Mr Bloggs Writes

2011-06-30T02:30:00.000-07:00

WHO CALI-FORNICATED FARNHAM?

'Californication...' sang the busker at the top of gentrified Lion and Lamb Yard, off West Street, in what used to be a very special and largely peaceful little Surrey town. If you're not familiar with the term Californication, it refers to what happens to somewhere beautiful if you allow rampant overdevelopment. 'Don't Californicate Oregon', read the bumper stickers in the golden state's woody neighbour. 'Call some place paradise, kiss it goodbye' went The Eagles' lament for bounteous America in the final song on Hotel California - 'The Last Resort'. As Don Henley was reported to have said: "The gist of the song was that when we find something good, we destroy it by our presence — by the very fact that man is the only animal on earth that is capable of destroying his environment."

After trying to negotiate Farnham's car-jammed roads and wandering its crowded streets for half an hour, for only the second time in thirty years, I couldn't help thinking the busker was really singing a lament for the town itself as I fled the mayhem for the tranquility of lovely Dockenfield, to the south, in search of an old friend.

I moved to Farnham in 1978 to start work at Hammick's, the bookseller in Downing Street. My first job, on what was even for those far-off days the fairly paltry salary of £2,000 - that's the book trade for you - was actually at the company's warehouse in Alton. Fortunately I was allocated a room in the two-storey staff flat over the shop, accessed through the shop itself. I think the rent was very low, if not rent-free, which was just as well, considering how little we were paid - but then those were the days when people who wanted to get into the book trade were expected to be motivated as much by the love of books as anything so sordid as a living wage or a career!

Such were the times, that the three of us who lived overhead had the free run of what was in effect a personal library and it was a very special experience to wander the shop quietly after hours, browse the bookshelves and borrow anything we fancied to read. I don't think the shop even had an alarm system. It was a charming old building in a row of shops, probably Georgian in origin or even earlier and was the only one to retain its ornate window - possibly Victorian or older. At that time, there were still numerous little alleys and passages in the town, sometimes blocked off by doors or gates, through which mysterious redundant yards could be glimpsed. Lion and Lamb Yard was one such and it was part of Farnham's charm that there were these wasted, gently decaying spaces that whispered eloquently of the hustle and bustle of days gone by. I walked through what had been Hammick's to find the dear old place had been gutted long since and turned into a corporately soulless chain optician - even the staircase had been moved and the large rear extension, which used to house the children's book department, had been made even bigger, taking over nearly the whole of the leafy courtyard where I used to park my motorbike during the day; at night I wheeled it into the shop to keep it safe from pissed-up pub-goers.

Although the town seemed outwardly to be quite comfortable, nay genteel and perhaps even then more than a bit pleased with itself, it had some rough edges. At the bottom of Castle Street was a pub called the Coach and Horses. I hadn't been living in Farnham long before I learned that its nickname was the 'Coke and Hashish' and I'm sure that doesn't require any explanation. Today it's a 'bar-restaurant' called The Coach - one of many that now litter the town. Halfway up Castle Street was The Nelson Arms, where I got a part-time job to supplement my pathetic income. The landlady was a rather fierce woman called Mary - so fierce in fact that she gave rise to a graffito in the gents along the lines of the Smirnoff vodka advertising campaign, which used the strapline 'I thought ..... was a ..... until I discovered Smirnoff vodka'. In this case it was ' I thought a Bloody Mary was a drink until I discovered the Nelson Arms' - marvellously and succinctly eloquent, really. There were others, one or two of which have remained with me: 'Snow White thought Seven Up was a soft drink until she discovered Smirnoff vodka' - that kind of thing. Today all appears to be safely suburban, although doubtless there are pockets of resistance.

Even the fairly sedate Nelson wasn't immune from the sort of high jinks that went on at the Coach and Horses. I was actually drinking in the Nelson one evening - as opposed to working behind the bar. I'd arrived on my motorbike (tame Japanese stuff, not full-on leather Triumph or something), along with my housemate on his machine. We were chatting to a guy with whom I was at school, although he was older than me - in my brother's year. He'd spent some time in the Royal Marines, which wasn't surprising - he'd been in the First XV at school and was a tough cookie. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw someone pick up my crash helmet from where I'd parked it. I immediately went over to him and asked him what he thought he was doing and told him to give me my helmet back. He said 'Say please', so being the hard-arsed bookseller that I was, I did. He still didn't give the helmet back, so I grabbed it and turned away. As I did so, he punched me on the shoulder. Big mistake. My ex-marine friend saw immediately what was going on and shot out a mighty fist, which sent my tormentor literally flying across the bar - something until then I thought really did only happen in films. There were no further problems, although I gave up drinking at the Nelson, since I couldn't guarantee my saviour would be there in future! And I gave up the bar job when I got promoted. Anyway, we had moved on - to the Hop Blossom, in a little side street just off Castle Street, one of the new wave of real ale pubs with sawdusted floors, pork scratchings, interesting things to drink (I eschewed real ale for real cider) and a very affable landlord called Tony - where is he now?

Another memorable pub was the William Cobbett, also popular with bikers. It even had an oaken plaque hanging up in the bar bearing the inscribed words: 'two wheeled horseless carriages' - possibly the result of some greaser's carpentry homework. It was at the Cobbett where I had my first date with Susan, whom I had espied working in a 'trendy winebar' called Sevens in the Borough. Sevens was probably the forerunner of the rash of similar places that have so suburbanised Farnham today, indeed I think it's now a branch of Prezzo, but at the time it was a one-off and so quite cool. A friend called Mark managed the place and I spotted Susan waitressing there one lunchtime. She was gorgeous and I was smitten. I found out where she lived from Mark, dropped by on my bike and asked her out. Amazingly, she said yes. She smoked Marlboro and I thought it would be churlish of me (and more than a trifle uncool) to refuse when she offered me one, so began an off-on affair with the weed that lasted until I was 32, although I downgraded to wimpier Silk Cut 'gaspers' long before then.

Susan turned out to be a real heartbreaker, but that's another story. After six months in the Alton warehouse I had got a job in the shop itself and by the time I left Farnham in 1981 I had risen to the dizzy heights of Assistant Manager, earning £3,750 a year! That was as far as I could go, since Phoebe the lovely manager was very comfortable in her job and showed no signs of moving on. I had originally got into bookselling on the advice of Nigel Sissons, he of Hamish Hamilton fame, who had been in the Army with my father. I went to see him for advice on how to get into publishing and he recommended spending some time in the trade first. However, by the time I had been in it for a couple of years it was painfully obvious that there was no money to be made in books - at least not at the sharp end and that the footsoldiers of the industry were underpaid worker bees whose love of books was cynically and ruthlessly exploited by - well, everyone, really.

However, if you were tuned in to it, the bookishness of Hammick's and one or two antiquarian booksellers pervaded the town, which still reverberated gently to the ghostly local influences of William Cobbett and his Rural Rides, Gilbert White and his Natural History of Selborne and the gentility of Jane Austen. Cobbett's and White's books were steady sellers at Hammick's and it wasn't difficult to evoke the atmosphere they conveyed directly. Now, that is all lost under the cacophony of regular gridlocks in the town centre's teeming streets.

A year or two after I arrived in Farnham, an old college friend and I got together to share a house - at Shady Nook (yes, it really was called that) at the top of the hill you reached when you left Farnham up Castle Street. A devoutly evangelical Christian fellow-Hammickite and talented mechanic took the third bedroom and not long afterwards my then-unemployed elder brother arrived and took the fourth. I collected him from the station (illegally) on my 200cc motorbike after I took the L-plates off and we weaved our way back up to Shady Nook with him balancing a single suitcase on his lap. He soon got a job in the ironmongers opposite the Cobbett and could be seen in there for a while in the traditional khaki coat, until he moved on to bigger things as a journalist on a medical publication in Guildford.

We had some wild-ish times at Shady Nook - or Shapely Knockers as we re-Christened it - not least because my brother was a fanatical skydiver and an assortment of similarly afflicted people (including my younger brother, for a while) would turn up at weekends and head off to Netheravon to, as my father put it, 'jump out of perfectly serviceable aeroplanes' - anathema to an old soldier! When they returned, still high on adrenaline (and one or three beers at the Dog and Gun in 'Nethers', I suspect), the party would get started. One of our number sold BMWs very successfully in the City, so he was always turning up in these incredible cars, while the rest of us drove around in heaps or rode motorbikes. It used to amuse the neighbours no end when he burned rubber in the quiet cul-de-sac as he departed in his latest beast and what with the noise from my very powerful hi-fi as the skydivers 'dirt-dived' in the sitting room to Boston's 'More than a feeling' and OMD's 'Enola Gay', no weekend was complete without a courtesy visit from Surrey's finest.

But I digress.

Like tourist attractions and the most desirable places to live in our increasingly overcrowded world, Farnham seems to have become a victim of its own loveliness, so that it is no longer lovely, or special, but something akin to Richmond or Chiswick or some other sought-after but anonymous and over-developed London suburb. The people who live in Farnham today probably think they've arrived, as they drink and eat in the town's expensive wine bars and restaurants and relax in their staggeringly expensive houses, feeling quite a bit more than a little pleased with themselves. But there is something intangible and fragile missing from the town that can never be replaced - I know, I was there when it still existed.

A lot of it has to do with excessive development - shoehorning in houses where space should have been preserved - and tacking on incongruous commercial development that has distorted the proportions of the place and which sucks in far too much traffic, business and people. I dare say that what has happened to Farnham only reflects what has happened to thousands of other sleepy little market towns the length and breadth of the country, but I don't know about them. Farnham is in Surrey, but in my day seemed to be geographically not of it - it was much more a Hampshire kind of place, perhaps because it was perched right on the county boundary. Now it could be Cobham or Effingham for all the difference and specialness it conveys, as the baleful influence of London creeps ever-further outwards.

When I reached Dockenfield, I called in at the home of my old friend's brother and, remarking on what a hell-hole Farnham had become, asked if he ever goes there these days. He doesn't - and I wish I hadn't.

2011-01-25T07:52:00.000-08:00

LACIE NETWORK SPACE - NETWORK ATTACHED STORAGE? - NETWORK ATTACHED BRICK, MORE LIKE

AND DEFINITELY NOT FIT FOR PURPOSE

I remember back in 1999-2000 knowledgeable techie colleagues were fairly unimpressed with Lacie products, so why oh why didn't I heed their criticisms a few years ago when I was looking for some network attached storage and found the Lacie Network Space?

I wanted an inexpensive but reliable, large-capacity hard drive that any PC connected to my home network could access for data backups etc. I thought 1 Terabyte (1,000 Gigabytes) would last a good while and hold plenty of stuff.

So the Lacie Network Space seemed ideal for a SOHO worker like me who needs to back up my everyday stuff but also my wife's, visiting stepdaughters' etc etc.

The Lacie looked sleek and shiny when I unpacked it and it seemed simple enough to set up and use, albeit slightly unpredictable as to when my PC could 'see' it. As I only intended to use it for backups it wasn't running continuously, so it's never had to work hard.

After I'd had it a while the drive couldn't be seen by my PC at all via the Windows Explorer and the Ethernet Agent software that came with it couldn't see it either. So as it was still under warranty I opened a support ticket with Lacie and played email tennis with them for a few weeks as they tried to avoid doing anything about it.

I have to say that Lacie's tech support is tantamount to useless and their customer communications are even worse. I ended up having to escalate the problem to their CEO before anything happened.

