The UK - not a good place for children

On Wednesday UNESCO published a report that puts British youth at the bottom of the pile in terms of happiness. I must be psychic or something, because I was travelling down on the train Monday afternoon to spend the week working away from home, and writing a blog entry on exactly this topic. Being away from home always turns me a little bit introspective as I sit alone in my hotel room.

Every generation, we often read or hear, looks at the generation that comes after it and thinks some variation of: "I'm glad I'm not growing up today" or "Things were so much nicer/ cleaner/ gentler/ more polite/ easier/ simpler when I was young."

I guess we forget, as we get older, how resilient young people are. But it seems to me that as the world becomes faster and more complex, they need to be resilient to even cope with everyday life. Children and young people need, even more than they did when I was young, to have somewhere where they feel no (or a minimum of) pressure to conform. A place where they can be themselves or, simply, where they can just BE. That place should be home, but for so many "home" is just one more place where they are pressured in one way or another. Maybe their parents have split up, they have stepmothers or fathers or stepsiblings to cope with, vying for attention from their own parent. They may have chosen, or been forced into, various extra-curricular activities, or intensive academic options. They are bombarded from all sides by media and advertising pressures - the need to have "the right stuff" - the latest gadget, the "right" friends, listen to the best music on the newest MP3 player, wear the trendiest clothes.

Today's world makes me realise how lucky I was to grow up in a stable loving home, with a Mum and a Dad, some good friends, and never to have to worry about where I would be sleeping. Does time lend those days a rosy glow, when in fact it was never as good as I remember? Sure, we didn't have a lot of spare money, but that's a common story. Listen to any celebrity chat show, and most of the guests will say "we never had much, but we were 'appy." It's a cliché, I know, but it's also true: money doesn't buy happiness. And basically Wednesday's UNESCO report said exactly that.

So what? Well, thing is that this is so close to home for me that I can smell it. My lot have two homes with parents in them (sometimes), sleepovers, boyfriends' houses, school trips, etc, etc. They certainly have more material possessions, and spend more time away from home than I ever did. But are they happier than I was, or even as happy? I don't know. And I worry they're not.

In common with most parents, I never wanted anything for them more than I wanted them to be happy. To have a stable home life and at least one place, one real home, where they could experience that stress-free sense of being able to get away from the cares of the world. When you can shut the front door and just do what you like. Be totally yourself. Even scream and yell if you need to, and know you'll be supported and loved instead of screamed back at.

Seven years ago I finally admitted I'd failed to give them that in the "marital home" and I don't think I'll ever be entirely free of the guilt that goes with knowing a lot of their stresses and worries derive directly from the time I walked out on their mother. I can never know how bad things would have got had I stayed, and I take courage from those who told me at the time and from personal experience that it was better to leave than put them through all the rowing and fighting that would have ensued.

I guess I'm trying to compensate in some small way by giving them some stability and fun when they stay with us, but it's a double-edged sword. Our time together is compressed virtually 14-fold, so it is in essence a false security. It's not permanent (that is, it's not 24x7), no matter how much any of us would like it to be so. That's not to say we don't have great fun - we do - and I look forward to our next weekend together from the moment I drop them off after the last. But real life isn't 100% fun. Often there are things going on for them that mean fun should really be put on hold while we deal with the issue. At least, that's how it would be in a "normal" family. It's natural for young people to have worries and fears. It's part of growing up. Exams, friends, boyfriends, career choices, great philosophical questions, or just feeling down in the dumps and needing a cuddle...any and all of these are put on a back burner because we have to cram 14 days of fun into, effectively, one day.

So I think what I'm slowly getting my head round is that it's unlikely, any time soon, that my kids are going to come to me with their problems. This is a revelation to me, because I always wanted to be able to do that for them. To be the kind of parent they could come to with anything and talk it through. Try to resolve it together, or mitigate it, or just present a united front to the world if it can't be avoided or fixed.

But then I think: did I ever do that with my parents when I was 18, or 13? No, I don't think I did. Half the time they didn't know what I was getting up to. I used to catch the bus into town when I was 12 or 13 and hang around the malls. My Mum didn't find out about that until I was in my twenties. Maybe all my kids need is to know they can bring their problems to me whenever they want to, even though they'll probably never want to. Maybe that's all any of us can ever do. Maybe I should stop worrying about it.

Home!

Well it's dark, late and I'm tired and hungry (by the time I got to the train shop all the sandwiches were gone) but at least I'm home! I love travelling on the train (wry smile).

Actually, it's not bad. For years I avoided train travel, thinking I much preferred to be in control. I drove everywhere. Then I started to realise it was becoming a real pain to get into London, something I was having to do more and more often. I actually used to drive down to one of the outlying tube stations (Hatton Cross, to be precise, just round the corner from Heathrow) and catch the Piccadilly Line into the centre. If you included driving time, rest stops, train waits, etc it used to take me around 5 hours to get from home to anywhere in Westminster.

When I finally woke up to how mad that was and started taking the Virgin service from Manchester to Euston I cut my journey time by about 2 hours and I had chance to work, or write, or read a book. Amazing. For someone with an allegedly high IQ I can't defend how long it took me to come round to the benefits of letting the train take the strain.

Plus there's the added bonus of the amusing announcements from the train manager. Today's was: "The Quiet Zone is located in coaches A and H. These coaches are the Quiet Zone and must...remain quiet."

My funny Valentine

It was a Valentine's Day when I flew over to Toronto to accompany Nikki to England, and since then we haven't spent a Valentine's Day apart. Until today. I hate being apart at the best of times, but not only am I away for an unheard-of THREE nights and four days this week, one of those days is Valentine's.

Some people think business travel is glamorous and I'm sure for some high-flyers it is, but at my level of the pile it's just a lot of damned hard work and lonely nights in a hotel bedroom that looks just the same as every other hotel bedroom you've ever stayed in.

I'm staying in Croydon to be close to the customer's offices, but today the team were working out of our Bracknell offices. Normally I would drive to Bracknell but since I'm already here, and without my car, I had to go by train. Not the best of journeys, it started off with my taxi not turning up. I took the late hotel shuttle bus to East Croydon station, the London Victoria train to Clapham Junction and then had a 25 minute wait for the Reading train to get me to Bracknell. And it was a stopper. Places you've never heard of. "Martin's Heron" FFS. Anyway it took the best part of an hour to get from Clapham Junction to Bracknell so having started off at ten past eight, I got to the office at 11am.

We have to get all our clarifications back to the customer by Friday, so it was shaping up to be a late night. I didn't know exactly how late but I was grateful for the offer of a lift from the Account Manager who happened to be staying tonight at the same hotel. At least I started off being grateful. When 7.30pm rolled round and we still hadn't left I wasn't so grateful, and then when he told me it was at least an hour's drive back to the hotel I became decidedly ungrateful. I could have been sat in front of my dinner long before we even set off for the drive back, had I known.

We finally arrived back at the hotel at ten past nine and I went straight to the bar to order the drinks while he checked in. The hotel stops serving dinner at 9.30 so when he entered the bar, he suggested we go right through to eat.

"You'll be alright, will you?" he asked.
"What do you mean?"
"You won't be embarrassed?"
"Embarrassed?"
"Well...they've got a bit of a Valentine's dinner night going on."

Just as he said that we entered the dining room to be greeted by about a thousand red heart balloons. The wall that had been in place at breakfast had been folded back, making the dining room twice the size, almost every table was laid for a single couple, and all were full.

They had some tables reserved for hotel guests way over on the left hand side of the room, and we made our way towards them, crossing the dance floor on which several couples were already slow dancing.

We took our table with barely suppressed nervous laughter. "They'll have a field day with this in the office tomorrow," he said. Our table was missing its balloon, but it was covered in metallic red heart-shaped sprinkles. The waitress arrived to take our order. I turned to my colleague:

"Well, darling, what would you like to eat tonight?"

Turkey anyone?

If Bernard Mathews famous "bootiful" "Norfolk" turkey business survives this bird flu outbreak it will be more by luck than judgement. I put Norfolk in quotes because it's come out that a lot of his turkey meat is shipped in, partly processed, from Hungary. Not exactly a marketing department's wet dream that, is it?

A representative from Mathews' farms was on the radio last Friday defending the company. The outbreak was originally said to have been contained in one shed. Later it emerged that the H5N1 infection had spread to two other sheds. "Doesn't say much for your bio-security measures, does it?" John Humphrys of BBC Radio 4's Today programme asked.

