The February of technology

Which is a whole lot different to the march of technology.

Because our February (and our January come to that) has seen the wheels start to come off of our tech-filled home. Or at least, that's how it looked at one stage, with the freezer developing a problem where it wouldn't, um, freeze, and the pile of expensive TV equipment refusing to display any of the HD channels.

You know how it is when things go wrong. You reach for Google to find out what they're saying on the forums. Or at least, we do. On the subject of our freezer a small number of people had been very vocal about what a pile of shit it was. Well to be honest that's not been our experience. We've had it over 6 years and apart from a problem with the auto-defrost element shortly after it went out of warranty ( O_O ) which was soon fixed, we haven't had a moment's bother with it. That's the thing about review forums. If you've had a bad experience you're more likely to gripe about it than you are to go and give a glowing review if you've owned something that's given years of trouble-free service. A bit more digging uncovered a slightly larger number of folk who HAD gone into print about how happy they were with our freezer, so we decided in the end it was worth repairing.

Which was a good decision because the fault was a simple evaporator fan, replaced in less than 15 minutes and all's well again. No more spongy "frozen" bread or slightly soggy fish food. And better to pay £80 for a year's service cover than £700 for a new model!

The TV thing was slightly more frustrating and hard to track down. Since installing it (at the beginning of December) we've had an intermittent problem where the screen would go blank, flash "No Signal" and then recover in 1-2 seconds. Only ever happened when watching HD programmes or, if recording them, the recording would freeze for 1-2 seconds while the PVR tried to cope with the loss of signal. I replaced the coax aerial leads. I replaced the HDMI cables. I bought an aerial signal booster. Nothing made any difference. Then a couple of weeks ago I retuned the PVR and it lost the HD channels altogether. And then it lost ALL the channels.

Aha! I thought. That intermittent fault was on the PVR's tuners, and now it's gone hard. Plugging the TV directly into the aerial, bypassing the PVR, allowed us to view HD again thus proving (I thought) my theory.

We took the PVR up to Warrington (the closest service centre) where they plugged it in, tuned it up, and it worked perfectly.

Their tech guy listened to our tale of woe, and opined that we had an aerial fault. I've always been a bit suspicious about folk who work on roofs. Roofers and aerial installers. You never can be quite sure what they're up to up there, can you? And you can't check it out very easily. AND we've had bad experiences in the past, with both. *AND* I was well ready to blame that new aerial. We'd paid for the top quality HD high bandwidth jobby and probably had a coat hanger up there. Tech guy recommended a local firm of aerial riggers (local to us, not him) that handle all their installations and they paid us a visit last Friday.

This is already a long story, so I'll cut to the chase - our problem lay not with the aerial, which was delivering a signal "five by five" (or strength 10 as it's actually called on the TV and the PVR) - but with how we were conveying that signal to the equipment. All those brand new cables I'd bought were... well... shite.

New aerial guys whipped us up some new cables in double-quick time and within minutes all our signal strength bars were fully green and everything was tickety-boo.

Anyone want to buy a signal booster?

In a life I more nice

I'm a lucky man. There can't be many men as sought after by hordes of Russian beauties as I. They write to me all the time.

Some of them, of course, take themselves out of the game with their first line. I could never be attracted to anyone stupid enough to ask, in their opening sentence, "What is your name?" when they've sent their email to my primary address, embodying as it does both my first and last names.

In her latest email, Olga assured me: "In a life I more nice." I could only wonder which life she was talking about. Still, I was reassured that she will be more nice when she eventually reaches it.

Recently, Svetlana was also moved to write to me, declaring: "I am 25 years, growth 178." Is this some arcane tumour denomination they use in your country, Svetlana? If so you can hardly expect me to hop the next plane with your life span already so badly compromised.

She went on earnestly: "I hope, our dreams will come true also we probably we shall embody them in the validity."

I'm sure I could aspire to hope for the same thing dear, if only I understood what it meant.

The eRoute to eSuccess

When I first started writing War of Nutrition (so long ago it even had a different title), self-publishing was frowned upon by "real" authors. It was a route for amateurs and, more importantly, it was the route that once taken could never lead you back to "proper" publishing. Real publishers and agents, it was said, would never touch anyone tarnished with the shame of self-publishing.