However, eventually I got them to agree to take the thing back for repair, although they warned me I would lose any data on the drive. So much for the reliable backup drive I had been seeking. I think the geeks at Lacie told me the network interface had failed, but they also said that the external power supply could cause problems - not delivering the right or clean-enough voltage, apparently. I suspect from this that Lacie sources the cheapest possible components for its products, regardless of the fact that they want to play in a market segment where the words 'reliable' and 'mission critical' are quite important to their customers.

Anyway. By and by the drive came back and it seemed to be working ok. A year down the line I have switched it on and used it no more than three or four times (not very good backup strategy, I admit) and usually managed to get it working after restarting it a few times.

One particularly annoying foible of the drive, by the way, is that if you don't ensure its onboard clock is correct after switching on, it returns to a default date and time at some point in 2000. If you save any files to the drive while it's in this state, it time and date-stamps them from its own clock, not from the files' built-in creation date, so they all end up being some time in 2000 and there's no way of knowing which is the most recent.

This is absolutely useless for a backup and pretty unhelpful for any other file. Ok, fair enough if its onboard clock is going to reset to factory default if it's been turned off for months, but you would think it could have been designed to ask you to confirm the date and time at power-up instead. Supposedly it can be configured to go and look for a time server on the internet and get the date and time from that, but that feature doesn't work, or at least not reliably.

One other thing: wireless PCs on the network can't see it at all, only when they're connected by cable. Marvellous.

Today I thought I'd better do a backup so turned the wretched thing on. Powers up, pretty blue light comes on and that's it. Lacie Ethernet Agent can't see it, Windows Explorer can't see it, so I can't connect to it to see what it's doing (actually, I know what it's doing: f*ck-all). Have tried restarting it three or four times but no joy.

This is a machine that's probably been on for eight hours in its miserable, useless life, so in terms of MTBF it's hardly been pushed to the limit. Maybe it's meant to be left running 24/7? Well there's nothing in the manual to say so and in any case it's not very green to leave something running continuously when you only want to use it once every few months.

No, it's just a piece of junk and so, based on my experience and the recommendations of my former colleagues, if you are ever contemplating buying a Lacie product I strongly recommend you don't.

And if you'd like a shiny, black paperweight - 'designed' (not sure how much design there is in a featureless brick) by Neil Poulton, no less - whoever the hell he is - then let me know and for a very small consideration I will bung my Lacie Network Space in the post to you.

Just don't plug it in and expect it to do anything useful.

2011-01-17T03:19:00.000-08:00

HAVE FARMERS TAKEN OUT A CONTRACT ON OUR COUNTRYSIDE?

Farmers come in for a lot of stick these days and are a popular whipping boy, for the most part unable to fight back against their critics. On the whole they don't deserve the brickbats that get thrown at them: they have responded to the demand for more and ever-cheaper food by producing it, year after year. But increasingly it seems that this has only been possible by getting into bed with the agro-chem companies and burdening the land with more and more chemicals.

Maybe things are changing: consumers are becoming more savvy about the environmental price that has to be paid for cheap food and that is slowly leading to a kinder approach to food production - in some areas at least.

One issue that has no profile, however, is the physical damage caused to the local infrastructure by agriculture. Here in Norfolk the land is in thrall to 'big power farming' - massive machines harvest potatoes and sugar beet and huge articulated lorries hurtle down narrow lanes to collect them. And have you seen the size of today's tractors?

Take a look at this image of a vintage 'little grey Fergie' tractor alongside a typical monster in use on the land and obliterating verges all over the country.

Once upon a time the diminutive machine on the left and others like it were deemed quite large enough to do the donkeywork on the farm. Not any more, now that the land is more or less bare of toiling and expensive human labour. Today one man can do the work of dozens, thanks to mighty machines like that on the right, so many if not most farmers only have one full-time employee and have contracted out practically all the work.

I believe the use of contractors is leading directly to the destruction of verges for two reasons: the aforementioned size of modern tractors which, wheel-to-wheel, are often as wide as the road and the fact that cost-driven contractors are always in a big hurry to get the job done. Sure, they work hard and all hours, but they have no obvious familial or social allegiance to the environment in which they work. They are also not accountable to the farmer for damage to the verges of roads that may well pass through his land: he just wants the work done as quickly and cheaply as possible. So tractor drivers think nothing of driving up onto verges - often towing massive and heavily laden trailers behind them - to let oncoming vehicles pass. The verges simply get mashed and take ages to recover, if they ever do.

Similarly, at least in Norfolk, the endless succession of 38-ton articulated lorries thundering down narrow lanes to collect sugar beet and potatoes and rush them to the refineries and processing plants, is also putting the local infrastructure under a lot of pressure. Once a verge is destroyed and the edge of the tarmac is exposed, the road starts to crumble and potholes appear. And we all know what those do to the tender wheels, tyres and suspensions of our cars. Oh - and those mashed up verges are really, really, ugly, turned from havens for flora and fauna into something more akin to WWI battlefields.

I watched a monster very like the one above, which was also towing a huge trailer with enormous tyres, ride up the foot-high verge outside our parish church to pass an oncoming lorry - instead of doing the sensible thing and pulling over further back where the road was wide enough for both vehicles. Those big tyres just chewed up the verge and scarred the grassy bank outside the church for good. That verge is a lovely spot, in the shadow of a mighty oak that must have been there for hundreds of years. Norfolk isn't blessed with many hills, but this spot is one of the highest locally and on a clear day you can see all around for several miles, hear skylarks singing and see Billy Wix the Barn Owl, who lives in the church tower, gliding silently over the fields and copses.

On another occasion, I was standing on the verge of a single track road, close to where a car had pulled over. Up roared a steroidal tractor and instead of waiting for the car to move, or even slowing down noticeably, swerved onto the opposite verge, leaving the deep and lasting tread marks characteristic of tractor tyres in the soft ground. In a kind of rough justice, the tractor driver caught the prominent bracket of his offside mirror on a tree, which ripped the whole thing off. Oblivious even to this in his giant vehicle, he continued on his way. I was still there an hour later when he returned somewhat sheepishly to collect the remains of the mirror - hopefully after he had been given a bollocking by his boss.

To be fair to the agricultural community, they are not wholly to blame for the destruction of verges. In this increasingly discourteous age, fewer car drivers will pull over at a convenient spot to let oncoming traffic pass, so more and more ad hoc passing places are being carved out of the verges in our haste to get to our destinations quickly and through our unwillingness to give way to other road users. It's almost as if there's a loss of face involved in giving way, an assertion that 'I have just as much right to be on this road as you - I pay my road tax!'.

I can't really see a solution to the problem: farmers are unlikely to badger their contractors to drive more considerately, while the behaviour of car drivers reflects the increasing selfishness of modern life. Many people would say: 'What do a few verges out in the countryside matter - it's practically all mud anyway?'. If you look at the erosion of verges as a metaphor for modern life, with the big battalions riding roughshod over the little people, perhaps it's not so easy to dismiss the issue as someone else's worry.

2010-11-17T07:38:00.000-08:00

MULTI-CULTURALISM FAILS THE CRICKET TEST

Hearing about the Territorial Army volunteers who have been verbally abused and worse in the street, for having the temerity to wear their uniforms in public, I can only agree with German Chancellor Angela Merkel's assertion that multi-culturalism has failed. It was brave of her, the leader of a country with a dark past on ethnic issues, to make such a statement, but it shows how strongly otherwise fair-minded people now feel about having their fellow-citizens plotting against them and otherwise abusing the lands that have given them a home.

America doesn't seem to suffer from these problems to quite the same extent: immigrants and their families and descendants are, for the most part, very proud to call themselves Americans first and their nationality of origin second. Does the same thing apply in matters of religion, which seem to override nationality? I don't know, but it certainly doesn't in the UK, where it's possible to be Muslim first, second and third and to hell with the country that has taken you in and made you welcome.

I'm not arguing in favour of a policy of 'my country, right or wrong', but if you are a citizen of the UK then that should come before any partisan considerations or religious loyalties. Abusing members of our armed forces going about their lawful business is tantamount to treason, not freedom of expression and it's only our weary tolerance of such freedoms, often at the expense of the values we claim to hold dear, that makes such expressions possible. In some of the states and groups that wish us harm, such disrespect would not be tolerated, indeed it would be likely to lead to imprisonment, torture or more extreme retribution.

Those who consider their first loyalty is to their god, not their country badly need to re-examine their values and priorities.

2010-06-16T01:06:00.001-07:00

COME ON, MET OFFICE, COME CLEAN AND TELL US WHAT'S REALLY WRONG WITH THE WEATHER

As you can see, I survived my heart surgery (four weeks ago as I write) and am recovering well.

Last thing I remember on the Monday of the operation is being wheeled down to the anaesthetic room at 08:00, where a regular bed jam started to form - it's a veritable production line there on operating days. I glanced to my left, where a somewhat apprehensive-looking elderly lady lay on her bed. Then somebody must have sneaked something into my canula because the next thing I knew, I was back on the ward, nearly 36 hours later.

When my wife came in to see me late the next day, she told me that I had taken a long time to wake up after the operation so had remained on the critical care unit for longer than usual. That was complete news to me. So Monday 8am to Tuesday early evening is a complete blank.

By Saturday, however, I was allowed to go home and so here I am, complete with nicely healed up 8" scar down my chest and a state-of-the-art Carpentier-Edwards Perimount Magna Ease bovine prosthetic valve quietly getting on with its business inside my aorta. Oh, I do hope it keeps going for a good while yet - I'm not sure I could go through that again! It's still a shock to look down at my scar and remind myself that I have had heart surgery - too weird!

Anyway, that wasn't intended to be the subject of this post - I want to know what's gone wrong with the weather and to what extent the powers that be think it's our fault.

When we moved from Dorset to Essex in 2004, that summer we spent nearly all our spare time in the garden. We ate breakfast, lunch and supper outside a lot and even decided to buy a boat as our village was coastal.

In 2005 we were able to get out on the Blackwater a fair bit, but an easterly wind began to blow and never really let up before we moved to Norfolk in late 2008. We more or less gave up taking the boat out as the Blackwater was just too choppy most of the time. Our boat was ok to force 4-5, but it was no fun. We know that East Anglia tends to be a bit windier than the south of England, but in the south there are long periods of calm weather, just as there were in Essex in 2004.

Every summer since, we have experienced unceasing winds throughout the summer,often coming from the east or north east, which makes them cold, even in months when it ought to be warm.

Once upon a time when a high pressure system settled over the country it meant warm southerly winds from the continent. Not any more - now it means sunshine with cold air being funnelled down from Scandinavia - and it seems to affect the whole country.

I mean, here we are, in the middle of June and we are still running the central heating (only to achieve 18 DegC indoors) or lighting the woodburner in the evening to keep warm. Outside the sky is grey and overcast and that blasted wind just doesn't stop blowing. It's ruined four summers now and with the distinctly indifferent Spring we endured, it looks like we might just slide into Autumn without having a proper summer and any sustained fine weather at all. Remember when June was called 'Flaming June'? What a joke that name is today.

I am surprised not to find more traffic on the 'net as to what is happening to the weather and more comment on the subject from bodies like the Met Office, whose own predictions seem to have lost credibility lately. Does that mean we're encountering weather they are just not expecting and they have no idea why? They keep telling us that temperatures are close to the seasonal average and that this Spring or that Summer was the warmest since records began, but how come we aren't enjoying them? Doesn't make sense to me at all.

