searching for some idea of how to get rid of the collection in the simplest way that would maximise the return, one of the pages I ended up at carried an ad for used dust collectors. Lower down I found a second ad, this time for "quality" dust collectors. Yes, I thought, I'm clearly in the right place.

Pensions again

At a time when I'm feeling particularly sore about my own pension - having had it ripped out from under me after 33 years by a company that took years of "pension holidays", and variously used the fund to pay off criminally negligent senior executives and to bankroll redundancy programmes - here comes a Panorama expose showing that I wouldn't have been much better off in a privately-held scheme.

Panorama: http://www.bbc.co.uk/pressoffice/pressreleases/stories/2010/10_october/04/panorama.shtml

Pay in 120,000 over 40 years; lose almost 100,000 in fees and commissions.

How is it even legal to have 80% of your money taken away from a pot that is supposed to look after you in your retirement? Why are the fees so high? Because the average length any particular share is held is now one year, and buying and selling the porfolio contents - the "churn" - attracts bumper brokerage charges and fees. And then there's the bonuses to pay, even if the fund hasn't performed well. And finally - surprise surprise - many of the investments involve kick-backs to the fund managers, incentivising them (see how effortlessly he invents new verbs!) to leave your money in under-performing investments because they pay the biggest bribes.

Yet another example of how the financial world stinks, and lines its own pockets at the expense of the ordinary guy struggling to put enough by to be comfortable in old age. Is it just me, or is this kind of thing becoming WAY too common these days?

The absurdity of following

Bearing in mind that we've recently been to Toronto and, as always with holidays, have therefore been spending more time "out and about" than usual - shopping, drinking, eating, watching the unfamiliar TV - it's as if the culture was thrown into a kind of relief by virtue of it being (only slightly, agreed) alien.

Somehow the brand names on the clothes, the celebrity magazines telling you how to be like someone, the adverts exhorting you to drink the same vodka, or coke, or juice as your "hero", all seemed more than usually visible, and definitely more than usually intrusive.

Isn't it the ultimate in sad that there are people who really believe aping the products that someone successful uses will give them their life or in some ill-defined and abstract way make the wannabes more like the... bes?

Free advertising, reflected cool. It's all shit, really.

Notes on a trip to Toronto

I've been away. We've been away. I did have access to a puter during this hiatus, but I didn't feel much like blogging (apart from that piece about Bob Edwards), and to be honest I haven't felt much like it since we got back (a week ago last Tuesday - October 12 - in the early hours of the morning. Jet lag? Maybe, a little. Holiday? Maybe, a little. Blogging can feel like work at times, which since I still entertain aspirations to be a full-time writer should probably be classed as A Good Thing, but who wants to work when they're on holiday? Especially when there's all that Coronation Street, EastEnders, Casualty, X Factor, Strictly and Spooks on the PVR that needs catching up with?

I wouldn't want to give the impression that we spent the whole of our remaining six holiday days in front of the TV. No, we went for the occasional walk. Did a bit of grocery shopping. Had lunch. But there was an awful lot of telly, it's true.

I think I might have been in awe of the raw *quality* of it all. After 12 days of Canadian TV I was starting to feel a bit like a vegetable. After being in a pressure cooker. And then a blender. And having been forced through a sieve. The chance to watch some British TV was like stepping into cool water after the burning heat of the desert.

So I made some notes in here while I was there (hence the title of this post) about my general impression of things that have changed in the five or six years since I was last in Toronto. Some of these will eventually be fully fledged posts in their own right. What remains in here is just jottings really.

The Americanisation of Canadian news - oh my GAAAHHD. I don't ever remember it being so breathless and repetitive. Maybe I was watching a US cable channel. Can't remember. Actually a lot of the really bad stuff I sat through WAS American. Endless sport, gameshows where the contestants are forced to clap incessantly like performing seals (Wheel of Fortune), adverts repeated twice in quick succession in the same break, breaks five minutes apart.

The litter. We've had this problem in the UK for as long as I can remember, but I always had this mental image of Canada being *clean*. I don't know if they've had to cut expenditure on street cleaners, or whether the younger generation is going the same way as much of England's youth - dropping their drinks cans and candy wrappers as soon as they've consumed the contents, no matter where that happens to be (I drove behind a carful of youths the other day, who seemed to think it was great fun to continue scouring the inside of the vehicle for bits of rubbish which they then dumped out of the windows) - or a combination of the two, but the streets around where we stayed were definitely besmirched. 