What a difference twelve years makes. So what happened? Lots of things:

Computers and the Internet.

Of course the Internet existed in 2000, but there were far fewer of us on it, and outside of the US most of us accessed it over dial-up. Slow and clunky, yes, but even back then it was starting to connect us in exciting and previously unimaginable ways. One of those burgeoning ways was a new route for authors to reach their readers, but much more than that the Internet provided a faster, easier and more accessible research tool. I can't begin to think of how I'd have learned enough protein science, or geography, or helicopter piloting (all of which are essential to the plot of WoN) before the Internet, but it would certainly have involved hours and hours in public libraries and in my case would probably have prevented the book ever being written.

The Recession

While traditional publishers were at first bemoaning, then begrudgingly accepting and then (almost but not quite) embracing the self-publishing revolution, the world plunged into recession. There was no longer as much money to risk on unheard of new authors (there never had been much), and scarce agent and publisher resources were focused on known quantities and guaranteed profit-makers. If you're an Ian Rankin or a Stephen King, no problem. Otherwise getting published became an even less likely proposition (and the odds never were that good).

Kindle

(Other e-readers are available) Obviously ePublishing could never have taken off in the absence of a platform to ePublish to. In the vanguard, Kindle offered not only a device but also a (fairly) simple route for authors to go it alone. Its success has been well documented, followed up in short order by other variants by the same and other suppliers, and eBooks recently overtook hardcopy sales in at least one marketplace. Although there still are, and will continue to be for many years, some dyed-in-the-wool lovers of paper, it's inevitable that these will decline as the generations turn and in a decade or two will be looked upon with the same gentle forbearance currently reserved for lovers of vinyl, 8-track, Betamax or more recently HD-DVD.

Naturally, it's not all good news. Easy access to self-publishing has removed many of the gatekeepers, and there are easily as many deluded authors as there are deluded auditionees on The X Factor. All their friends and family have told them what a good writer they are, they've had this cracking idea for a story which they've knocked up in a few weeks. No, they don't know how to spell- or grammar-check and have no idea what a copy editor is, but why does that matter when they're only a few clicks away from seeing their name on Amazon's bestseller list? With several thousand new works being published every day for e-reader platforms, consumers of fiction have to plough through mountains of dubious quality output to find something worth reading. So ironically, now that it's easier to publish, it's harder to find something that was worth publishing, let alone is worth reading. Not surprising readers tend to stick with what (and who) they know. Unless you're prepared to spend hours online on Facebook and Twatter or in Amazon forums and the like, the chances of you drumming up a readership beyond your list of Facebook friends are slim to none. And even interesting THEM in your creation is hard work half the time.

Not that having those gatekeepers in place was necessarily all that much better. What? You've never read a bad book? Never reached the final page and thought "God. That was *crap* - how did it ever get published"? Lucky you. During my 100-Theme Writing Challenge last year, I had the opportunity to explore reasons why in this post. It's depressing. But like so much in life if it was easy, everyone would be doing it. In the end it's probably better to write your book because you want to write it, not because you're expecting to get rich off the back of it. Very few people get that lucky.

(Originally started writing this in Feb 2012 shortly after War of Nutrition was published for Kindle. Hard to believe almost a year has passed.)

Unwired

Virgin Trains, eh? It's been a while, but this week I had occasion to delight in their services again. Since I last travelled they've been plastered with WiFi stickers. HotSpot (they shout): fast, reliable, wireless internet. Log on now.

Love to mate. But not at £4 an hour. And not when you're already stiffing me (well, my company) £142.50 for a single ticket to London. Our local cafe, which charges £1.99 for a cup of coffee, can offer me free WiFi for as long as I continue drinking. The least you could do is match this with free WiFi as long as I'm travelling. I guess you don't get to be a millionaire by giving shit away, huh?

Sign of the times

I had an appointment in the city (Manchester, not that London) this morning at 9.30 to attend a "probate interview."

That was annoying enough in itself. To manage an estate you need a Grant of Probate. A certificate, effectively, that officially states to anyone who needs to know "this person is allowed to handle all the affairs of this other, dead, person."