I'm not a conspiracy theorist, although I quite enjoy some of the wilder ones, but I can't help thinking that there's something going on with the weather that we are just not being told, because it's too awful to contemplate - that we are in fact sliding into an extended period of colder weather that might even be described as a mini-ice age. The implications for energy costs and the general difficulty of living, keeping mobile, growing crops and feeding the population are all quite frightening if such a change comes about. With national economies already fragile, prolonged cold weather could also be extremely damaging to the prospects for recovery.

What do you think?

2010-05-13T10:21:00.000-07:00

SOME WORDS ON INTIMATIONS OF MORTALITY

Ever since I discovered, in January 2010, that I need a replacement aortic heart valve asap, I've been wondering if and how to write about it here. John Diamond, the journalist and first Mr Nigella Lawson, wrote bravely, eloquently, often amusingly and without self-pity about his ultimately unsuccessful battle with cancer of the throat and tongue, so I thought he should be my role model, notwithstanding the fact that a heart valve replacement is not supposed to be life-threatening.

Once you are in the medical machine, there is so much information available to you on every subject, that you can both find out everything you could possibly want to know - and view it in graphic detail - but also scare yourself silly whilst actually seeking reassurance.

I started writing this entry before the General Election. Now it's over and we're in the brave new world of an extraordinary Conservative/Lib-Dem coalition, I feel more optimistic about the future of our country, if not myself.

The problem with which I have been wrestling during the seemingly interminable months of waiting for the operation, is what happens if I don't survive it; if I just don't come around from the anaesthetic, or die shortly afterwards from a complication? I've been told there's a 1% chance of mortality and a 4% chance of needing to have a pacemaker fitted following damage to my heart's sino-atrial node during the procedure. These are indeed very small odds, but if my surgeon carries out around 100 of these operations each year, that means one person doesn't make it. Ok, so at 52 I'm young to be having a valve replacement and therefore it's unlikely to be me, but no matter how many people I talk to and no matter how much I remind myself that my father had the same operation, with the added complication of several bypass grafts, at the greater age of 65 and survived, that tiny, insignificant chance just won't go away.

Here's the thing: the anaesthetist comes along and injects you with a drug that puts you out like a light and that's it - to all intents and purposes you have, as Monty Python put it, ceased to be. I've had a general anaesthetic a couple of times, for comparatively minor procedures and the shutdown is complete - you don't dream and there is no sense of self until you are coming around. The time you spend unconscious is totally lost, with no place in your memory. This time some maniac with a buzzsaw is going to cut my breastbone open, heave my ribs aside with what looks like a car jack and then a highly-qualified person with a very sharp knife and a sewing kit, but no mental health problems, is going to do unspeakable things to my heart, which is possibly the repository of my very soul! And I'm confidently expected not only to shrug it off within days, but be home within a week, skylarking about. It's madness; it's completely inconceivable!

Anyway, if you haven't made your farewells to your loved ones and the world in general and something does go wrong, you can't just sit up and say to the surgeon 'Hold on, doc - if my number really is up I'd like a few minutes to say my goodbyes, after that you can shunt me down to the mortuary.' It's too late; no-one will ever speak to you or hear from you again.

So I will leave parting letters for my wife, sons, brothers and stepdaughters - because you just never know, do you?

If you know/knew me and I didn't send you a goodbye letter, please accept this entry in lieu, would you?

'So goodbye, pleased to know you,
We had some laughs along the way,
But I have to be leaving,
And there's nothing you can do to make me stay'

- Barclay James Harvest, Poor Boy Blues, Everyone is Everybody Else (1974)

No flowers, just donations to the Norfolk Zipper Club for Papworth Hospital.

Thanks.

2010-04-15T02:03:00.001-07:00

I THOUGHT WINDOWS VISTA WAS BAD UNTIL I 'UPGRADED' TO OFFICE 2007

I started this blog in 2007 with a moan about how half-baked Windows Vista was and why did Microsoft feel they had to move familiar things around every time they upgraded their operating system. Now the various service packs and security patches have come out and it's running properly, more or less - although it still takes an age to boot up - and device driver developers have finally caught up.

Mind you, I hear it's practically back to square one yet again with Windows 7 - you can't even upgrade simply from Vista, apparently - you have to format your hard drive and start all over again, which means moving everything you want to keep off your PC first - how useless is that, especially when you consider how big today's hard drives are and how many thousands of photos and MP3s etc they can hold?

But anyway, these gripes pale into insignificance when you 'upgrade' (and I use the term advisedly) from Office 2003 to Office 2007 and find that you've been dumped in a maze, or perhaps more accurately the Alaskan wilderness without map, compass or GPS. While wearing a blindfold and earplugs.

In an attempt to make Office more intuitive and user-friendly (love that expression) Microsoft did away with the toolbar we all know our way around with our eyes shut, and gave us the 'ribbon' - a grouping of popular tasks that's supposed to make it easy to get straight to what you want to do.

Well it doesn't.

I've been using Office 2007 for several months now and I still find myself searching fruitlessly for such basic functions as a document's properties in Word so I can check the word count or how long I have been working on it.

It's no wonder that many businesses have shied away from migrating to Office 2007 - they fear the loss of productivity by their staff and the support overload for their IT departments as a deluge of completely unnecessary questions about where things are is unleashed.

I actually found a bit of software on the 'net that uses the add-in function in Office to give you back your original toolbar, more or less. It speaks volumes for how hopeless the ribbon is that someone felt it worthwhile coding software to restore the conventional toolbar. If you're tearing your hair out with Office 2007, you might want to give it a try - there's a free but functionally-limited evaluation version.

And of course, no new version of Office would be complete without changing the document format yet again, so old versions can't open documents created in the new version without a bit of MS software that allows the benighted users to read documents from the new version being installed. It takes a bit of digging on MS's website to discover there is such a thing, mind you - more time wasted - even if it is free. $29.95 seems a small price to pay to get your sanity - and productivity - back!

I do hope that Microsoft comes to its senses with Office 2010 and restores the toolbar, exactly the way it was. Perhaps the development team should ask itself why no other leading software developer has gone down the ribbon route, as far as I know.

It's because it's crap and doesn't work.

Now I see that Microsoft has had to come out with the Ribbon Hero game, which I see as a backhanded way of admitting that the ribbon is useless and that users need extra software just to teach them how to use it. So much for intuitive software!

Remember, Microsoft: if it ain't broke there's really no need to try and fix it. So if you don't want to lose everyone to Open Office, put the toolbar back - just the way it was.

Oh, and put the mailmerge function back the way it was in Office 2000 while you're at it, would you - you completely wrecked it in Office 2003?

Thankyou.

2010-04-14T05:56:00.001-07:00

IT'S A PLANE SHAME WHAT SOME COMPANY BOSSES HAVE TO PUT UP WITH THESE DAYS

Reading the story about the boss of Abercrombie & Fitch, who has been paid $4 million not to use the company's private jet quite so much, reminds me of the owner of the last company I worked for before jumping ship, with great relief, back into self-employment.

This company, which cleaned the dirty bits of industrial plant and took on other tough jobs that often defeated the competition, was owned and run by a volatile, eccentric, somewhat paranoid and deeply selfish man with a spectacularly inflated sense of his own importance and intelligence.

Despite the fact that the company only had a £1.5 million turnover, the MD/owner thought nothing of chartering private jets, normally the preserve of large multi-national corporations and pop and film stars, to fly him and his sidekick around Europe. He justified this by making out that his time was valuable and it was critical for him to be able to get to customers' facilities at the drop of a hat, something he claimed wasn't possible with scheduled airlines. I glimpsed an invoice from the private jet company once - for £25,000 - before the book keeper hurriedly squirelled it away! Of course, he used to take his partner with him on these jollies sometimes, which just might happen to take in a stopover in Venice, for instance.

'OK, so what?', you might say - 'It's his company'. But for a business with a relatively small turnover, the use of private jets can hardly be justified, can it? And here's the killer: this man also told me, when I asked why the company didn't make contributions to employees' pensions or give them any other in-service benefits, that his accountants had told him it "wasn't cost effective." There were people working loyally at this company who had been there many years, putting up with the personal whims, foibles and outright unpredictability of this man, who had absolutely nothing to look forward to in terms of pension rights. Oh yes, and he also had full private healthcare insurance for himself and his sidekick and co-owner - the operations director and apparently a former car dealer - who really should not have been in a role 'managing' people. The only other person to benefit from this arrangement was the long-serving but part-time employee who set up the healthcare policies in the first place!

To cap it all, the owner was a keen collector of art for investment and although I never saw any of his pictures, he was quite happy for them to be delivered to the company's premises under the noses of his staff, so that he could take them home in his AMG Mercedes. You'll like this: he drove everywhere like a madman in that souped-up Merc, by all accounts, often checking his email with his laptop perched on the passenger seat as he did so. Allegedly he had only managed to hang on to his driving licence by ensuring all his extra speeding points got added onto the licence of his elderly, non-driving mother, by claiming she was driving his car, not him!

Working at this company could at times be a bizarre experience - well, most of the time, actually. He had two school-age daughters by his first marriage and boy did he spoil them rotten - to the extent of taking staff off their proper duties to indulge the little darlings' whims. The IT manager and a creative bod had to spend many hours preparing a music video for the eldest daughter, as daddy had bought her some recording studio time to make a single, X-Factor style.

Talking of IT and being somewhat more PC literate than most, I was trawling through the bits and pieces installed on my company laptop one day, when I found a rather sinister-looking bit of software running almost invisibly in the background. A quick bit of Googling revealed it to be something called Net Monitor for Employees. The developer's website disclosed that the program allows 'someone' to visit any computer on a network without the user being aware, and see what they are doing and what's on their screen!

I was pretty sure that this was completely illegal in the UK without the user at least being aware that the program was present and that monitoring was included in the company's IT policy (which this company didn't have), but even then I had a feeling that it might contravene users' Human Rights. Net Monitor for Employees proved to be dug in like a tick, but I managed to find a bit of software on the internet that removed it. The MD sat in the same office as everyone else, but liked the desks arranged so he could see almost everyone's monitors. I re-arranged mine so he couldn't see it from his desk, but since he was always leaping up and striding around the room firing off random questions and (often self-contradictory and demonstrably pointless) orders, it didn't help much!

Without a word of explanation, one day I got an email out of the blue from the MD's partner who, not even bothering to introduce herself (we had never met), asked me to sort out the copy for a brochure she wanted produced for her own business, which was some kind of health and beauty 'spa'. It made a change from writing about cleaning heat exchangers in oil refineries, so I didn't mind, but I never got thanked for it.

You can probably see why I got to the point, in less than a year, when I felt I needed to get out of this weird company asap, so after a particularly bad day I resigned. Fortunately they let me go the next day, although they disabled my network logon before I even knew that was going to happen. I had to threaten to take the company to an industrial tribunal to get my last month's salary, however. I was almost sorry the owners settled before the tribunal - I would have loved to have had the opportunity to expose the two wide boys who ran the business as their own personal piggy bank, while taking their staff so completely for granted.