Cigarettes behind the wall. Apparently they've passed a law now preventing the display of tobacco products in corner shops, newsagents, convenience stores, etc. So instead they have row upon row of little grey plastic shutters behind the counter, which the cigarettes hide behind until the shop keeper rescues them at the request of the customer. I'd be interested to see the statistics on what effect this has on smoker numbers and consumption.

Maybe I'm getting old, or maybe the reason for our trip hung over our entire stay, leeching out much of the fun, but whatever the cause, this time round, I found Canada lacked a lot of the magic that I've come to expect from it.

Congratulations to Robert Edwards

Bob Edwards' pioneering work into in-vitro fertilisation began in the 1950s, and its first fruit "ripened" (in the form of "test-tube baby" Louise Brown) in 1978. He must be delighted at today's news that he's been awarded the Nobel Prize for medicine, but I have to ask: why has it taken more than 30 years?

I suppose it could have been worse. At least the Nobel committee didn't leave it until he was dead, like his research colleague Patrick Steptoe. Their story contains all the traditional elements of small guys with a vision fighting against opposition from all sides - church, government, scientific establishment, holders of research funds - and not giving up in the face of continual adversity.

Ralph Waldo Emerson famously said "Nothing great was ever achieved without enthusiasm" but enthusiasm is only one facet of success. An even greater ingredient is tenacity. Something Edwards and Steptoe had in spades, and which is embodied in many other well-used quotes. My personal favourite is good old Thomas Edison and his approach to inventing the electric lightbulb. He didn't view his (perhaps apocryphal) 10,000 unsuccessful attempts as failures, but merely treated each as a discovery of one more way that didn't work. A stepping stone to eventual success.

So whether your particular challenge is getting a book published, or buying a house, or finding a job, or trying to manage the estate of a deceased relative makes no difference. Just keep on keeping on.

Bloody Hell

I've had a gmail.com email address for almost exactly two months. Two months and two days, to be precise. I've never, so far, used it for anything. No subscriptions, no web forms, no purchases. I've only even disclosed what it is to very close family and friends, none of whom has ever used it.

I was spammed on it just now.

How does that work then? I only created the bloody thing as insurance against the day (rapidly approaching) when I'd have to abandon my main addresses at johnberesford.com.

It's about time something sensible, serious, and technologically impregnable was done to sort out flippin' spammers once and for all.

Flasher

I've long been of the opinion that just because you CAN do something, it doesn't mean you HAVE to.

If only BBC programme designers shared that opinion.

Recently we've been subjected to a series of really annoying animations on BBC News output. Whenever they put up a list to underline whatever point the talking head is making, each list item is accompanied by a matched pair of brackets - [ ] - that appear over the middle of the item and then gradually fade out as they slide apart heading for the start and end of the word respectively.

This is the wonderful world of Flash animation. A tool that has its place (probably) and can be very effective (occasionally) but which is so overused and ubiquitous now that it's become a joke. It is no longer clever or cool, assuming it ever was. It's been used in the title sequences of dramas for several years, as the actors names slide over each other in opposite directions, fading in or out as necessary. Or expanding as they fade - a trick that belongs in Flash 101.

None of this adds anything to the piece, whether it's a credit sequence or a news graphic or whatever. It's a distraction, and an expensive distraction at that, as it presumably requires the services of a graphic designer. Still, I guess the producers figure they've got all these graphic designers sitting around, right? May as well use them for something. And if you don't need a pie-chart for your particular piece, what are you gonna do? Go on, stick some Flash animation to the viewers. At least the more moronic ones will be impressed.

A series of sorry tales

I've been shopping on the Internet for over a decade, almost without incident. It seems either I've been very lucky, or I was saving all my bad luck up for our latest project.

We've been having an en-suite shower room fitted and our online purchases have, to say the least, not been straightforward. My previous successes in the area of online retail have definitely lowered my guard, to the point where I never even think of checking for adverse reviews before using a new supplier. More fool me. I can't work out whether the plumbing supply trade has more than its fair share of incompetents, but such has been our experience so far.

Problem #1: Broken shower tray; strange approach to customer service
We ordered a Coram shower tray and door from a supply company who quoted up to 5 days delivery. I gave the builder an estimate of arrival, to which he worked. It didn't turn up. To be fair, this was partly my fault for misreading the delivery details. It meant 5 *business* days. Buried even further in the small print, news that this countdown didn't start until after the products were shipped, and it had taken them two days to process the order and pick the goods from the warehouse. Hardly Internet speed that, is it?