Well John, as anyone who has worked in industry could tell you, what's written down in the process manual often bears absolutely no relation to what really happens. Processes rely on people, and people will do whatever seems expedient to give themselves an easy life, unless they are incentivised to behave differently. That incentive can be money, comfort, supervision, threat (of loss of earnings, face, or job), kudos, whatever, but there has to be one. It's no good for it to simply be written in a process manual.

If the process is that boots are scrubbed with disinfectant, and that chemical has to be lugged in 50-litre drums from a store on the other side of the compound, then one day, when the juice has run out, someone will think "hey, I can't be arsed to fetch another drum. One day without scrubbing my boots can't hurt." And they move from one shed to another with no scrubbing. And nothing awful happens - no-one even notices, and no-one fetches more juice. So there's no boot scrubbing the next day, and still nothing bad starts up. Pretty soon everyone is leaving their boots unscrubbed and nothing ever comes of it. If it goes on long enough, old workers might even start to say to new hands "oh, yeah, it says in the manual we're supposed to scrub our boots, but you don't need to bother with all that hassle. It's not necessary."

And then one day, H5N1 turns up and all hell breaks loose. If they had been scrubbing their boots like they should have, it would have been kept to a single shed, but instead it's all over the shop.

There's a famous piece of research often quoted on t'Interweb (usually in the context of managers' behaviour). It goes like this: You put eight monkeys in a cage, with a bunch of bananas suspended from a hook on the top of the cage. You place a ladder so that the monkeys can easily climb up to the bananas. Then every time any monkey tries to reach the bananas, you turn on a sprinkler and drench all the monkeys with ice-cold water. Pretty soon the brightest monkeys will cotton on that the water is connected to attempts to get to the bananas, and they will stop any monkey who starts up the ladder. The really dimmest monkeys will carry on trying for a while, but more and more monkeys will join in to stop them, until all the monkeys in the cage have learned that to climb the ladder is a Bad Thing.

At this point, you take one of the original monkeys out of the cage and replace it with a new monkey. This monkey will see the bananas and attempt to climb the ladder. The other seven monkeys will scream and yell, and drag the new monkey off the ladder before the water starts up. For a short time, depending on how bright it is, the new monkey will continue trying to get to the bananas, but eventually it will give up, knowing that it will be set upon every time it tries. Once it's learned this lesson, the process can be repeated, replacing another of the original monkeys.

Eventually, the cage will be completely populated with monkeys who have NEVER been drenched with water, but who will all scrabble and fight to prevent any new monkey from reaching the bananas, and will never try to use the ladder themselves. They don't know why, it's just "the way things are done around here." Learned behaviour. Disincentives (or, in enlightened societies, incentives). The answer to Bernard Mathews' prayers.

Gaseous emissions

We woke up on Saturday morning to a faint smell of gas in the study. So faint, in fact, that we couldn't really be sure it was gas, so we didn't think too much about it at the time and it was faint enough that when we'd been sat in the room a while we didn't notice it any more.

When I got back from picking the girls (and Nat's boyfriend) up though, it was much more noticeable. Faint in the hall but quite strong in the study - which is weird because we don't have any gas appliances in the study, or anywhere outside the kitchen for that matter - and this time definitely gas. I checked the boiler and the cooker in the kitchen. Not only was there no smell near them there was none in the kitchen at all. I made us all some cheese on toast and by the time we'd eaten it and gone back upstairs the smell in the study was even stronger.

I called the National Gas Emergency number and they instructed me to turn off the supply, not turn any lights on or off, and someone would be with us within an hour. We opened the window in the study and our bedroom to get a through draft and air the place out. After twenty minutes of that we were (a) gas free and (b) freezing so we closed the window again. After another ten minutes, the smell was back - just as strong as before.

How could that happen, I wondered, when we'd shut off the supply? Surely there wouldn't be that much pressure in the pipes, even if there was a gas pipe in the study we weren't aware of? Nikki wondered if it might be coming through from next door. Our neighbour is in his eighties and lives alone. We guessed it was quite possible he'd left a gas tap on - maybe even on a bedroom gas fire on the other side of the party wall? This theory was given added credence when I knelt down near that wall and discovered the smell was even stronger there.

True to his word the gas engineer was with us in around 40 minutes and took only a few minutes to declare the house gas-tight (which was a relief as the evening's large pan of chilli hadn't quite finished cooking!). We explained where the smell was and he fetched his gas "sniffer" device up to the study. He waved it around all over the room, even near the wall where the smell was worst. Not a peep out of it. "I'm not even sure that smell is gas," he said. "It doesn't really smell like gas to me, and if there was any gas in here at all, this thing would be going crazy."

Well it sure smelled like gas to me, but I wasn't about to argue with him. He's the expert, right? We mentioned the guy next door, and the gas man asked me to go with him to explain why we were there. The chap is Polish and although he understands English quite well, he's a little slow with it. As soon as he opened his front door, you could smell it - really strongly. When we walked into the hall it was unmistakable and in the kitchen it was overpowering - you literally could hardly breathe. He'd left his oven on, unlit. He'd been at home all afternoon and not noticed!

I had a chilling moment when the gas man went to check the meter and our neighbour helpfully turned the light on for him. As you can tell by the fact I'm writing this, there was no explosion.

I found it slightly disturbing that an expert gas engineer had doubted that the smell was gas, and that his detector had not detected it. For the gas to have seeped through to our house it must have been on for some time. Maybe even since the night before. But what was even more disturbing was when I later telephoned his son to report what had happened. I just thought he should know, you know? He might want to buy his Dad a replacement cooker. An electric one. He didn't seem too concerned. "Oh," he said, "thanks for telling me. He doesn't do that very often."

!!!

Hunger Site update

You remember I exhorted you a couple of days ago to support the Hunger Site (link over there on the right)?

I visit there and click daily and this week I noticed they had a banner up declaring that they have donated a staggering HALF A BILLION cups of food to starving people since they started up in 1999. We did that! I love the Internet.

New baths for old!

Chorlton Players did Aladdin this year for their panto. You can see some of my photos on their website. Anyway it was Abanaza's cry of "new lamps for old" that inspired the title of this post. We're getting quite excited here as the prospect of our new bathroom draws closer.

We've booked the guy to come and refurbish the sash windows in bathroom and toilet first. I may have mentioned this before, but most of our windows need some attention. A lot of them don't open at all, and of those that do open, some of them don't close properly (!). The bathroom being a case in point. The top sash has dropped slightly, and the bottom one has a gap on one side with the result that the bathroom suffers a semi-permanent force 9 gale and baths are extremely rapid! Anyway since the bath is to be repositioned under the window, these need sorting out before any other work can be done.

We now have a firm booking for the window work, so we've been trying to make our minds up on the new suite. After much to-ing and fro-ing we eventually decided on the Westminster suite from Imperial. We're keeping our original bath and having it resurfaced, so even though the Westminster is quite expensive we only need a loo and a wash-hand basin. Then we've to add in the cost of a heated towel rail, shower tray, door and mixer, tiles and lights so all-in-all it's a lot of money but it will be worth it to be able to shower again and to be warm in the bathroom.

If you take a look at this post of Nikki's, which is actually talking about the study, then you'll see where we intend to pinch a bit of space from the study to make the shower enclosure. Looking at her floor plan, the bathroom occupies the space above it in the middle. By moving the walls around to enclose the other two sides of that rectangular area behind the door, we can make it part of the bathroom. It will have internal dimensions of 1345 x 945mm - perfect for a nice big shower :) The work is scheduled to begin on March 19 so I'll post before and after pictures nearer the time.

BT Call Minder

Someone left a message today on my BT answering service "BT Call Minder" and it reminded me how piss-poor their IVR messaging is.

"BT Call Minder. Thank you for calling. You've...ONE...new message. Main menu. To listen to your messages...press ONE or say ONE after the tone, to change your personal options..."
[1]
"FIRST...new message. Message. Received...TODAY at...NINE...FORTY-FOUR...A.M."

This is such a long-winded way of getting to your messages I'm amazed they aren't inundated with complaints. Let's just break it down:

BT Call Minder.
Yes, thanks I know who you are. I called you, remember?

Thank you for calling.
I'd like to say I appreciate your manners, but you're not real are you? You're a machine that has been programmed to thank me for calling. You don't really care if I call or not do you? You don't truly appreciate my call. So pretending you do is just another waste of my time. Get on with it.