The women who booked accommodation all over the country for the poor sods who did the (very) dirty work were under orders not to book anything costing more than £40 per head per night, which meant the lads ended up staying in some real dives on a regular basis. It also meant they might be billeted some distance from where they were working, too, so had to get up extra-early to be on site on time. This could be particularly tough when they might have been up to their necks in filth until midnight the previous day and got back to their digs too late for supper. They were poorly paid to boot and basically treated as expendably as any cannon-fodder. The clients were billed at the rate of £80 per night, however, with something like another 15% on top for a 'profit' margin. I was told that some of the clients knew this was going on but reluctantly accepted it as a cost of doing business with a company that at least knew how to fix their problems, which were often severe, resulting in downtime that could be costing millions of dollars a day in lost production.

As I write this, in the run-up to the UK's General Election on May 6th 2010, I am also reminded of an article in the Sunday Times last weekend, which was suggesting that that the electorate is getting concerned about how increasingly out of touch with their workforces the ultra-highly paid bosses of some leading companies have become. Well, in my experience, the same applies to the bosses of some quite small companies, too.

2010-03-13T02:20:00.000-08:00

USING THE ROYAL MAIL - A BOND OF TRUST?

Some years ago I posted a Christmas card with enclosed cheque to my Goddaughter in Essex from our home in Dorset. It never arrived. My Goddaughter's father remarked that post was always being stolen in his area (Wickford) and I remember thinking at the time that the bond of trust between sender and the Royal Mail was fragile and easily broken.

I've never forgotten the lesson of that incident, so when I sent my son a birthday card to his flat in Finsbury in February, I put the telltale coloured envelope inside a boring-looking C5 business envelope to make it look less interesting, in the hope that the £20 note I'd enclosed might make it into his hands, rather than those of some dishonest postie.

Sadly, my precautions were in vain: the card never arrived. So I started the Royal Mail's complaints procedure, more as a matter of principle than in hope. After a few weeks I received a response advising me that the matter had been investigated as far as possible, but that as I had only used first class post I was not entitled to any compensation for the lost £20. I was sent a book of six 1st class stamps, however.

My point about making the complaint was not to get back the £20, although that would have been good, but to alert the Royal Mail to an incident of mail being pilfered by delivery postmen. The fact that the vast majority of mail is not stolen is testimony to the basic honesty of nearly all posties. But it only takes a few bad apples to spoil the barrel, so when I needed to return a DVD to my son by post, I felt I had no choice but to send it recorded delivery - what should have been an unnecessary additional expense.

I don't know whether it's a coincidence that my experiences of postal theft involved London and the London area. I've never had an item sent to or by me me fail to arrive elsewhere in the country, so are our capital's more militant postal workers also our most dishonest? I'd like to hear the Royal Mail's thoughts on the matter.

2010-01-25T02:51:00.000-08:00

OPENING PANDORA'S BOX HERE ON EARTH

I usually try and avoid over-hyped films, at least until the fuss has died down, but with James Cameron's Avatar it seems it just won't go away. Every now and then a film comes along that you just have to see in the cinema, either to appreciate it fully, or because it's groundbreaking in some way. I followed the Lord of the Rings trilogy avidly through the cinema and then invested each year in the extended edition DVDs (well, ok, they were Christmas presents) and will undoubtedly do the same with The Hobbit. Slumdog Millionaire was another cinema must-see and so Avatar, with its promise of extraordinary 3D and a compelling story, was added to the list.

It's not a complex story as it happens, but is perhaps the better for it. The theme is simple, but it was refreshing to watch a humans-versus-aliens film where we humans are the baddies for a change - and what venal, rapacious, amoral, planet-pillaging, culture-raping baddies we are in Avatar, for the most part. I'd like to think that by the time we develop enough to journey to the stars and find new life and new civilisations, we might have learnt to live more in harmony with our own world and the universe, but this film suggests otherwise. Certainly the history of mankind and the systematic displacement, 'ethic cleansing' or plain and simple eradication of indigenous or minority peoples who stand in the way of colonisation, 'progress', religious fundamentalism or plain old tribalism - Native Americans, African slaves, Australian Aborigines, rainforest indians, Hutus, Tutsis, Jews, Bosnian Serbs, Croats et al - give little reason for optimism.

The unadulterated greed and self-interest of corporate man, as evidenced most recently by bankers clinging ferociously to their obscene bonuses, regardless of what has happened to the world as a whole, largely as a result of their actions, suggests that the character traits that give us the boss of the mining operation on the world of Pandora in Avatar, and his mindless military lackey, will indeed survive well into the future. It's in our genes to be selfish and exploitative, but it's also in them to be incredibly humane and self-sacrificial - look at the truly heroic rescue work going on in Haiti right now. That's not to say that the former behaviour isn't our fault, it's more that we have to be on our guard against it at all times and to work hard if we are to resist it successfully. That isn't easy.

Films come and films go and some have a lasting impact and become classics. But has any film every changed this world - or any other - for better or for worse? Avatar could possibly be such a film, but I doubt if the people who need to go and see it will bother, or if they do will only do so out of curiosity because it's the first 3D blockbuster - films are a minor distraction from the serious and very grown-up business of making money - whatever the cost.

2009-11-04T08:21:00.000-08:00

ARE THE COURT JESTERS REALLY TODAY'S HEROES?

In their lament for how England has lost its identity and pride - the wonderful anthem 'Roots' - Show of Hands included 'Overpaid soccer stars' and 'Prancing teens' among those who now vie for our (almost completely undeserved) hero worship.

In centuries gone by, those who entertained us occupied a relatively lowly place on the social scale, as befits the role of those whose occupations may make life more interesting and fun, but who are largely unimportant and dispensable.

It seems to me that as our interest and faith in established religion has waned, we've been looking fairly aimlessly for something else to put in their place. Most people agree that shopping malls and shopping are the new temples and worship of a Godless age, but where do we position the court jesters?

So-called 'professional' footballers command salaries that are right up there with bankers' bonuses for social justification, yet the loyal fans willingly spend hundreds of pounds each season on tickets and the latest club colours trotted out by cynical and exploitative club owners. The fans may be being ripped off ourageously, but they appear to be willing victims. It seems a high price to pay to watch 22 men chase a ball around a grassy patch for 90 minutes, unless you buy into the tribalism that goes with it and which seems to satiate our warlike tendencies - well, not mine - I loathe the game and all it stands for - particularly in terms of its contribution to the sad deterioration of the quality of British life. Are soccer stars the gladiators of the modern age? Hard to compare when soccer players roll over clutching their shins on the slightest pretext - not exactly fighting for your life, is it?

Racing drivers also fit firmly into this camp. What is the point of driving a car round in circles for an hour or two, just to prove you're the fastest? I can't think of anything more tedious or a more pointless waste of time and resources. But a lot of people enjoy it and the whole circus seems to consume staggering amounts of effort and money.

Perhaps the rise of these pastimes indicates just how boring modern life has become and how we need causes and challenges to make it worth living. Maybe that's why there has been such an increase in extreme sports and activities. Life is precious to us, yet we are more and more willing to hazard it for a brief adrenaline rush.

The whole celebrity 'culture' in which we now live is cynically exploitative of people whose own lives are or must be, for the most part, tedious. Why else would weak-minded people take such intrusive interest in the minutiae of other people's lives, just because they've been on TV or in a film, pop group, X-Factor, Big Brother or whatever. 'Get a life' springs to mind, but these people think they already have a life.

I suspect that our obsession with court jesters will eventually run its course and may be foreshortened by something more significant taking its place, like war or environmental catastrophe. If we can stand up and say 'enough is enough' to bankers' bonuses, maybe we can do the same for the general vacuity of our age. I hope so - and I hope I live to see it.

2009-10-20T07:13:00.000-07:00

CERN's LHC: STARING GOD IN THE FACE?

Two eminent scientists have expressed the opinion that the Large Hadron Collider at CERN, in Switzerland, may be sabotaging itself from the future and apparently they have the mathematics if not to prove, then substantiate their claim.

Back in the early '70s, science fiction writer Arthur C. Clarke wrote a short story called 'The Nine Billion Names of God'. Set in a Nepalese monastery, high in the Himalayas, it described how the monks had been toiling for centuries to list all nine billion possible nine-letter names for their god. They believed that when the list was complete, the world would come to an end as its purpose would be over. Frustrated that the job was taking so long, the monks bought a computer to speed things up.

The two techies who installed and looked after the computer decided that, as it neared the end of its run, they would slip away from the monastery, reckoning that the monks, disappointed that the world had not come an end after all, would take out their rage on the computer and its servants.

Descending from the monastery on horseback, one of the techies glances at the clear sky at the appointed hour and observes that "one by one, and without any fuss, the stars were going out" or words to that effect - my copy of the book was lost years ago.

Although the story is a bit daft, there is a parallel between its message and what is going on at CERN today with the LHC: there may be some things either we're not meant to know, or it would be better not to know.

When the hydrogen bomb was invented, more than one nuclear physicist expressed the concern that detonating such a weapon could possibly set off a chain reaction that would ignite the entire atmosphere, bringing life on Earth to an abrupt end. Despite this possibility, the scientists went ahead with testing their new toy and now we live with a weapon that can truly bring the Sun to Earth.

Given the, to-all-intents-and-purposes, infinite size of the universe, it is reasonable to assume that there are or have been many planets capable of supporting life that evolved into technologically advanced species. How many of the black holes observed in space are actually the sites of former planets where similar experiments took place? Perhaps black holes exist as a warning to the rest of creation not to mess with things that are best left alone?

Not all bold decisions are taken wisely in the name of progress.

Is anyone listening?

2009-09-22T00:03:00.000-07:00

THE HELICOPTERS OF DAWN

I love that title - I wish it could be the title of a book I have written, but I fear it would sound too like a sci-fi, spy or Vietnam war tale. Having been a sci-fi nut as a boy, youth and young man, I amassed quite a collection and my favourite author was the master himself, Isaac Asimov. That brilliant man wrote sweepingly epic stories of the future, including one called 'The Robots of Dawn' so perhaps he is the inspiration for this entry.

With mixed feelings about air bases being closed down (you just can't help feeling they will be needed again one day, especially in what looks like being a very troubled century), we were relieved that RAF Coltishall no longer operates when we came across and moved into our present home in a most tranquil location in north Norfolk. Since we arrived, we're heard hair-raising tales from people in the area of being able virtually to 'count the flies on the pilots' teeth' as their Jaguar fighters took off and banked at low altitude overhead before screaming off on some exercise or other.

Having lived in the countryside for many years we were used to tractors and other agricultural machinery chuntering about - although here in Norfolk there are an awful lot more of them and they are bigger and noisier than anything we ever witnessed elsewhere. That's life in a deeply rural and agricultural area and you accept it philosophically or move back to town.

What we hadn't bargained for are the helicopters that service the North Sea gas platforms and which buzz to and fro on a line from Norwich airport to Bacton and beyond, pretty well all day long and often starting at first light, hence the title of this entry. And our village is right under their flightpath. One summer's morning, when I had got up especially early to try and catch the odd rabbit off-guard, I counted six helicopters (and these are big machines) between 06:30 and 07:10.

Helicopters are relatively slow, fly quite low and the biggies have very large rotor blades that literally beat the air, creating sound and shock waves that signal their approach some time before they arrive and leaving behind echoes of their passing for some time after they've gone. Thank goodness they're not the truly awesome Bell 'Hueys' of Apocalypse Now fame - their mighty two-bladed rotors create shockwaves that hit your diaphragm like a bass drum, long before you can see them. A Bundeswehr (German army) Huey came in to land maybe 50 metres away from me at Rheindahlen (HQ BAOR) once and I was practically bludgeoned into unconsciousness by the vibrations.