There are two ways to get one of these. You can engage the services of a solicitor, who fills in the form for you and pays the fee, and everything goes through on the nod. Because solicitors are trustworthy people aren't they? And if they sign something, then it's right and proper and true. This alternative, you won't be surprised to hear, is expensive.

Alternatively you can fill the form in yourself. It's not complicated. Because you're not a solicitor you'll have to pay an inflated fee - roughly double what the solicitor would have paid (or, more accurately, what you would have paid through your solicitor) - but the really galling part is that you then have to attend a meeting with a representative of the Courts & Tribunals Service to make a formal declaration that what you put in the form is the truth. Because let's face it, since you're not a solicitor you can't be trusted and have probably made it all up. Despite having proven who you are, and being the person named IN THE WILL as the one the deceased chose to handle their affairs.

Still, all that is not what this post is about. I just got carried away a bit. Sorry.

Since the Probate Registry offices in Manchester are in the Civil Justice Centre (an imposing steel building in the Spinningfields area) I parked in one of the central car parks. One of those with a "pay before you leave" machine. Returning to the car after the brief meeting (I was in there a total of five minutes) I was urged by the machine to "Please insert your ticket."

And the second language the machine gave this prompt in?

Polish.

iBeer

Here I am in the living room, with an iBeer, doing an iBlog on my new iPad. Crikey. Saturday nights will never be the same.

(Back on the old - well, new - desktop now). We went out shopping today. Nikki wanted to change our pillows. So... four pillows. That's what we needed. We came back with seven movies, Kasabian's new album (it was playing while we were in HMV and we both quite liked it), a funky clever folding chopping board (Chop2Pot by Joseph Joseph) and a set of ice cube trays, two bags of food from M&S for a "picky tea", a 32GB iPad, an Apple TV box, black leather smartcase, camera connection kit, and... four pillows.

These may well be the most expensive pillows I've ever slept on.

Lovin' the iPad though :o)

Put it on eBay

That's a phrase that has echoed around our house - both houses actually - for almost ten years. Whenever we inherit or find something, or for one reason or another it becomes surplus to requirements, but it's "just too good" to throw out. Like it still works, or it was originally quite expensive. We have some sort of investment in it still - emotional, financial, psychological - that prevents us from driving it to the tip.

I'm not pretending we never chuck stuff out. We do. But there's always more. And increasingly (it seems) the stuff is still OK. Still serviceable, usable, whatever. Just not by us.

So "the eBay pile" has been growing for many years. That old hi-fi stack I never use. It was all wired up in our previous house. Played occasionally. But that was in the B.I. years. The time Before iPod. When listening to music entailed physically inserting a CD or a cassette tape (a WHAT? Google it) into a device and pressing a real, solid, play button. Not clicking an icon that just *looks* like a play button. Anyhow when we moved, this lovely old stereo stack in its smoked-glass-and-mahogany cabinet came with us and lived under the stairs - well, the loft ladder - for three years. Then the loft ladder was replaced with stairs and the cabinet had to move into the study. Then into the dining room. Still never connected. Never played. Listen, I spent over £2,000 on in it 1984! I can't just throw it out!

The Christmas tree stand that we don't need since we started using an artificial tree that has its own feet. An old telephoto lens for a camera long since crushed under the boot heel of digital technology. The camera that it fits. The aluminium flight case I carried them both around in. The socket set I used to use to service my car, in the days when I did my own car servicing (OK, this item has been kicking around for a lot longer than ten years. It sat in the garage of my old house in Yorkshire quietly rusting away for most of the 12 years I lived in that house, and I hadn't used it much in the ten years before THAT).

You get the picture.

Three months ago something snapped. "Put in on eBay" became something more than just one of those things we say that doesn't really mean what the words imply. I actually listed some things on eBay. What? Yes, you read that right. I started small. A couple of things on the Saturday, and a couple more on Sunday. Just to ease myself into it. And you know what? It was easy. I said I started small, but one of the first things I listed was that stereo. I figured hey, if I'm going to dump my emotional baggage let's start with the biggest bag. It had 11 watchers within 12 hours. It sold easily, and for more than twice the starting price. The guy drove up from Northampton for it.

There's no stopping me now. Well, not quite. I still wait for those "zero listing fee" weekends. eBay gets enough money out of me when I sell the stuff. I'm not giving them anything up front. But gradually, all that tat that's been hanging around for years is disappearing. And the bank balance is rising!