You've...
If you thought the pauses at the end of the first two sentences were long, welcome to the variable part of the message, where the pauses are so long you can go away and make a cup of tea and still not miss anything meaningful. Really. I've used an ellipsis (...) to show where the pauses are, and variables are in uppercase. Full stops indicate shorter pauses. Wherever a spoken variable appears in the system - like the number of messages that is about to be revealed - you could grow a beard in the gaps. Come ON! Edit these pauses out!

ONE
Here's the first place where the 80/20 rule should be applied. 80% (at least!) of the users of this service will never acquire more than ten unread messages. So the quality of service for the majority of users could be vastly improved by recording these as specific messages rather than using a variable every time.
You've one new message
You've two new messages...etc
I can say "you've one new message" in less than a second and it's still easily intelligible. Instead we have to put up with TWO pauses - one each side - just so the system can pull out details of exactly how many messages are waiting.

Main menu.
What? I called up to hear my message FFS! Why are you presenting me with all these options? This is why this service appears SO bad at the side of, say, the Vodafone Recall service (which is essentially the same thing). BT have not designed their service quickly to deliver what the majority of users will call up for, while still retaining access to all the other features they might want to use once a year, or once only when they set the service up. Vodafone have got it right (never thought I'd say that) - when you call to retrieve a message, you get straight to your messages: "You've one new message" and you're straight into it. The time and date of the call are revealed at the end of the message, so in the majority of cases you never need to wait to hear that - you can suss out what it's all about during the message and deal with it much more quickly. If you take an option to listen to the message again, the Vodafone service simply adds "for the main menu, press 1" - snappy, quick, and it doesn't get in the way.

You can see where I'm going with this, so I'll skip the rest of the first part. The fact is that if you're not bothered to find out how many messages you're going to have to listen to, you can skip this part by pressing 'one' as soon as Call Minder connects. But this next bit you can't avoid:
FIRST...new message
Same rule as above. Record ten separate messages for the first ten messages
First new message
Second new message...
And then you only need to use a variable when there's more than ten messages - i.e. almost never.

Message.
This is just totally superfluous, and by now you're getting really annoyed with it. Or at least, I am. We already KNOW we're going to listen to a MESSAGE because you've just told us it's the first new MESSAGE for Chrissake! Jeez. Get on with it.

Received.
No! Really?

TODAY
Another 80/20 rule must surely apply here. I imagine 80% of messages will be retrieved the day they are left, or the next day. So the two messages
Received today
and
Received yesterday
should not use variables. If they were edited properly to remove pauses, then the whole of
"First new message received today at "
could be over in just short of two seconds instead of the six seconds it takes now.

And let's not even bother with the message timestamp. Hours and minutes as separate variables with associated pauses? AM and PM? God.

The Call Minder service has been in operation for at least twenty years. I don't think it's had a revamp in all that time. Other IVR systems have improved out of all recognition while BT have carried on oblivious to the march of technology with their massive long pauses and their "Thank you for calling." It can't be a lack of investment funds that drives this refusal to upgrade their service. At one point in the not-so-distant past BT were making £90 A SECOND profit. That's ninety quid every second of every day of the year. Would you MIND awfully spending some of that mountain of cash on a decent voicemail service?

BT - whose strapline should really be: "the most shit service we can possibly get away with before OfCom come down on us like a ton of bricks."

A bad day for travelling back

You'll remember the "fun" I had getting down to Euston yesterday morning. I thought I'd struck lucky with the return journey though. My rescheduled 3pm meeting finished earlier than expected and I arrived at Euston in time to catch the 4.35. Woohoo! I should have realised that my original title was going to hold true for the whole day.

Prior to departure the train manager announced that, in common with other trains today, we would be diverting via Stafford and Crewe on the way back (the 4.35 normally only calls at Macclesfield, Stoke-on-Trent and Stockport) owing to a gas leak in the Macclesfield area. The train was still expected to meet all of its normal arrival times though, so everything still looked pretty good. Except for those travelling to Macc and Stoke of course, who were now going to have to change at Stafford onto a local service.

Laptop deployed as before, game of Spider Solitaire successfully concluded, I noticed that 4.35 had come and gone and there was no sign of movement. After a few minutes the tannoy crackled into life once more to apologise for the delay in departure which was caused by a fault on an external door. It refused to close properly, with the result that the automated system wouldn't give the driver the all-clear to leave, or release the computerised lock on the brakes. An engineer was, we were told, on his way...

We finally departed Euston at 4.55 and delays en-route meant we were a full 30 minutes late back to Piccadilly. I guess it could have been worse. I could have been travelling today and incurred the snow-instigated delays. We don't normally deal with snow very well in this country. Public services are disrupted out of all proportion to the amount of snow, and most drivers take one look at a white pavement and engage overcautious mode, refusing to take corners at anything above a walking pace.

This time round though, Virgin Trains were prepared. They announced during the journey home that owing to the expected snowfall, they would be running a reduced service! The wonders of modern weather forecasting - now companies can cancel services before a single flake has fallen!

A bad day for travelling

Getting down to London and being established in the office for a 10 o'clock meeting is in some ways harder than for 9 o'clock. There are more choices. If I need to be there first thing, there's only one choice - the 5.20 - and although it's an excruciatingly early start, at least the train is guaranteed to be almost empty at Piccadilly. It fills up around Rugby because by then it's not stupid o'clock and it's the commuters train of choice, but at our end you have your pick of seats.

To arrive later, there's almost too much choice, but I've learned that the 6.05 is very heavily booked and it's hard to get a seat at a table. There are two reasons for this. First, the time is (a little) more sensible. Second, and probably more important, it's fast to Euston - stopping only at Stockport - so it gets in shortly after 8. Ironically only a few minutes later than the 5.20, because that makes several stops and goes via Crewe which is a longer route. However in the past I've discovered that the 6.15 is almost as empty as the 5.20. Leaving only ten minutes later than the 6.05 it's not a good bet for those in a hurry. It's a stopping train and gets in almost an hour later. But for those of use wanting only a relatively early start, it's ideal. Or so I thought.

This morning's journey started on the wrong foot when the taxi I'd ordered for 5.40 arrived at 5.30 and rang the bell. I was still in the middle of a post for TV Scoop and was annoyed that the bell had woken Nikki. The taxi driver confirmed that the controller had given him 5.40 as the time booked but said I needed to specify "don't knock" on the call if I wanted him to wait outside.

Arriving at Piccadilly I noticed the early train times had been pushed back two minutes. The 6.05 was now the 6.07 and was on the board. The 6.17 was waiting on Platform 6. I bought a magazine, sussed out the table seat I wanted and stood on the freezing cold platform waiting for the doors to be opened, feeling very glad I'd decided to leave a T-shirt on under my shirt. A few minutes later I was settled in to my seat, laptop deployed and waiting to set off. The train manager started his usual announcement: "This train calls at Stockport, Wilmslow, Crewe, Birmingham, Birmingham New Street, Coventry and arrives at Euston at 9.42."

9.42?? That's (works it out on fingers) 3 hours and 25 minutes! Trains from Piccadilly normally take about 2 hours 15. The train manager continued: "passengers with first class or standard open tickets may want to travel on the 6.35 which gets into Euston almost a full HOUR earlier."

I was off that train like a shot. Had to be: it was only two minutes away from leaving! Having warmed up nicely I spent another cold ten minutes on platform 8 waiting for the doors to open again. I spotted a table seat with no reserved ticket on it and bided my time. Being late onto the platform I wasn't in pole position for the door, and a woman with a suitcase was already waiting by the closest door. I didn't want to get stuck behind her so I walked further up and stood by the door at the other end of the carriage. Strictly, according to unspoken platform etiquette, I was "behind" the guy waiting there but when the doors pinged to indicate they'd been unlocked, he hesitated for a split-second too long giving me the social permission to activate the button and hence get in before him.

As I swung into my chosen seat I glanced up at the electronic seat reservation displays. Damn! The seat was taken! Not just that seat, but every seat at that table. I grabbed my bag and started back up the coach. The next table was taken and the next. And it wasn't only the tables. Every seat was taken; even the ones without paper "reserved" tickets. I should explain that Virgin trains don't have an awful lot of success with their automated booking service, so the displays are often wrong, or not working at all. When this happens they use the fall-back manual system of sticking bits of paper in the back of the seats, but these can be a trap for the unwary traveller. The presence of tickets in the seat backs does not necessarily indicate a malfunction of the displays. However, on walking through to Coach E and discovering that the displays in there also showed every single seat reserved I began to suspect the signs were indeed wrong. Other passengers were beginning to mill about in the aisle in confusion, so I quickly made my way back to Coach D, dumped my bag back on my original seat, and went to find the train manager. He confirmed the sign information was "still downloading" and we should take notice only of the paper reservations in the seatbacks. My seat didn't have one (the reason I'd picked it out while still on the platform) so once again I settled in for the journey, albeit a little wary of anyone walking past in case their name happened to be S Clark or A Chilton.