But the problems didn't really start until the tray arrived. I should have been suspicious at the haste with which the courier dropped the goods off and presented his electronic device to record my signature, but a cursory glance revealed nothing amiss so I signed and he left. Three hours later, when the plumber came to remove the packaging, he discovered a huge chunk missing from one edge of the tray. A piece had been broken off and was rattling around inside the polythene sheet. I thought at first this had happened in transit - a result, perhaps, of heavy braking and the tray careering into another package in the van - but closer inspection showed that the package had previously been opened, and there was no waste trap included with the tray. It looked like a returned product had been recycled without being checked.

I returned to the supplier's website to look up the customer services number and was horrified to find they didn't have one. Policy. To "keep costs down" all customer complaints were handled by email. I emailed them, and proceeded (belatedly) to search out online reviews of the company. What I found sent a cold chill down my spine. Appalling reviews seemed to be the norm, and numbered in the hundreds, with only a handful of notes from satisfied customers. Late, incomplete, or totally absent deliveries, damaged goods, money taken from accounts before goods were shipped and never refunded. Lack of response to complaints. The same story told over and over again.

And then I received a reply to my customer services email. They handled (they said) all contact in the order of receipt (i.e. no attempt to prioritise urgent problems), and my ticket was #126 in the queue. I would receive an update on its progress every two hours until it was answered. Two hours later, I had moved to position #110 in the queue, but by now it was 3pm and they only work until 5. And this on the Friday before Bank Holiday weekend. I passed on the bad news to our plumber and builder, who began the process of scratching heads to work out how they could rejig their schedule to cope with the lack of a tray for what would probably be a minimum of another week.

The day after the holiday, the email countdown resumed. By then we had already investigated alternative suppliers. No local outlets carried stock and it soon became obvious our only recourse was to wait for the original suppliers to deal with the issue. This turned out to be a good thing, as my first contact with the support department that WASN'T a countdown informed me that a replacement would be despatched immediately. I replied that if this second delivery was going to take 9 days, like the first, that was unacceptable. "As a gesture of goodwill" they agreed to upgrade to next-day delivery and sure enough the replacement tray arrived the next day.

So a good result, eventually, but not without a deal of angst and I still wouldn't use them again. If I'd been able to talk to someone on the phone it could have been sorted on the Friday and a replacement delivered Saturday.

Problem #2: "Pedestal" Sink
We ordered a washbasin/toilet combo which came complete with pedestal. An easy assumption then that it had a standard fitting (wall mounted) to go with the pedestal. Wrong! The version supplied was designed to be fitted atop a vanitory unit. Luckily our builder had dealt with such a situation before, as none of us could face another trip around the complaint/replacement loop.

Problem #3: "Chrome" robe hooks
We chose a small (300mm wide) heated towel rail for the small return wall at the side of the shower, and I wanted some robe hooks to clip onto this similar to the one we already have in the main bathroom. I found two suitable designs but the one from taps4less, which because it was "chrome" came in considerably more expensive - like five times - the other, was exactly what I had in mind.

Delivery was swift, as was the disappointment when I opened the package to find the hooks (two of them in the deal) were not solid chrome, nor even chrome plated brass, but that awful faux-chrome plastic that they use for kiddies toys.

A brief sojourn in the online forums yet again revealed one awful review after another, with no evidence that anyone had ever had any satisfaction from long months of complaining. I decided to swallow it. Yet another company I'll never deal with again.

A Grizzly tale

Just back from another get-together with mates in Nottingham, where as usual a good time was had by all.

The festivities were not dampened at all by the weather, or my discovery a few minutes after arrival of another slow leak in one of my tyres, and were only slightly blunted by the absence of one of the couples.

This time round we enjoyed the hospitality of someone who hasn't hosted before (personal reasons that it would be inappropriate to bore you with) and who did an excellent job of not allowing his self-confessed lack of culinary accomplishment get in the way of a good party. He proved perfectly capable of (a) preparing enough garlic bread to sink the Bismarck, and (b) assembling a fine selection of takeaway flyers that empowered us to choose some of the most intensely cheesy pizza I have ever feasted on. Way to go, Griz.

Sometimes, the little guy wins

Just been reading a weekly news breakdown on the Guardian website. In among the headlines of Vince Cable's conference speech and Fatty Moyles' BBC Radio One rant, is the story of Paul Taylor, a 61-year-old widower who this week won a fight he began in 1995 to buy his council house under the right-to-buy scheme.

Back then the local authority refused the sale, arguing the house stood on consecrated land and also had a public footpath running through the garden. Undeterred, Taylor took a law degree and eventually was able to prove the house is built on separate land, and has no legal right of way through the garden.