I picked a good time to get into this, when you remember that we just inherited the contents of an entire second house. And 95% of the stuff in it is both stuff we don't want, AND stuff that is "too good to throw out." Only one answer to that. Put it on eBay.

A long, hard slog

Anyone who has been around the Internet for even a short while will be familiar with spam. Even after the well-publicised fall in spam in December of last year from its historic highs of around 80 billion emails daily, it still accounts for almost 80% of all email traffic, and signs are that it's on its way back up again, as new botnets compete to fill the gap opened up by those that have been shut down.

But this is all going on in your Inbox, right? And in the hidden wars over at your ISP, with ever more sophisticated spam filters that can get rid of 99% of the crap before you ever see anything?

That's what I thought, until I received a letter recently offering me longer harder erections. Yep - POSTAL spam. Incredible.

Temporarily floored and carpeted

One of the unfortunate side-effects of the construction work we endured in the second half of last year was that the landing floor, already in a pretty poor state, became even more chewed-up than before.

Over the years - both before we moved in and since - alterations have shortened what was once the corridor leading to the small back bedroom to probably less than half its former length. The original door at the end was removed and boarded up when the two back bedrooms were knocked into one (before our time). Our bathroom conversion removed another door and the subsequent installation of a linen cupboard at the end of that corridor-to-nowhere has left us with a landing that is little more than the confluence of doors to remaining rooms.

As you might expect in a house of this age (100+ years) this landing has been used over and over again as the conduit space for each installed service. Central heating, electrics, phone, alarm, central heating extensions, additional wiring circuits - all pass along and across the landing, and all have involved lifting and replacing the floor.

Which brings us to today, the most recent set of work, and the parlous landing we've endured for the last three months or so. A floor board outside the study which is not so much floor board as floor shredded wheat. A board between bedrooms and bathrooms which has been left loose, and knocks against the heating pipes with a resounding BONGGGGG every time it's stepped on. And several other boards which no longer fit properly, or whose ends have been sawn off adjacent to a beam so that they dip and bend and creak when anyone walks past.

Long overdue for some DIY magic.

Which is how I spent (the working part of) yesterday and today. Sorting out something that's not as straightforward as it sounds, once you realise that 21st century floorboards from B&Q are (a) narrower and (b) thinner than their early 20th century counterparts, hewn (as they undoubtedly were) from the living tree by swarthy journeyman joiners who cared not one jot (nor, I'll warrant, a tittle) for cost, but only for quality. Or at least, width.

Anyway, this disparity, along with the fact that the modern materials are tongued and grooved, meant I had to assemble a kind of jigsaw piece of flooring, roughly 2 metres long and three-and-three-quarter boards wide, with edges that resemble a refugee from Tetris. That was yesterday. Today involved the complex assembly of four pieces off carpeting off-cut (one from the spare bedroom and three from the lounge) into something vaguely reminiscent of a Tangram.

Although it has a small hole in one edge, and falls short at the top of the stairs, it's decidedly more comfy than bare boards, and it no longer goes BONGGGGG. It'll do for now.

Predictions of the non-cephalopod variety

Around this time of year it's traditional to publish predictions of various kinds. Although nowhere near as accurate as those of Paul the Predicting Octopus, most of them stretch beyond the limits of football match results, so I find them considerably more interesting.

Take, for example, these "20 predictions for the next 25 years" from yesterday's Observer. Lose yourself in the plethora of "experts" from twenty different industries, groups, or spheres of human endeavour. Erudite and influential though they no doubt are, commenters have already pointed out that few if any of them take account of the full impact of climate change over that period. At least one of them alludes briefly to the likely effect of oil shortages in terms of protectionism and conflict, but there's an even more precious liquid resource that we'll be fighting over sooner or later: water.

But my main issue with predictions like this is not that they go too far with their postulations, nor indeed that they don't go far enough. Extrapolating likely outcomes from current conditions takes a certain degree of understanding the subject in question, but beyond that there's no magic to it. The real question - and the most fascinating area of prediction - is not what will happen to the stuff we know about. It's what will be the next Facebook or Twitter? Or come to that, the next World Wide Web. Things which, before they were invented, no-one could have predicted. Things which, shortly after they were invented, no-one (or at least very few people) really understood how ubiquitous they would become. But things which, now they're established, large sections of the populace wouldn't know how to live without.