Anyway, what I want to know is, why are so many helicopter flights to the gas platforms necessary? I understood that ships do most of the re-supply work and that crew changes are not that frequent - four weeks on, two weeks off? Why so many flights every day, then? The expense, which no doubt finds its way into gas prices, must be astronomical, as large helicopters cost (I believe) in excess of £500 per hour to operate - and that doesn't include crew and other logistical costs.

Ok, we are lucky to live in such a peaceful and lovely spot and I am lucky to be able to work from home and look out of my office window onto such a vista, so I know I can't expect much sympathy, but if someone can explain why so many flights are necessary and why they all have to fly over our village (can their route not be varied from time to time?) I'll shut up. In the meantime, if anyone's got a spare Stinger or two, I've thought of an interesting variation on pigeon shooting!

2009-09-18T01:41:00.000-07:00

WHATEVER THE WEATHER IN BROWN BRITAIN, IRELAND DOESN'T EXIST

When the BBC's national weather forecast comes on, I sit less comfortably in my chair - for two reasons:

Firstly, I hate, with a passion, the hideous colour now imposed onto the British Isles - a rather drab and dingy shade of brown that makes the country look like some post-apocalyptic desert. Mind you, given the state of the nation under New Labour's Gordon Brown, perhaps the colour is entirely appropriate. We're all in the sh*t, sh*t is brown in colour (usually) and who presided over our immersion in the brown stuff but Mr Brown? Quick joke: Did you hear about the two men who fell into a sewer and drowned? They were interred together.

Anyway, back to the point. I would appreciate it if the map could be more in keeping with the perception of our country as the 'green and pleasant land' of yore, maybe with some relief to show our magnificent hill and mountain terrain, so how about it, BBC? Talking of green and pleasant lands leads me neatly on to my second point.

Just over the water lies the 'emerald isle', a chunk of which, rightly or wrongly (don't want to get into that here) is part of the United Kingdom. The other, larger part, is a country so foreign, so alien, that it doesn't exist at all when it comes to the weather. Yet the citizens of both parts are constantly to-ing and fro-ing between them as if they were one country - as indeed in most ways they are.

Surely it would be in the interests of good neighbourliness with the Republic of Ireland to acknowledge its existence, meteorologically speaking, and include details of what's happening to the weather there? If you live in the North and are planning to drive down to Dublin for the day, you'd probably like to know what the weather's going to be like, wouldn't you? Well, Auntie Beeb won't tell you. Maybe she does on the regional weather for Northern Ireland, but I wouldn't count on it. And I bet national forecasts in the Republic include the North - well, you would, wouldn't you?

We're more closely related to Ireland than any other European country and our uniquely isolated geographical proximity means we're all in the same boat, weatherwise, so why not include all our cousins over the Irish sea in our national forecasts - it would be the grown-up, friendly and neighbourly thing to do, wouldn't it?

2009-09-08T03:39:00.000-07:00

THE KNIVES ARE OUT FOR USELESS PARENTS

The latest news - that Scouts are being advised not to carry (pen)knives any longer - makes for depressing reading and is yet another nail in the coffin of any sort of 'normal' society - ie one where it is possible to carry what may be deemed to be an offensive weapon without the authorities automatically assuming you're likely to attack someone.

As a boy, my brothers and I and our friends loved knives - they were so useful and represented an early opportunity to justify parental trust and enjoy some independence. I think my father took me to a shop in Bulford, near Larkhill where we were then stationed (my father was an Army officer) to buy my first knife. We left Larkhill for Malaya in 1965, when I was about seven, so I must have acquired my first, albeit small penknife around the same age. I had that little knife for many years, well into adulthood, and I think I was able to pass it on to my sons when I, in my turn, thought they were old and sensible enough.

In the shop, the display case of gleaming penknives was irresistible and I would compare the relative merits of each knife, looking for the best combination of blades, construction and materials, design, shape and of course price. I would then covet the chosen one until I had enough pocket money to buy it, or could persuade my parents to give it to me as a Christmas or birthday present. My Godfather, who had been in the Army with my father when younger, used to send me penknives at Christmas from America. That's how totally normal they were back then.

It was always tricky to decide whether to go for a knife with lots of blades, but possibly poorer construction, or a simpler affair with just one - or maybe two - blades, which would usually be better made and last longer. Blades invariably did get damaged or snapped off, in trying to make a knife do something for which it wasn't designed, like being a screwdriver or levering the lid off something. Once a blade was broken, sometimes it could be ground back to become useful again, but usually the knife just languished in a drawer, lamented but no longer loved - not when the breakage offered a cast-iron reason to seek out and buy a new knife!

But other than being told sternly that 'Knives are dangerous and are not toys.' we were neither given nor needed any detailed instructions in how to carry and use them safely. You very quickly learnt that trying to use the knife to open a tin of beans would either break the blade or result in it folding up on your fingers, something you only ever did once. Lockblades were a great discovery, but they tended to be cheaply made at the pocket money level - I did buy one in a huntin'/shootin'/fishin' shop in Dulverton when I was on Exmoor for a Combined Cadet Force camp when I was, oooh, 14 - in 1972. No school master forbade me buy it and none of my fellow-cadets were ever in any danger from it.

And so we whittled away our spare time and an essential part of our boyhoods, making walking sticks and bows and arrows, cutting string and other important accessories of boyish pursuits. As far as I know our parents never worried that we were going to stick our knives either in ourselves, each other or complete strangers.

As we got older, so we graduated from penknives to sheath knives and although they were great things to have, in some ways they weren't as useful or versatile as a good penknife. We could even wear sheath knives on our belts, at least at home.

So, what has changed in the intervening years? Well, like most malaises of society, I fear the change in knife 'culture' if that word is really appropriate, comes down to incompetent parenting, plain and simple. My parents didn't have to beat me to instill discipline and respect for my fellow man (or boy) in me and although they were reasonably strict, you can see that they allowed us a fair bit of latitude as children. We would no more have dreamt of threatening someone with a knife, let alone attacking them with it, than we would have set fire to the local school!

With the media full of stories of feral children and the horrendous crimes perpetrated by children supposedly too young to take responsibility for their actions, it's glaringly obvious that we are looking at a catastrophic social breakdown brought about by generations of badly brought-up children becoming feckless parents themselves.

Being married to a teacher at a successful state school with relatively minor social problems, I get an inkling of some of the things going on and wrong with today's children. Too much bad child behaviour has become normalised and almost acceptable, just to get the job done and it's making it impossible for schools to impose the discipline that allows classes to be managed, at least in the state system. The degeneration of Rock and Polzeath into drunken squalor as armies of private school children descend (often without parents) on Cornwall shows that the deteriorating behaviour of the young is a problem that spans the whole class 'system'.

There was once an entirely reasonable expectation that children would come to school equipped to interact with their peers properly, be able to use cutlery and the lavatory successfully and imbued with basic politeness and respect for authority so that they could sit (reasonably) quietly in class and pay enough attention to make it possible for teachers to educate them. Without these things a school cannot function and ultimately families and society cannot function.

Children have an instinct for what is right and wrong and although the savage lies just below the skin, as exemplified by Lord of the Flies and the death of James Bulger and subsequent child-perpetrated atrocities, it is possible to produce and raise children who can become decent useful citizens. That means them being brought up in a loving, consistent but disciplined way and being made to realise as early as possible that the world does not revolve around them and then understanding that a knife is a tool and not first and foremost a weapon of self-defence or offence.

Knife crime, underage drink and drug abuse and youthful promiscuity are all problems that could be fixed, if we were brave enough to empower governments to do something about them, but the steamroller of rampant liberalism grinds on, leaving an increasingly broken society behind it. It's a grim thought that it has taken just a couple of generations to undo what it took nations many painful centuries to achieve - something approaching real civilisation.

2009-06-30T02:35:00.000-07:00

JUST WHAT ARE WORDS WORTH?

I signed up recently to a newly-launched service called People Per Hour.com. Supposedly it brings freelance service providers and potential clients together. You get emails telling you about jobs relevant to your skills and services and then you can bid for the projects they feature.

The problem is, there are a lot of people out there who think it's possible to dash off lengthy articles in volume, in no time at all and for practically nothing.

Here's an example: Someone wants lots of 500-word articles written for his/her website, for which they are prepared to pay... wait for it.... £5 per article!

It takes an entire day to write 1,000 words well, including client changes etc. So this person thinks a freelance writer can live on £10 a day. Not very realistic, is it?

In fact, the freelance journalism rate has been £300/1,000 words for years and really it should be higher than that by now, but people don't place enough value on good writing, especially if they have to pay for it!

I suspect that many people go looking for help with writing just because they are either too busy or can't be bothered to do it themselves. Some people know they don't have the talent for it and recognise that writing well is a special skill that must be valued and paid for commensurately - they are usually the people who become my clients.

If you're considering looking for help via People Per Hour, please - be sensible. Would you be willing to work for £10 a day? Didn't think so.

2009-06-17T03:01:00.000-07:00

THOSE WHO LIE IN UNVISITED GRAVES

I love visiting churches, especially here in Norfolk, which has more ruined mediaeval churches than any other county, apparently. I like looking at the memorials in the church and the gravestones outside and trying to imagine the lives those named might have led, especially if they seem to have been cut short.

You quite often see memorials to young women, many of whom must have died in or after childbirth, as well as poignant dedications to children. What carried them off? Fever? Poverty? Falling off a horse? I feel quite connected to these sad testimonials and speculate about the times in which those who lie beneath lived.

In a church near us, there's what I consider to be a remarkable memorial to a young woman, apparently of a very good and prominent local family, who died at the age of 25 in 1841. The wording on the memorial doesn't speak of her family's grief at losing her so young, but rather suggests that she may have been a thoroughly bad girl! Either that, or she was so virtuous or self-effacing, that she asked for such dismissive words to be left as her memorial.

This is what it says:

Here's my claim and here alone,
None a saviour more can need,
Deeds of righteousness I've none,
No not one good work to plead,
Not a glimpse of hope for me,
Only in Gethsemane.

I believe this young woman was related to the rector of the parish. Was he some stern Victorian who was shamed by his daughter's louche behaviour - perhaps she became pregnant out of wedlock and died in childbirth at 25? Was the wording on the memorial a warning to other parishioners not to follow his daughter's path?

Maybe I'll get to the bottom of it in time - we've only lived in the area a few weeks - but in the meantime I can't help wondering about that young woman and what she did to deserve such a
damning postscript to her short life.

2009-05-18T07:35:00.000-07:00

CAR SCRAPPAGE SCHEME - SOMETHING NOT QUITE RIGHT?

So, the car scrappage scheme goes live today.

If you have a car that's over ten years old, the government and the car industry will contribute £2,000 towards a shiny, new and presumably low CO2 emissions (and therefore low VED) vehicle.

So, what if your car is only eight years old, but has fallen foul of the new VED bands now being applied arbitrarily and retrospectively to vehicles registered after March 1st 2001?

Our Land Rover Discovery TD5 was registered in May 2001 - just two months too young to duck under the wire, yet it's exactly the same car as one registered pre-March 1st. That two months means that VED for our car is now a massive £400 per year - up from £210 this year.

That's a swingeing, punishing tax, penalising us for a purchase decision made some time ago, before we had any idea VED bands would start being moved around to address some pseudo-green agenda.