The courts awarded him the right to buy the house (current value £350,000) at its 1995 market price, less the right-to-buy discount for long-term tenancy - in his case 30% - which reduced the price to £63,000.

It gets better. On top of that, he won back payment of rent paid since the fight began in 1995. A total of £36,000. Way to go, Paul. Wonder if he's now going to sue them for wasted time, distress, psychological trauma and hair loss? Be a shame to let that law degree go to waste.

Silent Key VE3QF

I've never known much about amateur radio, but the little I do know has always interested me. Whenever I think about it, it's with a feeling that if I'd been born one generation earlier it would have been something I'd have been into. My existing penchant for chat, on IRC and now more modern alternatives, is easily interpretable as a leaning towards communication with new and interesting people in exotic places all over the world, and amateur radio was always the best - indeed only - way to do this in the years before the Internet.

I've never known much about the man who I liked to think of as my father-in-law, but the little I do know has always interested me. Whenever I think about him, it's with a feeling that if I'd been able to spend more time with  him, through an imagined combination of meeting Nikki earlier and living closer than 3,000 miles away, he would have been someone I'd have got along with really well, what with our shared background in computing, our tendency to geekiness, the chat thing, ...

But now, after one of those traumatic late evening phone calls and a poignant Facebook status update, I'll never have that chance. "Silent Key VE3QF" was Paul's brief message, and although I knew the background to it, knew that VE3QF was Tony's call sign and I could work out what "silent key" meant, I still looked it up. What I found was a clear explanation of a simple yet profound message for the amateur radio community that I found unexpectedly moving.

Part of the explanation reads: You may hear a silent key referred to as an SK in Morse Code, although "SK" can also signal "end transmission."

End transmission. What a perfect expression for any geek at the end of their life, especially one steeped in the lore of the amateur radio enthusiast and who had a well-developed appreciation of irony. Sleep well Tony.

Vinyl: In The Land of Grey and Pink

Artist: Caravan
Owned on digital media: Yes
Want to replace: n/a

By the time Caravan released this their third album, they already had a small but dedicated following, but this was really their breakthrough disc and is the one that widened their fan base considerably. Most significantly from a personal perspective, it was my first exposure to the band that were to become firm favourites in my late teens and the first one from whom I bought more than one album.

Even though later supplanted by Genesis in my affections, this remains one of my all-time favourite records. Surprising then that I didn't replace it with a new digitally-remastered version until April of this year, but it was certainly worth the wait. Rediscovering Golf Girl, Winter Wine, Nine Feet Underground and the title track again after not listening to them for over a decade was a total delight.

We've been carpeted

Great excitement yesterday evening as the carpet company called to say our replacement carpet had finally arrived and would it be convenient to fit it today? You bet your sweet bippy* it would.

The very personable man on the phone assured me that since we'd been waiting ages and the (replacement) order was marked as urgent, he would put us down as the first call. Which meant the fitters should arrive shortly after 9am.

At 10:45 I tried to call the shop. After the third busy tone I was in the middle of trying again when my mobile lit up with the shop name, calling with sincere apologies that the fitter had been delayed but was loading up his van RIGHT NOW and would be with me in 20 minutes. Which turned out to be, naturally, 40 minutes. But at least he was here! With a carpet!! Which was the right size!!!

But didn't have any underlay or gripper rods with it.

Chief Fitter walked into the room.
"Just going on the floor, is it?"
My initial reaction, which I managed with superhuman effort to bite back, was to say "No, it's a carpet. It's going on the fucking ceiling, where do you think?"
Then I realised what he was saying. That he was going to lay the carpet on the bare floor.
""No, there should be underlay with it."
"They've not given me any underlay. Or grippers."
""You ARE joking?"
I fetched the invoice.
""Underlay," I pointed.
He called the shop, and shortly afterwards with much muttering under his breath at the incompetence of both the shop and the previous fitter, who "if it had been me" should have at least fitted the underlay and grippers before taking the too-short carpet back, returned to the depot to pick up... underlay and grippers.

An hour later he was back, and not much more than half-an-hour after that (it always amazes me how fast professional carpet fitters work), our new room was finally, finally ready to receive furniture, and have its new curtains hung.

A task for the coming weekend. With any luck, we only have one more night on the sofa bed! Yippee!

*What exactly is a "sweet bippy"? Does anyone know?** And why would you want to place a bet with it?
**Yes, I know. Google does. Slang term for unspecified body part (probably 'ass') as used in Rowan & Martin's Laugh-In. God, I never knew it was THAT old.