Another area I find fascinating might be called "Inventions whose time is past almost before it starts." When first developed, DAB radio (for instance) was widely predicted to replace traditional analogue broadcasting within a similar time frame to the 20 predictions above. Lack of available bandwidth, technical problems with mobile receivers (in-car DAB, etc), high price of early models and a general distrust of the product or a perception that it delivered limited benefit all contributed to appallingly low initial take-up. Now that many of the teething problems have been fixed, and the price has reached a sensible level, the need for DAB has evaporated. Replaced by Internet radio. Vastly more choice for anyone with a PC, equal or better quality, and with the increasing prevalence of home wireless networks, dedicated Internet radio devices are springing up to first supplement and soon no doubt supplant DAB in the home.

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.

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.

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.

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.

HOW many?

I bought Nikki a new Lumix camera for her birthday - she's been hampered for a while by the limited zoom on her old Ixus and envious of the 12x optical zoom on my (older) Lumix, so I thought I'd treat her - and I noticed the other day when copying some photos off her (new, 16GB) card, something that should have been obvious right from the start: the two cameras use identical file naming formats.

This could have been an issue leading to all sorts of photographic clashes and mixups, but for two things. Firstly, we file all our photos chronologically, in top-level folders named 2005, 2006, etc, so unless there was a chance of her "catching me up" it's unlikely that two pictures with the same filename will end up in the same folder. We just have to remember not to change the filing system to be, for example, topic-based.

The second factor is the precise extent of the remoteness of that chance that Nikki will catch me up. I have something like a 6-year head start with my Lumix and I was astonished to find, by comparing recent file names, that in those six years I've taken around 110,000 photos. The wonders of digital photography, eh? If I'd taken that many with my old 35mm film camera it would have cost me something over £25,000.

I'm guessing that there'll be a low-level option somewhere to adjust the file name convention but in light of the above we probably don't need to bother. Let's hope those aren't famous last words.

It's the future!

I have a Slashdot widget on my iGoogle home page. Along with most of the other widgets on there, except Google Reader, I don't often pay it much attention, but today it displayed a tantalising headline: Extreme Memory Oversubscription For VMs. Having worked on VME for many years, I still retain an amused, distant interest in the activities of today's virtual machine enthusiasts. Here's a quote from the article...

"Their method is based on a combination of lightweight VM cloning (sort of like fork() for VMs) and on-demand paging. Seems like the 'other half' of resource oversubscription for VMs might finally be here."

Good grief. On-demand paging! Imagine that. Something we were doing in the mainframe world at the end of the 1960s. Next they'll be telling me they've invented a subsystem called Virtual Store Manager.

That's the trouble with the computing industry today. It's staffed with twenty-somethings fresh from college who like to think they're original thinkers and have no concept of, or interest in, history (or reinvention of the wheel). Even if they could be bothered to read up how we did it on mainframes they would probably not think it relevant (as a commenter on the article points out). Sad, really. The truth is high-end PC systems with massive amounts of memory and virtualisation technology look more and more like mainframes every day. They have the same problems, and those problems have the same solutions.

(If you're *really* interested, you can read the original Slashdot story here.)

Water boy

We have a hosepipe ban here in the North West of England, as of last Friday. You might remember I blogged on United Utilities' incompetence a while back, and now the predicted ban is in place.

Information on how to save water, and how to keep your garden alive without a hosepipe (save the bath water, the washing up water, use a watering can, etc, etc) abounds. Businesses that rely on hosepipes, such as the dodgy five-minute car wash places that have sprung up all over the place, largely unmonitored and, I suspect, not paying an awful lot of tax beyond what they're forced to pay on account of their water supply being metered, are exempt. This is understandable. We wouldn't want people thrown out of work just because we're running out of water, would we? No matter what tax avoidance scams they're getting away with.

But even so, I'd expected (in my naivete) that most businesses would at least be doing their bit to avoid wasting water. Not so the Greater Manchester Passenger Transport Executive, apparently. I drove home this morning past a man with a van, and a handy hose-and-spray attachment, giving our nearest bus shelter a quick squirt. Because let's face it the one thing everyone needs in the middle of the worst drought since 1929, is a clean bus shelter.