The seat information never did download properly, neither Clark nor Chilton ever turned up and eventually the train manager began to tell boarding passengers to ignore the displays. At Crewe a besuited gentleman boarded and asked if he could sit down. I moved the bag containing the remains of my breakfast onto the table and wedged myself against the window. Sitting four to a table is always uncomfortable. The seats are just too narrow to easily accommodate two and sitting opposite someone inevitably means legs can't be stretched and discomfort results. The suit squirmed around in his seat for a few seconds, tugged at his jacket as if I was sitting on it (I wasn't), waved his arms around to test the space available to him and then declared sotto voce "not really enough room here, is there?" and stood up again. I really don't think I'm that wide, but he found alternative accommodation at the next table down on the other side of the carriage, next to a lady who must have been somewhat narrower than me, since he settled there without further trouble.

The views from the window were pretty this morning though - everything painted white with frost. Even the train yards and scabby factories lining the track look more attractive when they're rimed with cold.

I had to look for some silver - or in this case white - lining to the journey. Train problems at Crewe held us up for 15 minutes and signalling problems outside Watford delayed us even further, so in the end we arrived at Euston at 9.54: twelve minutes later than I would have arrived if I'd stayed on the 6.17. >sigh<

Naturally I'd texted my manager to let him know I was going to be late for the 10am meeting. "It's OK," he replied, "it's probably going to be at 3pm now." I love my job.

Rituals

Rituals or ritualistic behaviours run through every human and animal society like the string that holds a pearl necklace together. Whether it's the annual rut of the deer, the mating dance of the bird of paradise, the coronation of a monarch or a common man's funeral - the ritual ceremony, the dress code, the formally observed "rules of engagement" all come together to mark whatever occasion is being celebrated, the most obvious ones being Christenings/Baptisms, weddings and funerals, or "hatch, match and despatch" as they are sometimes called. The sense of a familiar order to the events can make what might otherwise be an extremely stressful time for the "main players" into a more relaxed, enjoyable affair (or, in the case of funerals, forms a framework of support for the mourners).

If you can take a step back from occasions such as these and act as an impartial observer, they can look faintly ridiculous. Especially weddings. Perhaps with two failed marriages behind me I have a tendency to look on them as the triumph of hope over experience, but of course in the case of first-time couples, like the ones whose evening wedding party we attended last night, there is no "experience" that needs to be triumphed over.

It was with thoughts like these that I drove Nikki through thick freezing fog last night to Statham Lodge, to celebrate the marriage of Charlotte & Paul. While I don't particularly enjoy driving in fog I do love the way it makes everything feel mysterious and special.

We quickly found the bar and secured a comfy sofa and a couple of pints, greeted those members of Charlotte's family we knew and sat back to await the main event. The guests had all made an effort to follow the ritual dress code (with one notable exception, who drew sidelong glances and muffled tuts from the older guests which I found extremely amusing) and the penguin suits of the principal players were quite restrained, looking smart and slightly Edwardian, rather than completely buttoned-up and over the top, as they sometimes can.

Being a bloke I'm not about to wax lyrical on how beautiful "the dress" was. Suffice to say that Charlotte, when she appeared, looked radiant as only a bride can and provided proof, if proof were needed, that fat-bottomed girls do indeed make the lovin' world go round. She and Paul did a very thorough job of touring the floor and making sure they spoke to everyone during the course of the night, which I thought was a nice touch.

When the function room (the Gainsborough Suite) opened around 8pm it wasn't long before the happy couple took the floor for the first dance. Immediately following her dance with her new husband, Charlotte had arranged one with her Dad to the strains of This Is The Moment from Jekyll & Hyde ("This is the moment! This is the day, when I send all my doubts and demons on their way!"). I couldn't help wondering if either of my daughters will ever want a massive do like this, complete with "proper" dancing. I'd be in bits before I ever got anywhere near the dance floor.

Gradually Nikki & Charlotte's other workmates and their partners started drifting in. We'd grabbed a table which seated a perfect ten - just enough for us all since our party also included Anita and her husband, who Nikki worked with at Sage a few years back. It was good to catch up with them again. We sat and watched a lot of traditional wedding "Dad dancing" - including one guy who looked a lot like Buzz Lightyear and danced about as convincingly. To infinity and beyond! Nikki persuaded me up onto the floor for one slow number, but as I was driving it was always unlikely I'd get drunk enough to spend much time dancing :)

The evening had a lovely warm, friendly feel to it, which I guess isn't really surprising for a wedding party. Indeed, Charlotte's whole family is a warm and friendly one. Not that a strong family is any guarantee of a happy lasting marriage (living proof of that is sitting right here), but you just had to wish them well - which I did, in writing, when the Guest Book came round.

A study in scarlet

Well, maybe not scarlet. Not yet at least. We haven't painted it yet. But we have moved it around a bit. Unpacking a few more boxes gave us room to put Nikki's desk in the corner where she wanted it, and although her real desk still hasn't arrived (due to even more delays from the supplier, but now we're promised it by the end of February) it's still made a big difference to how the whole room looks. You can get a feel for how it will be when it's all replastered, redecorated and carpeted.

It's amazing too what you find when you unpack after four months! Chopsticks!

What I haven't been able to fathom is how to put a PC together without a rat's nest of cables all over the place. Don't say "cable tidy" because I have one of them, but the darn cables go every which way, so none of them will fit in it. It does help having the PCs in different corners of the room. When we first moved in we just dumped them in a temporary position - both on one desk - which meant under the desk was more like an elephant's nest than a rat's! It was good to finally sort all that out. I love the sense of progress and achievement even such a small step as we made today can give.

Off out to a wedding reception this evening - one of Nikki's workmates. Sounds like it might be fun, but if it isn't it's only twenty miles away so we can just bail ;o)

What goes around comes around

It's funny, but even though our new house still needs work on just about every room, I've been working 70-hour weeks since Christmas on a bid for a large contract (which went in on Wednesday) and we're saddled with the biggest mortgage we've ever had, recently I've been thinking that I have never been more content.

The feeling started to gel for me last Saturday night when we took Natalie and Blythe out to celebrate Nat's 18th. I get such a buzz from being around my girls. I guess you have to be a Dad to understand it - and a Dad of daughters too. It's wonderful to see the people they are becoming; to hear them crack jokes (and realise that the famous Beresford sense of humour that I inherited from my Dad is alive and well and has made it safely to the next generation); to talk about their plans and dreams. This was especially poignant now that Nat is "officially" an adult. Naturally she doesn't feel like one. Hell, I'm 50 and I don't!

That feeling grew stronger on Tuesday night. It was the first book club meeting of the year and I was there on my own. Nikki had been invited for a girlie night out with the neighbours. I was enjoying the company of the ladies in the club (as it turned out, I was the only male member there that night). They really are a cracking bunch - excellent company - and I thoroughly enjoyed the evening. Nikki had a great time with our neighbours too.

Then on Wednesday we received confirmation of our booking at the Great Orme Lighthouse. We spent a fabulous couple of days there in October with my mates and we've arranged a repeat visit later this year. There was a time when I didn't see these guys or their WAGs from one year to the next and now we're enjoying a wonderful rekindling of the friendship we've shared for 30+ years. Like someone has stoked the ashes of a dormant fire and it's burst back into flame as if to prove that it was always there and never went out. And that's the point of this post really - friendship. We're surrounded by it at the moment: old friends, new friends (both in Chorlton Chapters and Chorlton Players), new neighbours, and great relationships with working colleagues too, some of which also go back almost 30 years.

One of the fundamental Principles of Spiritualism is that one is "compensated" for all the good one does and one has in turn to compensate for any bad. There is so much love around us at the moment, I can't help feeling I must be doing something right! That time, now thankfully long past, when I had to curtail my sociable nature...it seems like that was someone else's life I was living and now I've got mine back. Cheers!

Bloody IE7

I upgraded to Internet Explorer 7 before Christmas. Why? Ha! I've begun to ask myself the same question. IE6 was relatively stable (or at least, it seems that way now!) but having experienced tabbed browsing in Firefox I wanted it in IE.