Here's the paradox: on the one hand the government is telling us our car is a polluter and if we keep it we can expect to pay more and more VED for the privilege of paying them more and more tax on fuel as well, but on the other hand it doesn't qualify for the scrappage scheme which is supposed to be taking more polluting cars off the road.

Now,that really makes sense, doesn't it?

But even if our car did qualify for the scheme, we couldn't afford to take advantage of it because we have no equity in it - the new VED bands have rendered such vehicles all but worthless and in any case we are only one year into a five year bank loan we took out in 2008 to buy the car in the first place!

This must be what it feels like to be set upon by a gang of thugs and be given a kicking while the Police look on but do nothing. Whichever way you turn you are being hit and the very people who claim to be helping you don't give a monkey's.

Apparently the new VED bands have affected over 9,000,000 cars - that's an awful lot of vehicles and many of them aren't 'evil' 4x4s - oh no, they're things like people carriers and perfectly ordinary saloon cars that just happen to have larger engines. The result is an enormous number of worthless cars that can't be sold, second-hand dealers stuck with stock they can't shift and therefore going bust and millions of ordinary and probably not very well off people caught in a rather nasty Catch-22.

I think we can expect to see more older but perfectly serviceable cars torched or otherwise 'disappeared' and a corresponding rise in dubious insurance claims as fairly desperate people try to extract some value from vehicles that have become veritable albatrosses. I have a friend - an East End lad - who could arrange for a car to be 'stolen' and torched. If we didn't need our dear old Disco for towing our boat, I think I would be tempted to give him a ring.

Now, when is the General Election due?

2009-05-11T01:04:00.000-07:00

WELL, MY HEART WAS CERTAINLY 'DANCING AT LUGHNASA'

Some years ago, my wife (before she took on the job), sent me a cassette (yes, it was that long ago) copy of a CD called 'Talk on Corners' by a band I'd never heard of: The Corrs. She sent a note with the tape, which said something like:"Play this to see if you're still alive!" I did, and was instantly smitten by the electrifying blend of catchy pop and Irish folkiness I heard.

It didn't take long to become equally smitten by the beautiful Corr sisters: Sharon, Caroline and Andrea (talented brother Jim not really being my type!) and especially Andrea. So we started collecting their consistently brilliant albums, but never got the chance to see them live, having to settle instead for their excellent 'All the way home' documentary and concert DVD. After they released the CD 'Home' they split up, mostly to get married and have babies, and that seemed to be the end of any prospect of another live performance.

In 2005-6 I was working for an Irish software company and had to make regular trips to Dublin for meetings. Then there was the company's Christmas bash over a weekend at Castle Leslie, near Monaghan. Maybe it had something to do with the fact that my paternal grandmother (whom I never knew; she died of breast cancer before I was born) was Irish that led me to start feeling a real affinity for the Emerald Isle. I even wondered if I might qualify for an Irish passport! I couldn't track down my grandmother's parents, though, so never did. Like Australians, the Irish are viewed as kind of global citizens, welcome and envied more or less everywhere and I suppose I wanted some of that aura to rub off on me.

Such fanciful notions pass, just like the job with the Irish software company - and the Irish economy, come to think of it - but my interest in the Corrs, and Andrea in particular, has endured. Like her sisters, she exudes a girl-next-door sweetness which combines with an Irish winsomeness and, let's face it, looks that have propelled her to the top of numerous 'most beautiful woman in the world' polls. I love the little joke that Terry Wogan always makes when he plays a Corrs number: 'Ah, they've got great voices, those Corr girls - shame about their looks, though - plain as pikestaffs.'

It was interesting to see Andrea embark determinedly on a solo acting and musical career - she may be diminutive, but she must have big boots! You could see from her early efforts that she had a talent for acting, but at that time it looked as though she wasn't finding it easy to settle into her roles. It must be difficult to make the transition from pop princess to serious actress and maybe her not-entirely-successful solo album showed that she was struggling with the conflicting demands of the different careers and as a result not shining as brightly as she would have liked.

So it was gratifying to see her get the chance to put herself to the test more thoroughly in the role of Christina, in Dancing at Lughnasa at The Old Vic. We travelled down to London to see her for the matinee performance on the closing day, which also happened to be my birthday.

It's curious to see someone you've admired from afar in the flesh - and undoubtedly far closer in the intimate surroundings of the wonderful set in The Old Vic than would ever have been possible at a Corrs concert. But there she was, large as life - or rather, as petite as she is. And I have to say that she carried off her role extremely well, putting herself into the character heart and soul and with such a convincing array of facial expressions, gestures and delivery that left me in no doubt that she's an actress with genuine talent and deserves to go far.

Mind you, having read recently that her sister, Sharon - the violinist - is about to launch a solo album and go on the road, maybe there are signs of a restlessness in the family that will lead to the Corrs getting back together one day - I hope so. I know it's best to 'quit while you're ahead' and 'leave 'em begging for more', but I think they could have a few good years left in them first, without losing the magic.

As for Andrea's personal life: it's probably typical of her generous nature that she has rescued a waif and stray (chuckle) by becoming engaged to a hedge fund manager, one Brett Desmond, who probably needs her millions more than she needs his right now (if the credit crunch hasn't left him destitute). I hope he's a good man who will treat her well, love her as she deserves and nurture her career and many talents. To paraphrase Colonel Brandon's words in Sense and Sensibility, "To Andrea I wish all imaginable happiness; to Brett Desmond that he may endeavour to deserve her."

2009-04-27T01:43:00.000-07:00

ALL 4x4s BA-A-A-A-D, ALL OTHER OLD CARS G-O-O-O-D?

In the April 20-26 issue of The Big Issue, which we like to buy whenever we're in the city centre, there was an article on the rudeness (or at least lack of good manners and common courtesy) of a woman driving a Land Rover Discovery III to the writer of the article. Apparently, she pulled up alongside him in his home street (possibly while he was standing next to his "old Volvo" and, powering down her window without a greeting or an 'Excuse me, could you help me, please?' bluntly asked him if he knew where such-and-such a street was located. He did of course, but in the face of such perceived arrogance, said that he did not. He observed that he sort of wished he had said he did know and directed her to a dodgier street in the neighbourhood, where she may well have been relieved of her vehicle. She drove off without a farewell or thanks.

If you drive a 4x4 you're kind of used to being a bit of a pariah, unless you live in a rural area. Mind you, I was driving our own Disco (sedately - reduces fuel consumption and allows you more time to admire the scenery) down a narrow lane near North Walsham when a woman came sweeping towards me in a blue Mazda MX5 or similar. Not having driven this road many times, I wasn't sure where all the passing places were and I did not see her very low vehicle as early as she must have seen my quite tall one. We therefore arrived at a point in the road where I had to veer somewhat to the left to give her passing room and as she did so I could tell, from the look on her face and without being a lip-reading expert, that she was snarling something like: "F*&%$ing four wheel drive w*#@%r!" as she breezed past.

Given that it was quite hard to determine who should have given way to whom, if only out of 'courtesy' I thought her reaction a little harsh, especially right out in the countryside!

Anyway, all the above is just to put into context a balancing letter to The Big Issue I thought I should write, the text of which is below. I have added the odd thought that has occurred to me since, but essentially it's as-sent.

*********************************************************

As both a reasonably regular reader of The Big Issue and the owner of a Land Rover Discovery (albeit an eight-year old Discovery II, not the latest version III featured in Phil Robinson's article under 'Spam - world wide weirdness' in the issue of April 20-26), I find myself unable to resist making some observations on Phil's comments.

Firstly: I agree; the driver of the Disco in question was extremely and inexcusably rude, regardless of which model of car she was driving. It is almost certainly unnecessary to own and drive a 4x4 if you live in a city but, thanks to an accident of economics (collapse of the housing market), we too currently find ourselves living in a city and owning a 4x4, even if we do our best to get out of it whenever possible (the city, that is, not the 4x4).

Secondly: it is quite possible that Phil's "old Volvo" emits more CO2 than a brand new Disco. It almost certainly emits more unburnt heavy hydrocarbon particulates from engine oil because its piston rings are worn. These are smelly, nasty and probably carcinogenic; it's grim to be stuck behind such a 'smoker'.

Thirdly: most 4x4 drivers are very friendly and helpful and far from being arrogant arses and quite a lot of them use their vehicles for perfectly legitimate purposes, for which no other vehicle will really do. We tow and launch our venerable and heavy motor launch (original cost: 850 quid, in case you're about to condemn us as Abramovich-alikes) with our Disco, for instance, and I use it to drive up deeply-rutted farm tracks when I go out to do my bit to reduce the 'grey plague' (woodpigeons) that do their best to 'eat the world' and drive up the price of food by making it as scarce as their insatiable appetites can manage.

Fourthly: although a Discovery looks quite large (mostly on account of its height) when placed next to an ordinary car, it is certainly not the largest car in the world by some margin and is no longer than an old Volvo estate. The recent vogue for twin-cab pickup trucks, which have to be amongst the largest and most useless vehicles for the road, at least as an alternative for the estate car, means that there are masses of these daft vehicles around today. And of course you only have to cross the Atlantic to the USA to find supersized vehicles like the Chevrolet Suburban, which makes the Discovery look like a Mini and where even the pickup trucks make those on sale in the UK look like Tonka toys.

I suspect that Phil's problem is as much to do with the psychology of 4x4s and the attitude of their owners, as their environmental impact. For the arrogant woman high up in her Discovery, read woman in full fig, sitting high up on her thoroughbred hunter, looking down at the peasants. It's the "unspeakable in pursuit of the uneatable" all over again, and I suspect that Phil, with his crappy old Volvo, feels like a cross between a peasant and the fox.

The government which, being Labour, is still driven by the imperatives of the politics of envy, for all its capitalism-friendliness of the last ten years, has decided that the Discovery and other 4x4s must be swept away and is legislating like mad to bring this about. As with the fishing industry, however, their net is catching all sorts of creatures that are completely innocent, but which just happen to have unfashionably high CO2 emissions. Some 900,000 cars, including people carriers and quite ordinary saloon cars, which were registered after March 1st 2001, (ours was registered in May 01 - how ironic is that?) now attract a retrospective and iniquitous new level of Vehicle Excise Duty of 400 pounds per annum. This has rendered these vehicles all but worthless and has left secondhand car dealers with huge numbers of unsaleable cars - cars that otherwise have plenty of life left in them.

People (like us) who spend several thousand pounds on an older vehicle, cannot just afford to scrap it because the licensed bandits who run the country suddenly decide it would be a jolly green idea to punish people for decisions they may have made years ago, when the environmental landscape was different. So we will keep our Disco and pay the 400 pounds each year, rather than throw our investment away. A good Disco should be fine for 250,000 miles or more and ours has only done 74,000 - probably less than Phil's faithful steed.

So, Phil, we 4x4 drivers are not all Chelsea Tractor-driving Hoorays charging about the capital yelling 'Sterilise the working classes' (I love that line: some prat used to come out with it in the Admiral Codrington in Chelsea (a hangout of Old Harrovians), where I had the misfortune to work as a barman for a few months when I was out of work in 1981). And I can say 'prat' with authority, as a former (minor) public schoolboy myself, incidentally!

I hope The Big Issue will be brave enough to print this letter, in the interests of balance, but just in case I will put it up on my blog as well.

P.S. My wife, a comprehensive school teacher, agrees!

P.P.S. Our 'green conscience' second car is a six-year-old Smart car.