The YouTube generation

You'll be surprised to learn that it's common practice to decamp to one of the local ale houses following any (and all) Chorlton Players' performance(s). So it was that I found myself stood outside on the "porch" of The Bar clutching a pint of Alchemist's on Thursday last.

The evening began in unassuming fashion, but turned rapidly surreal as we watched a woman dressed in a leopard skin outfit drive a disabled cart determinedly across the road towards a waiting taxi. It seemed a dangerous manoeuvre, it being dark, the cart having no lights, and the road outside The Bar - passing as it does over the railway - being effectively on the brow of a hill. Still, she made it alright, and the taxi driver got out to help her into the cab (or so we thought), so we turned back to our drinks and our conversations expecting that to be the end of it.

How wrong we were.

A few minutes later, someone called out "oh my God! Look at her!" Far from alighting the cab and leaving, the woman was now holding up the traffic. Facing the cart the wrong way down our side of the road, she drove it from side to side in a kind of mad, figure-of-eight dance, narrowly missing the headlights of the first car in a queue of about ten that she was preventing from making any progress down the road.

The cab driver decided he didn't want to know, did a U-ey and headed back into Chorlton centre.

That was the start of an interesting half-hour during which this lady, who was clearly inebriated, high, mentally disturbed or a combination of all three, drove maniacally around on the open road, or the pavements, alternately stopping vehicular or pedestrian traffic. When, eventually, a man intervened to try and steer the cart to safety, she beat him around the head, and then got out of the cart and chased him down the road!

So. Not disabled then. No. It wasn't even a real disabled buggy. When it passed us at close range we realised it was a disabled person's shopping trolley, the "Asda" emblem clearly visible on the side. As the nearest Asda is in Hulme she'd done pretty well to navigate the thing from there to here, especially in her... incapacitated... state.

Eventually someone called the police, but they didn't seem especially interested in her or her behaviour. Not the theft of the trolley or the multiple traffic offences she must have committed, or even any kind of breach of the peace (she'd had minor altercations with several bystanders by this point).

But the most surprising and disturbing thing of all, for me, was the reaction of the overwhelming majority of onlookers.

Did they try to help her?
No!
Protect her?
No!
Warn any of the other approaching drivers?
No!
Call the police?
No!

They got out their videophones and recorded the whole thing for YouTube.

Water, water, everywhere...

Here we go again. A drier spring than usual has led to reservoir levels being 15% down on the average for this time of year, and we're already getting water companies warning of hosepipe bans and giving us advice on how to save water.

Apparently leaving the tap running while you're cleaning your teeth wastes 7 litres. Imagine that! And then imagine the fact that United Utilities (previously Northwest Water) wastes considerably more each day through leaks. And when I say considerably more, I mean orders of magnitude more. I mean 460 million litres. Per day. "Chief Reporter" Dave Guest pointed this out to the water authority stooge on the telly last week and got the same old reply. We have an ongoing programme of leak control in place. Yeah, and you've been saying that for the last ten years to my certain knowledge. After ten years of "ongoing" leak control, you're still losing 460 million litres a day. How bad was it when you started, ferchrissake?

It's a total disgrace that water companies up and down the country are STILL allowed to sit on miles of old, dodgy, perforated piping and yet declare "profits" every year. Profits that come from ordinary households paying over the odds for their water supplies, only to be told to cut their usage in times of drought. Not even drought, actually. It's been raining on and off for weeks. There is no drought. If this is a drought God help us if it ever gets as "bad" as the oft-quoted summer of 1976 when we went 10 weeks without any rain at all.

Let's do the maths together. If you wanted, through the simple expedient of not running your tap while you were cleaning your teeth, to save the water wasted by our local water company in a single day, it would take over 65 million people changing their behaviour to do it. The entire population of the UK. And then what could we all do to save the wastage by Southern Water? And Severn Trent Water? And Thames Water? And Yorkshire Water? There are 20 water companies serving the UK. 20 companies pissing our expensive, treated, potable water out of their pipes and back into the lakes, rivers and streams, and all the while shelling out the money we've paid them to supply our water, to their shareholders, as "profit."

You couldn't make it up.