Fool.

I've never been one of those who "hates" Microsoft and engages in constant bashing and sniping at their products, their market strategy, their treatment of independent software companies, but at best my experience with IE7 can be described as annoyed exasperation. How a company with their resources can put out a product - a SEVENTH-GENERATION product - that hangs up completely every couple of days, is utterly beyond my comprehension. MS have been developing IE for well over ten years. They employ armies of designers, coders and testers. They use the product for years internally before letting it anywhere near the market. And yet when we eventually get our hands on it, it's shit.

Maybe it's my own fault. I don't turn my PC off. Ever. I like my Windows desktop to behave like my real-life desktop - when I get up, walk away, and then come back, everything is still where I left it. So I'm at the mercy of memory leaks and creeping death, and it looks like IE7 has both of these in spades. I also like to have a lot of tabs open at the same time. Isn't that the point? I do a lot of stuff. I blog here, and on TV Scoop, I like to have a Google tab open, some of the Entertainment sites like Digital Spy, NewsNow and MediaGuardian, and some of my friends' and family's blogs. I usually run with about 8-10 tabs up. And the crock that is IE7 stops dead every other day.

Would I like to send an error report? You bet your sweet bippy I would. It might be exactly the SAME error report as I've sent 30 times already, but I will keep sending them until they send me a fix. Roll on SP1! Or even better...maybe it's time to dust off that Linux distro?

Manchester wins 'super casino' - whingers out in force

So contrary to all expectations, Manchester has won the bid to build the UK's first super casino. Most people believed either that London would get it or, if enough of the decision makers wanted to throw a bone to the non-London majority of the country, they would throw it Blackpool's way.

How predictable that yesterday when the news broke, the bulletins were full of whining hypocritical toadies wringing their hands and banging on about how "the vulnerable" would be affected. About how, virtually overnight, hordes of Mancunians would be turned into slavering gambling addicts, and the city would become a haven for organised crime, drug dealing and money laundering. This morning the BBC news had managed to find a reformed gambling addict who was trotted out to reinforce the point that gambling is...well...addictive and tell us how he was an intelligent bloke who never thought it could happen to him and he stole money from his friends to fund his gambling and his girlfriend threw him out yadda yadda yadda.

Don't get me wrong, I felt sorry for the guy, and I'm well aware that there are hundreds of people like him, and hundreds more addicted to drugs, alcohol, etc, etc. But there are many more people, indeed the majority, who can enjoy the occasional flutter, or put a couple of quid in a slot machine, without becoming addicted.

We know there are alcoholics in the world, but we don't prevent supermarkets stacking up their 24-packs of Stella and their racks upon racks of wines of the world and selling them 24x7. The government recently relaxed the licensing laws to allow longer opening times. No-one suggests that the availability of alcohol should be curtailed to protect "the vulnerable."

We know there are poor unfortunates who self-harm. They cut themselves daily to relieve their inner demons. No-one suggests we should restrict the sale of kitchen knives to protect "the vulnerable."

We know there are sad workaholics who spend 18+ hours a day working, to the detriment of their health and their family life. But (Working Time Directive notwithstanding) no-one suggests putting guards at office and factory gates to ensure these few misguided souls don't work too hard and the vulnerable are protected.

The new "super casino" in Manchester will create 3,000 jobs in one of the most deprived areas of the city. It will be much more than a casino - the complex will include a huge new hotel, spa, sports facilities, shopping arcade - and will bring even more investment into the city as well as additional visitors from all over the world, including (and even especially) from Toronto ;o) It will be I believe, on balance, a good thing. This is the second largest city in the UK for goodness sake - we already have organised crime, drug dealing and money laundering here! The new casino won't change that overmuch. When will government and the media get wise to the idea that they are not there to babysit the population? We don't, by and large, need protecting from ourselves.

Please support The Hunger Site

I don't know if you've discovered this or not, but I've been clicking on it every day for over 5 years:

The Hunger Site

Every click funds a cup or so of food for starving people in the world, funded by the advertisers. Clicking is free, but you can also buy loads of cool 'ethnic' stuff from there, and anything you buy contributes more food.

There's a few other support sites 'tabbed' on the same page. I also regularly (ie, daily) support

The Rainforest Site

I dunno if it makes much difference but hey, it's free, it's easy and it can't hurt, right? Set yourself a daily reminder now!

The price of procrastination

Finally got around to fixing my tyre this weekend. The one that keeps (kept) going down. Oh, right, I didn't tell you about that. Rewind. I had this tyre that kept going down. So I kept pumping it up, and thinking "I must get that tyre checked out." And not getting it checked out.

It was kinda weird because sometimes it would go for, like, four weeks and not go down. And then it would BE down and I'd have to rush to an airline and pump it up. And then, just a couple of days later it would be down again. I'd think "I really must get that tyre checked out." But I'd be busy and I wouldn't get around to it for a few days, and it would stay up and I'd think "can't be that urgent" and so it would go on.

The main problem was that it could get down to something like 12lbs of pressure (normal is around 28lbs) without any visible sign of trouble but then it only had to lose another 6lbs to be almost flat. And yes, I had pumped it up a couple of times when it was as low as 6lbs. I can't remember exactly how long this has been going on, but it was happening months before we moved house (13 Oct 2006) so I guess for at least six months and probably a lot longer.

So anyway, last week - Monday I think it was - I "just caught it" again. Luckily I'd stopped for a paper at a petrol station and when I came out of the shop I noticed it was really flat. There was an airline right there, so I filled it up. Two days later it was down again and I'd finally had enough. I made time Saturday to call round to National Tyre. They were really quick, had the wheel off the car in no time and there was the nail - only a small one - stuck right in the middle of the tread. Pretty soon the guy had the tyre off the rim and was peering at the insides.

"Have you been running this flat?" he asked, marking several chalk circles on the inner surface of the tyre and beckoning me over.
"Umm...yeah."
"Thought so. The sidewall is pretty chewed up. I would have been able to plug it - it's only a small hole - but once the sidewall's gone, well..."

Cost of a plug, that could have been fitted six months ago and saved me all the pumping up and stress? About £10. Cost of the new tyre I now needed because I hadn't got off my arse quick enough and got it sorted? £58.50.

Chinese celebrations

So we took Nat & Blythe for dinner at the No.1 Oriental Buffet last night. Same idea as the Nawaab - all you can eat for a tenner - but this time with Chinese food instead of Indian. Fantastic! For us, the best part of any Chinese meal is the crispy aromatic duck, and here they have a corner of the restaurant devoted to assembling your pancakes - a huge plate of shredded duck, a tureen of Hoisin sauce and large dishes full of shredded spring onions and cucumber. The Szechuan chilli beef was to die for too, not to mention the crispy chicken and the excellent ribs.

One of the great things about buffet-style restaurants like this is the chance to try new stuff without incurring any extra cost, which was a relief when I discovered the fish with ginger and spring onions had almost no flavour at all, and one of the noodle dishes tasted like the smell of newly-pasted wallpaper. This made everyone laugh until they actually tried some. Then they laughed even louder when they agreed it was a perfect description of the flavour.

Back home we turned the lights down low and the home cinema volume up high and settled back to watch Forrest Gump followed by Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, accompanied with lots of ginger beer and ... no nibbles. We were all still stuffed!

Wobble

It's bloody cold. You're all gonna start laughing now, all you Canadians and North Americans with your -40­°C's and your wind chills, but lemme tell you when you move from a nice new double-glazed well-insulated relatively small house to a large old drafty Edwardian semi with no carpets and windows that don't shut properly, then even -1°C is cold, especially on a breezy day.

We discovered something though. The lounge stays warm if we close the door. Simple, innit? But again living in a modern house, you forget traditional stuff like closing doors. Or "puttin' t'wood in th'ole" as they say round here. It's amazing the difference it makes. There's a downside though. The room gets so warm we fall asleep. I'm not joking, there's not been a single night this week we haven't both fallen asleep in front of the telly. Must be an age thing. Or maybe I'm trying to hibernate.

My mate Phil sent me a couple of links yesterday. One to the top 40 funniest pictures - I was laughing out loud right from the first one - and one to the top 40 prettiest pictures. All of those are really beautiful. I've seen quite a few of them before. They're the sort of pictures Nikki's Mum often sends, usually wrapped in a transportable Powerpoint file with some inspiring music. Oh, and here's my go at tvor's book meme that came to me via Nikki. I've had to cheat a bit (no - I didn't reach for the most intellectual book - the closest one is Perfume, cos it's right across the desk from me owing to the fact that Nikki already did it, and the next closest is the Radio Times. I didn't even know the Radio Times had 123 pages, but it does and you're right in the middle of the radio listings so I didn't think they'd be very interesting) but I've found something interesting so maybe you'll forgive me. Remember, the idea is...