11/5/09 - P.P.P.S. The Big Issue actually printed my letter, albeit somewhat edited, which did change the meaning in places. But hey, at least they did it, so well done them!

2009-04-26T05:26:00.001-07:00

ASSEMBLE THE FIRING SQUAD, COMRADES, IT'S THE SUNDAY TIMES RICH LIST AGAIN

I like the Sunday Times and have been buying and reading it for years, despite the fact that it's published by News International, controlled by a dynasty that apparently isn't entirely familiar with the concept of editorial independence.

The ST has become a chunky purchase, but its £2 cost still strikes me as reasonable, given the fact that it lasts all week. We don't take a daily paper - too expensive and there aren't enough hours in the day to justify it when you can get all the news from the BBC's website during the week, then all the comment, opinion and even entertainment (many thanks, Clarkson and Gill) on Sunday.

So once you've fast-tracked the redundant sections to the recycling bin - Sport (i.e. football), Money (haven't got any), (dis)Appointments (has anyone ever got a job by replying to an ad in this section?) and shaken out all the loose inserts to go the same way, you are left with the makings of a varied, decent and, I like to think, reasonably objective read.

But once a year, a greasy interloper slithers out of the pack and slaps bloatedly and complacently onto the table - The Sunday Times Rich List supplement. Having been to see State of Play on its opening night, which reminds us there used to be (almost) fearless crusading journalists who couldn't be bought at any price, the Rich List sits more comfortably with the image of the prurient, celebrity-obsessed, amoral drones who work for the tabloid press, than a newspaper with a proud heritage of exposing the liars, cheats and thieves who would be our masters, many of whom probably still grace the pages of said supplement.

Until last year, the Sunday Times justified the resources and publication of this paean to an obsession with wealth at any price, by telling us that the people it features are the veritable engine room of any healthy, growing economy.

With the gap between the very rich and the very poor wider than at any time in human history, and after a global economic collapse without parallel for its sheer scope in living memory, this fatuous claim has been exposed as the total load of old trousers it always was. Except we were all too busy trying to get our own snouts in the trough at the time to notice or admit it.

Coinciding with the publication of the Sunday Times Rich List comes the news this week that an awful lot of billionaires have been downgraded to mere multi-millionaires, and this must be as galling for them as it is cheering for pretty well everyone else. Perhaps even in America, where extreme wealth is celebrated as the ultimate realisation of the American Dream, there has been an awakening to the awful price that must be paid by society and indeed whole nations, to make just a few people obscenely wealthy.

I'd quite like to be a bit rich myself - who wouldn't? And I know now that I haven't got what it takes to be a successful entrepreneur, so good luck to them all - if they can get away with it without screwing the rest of us. But plainly that formula hasn't worked and 'light touch' regulation has allowed selfishness and greed to have their way, and what a terrible mess we're in as a result.

What I think those of us who don't exactly resent the rich their success and wealth would like, is rather a lot more taste, discretion and philanthropy on their part and a lot less sucking up and fawning over them by the media we count on to be resolutely independent and fearless in defending our interests against the uglier aspects of unfettered capitalism.

That is the job of The Sunday Times and every time it publishes its loathsome Rich List I wish, oh, how I wish, that it wouldn't.

2009-04-07T01:01:00.000-07:00

NOT SO INNOCENT

Well, I was more than a little surprised to read on the BBC's website this morning that Innocent, makers of really rather good bottled smoothies, had accepted investment money from big, bad, Coca Cola.

Did their PR people not suggest this might just not be a very good idea for a company that makes such a song and dance about trading ethically and manufacturing responsibly? Or did they think this was some other Coca Cola company - not the one whose manufacturing process reportedly empties Indian aquifers for miles around each bottling plant, or which requires 10 litres of pure, innocent, drinking water to make just one litre of their sugar-laden, teeth-dissolving gloop?

I appreciate you needed money to expand your empire, guys (is that a very 'Innocent' thing to be doing in itself?) but to take it from corporate America? It makes Green & Black's sellout to Cadbury look positively sensible! Somehow I don't think quite so many little old ladies or ditzy young things will be willing to knit mini bobble hats for Innocent bottles next time - not when they can be made for pennies in Indian sweatshops!

One thing's for sure: Coke won't settle for a minority stake in Innocent for very long. Expect to see the founders taking the money and running within a year or two and at least one of them become a new face on Dragon's Den, looking for new 'ethical' investment opportunities. Cynical? Moi?

2009-04-06T04:36:00.000-07:00

ONLY 313,912 NEW CARS REGISTERED IN THE UK IN MARCH!

Well, when the car industry tells you it's in trouble and the media go on about a veritable slump (their favourite word these days) in car production, you imagine that people have more or less stopped buying cars.

But over 300,000 cars sold in one month, in one country, is still a hell of a lot of new vehicles on the road, whichever way you look at it. Sure, it's well down on the 451,642 sold in March 2008, but I can't even imagine what 313,912 cars would look like. Should we be asking how many cars were scrapped in the same period, to make room for all these new vehicles? If the average length of a car is four metres, which sounds reasonable, that's a bumper-to-bumper queue over 1,255 kilometres or 784 miles long. That's long enough to stretch from Land's End to John O'Groats with a bit over, isn't it? Where do all these cars go?

So is this another drama being turned into a crisis? Car company workers have been losing their jobs and that's not good, but maybe we're just suffering the hangover from a gross worldwide oversupply in car production. It was just about sustainable at the peak of a global economic boom - before speculators decided to get into oil, anyway - but now we can see that there are too many cars chasing too few buyers and probably always would have been if the world hadn't been on some economic Nantucket sleighride for the last few years.

Is this news another example of how the media make things look worse than they are, because bad news sells better than good? I would have classified 'No cars sold in March' as bad news. 'Still a surprisingly large number of cars sold in March, despite everthing' isn't quite in the same category, is it, unless you subscribe to the view that anything other than continuous growth is little short of economic disaster? We all know that we can't keep putting more and more cars on the roads for ever, just as we knew in our heart of hearts that the housing market couldn't keep rising for ever. We seem to be locked into a commitment to permanent growth, which is stimulated by periodic recessions when it starts to flag. As usual, we know that when confidence returns at consumer level, there will be a lot of people only too ready to trade in cars they've hung on to for much longer than usual and so a new golden age of car production and sales will begin. By that time, of course, fewer of those cars may be produced in the UK or elsewhere in the western world and that will be a shame, not least for the people who work in the industry.

This is shaping up to be a very interesting century and not necessarily for all the right reasons. I want to be alive to try and do what I can to help friends and family cope with the turbulent times and changes that must surely be coming, but who can deny the grim reaper when he comes a-calling - and that includes the car industry?

2009-04-05T01:53:00.001-07:00

OUR LITTLE DOG HAS GONE AWAY - JUST FOR NOW, HOPEFULLY

Since we moved to a flat in Norwich in December 2008, our little border terrier, Pepper, has been pining for her lost garden at our house in Essex - see previous post. Pepper loves to lie in the sun, yap a bit at passers-by, try and catch bees and generally please herself between walks. So it came as something of a shock to her when her new home turned out to have no 'outside' and no catflap (I told you she's a small dog) through which to come and go.

We've had Pepper since she was a puppy - bought her from a breeder on a council estate in Bristol. The breeder seemed to be very involved with the hunting scene. There were numerous fox masks on walls, photos of meets etc etc. It turned out that Pepper's father ran with the Exmoor hunt, a pack of deerhounds. And her mother had even been kicked in the face by a horse, poor thing, so her top front teeth were dying. Can't remember how many brothers and sisters Pepper had, but she seemed as playful and friendly as the rest of them and we liked her grizzle and tan colouring, so we chose her.

We were proud of Pepper's strong working and pedigree lineage, but it nearly proved to be her undoing on more than one occasion as she was growing up for, as soon as she was able to go on proper walks, she would head off after deer in Cranborne Chase, yelping her head off. We lost her to deer on several occasions and she would return home many hours later, exhausted and filthy, sometimes in the dark and the rain. One Friday it happened on Salisbury Plain - I was out for a walk with my son Harry and my elder brother and his dog and when we were nearly back at the car, Pepper spotted some deer. The red mist came down and off she hurtled. There is no way a border terrier can catch a deer - or most other animals, come to that, but she would try anyway. We looked for her until it was dark and then headed back to my brother's house. I called my wife and told her what had happened and she joined us. The next day was a Saturday and it rained as only it can on Salisbury Plain. We walked everywhere we thought the wretched dog might be and kept dialling in to our answering machine to see if anyone had found her and tried to call us. But no joy.

On Sunday we set out searching again, still calling the answering machine, still in the rain and then, suddenly, a message was left by a couple living in Netheravon that they had got Pepper.

It turned out that they had actually found her on Friday evening, at the side of the road, but didn't want to leave a message in case we were away. Aaarrrgggh! So we spent two days wandering around Salisbury Plain in the pissing rain for nothing. And all the time, Pepper was cosied up in a house full of large cats, being spoonfed catfood and being totally spoilt. By the time we got to her, she didn't even want to leave - and she hates cats! The guy who found her had even plaited her a temporary lead - which we still have - with a nice little brass caribiner to attach it to her collar. They said they would be delighted to have her to stay anytime we wanted to go away on holiday!

After that episode, we decided some formal training was required. Pepper's a very docile and biddable dog, but the hunting instinct is very strong in her, as you can tell. We started taking her to a Police dog handler who trained dogs in his spare time and he was brilliant. Pepper became much more disciplined - border terriers tend to have a fairly laissez-faire attitude to obedience - and we found taking her for walks and getting her to come back much more successful and pleasurable.

Where we diverged from the dog handler's teaching, however, was his proposal for the aversion therapy Pepper needed to stop her running off after deer - or hares, rabbits etc. - when we wanted her to come back. He proposed a set of metal discs to be thrown to the ground when the dog didn't come back, the sound having been linked in her mind with negative associations. We just knew that metal discs would be no match for the red mist, however, so reluctantly we decided to invest in an electric collar. These remotely-controlled collars tend to provoke strong reactions from animal lovers, since they involve the option of giving the animal an electric shock of variable strength, but similar to an electric fence, for failing to obey. There are others, supposedly more humane, that squirt some citronella at the dog's nose, but again we had little doubt that a whiff of lemon could overcome Pepper's hunting instinct. We are convinced that Pepper's collar saved her life on at least one occasion and it certainly saved us from hours of anxiety and searching. The best thing about the collar is its beep function, which makes a distinctive noise without giving the dog a shock. But when Pepper hears the beep, she heads straight back for us from wherever she is. We know the collar has done its job without damaging Pepper psychologically, because we introduced and used it carefully and because she goes crazy with excitement whenever she hears its buckle rattle, for the rattle means a good long walk. She will also come back to two toots on the whistle - most of the time. And we always reward a successful recall with a small treat.

Most of the time these days, the collar isn't needed, but if we take Pepper for extended walks over several days, with plenty of rabbiting opportunities, gradually the voice recall becomes less and less effective as the power of the red mist returns - once a hunter, always a hunter! Then, another walk wearing the collar restores law and order and it isn't even necessary to beep her - the collar ensures she stays just a little closer and remains more attentive to commands. Did I mention that you don't take Pepper for a walk, you facilitate a hunting opportunity? We have always slightly envied other dog walkers, with their faithful companions trotting along by their sides, or close by, running off to fetch sticks and balls and so on. With Pepper, as soon as you set off, she is gone: working hedgerows, bushes and ditches, flushing everything she can find and giving noisy chase to bunnies. Being small, she is not much more of a threat to rabbits than to deer, unless the rabbits have myxomatosis or a white stick.