1. Grab the nearest book.
2. Open the book to page 123.
3. Find the fifth sentence.
4. Post the text of the next 3 sentences on your blog along with these instructions.
5. Don't you dare dig for that "cool" or "intellectual" book in your closet! I know you were thinking about it! Just pick up whatever is closest.

"In medieval European folklore, the Chichelvache is the wife of Bicorne. Chichelvache takes the form of an undernourished cow who has a miserable expression on her human face. She is supposed to live on a diet of wives who were both obedient and tyrannized by their husbands."

From 'The Element Encyclopedia of Magical Creatures - the ultimate a to z of fantastic beings from myth and magic' which we bought Natalie for her 18th birthday (and gave to her today). No wonder the cow is undernourished! Obedient wives? (*ducks*)

Mind your grammar!

I see in the news this week that this tarnished Labour government's "education guru" - Lord Adonis - has finally admitted he was wrong to abolish grammar schools. Since Tony Blair came to power in 1997 banging his podium to the beat of his mantra "Education, Education, Education" standards have continued to fall despite the spin put on school results by the government's propaganda machine. Young people spill out into the job market unable to read, spell or count properly and universities, as well as being virtually unable to distinguish good candidates from bad since an increasing majority have achieved "A" grades at A-Level, have to spend an ever greater proportion of the intake year bringing students' basic English and Maths up to an acceptable standard.

Luckily (and although some planning went into it, it is more luck than judgement) my two daughters have enjoyed a relatively high standard of education. One of the reasons I originally chose to live where I did back in 1988 was the proximity to the local junior and infants' school which was, and remains, an extremely successful school. The high school in the area is above average, and the A Level college my elder daughter currently attends is one of the best in the country (including private colleges).

I too led an almost charmed existence at school - starting off at Edwalton County Primary - which I'm pleased to see is still in fine fettle 40+ years after I left - and progressing through the local state schools and University with little trouble, apart from that of my own making. So I guess some would think I'm not best placed to comment on poor education: I didn't suffer it, and neither have my kids. But God! Those intervening years have been hard on so many, as one "guru" after another experimented with various teaching fads (Initial Teaching Alphabet to name but one), targets and statistics, curriculum changes and wholesale devastation of exam syllabuses. And who were the losers? Well teachers for one, as they struggled to cope with mounting workloads, crumbling schools, lack of basic tools and poor salaries. But of course the main losers were the kids.

True, some schools shine out like beacons in the void - ECP above being one of them - but all too many are struggling and failing to give our kids a fair chance of a good start in life, while all the time this vacuous government tries to convince us that things are getting better.

What does this have to do with the abolition of grammar schools? Well for generations, they were the passport out of poverty for thousands of working-class children. Many in today's upper echelons of industry and government started their climb to fame and fortune in a grammar school, and yet now they're busy denying the same chance to today's children. Deprived of the opportunity to push themselves to excel, surrounded by mediocrity and sullen resignation, they turn their back not only on academia, but on any pursuit of the mind including plain ordinary reading, content instead to while away their time on video games and mindless television pap such as Big Brother and Love Island.

This sorry state of affairs has gone on so long we now even have teachers who can't spell properly. How are they supposed to teach English? Simple - they decide spelling "isn't important" and stop correcting poor examples, with the result that the next generation's spelling is even worse. And don't even get me started on apostrophe usage.

Lord Adonis might well have the courage to admit he was wrong to get rid of grammar schools, but unless he or someone like him takes the next logical step and brings them back, education in this country will continue its downward slide save for a few islands of excellence.

The Signs of Power

It's long been a theory of mine that the more senior you get in an organisation, the less common sense you have. The more powerful you become, the more the simple things in life tend to elude you.

The original clue that led me to form this theory is the kind of sign you see on the inside of the toilet door in the gents lavatory (or quite possibly the ladies, but I wouldn't know about that). In my part of the world, oop t'North (and in an office populated by relatively junior staff) we simply don't have any signs on the toilet doors. You're expected to know what you have to do. Or use your initiative and work it out for yourself (with or without a pencil).

Years ago, when I started travelling down to our offices in the South (which by and large have a higher proportion of more senior staff), I noticed their toilets had twee little signs on the doors saying "Now wash your hands" or, in some cases, "Please leave this toilet in the condition you would wish to find it." This latter instruction is a euphemism aimed at men who...well...need help with their aim, or even worse never learned how to flush a toilet. I learnt that there are, apparently, more of that sort down there than there are up here.

But it wasn't until I visited our headquarters, where the CEO and all his minions hang out, that I saw the sign which caused my theory to gel. Here, the toilet signs read: "Please leave this toilet in the condition you would wish to find it. That means ensuring the toilet rim is dry and anything you have put down the toilet has been flushed away."

You see? It seems that at the seat of power, they don't even know what condition it is preferable to find a toilet in unless it's spelled out for them.

I was reminded of my theory today, as I had occasion once again to visit our HQ. As I was leaving the conference room I noticed the expensive-looking phone was displaying a message on its little screen. Nosy as ever, I bent forwards to see what it said. "Press the 'Phone' button to get a dialling tone." Next time I go, I'm half expecting to see signs beside the door handles: "Depress handle to exit room."

Smashing!

If we ever start to believe that we're living in a little civilised oasis here in our new place, and forget that we're actually part of the second largest urban conurbation in the UK, the recent spate of vandalism is more than enough to act as a wake-up call. After a lull of some months, suddenly everywhere we look there are smashed bus shelters once again, their sad little piles of broken glass littering the morning pavements as we drive to work.

It must be a sad and boring life indeed if the best you can do for entertainment is drive around the streets of Manchester in a beat-up old jalopy with a couple of mates and a baseball bat, and vent your frustrations on a load of defenceless bus shelters. The satisfaction you get from the *pop* as the glass shatters and the *tinkle* as it falls to the ground must be short-lived. Do you feel any remorse? No, I don't suppose you even know what it means. Do you ever think about the people who have to use the smashed bus shelters every day? They're pretty much people like you, except most of them will be on their way to work - another concept that I expect doesn't have much meaning for you.

I guess Manchester City Council have worked out the commercials and figure that it's cheaper to continually replace the smashed panels of glass with more glass, rather than build their bus shelters out of more durable materials. They must do, because smashed shelters have been a feature of our urban landscape for at least five years. Or maybe they think if the yobs take their anger out on the shelters, they'll leave other more sensitive targets, like people, alone.

Life After Death

In the news: an Israeli woman whose 22 year old son was killed by a Palestinian sniper has won a four-year legal battle to be allowed to create her own grandson using sperm she had asked to be extracted from her dead son's body. Over 200 hundred women responded to the woman's advertisement for a surrogate mother to carry her dead son's child to term, and the lucky winner will be inseminated with his sperm, which has been in liquid nitrogen for the past four years.

When you start to think about this incredible conundrum it's easy to understand why the legal argument has taken so long to settle. The man didn't have a partner and had no immediate prospects of having children. Did he even want children? Despite his mother saying her son's voice spoke to her when she was holding his photograph, telling her there was something she could do for him, there's no real evidence one way or the other. In life, parents often urge their children to present them with longed-for grandchildren, and many children resist the pressure because either they are not ready to procreate, or they never want to. In death, they cannot protect either their wishes or their genotype. If someone were to remove your sperm without your permission while you're alive they would be guilty of assault. When you're dead apparently you have no such protection.

Many people shy away from being sperm donors because they will have no control over the lives and upbringings of what are effectively their children. They may be condemning them to lives of extreme poverty, deprivation, degradation, abuse, indifference. You may make these decisions for yourself while you are alive, but apparently it makes no difference once you're dead.

What kind of relationship will the mother have? Is she just a surrogate? Does she want to bring the child up, or be involved at least? Is she being paid? It will be her child too. What rights will she have? Is she being coerced into signing them away?

What about the child? How will he or she cope with the knowledge that their germ was plucked from their dead father's loins and used to fertilise someone who not only didn't love their father, but had not even ever met him?