Today, my wife has headed off to Dorset with Pepper, who is going to live with my parents-in-law for the time being. She will get two rabbit-intensive walks each day and the chance to lounge about in the sunshine, harass bees and frighten the local cat population. She will love it, but I will miss her funny little ways. She is not a demonstrative dog and spends 90% of her time at home curled up asleep (true hunters don't waste their energy on frivolities like playing, I understand), but we love her and we know she loves us - we are certainly at the centre of her little universe. I hope we can have her back one day when we move out of the 'shoebox' and back into the countryside ourselves. I don't like being cooped up indoors either!

2009-03-31T07:38:00.000-07:00

I'VE BEEN NEGLECTING MY BLOG!

Ok, I admit it - I've left my blog untended for far too long. Now the weeds have grown up, the dust has gathered, the doormat's knee-deep in junk mail and the fly posters have accumulated.

So, time for a tidy up and a bit of making good.

We moved from Essex to Norwich recently and it's come as a bit of a shock. Where we lived in Essex was pretty rural and our house was (is) a delightful Grade II-listed, timber-framed cottage in a former fishing village.

Anyway, my wife was head of department at a school in Brentwood, where she's been working for four years. It's what brought us up to Essex from Dorset. As I work from home and all my clients communicate with me through the 'net, it doesn't matter where I am based, although moving away from the south of England did put some distance between me and my sons. Mind you, my wife binned the application pack for the Essex school and I fished it out of the bin and encouraged her to apply, so I have only myself to blame!

So, after four years of a 70-mile commute, my wife felt she had taken the job as far as she could and it was time to look around for an assistant head's job. We'd got to know and love Suffolk during our time in Essex and were keen to see if we could relocate there. Try as she might, however, the right opportunity didn't come along, so we decided to cast the net a bit wider and bingo - a school in Norwich made her an offer.

Well, that was in June 2008. So we thought: we'll put the house on the market, which will give us three months to find a buyer, find a place for ourselves and get all the legal stuff done, before the new school year started in September. Ha!

An added complication: my mother was living with us, following my father's death in 2007. My mother has Alzheimer's disease. When my father died, she went to live with my brother in Switzerland initially, but on returning to England to give them a break, it became clear that her homeland was the best place for her, so she moved in with us. In a two-bed cottage that's not trivial and indeed it was the start of a difficult year. In preparation for moving to Norfolk, however, we agreed eventually that it would be best if my mother moved into a retirement home, which we found near Dereham. We had found a lovely old house in the area with an annexe, which we thought my mother could live in, but the consensus in the family was that this wouldn't work. Given the fact that we couldn't sell our house - or my mother's, which was rented out - it all became a bit academic.

No-one would buy the house or even make a half-sensible offer, so come September my wife started weekly boarding, staying in a shared house near work, while I soldiered on alone, except for a mid-week trip to Norwich to break the week up. Meanwhile, my mother was safely installed in a very nice and caring establishment, so although I didn't have to worry about her on a daily basis, it was hard not to escape the feelings of guilt that go with making such a decision, collective though it was.

After a few months of this strange and unsatisfactory existence, we decided to rent out our lovely old house and buy a flat in the city of light, calculating that the rent from the house would just about cover the mortgage on the flat.

And so it has come to pass that I now spend my days, weeks and months in a new-build flat on the site of a former shoe factory in a not-entirely-lovely part of inner-Norwich, near Mousehold Heath. Since the flat is not large, I have Christened it The Shoebox; it seemed right. On the plus side, I have managed to find some rough shooting already - something I never managed to do in Essex - and hopefully we will get our old motor launch out on the Broads when the weather cheers up. Should be less stressful than getting out and back on the same tide on the River Blackwater, hopefully - and calmer waters, too. The last two dreadul summers, when the wind never stopped blowing, put us off taking our 18 foot boat out - we're definitely fair weather sailors. Hell, before we moved to Essex, we weren't even sailors at all, but in our village, one of the first questions you were asked by new acquaintances was: So, when are you going to get a boat? So we did. More of that in another entry.

We live just 20 miles or so from my mother's home, so it's not too hard to visit her. I'm kind of flying the flag for my brothers, as they both live abroad (the other one lives in Melbourne), so we still tend to be pretty regularly involved in doing things for and with her.

But I do miss the country - a lot - and fear we jumped into buying The Shoebox too quickly, when we probably should have rented a cottage out in the sticks somewhere. Our dog isn't coping very well cooped up in a flat all day, either - she was used to popping in and out of the catflap the previous owner of our little wooden house had fitted in the small kitchen door you can see on the right in the picture, so she could lounge in the sun, harass bumble bees and bark at passers by. Looks like she's going to relocate to Dorset for the time being and live with my in-laws, where she will get good walks, a garden to mooch about in and be a 'Pets as Therapy' companion to my ailing father-in-law - and be fussed over by his carers. Actually, she's going to be better off than me!

It's true to say that Norwich is a very interesting place at its heart, but that attractive core is ringed by suburbs of unrelieved dreariness, with miles of unimaginative and depressing public housing. The exception is an area the estate agents Christened 'The Golden Triangle' and it took us a few weeks to work out where it is. Perhaps I'll look at it in more detail in another post. Anyway, there was no way we could afford to buy any kind of place there, not while we're still lumbered with what is now the albatross of our little Essex cottage. Did I mention it is now only worth what we paid for it in 2004 (maybe), despite the thousands we spent on it - including the acquisition of a strip of land to create a drive etc? So not only are we reluctant landlords, we're in negative equity as well! Ho hum!

2008-01-02T09:01:00.000-08:00

HELP FOR HEROES

I'm dismayed to see that the Help For Heroes fundraising campaign seems to be running out of steam. If you haven't made a donation towards the cost of a swimming pool for injured service personnel at Headley Court, then you really should - it's the least we can all do and hopefully should put the government to shame as well.

2007-12-05T23:13:00.000-08:00

I'LL BE DAMNED - IT'S NO FAINT PRAISE

It's great when you can get a short, snappy quote from a client who's pleased with what you've done for him. When one of my favourite clients gave me a testimonial, however, it was so long and fulsome I wasn't sure what to do with it, so I thought I would put it on my blog. Thanks Paul.

"Peter Gallon's copy has had more impact on my training business than any other marketing. Full stop. A few days after receiving my £150 copy I received over £6000 of business. Thanks to Peter I now have the luxury of adding extra workshops due to overbookings.

"I had never used a copywriter before Peter Gallon and was quite nervous. I run a small, young, (but expanding - thanks Peter) business and did not have the time or money to get my copy wrong. I emailed around half a dozen writers I found on Google. Most of the copywriters who called were fine. Peter Gallon was different. He developed a rapport with me immediately. He had an intimate knowledge of my company and how I worked. Despite contacting me just a few hours after I sent him my enquiry, it was clear he had done his research. I hired Peter Gallon Writing on the spot.

"Before Peter, many clients had a take it or leave attitude towards my products. Now I have advanced booking months ahead. After the increase in my business I asked clients why they chose my company. They said my copy spoke to them directly. Thanks to my increased revenue I refuse to write another word. Peter Gallon Writing is now a central part of my team and is responsible for new websites, bids, brochure and promotional materials.

"If you're like me, you probably find testimonials rather fake and cheesy. So call me on 020 7622 2400 - if you can get through. If you are looking for increased revenue call Peter Gallon Writing - unless you are a competitor of mine!"

- Paul Pennant, Managing Director, PDP Associates - www.indiquo.com

2007-10-18T04:19:00.001-07:00

TO BLOG OR NOT TO BLOG

I've struggled with how and if to start writing a blog since I registered this account in 2006. I have tended to agree with the view that, if you're not careful, a blog is most easily seen as a form of vanity publishing - and I hope I'm not vain! Well, I have yet to be brave enough to add a photo of my ugly mug to this blog - ditto Facebook, which I've had to join because friends travelling the world on their yacht want to send me pics from their various stops, and Skype.

So, anyway, I have got started at last and I have decided the first thing I need to do is tell you how awful Windows Vista is. I'm no Microsoft basher, but Vista makes me want to take up the baseball (or cricket?) bat and go looking for someone from Redmond or Seattle to sort out. We're several generations into Windows now, so why does the latest version of the world's leading PC operating system have so much wrong with it at launch? Why does Microsoft insist on forcing people to learn how to use its software all over again, with its attendant negative impact on productivity, efficiency and user serenity?

I bought a new Toshiba Satellite laptop from PC World in early August. It was pre-loaded with Vista Ultimate. 'Ho hum' - I thought, having heard nothing good about Vista since it was launched and that includes the people who have to sell PCs with Windows Vista. Within a day or so, I realised that the new 'Power Plans' do not actually work. It doesn't matter what settings you apply to tell your PC when to turn off the display or hard drive or itself - it just ignores them and stays on regardless, whether on battery or mains. Ok, this could be Toshiba's fault for not ensuring that its hardware worked properly with Vista before putting it on sale, but I never heard of anyone having this problem with PCs running Windows XP. Neither PC World not its so-called Tech Guys could solve this one, so if I want to turn off the display while I go and do something else for a while, I have to put the PC to sleep manually. That's progress?

Remember Outlook Express? Quite a mature program (when I write I tend to use the American spelling to differentiate computer software from things like television programmes) by the time you found it bundled with Windows XP. Nice simple email program that... sent and received email. In Windows Vista it has become Windows Mail and, on my new lappie at least, refused to send email under any circumstances. Even with the firewall turned off. For a nth generation product, that is completely unacceptable. As I wanted to use the full version of Outlook for another email account, I had to go hunting for another email program. Being a fan of Mozilla Firefox for web browsing, I thought I'd try its Thunderbird product, but that's hopeless as well. Eventually I came across end-of-life Eudora, which does what it should, even if it does display incoming emails in a rather quirky way - header gobbledegook and all.

I know I am far from the first to make these gripes about Microsoft, but I do feel that the company introduces changes and tweaks for the hell of it, just so they can claim that they have launched something really new. Why did they do away with the Office Toolbar, a truly useful little gadget for launching your favourite programs? Why in Vista have they moved things you use all the time to new locations, so you have to learn all over again where they are? Why did they mess around with the Mail Merge Manager in Office 2003, so it doesn't work as well as it did in Office 2000. I could go on, but you get the point.

A quick pop at Hewlett-Packard, "the inkjet cartridge company" as someone once Christened it. I have a ScanJet 3300C flatbed colour scanner. Not ancient, by any means - connects via USB - so quite up to date. Went to get Vista drivers for it from HP's otherwise excellent support pages, only to find the doom-laden message: 'HP is not supporting this scanner under Windows Vista. We suggest you consider buying one of our lovely new scanners instead.' Well, thanks for that, HP. As both scanners I've had from you over the years have tended to be a tad temperamental, I think it's time for a change. So it's bye-bye HP, hello Canon and 'nul points' to Microsoft for making Vista just different enough to make my scanner redundant and to HP for contributing a little bit more to landfill world-wide.

Rest assured -my blog is not going to be IT-based. I have finally found a genuine reason for blogging: to showcase my writing abilities so that visitors to my business website can see bang-up-to-date proof that I can write - and write well. I hope you will come along with me.