Science can do remarkable things, and the boundaries of what we can and cannot do are being pushed back further and further every day. I strongly believe that it is our right and our duty to use the intelligence with which we have been blessed to understand the world better, find out how things work, and change those things that are bad for the better. But this macabre case, perhaps more than any other, has pointed up for me the difference between what we CAN do, and what we SHOULD do. If our moral and ethical sciences don't keep better pace with our biological and chemical ones, then decisions like this one, driven by the raw emotional wants of distraught bereaved parents, will come to haunt us.

A Damp Squid

I love malapropisms. We recently gained a new character - Honey Mitchell - on the soap EastEnders here in the UK who is unintentionally hilarious with her misuse of words. It takes a gifted writer to invent malapropisms that are actually funny, but the real hilarity for me is when it happens in real life. I was listening to a news package on the radio today about how large supermarkets are deliberately making life harder for smaller retail outlets. Nothing new there, you might think, and true enough it's been going on for a while. So much so that the Office of Fair Trading are now looking into it. The case under discussion in the package was a small retailer who had recently opened a new branch. The opening happened several months after the local branch of Tesco's had been refurbished, but Tesco's chose this guy's opening week to leaflet the whole community and draw their brand spanking new premises to everyone's attention. In the words of the small shop owner, this turned his opening ceremony into "a damp squid."

ROFL! Squids are meant to be damp ;o)

Another classic that has now been virtually accepted into the language is "Early Doors." I would hate to be an etymologist in a hundred years time trying to unravel the meaning and provenance of that phrase. Similarly, if "damp squid" gained currency, who would ever guess that it was originally a corruption of a "damp squib?"

Incidentally, my Nikki has been rating her life so I thought I'd have a go. How does yours rate?

This Is My Life, Rated
Life:	8
Mind:	7.1
Body:	5.1
Spirit:	7.6
Friends/Family:	6.9
Love:	9.1
Finance:	7.9
Take the Rate My Life Quiz

Not what I call a weekend

I've had to work this weekend and I'm out of practice, I can tell you. I've been spoiled, for at least the last ten years, being in a position where I was able to restrict my overtime to weekdays and call the weekends my own. But right now I'm working on a big government bid (I could tell you what it's about, but then I'd have to shoot you) and for the second time in as many months, I've been working on it all weekend. And it sucks.

It might have been at least ten years since I did weekend overtime, but what sucks even more is that it's almost twenty years since I was paid to work overtime. Yes, I've reached the dizzy heights of the slippery pole where working additional hours (or even, "as many hours as it takes") to get the job done is not only expected, but if you don't do it your performance assessment suffers. This is an insidious, dehumanising side of business in the UK. Forget "a fair day's work for a fair day's pay." This is more like a long day's work for the privilege of having a job. Some years ago, I worked out how much the company owed me in unpaid overtime, based on my salary since 1988, and standard overtime premiums of 1.5x hours worked on weekdays and 2x weekend hours. The figure came to almost £100,000 then, and it's been at least five years since I did the calculation.

There's a silver lining to every cloud though, innit? And this weekend my silver lining has been the wonderful dinner Nikki cooked for me tonight - a smashing stick-to-your-ribs beef stew served up with a glass of chilled wine, a candlelit table, lashings of hot horseradish and an apricot crumble to follow (which we've yet to enjoy). That, and the snow that started up about half an hour ago, the first of the year. Nikki has a photo on her blog.

Celebrity Shopping

Wandering round my local Morrison's is the last place I expected to spot a "celebrity" but there we were in the middle of our weekly grocery shopping tonight when who should be stood there next to us but Chris Gascoyne, who plays Peter Barlow on Corrie. I had one of those "is he, isn't he?" moments for a while because he was wearing a flat cap and had his head down and also (sorry Chris, I bet you get this all the time) he was considerably shorter than I was expecting, but it was definitely him.

I shouldn't be surprised - Chorlton has long been a favoured haunt of Corrie actors. Craig Charles famously has a place here (very close to the Morrison's actually - I wonder if he and Chris were planning a boys' night in?) and ex-Corrie writer and archivist Daran Little lived locally too - so it's not unusual, but somehow you never expect to see these people in supermarkets do you? Realising that they have to do their own shopping is almost akin to realising that the Queen has to go to the toilet.

Anyway, cognisant of my recent faux-pas with Wendy Richard I did NOT approach him or shout "Chris! Hi!" or anything of the sort. He looked pretty nervous actually, so I guess he was trying to be a regular guy out doing his weekly shop and wanting to be left alone. Several other shoppers spotted him too, but no-one spoke to him the whole time he was in view, so I hope he got out without having to speak to anyone if that was his aim.

That's the second Corrie star I've seen in supermarkets, thinking about it. I stood behind Anne Kirkbride in a queue for the tills in Cheadle Sainsbury's a couple of years back. I know, I know, you're thinking "how exciting." In a couple of years' time, when I'm a famous author (*koff*) I hope I'll still be able to shop in Morrison's without being mobbed.

Interesting trivia:
When I was searching for a photo of Chris, I misspelled his name "chris gascoigne" and found the website of a famous photographer. The "Images" link on Google contained nothing but his photographs. "Never mind," I thought, "I'll search for Peter Barlow." And I found...the website of a famous photographer. Spooky.

Wind in the Willows

Yes, it was one of my favourite books as a boy, but in this case the title refers to this mad weather we've had today. 90mph winds? What's that all about? My colleague Steve called me up this morning to complain that he was going to be late for his meeting - the train was restricted to 50mph because of the wind. He had even more to worry about later - he and Nic were stuck at Euston after their trains home were cancelled altogether. There were so many fallen trees and branches on the lines they weren't safe. I've been working side-by-side with these guys for months and that could easily have been me.

Our firm issued a bulletin later in the afternoon containing a list of closed roads as long as your arm, but by the time it came out I was already stuck in a queue on the A5103 bringing Nikki back from work. We didn't know at the time, but the queue was caused by a fallen tree completely blocking both sides of the dual carriageway. Someone sent this photo into the BBC News pages:

We sat stationary in the queue for almost fifteen minutes. Luckily we were just south of the M60 interchange so we were able to swing left onto the motorway and come home via Sale and Stretford, but even so it took us over an hour and a half to get home (a journey that usually takes little more than 10 minutes). Every road we tried was blocked with creeping traffic so in the end we decided we may as well stick it out. Found out later that it was a good job I didn't try Palatine Road as an alternative route home - there was a fallen tree there too and we would have had no escape if we'd been trapped on that road.

We're grateful that 90 minutes was not all we lost. The number of people killed is still climbing and not far from us the entire corner of a house has been taken out by another tree, so things could have been a lot worse. 40,000 people are without power tonight and many more have been injured, whereas the worst we had to do was stand the wheelie bins back up.

We're surrounded by sound

Annie popped over this evening to cable up the surround sound system. Wow. We had a quick blast of LOTR Return of the King. The battle scene is awesome. There'll definitely be a weekend viewing of the whole trilogy going down sometime soon, with candlelight, junk food and beer.

But amazingly, that wasn't the best part. Oh no. The best part was setting the XBox to full Dolby Digital 5.1 and hearing some of the games in full glorious surround sound. Amazing.

The only slight downside? We couldn't get DTV recording working. I've been struggling with this for two months now (ever since we left Sky behind - another story in itself) and it seems there's some incompatibility between the Pioneer media centre that came with the plasma TV, and our Sony PVR (which only has an analogue tuner). At least it wasn't anything obvious that I hadn't spotted, so I didn't feel too stupid.

I dunno, you pay thousands for this stuff and it won't talk from one box to the other? Sheesh. We can record a digital channel, but only as long as the TV stays set to that channel AND only if we've programmed the EPG and the PVR to the same time. Not a lot of use. I can see us forking out for a second Freeview box before long.

Avenue Close

While I was driving over to Nottingham at the weekend, I passed a street sign I've seen many times before in Stoney Middleton. It's "Avenue Close" and it always makes me chuckle. I was travelling on my own, so with no distractions my mind wandered to other comic possibilities for street names.

I think those Stoney Middleton planners missed a trick by not putting "Real Close" next to "Avenue Close." Of course, the classic "Letsby Avenue" is well known but by the time I'd gone through Memory Lane, Blind Alley, Bowling Alley, Upping Court, Back Passage, Tennis Court, My Way, Perfect Place and Whist Drive I was giggling fit to burst and almost had to pull over.

I'm easily amused.

A walk in the park

Waking after the party to a beautiful sunny, crisp, breezy January day, Nikki and I had the same thought independently: what a great day for a walk in the park.

When I used to live next door to a pub, it was so close and convenient that it lost its appeal. I sincerely hope the same doesn't happen with the park. It would be a shame not to take advantage of it.

Alexandra Park featured large in my student life. Lying on its sward listening to a transistor radio in the early summer was where I did most of my second year revision. Maybe that's why I didn't do too well in those exams! Today was the first time I had set foot in the part since those days back in 1977. Another couple of months and it would have been thirty years.

The wonderful day, and having Nikki with me, dispelled any thought of dwelling on those intervening thirty years. I just enjoyed the park: the footballers, the locals walking their dogs and children, the lake with its various waterfowl, the fabulous sweet smell of old autumn leaves and wet mud. Our conversation ambled along at the same pace as we did. After all this time Ally Park can still work its magic on your soul. We returned home feeling buoyed up by our walk and I found I was actually looking forward to the chance to do it again, but this time in the rain!

Read Nikki's thoughts on our walk (with extra pictures!) here.

The party of the first part

I love partying, especially in the company of delightful women. Naturally, I'm always in the company of at least one delightful woman, but tonight we attended a party thrown by Simon (one of our friends from Chorlton Chapters) along with around half a dozen of the Chapters laydeees. What a lovely bunch they are and it was great to have the chance to meet some of their partners too.

Simon does a unique line in parties. Salsa dancing in one room and karaoke in the other. It will come as no surprise to anyone who knows me that I gravitate to the latter, much to Nikki's occasional irritation ("can't we mingle?"..."we are mingling - there's lots of people in the karaoke room!") but it was, as usual, a whole heap of fun, especially later when the girls got going with the singing AND dancing.

And Nikki sang!! Woohoo!! Carpenters Superstar. She'll never again be able to tell me she can't sing.

We left at 2am - personally I could have stayed another hour or so :o) - but what a great night. Thanks, Simon. I only hope our housewarming party this coming May can match your high standard! (Even without the salsa)

A round-about way

I had to drive over to Nottingham unexpectedly today. My Mum's finding it increasingly difficult to get upstairs and had finally decided to have a single bed brought down into the dining room. As a result she has no space for the table/chairs and I was going over to pick them up, and to set up the bed for her.

In the usual circular way of things with Mother, this was a return to the state of play before Christmas when I thought I was going to have to juggle all the pre-Christmas goings on (such as the mulled wine party) with a dining room reconfiguration. At the eleventh hour she called the whole thing off. Someone had mentioned getting a Stannah stairlift fitted and that idea became flavour of the month. I knew very well she had no idea how expensive they are, so I just sent up thanks for not having to move the dining table before Christmas, and bided my time.

Sure enough, Stannah were kicked out of the house (£7,000 AND she would have had to have two radiators moved) and the move was back on, so off I set.

So now, we get to the point of my tale (at last! you're probably thinking) which is mini-roundabouts. Yes, sorry, another driving blog. Only in disguise this time. Non-UK readers, particularly those in North America may be in the dark about what exactly I mean by "roundabout." Well, you could Google it, but basically imagine a four-way stop (or in some cases, more, or less ways) but with a circular road in the middle instead of a square lump of tarmac, and where priority is given to cars coming round the circle (the roundabout) from the right. Only in the case of North America (and the rest of Europe), they would be coming from the left. If there's nothing coming from the right, you can enter the roundabout, and once you're on it you have priority over anyone else trying to enter.

I know from talking to North American friends that the idea sounds mad, but trust me it works very well and - to European eyes at least - makes a lot more sense than a four-way. How you ever work out who was first and last to pull up if it gets busy I wouldn't like to guess.

Anyway, I'm not talking about roundabouts per se, but MINI-roundabouts. These are used at junctions where there isn't enough space to build a real roundabout, but where traffic control is simplified by the roundabout concept. They're often just painted rings on the road like this one. My reason for blogging them is that on my journey to Nottingham there are two of these little guys, and at both of them I saw drivers making a real meal of them. I said they're used where there's not much space, right? So it's amazing how many drivers try to drive around the little painted circle, even when there are no other cars near the junction. Why?

The whole idea of them is that they introduce the concept of the roundabout, without necessarily needing to be treated like one in terms of road positioning. I admit opinion is divided on this one (and indeed there's even a campaign to abolish mini-roundabouts and end the confusion) but to me, all that is necessary is to give way to the right, just as you would on any other roundabout. If there's no-one about there's absolutely no need to attempt to drive around the paint. Indeed in many places it's physically impossible to achieve that anyway.

Woof! Woof!

Hey, we're almost there on the surround-sound front. Annie succeeded in her eBay quest and picked one up for a snip (well, £23 to be precise). Nikki & I elected to avoid the £20 postal charge by driving up to Blackburn this evening to collect it. The nice man even threw in a phono cable with the deal. Result!

Now all we have to do is wire everything up. Rear speaker shelves were taken care of last weekend in a few minutes - another benefit of picture rail!

I met Wendy Richard today...

I was in London today for a business meeting. Nothing unusual about that, nor about the fact that, since the meeting finished early, we decided to repair to the pub around the corner for lunch. Come to think of it that is quite unusual. It would have been only the second time I'd visited that particular establishment, but the second time will have to wait: it was closed for refurbishment.

Following closely on the heels of Nic, who knows the local pubs in the same way as he knows everything else - thoroughly - we dashed around the corner into an alternative pub and ordered pints. As I turned to find a seat who should be standing next to me at the bar but Wendy Richard, aka the recently deceased Pauline Fowler from EastEnders.

It was at that point I turned into a gibbering wreck. I don't know what it is about being "around" famous people, but I don't cope with it very well. It's almost as if I'm trying to prove something. Along the lines of "I know you're famous but that doesn't cut any ice with me so I'm just going to treat you like anyone else and act completely normal and definitely not all fawning and star-struck." Only I don't act normal at all. I go completely the other way - wayyyyyyy too pally and sociable. Because even though I'm from the "friendly" North I just do not walk up to complete strangers at a bar and strike up a conversation as if we've known each other for years. But I did with Wendy. Not even a "hello, nice to meet you," or a "my name's John," or anything else that remotely resembled social graces. With no consideration of the fact that she probably just wanted to sit at the bar and have a quiet drink, I just sauntered up and asked "so what's next for you?"

I felt like Baby Houseman from Dirty Dancing where she meets Johnny Castle for the first time and says "I carried a watermelon."

Wendy removed her coat with infinite grace and replied politely "you can't have been watching much television over Christmas dear," referring presumably to the EE special that had been on which I expect covered something about the work she had lined up. No, I hadn't seen it, I admitted. She went on to tell me that she'd been on some breakfast programme and was about to do a spot on Wogan's radio show, but I wasn't really listening. I was already mortified at my presumption and looking to make my escape. One of the others asked me to order another drink and I gratefully turned around to address the barmaid. Wendy went back to her paper.

I couldn't leave it there though, could I? What would she think of me? So as I turned and walked past her with two drinks in my hands I said: "forgive me - us Northerners just strike up conversations without a by-your-leave." Wendy was ready for me again: "I'm from Middlesborough myself dear, so I quite understand." More embarrassment! Clearly if I'd been a real fan, I'd have known she was from oop t'North.

I sat down, reflecting on my total lack of social skill. I remember meeting Bryan Pringle in the Trip to Jerusalem one lunchtime many, many years ago. Bryan, most famous to me in those days for playing the part of 'Cheese and Egg' in a TV comedy called the Dustbinmen, had been appearing in a play at the Nottingham Playhouse and had also sought refuge in the pub. I spotted him when I was just about to leave the bar. "Hello Bryan!" I yelled, as if he was the long-lost best mate from my childhood, and when he smiled and said hello I beat a hasty retreat to the other side of the pub. Clearly I'd learned nothing about how to handle celebrity in the intervening 30+ years.

Next time I see someone famous I'll just nod and smile. Then they'll only suspect I'm simple minded - I won't have proved it.

Beresford & Wallace

What's this? Two consecutive posts about writing? The guy must be serious! :o)

Well almost - this one's about songwriting, for these are exciting times. If you've read my website you might know that last year my good friend Annie Wallace and I recorded an album. If you're a close friend or family member you may even have a copy. Short clips from each track have been available on our websites for a year but following an idea of Annie's and a short discussion we agreed we would make the whole thing available for download from a dedicated website.

Beresford & Wallace.com went live at the end of last week and for the time being you can still only get those original 30-second clips. Soon though, you'll be able to download the complete tracks. We're not expecting to do an Arctic Monkeys with any of our stuff, but you never know.