Bonfire night

My best ever firework display was the Southbourne Prep School bonfire night in 1951, when I was nine years old. The fireworks were laid out ready on trestle tables on the playing field in front of the school, to be set off, one by one, by the assembled masters after the bonfire had been lit. Boys and parents were lined up on the touchline, ready to go 'ooh' and 'aahh'.

It might have been a stray spark from the fire, or a master's dropped match or fag-end - for whatever cause suddenly the whole lot started to go off, all at once. At first we thought this was part of the show, but then the masters began to run away ... Adult decisions or panic reactions must have taken place, but there was really no choice but to let it run its course. It lasted about ten minutes, and it was spectacular. Rockets flew off horizontally, Catherine wheels span away into the sky, firecrackers leapt around like liberated venomous insects ...

I was enthralled by the undeniable beauty of this unintended display. But the real reason I now think of this as 'best ever' is that it awoke in me, for the first time in my life, a sense of gleeful anarchy, a realisation that the worlds of controlled order and wild chaos are sometimes separated by no more than a random spark. That perverse exhilaration has never entirely died down, and I hope it never will.

"Selling off the bank branches"

Any clues as to what this diktat from the EU (strangely unchallenged so far by the likes of UKIP) is supposed to mean in practice?

Look at your average "bank branch". It consists of a) some premises which are effectively a retail outlet, rather like M&S or Vodafone; b) some local employees manning the above; and c) a bunch of customers' accounts which have been grouped together, largely for historical reasons to do with obsolete technology relating to cheque clearing, under an identification code known, amusingly archaically, as a 'sort code'. All these branches use exactly the same centralised computer systems, distributed networks, and front-of-house presentation and product range. So what, exactly, will be up for sale?

Well, it could be the the premises - but where I live in Reading, empty retail sites are currently as cheap and available as oven chips, so not much of a deal there. The staff? Nah. So that leaves the business - the customers. But hang on. Does the EU really believe that these are also an "asset" which can in some way be sold off willy-nilly to Virgin or Tesco along with the bricks and mortar?

Given that I will under no circumstances accept the enforced transferal of my banking business away from my current preferred supplier to the likes of Tesco, I would presumably have to go to Newbury or Glasgow or somewhere if I wanted to chat face-to-face with my bank. Meanwhile, a new customer in Reading will have, at best, the same number of local choices of bank as he does now, just different ones. How exactly does this increase competition?

Finally, coming at the question from a slightly different though intrinsically related angle, I've heard a lot of talk about the need to break up certain banks because they're "too big to be allowed to fail". Personally, I'm very pleased that my bank was too big to be allowed to fail - I'd have lost a lot of money otherwise.

Praise for the insurance industry

The back of my car got driven into, on the A303, by a careless van driver. My rear bumper was badly dented, but the car was still driveable. We got off the road, exchanged details, I comforted him for his obvious distress, poor lad, drove on and had a great weekend in Devon.

As soon as I got home, I phoned Privilege Insurance, fully expecting to be told that a form would be in the (postal-stricken) post, and then, etc. Instead, Craig patiently took the details of the accident and said OK, obviously not your fault, shouldn't be any issues, our repair people will be in touch, all warranties unaffected etc. Ten minutes later the repair people phoned - we can pick up the car for repair next Wednesday, OK? Ten minutes after that, the phone rings again - a bunch called DriveAssist, anxious to provide me with a replacement car, OK, would you prefer automatic or manual? fine, we'll deliver it next Wednesday morning ...

7.30 this morning (Wednesday) the phone rings - DriveAssist, is it convenient to deliver your courtesy car in ten minutes time? OK, give me time to get my trousers on ... 8.00, Graem delivers Vauxhall Zafira (not quite a BMW 335, but it is manual). 11.00, repair people come and collect the BMW with its sad little dent - 'should take about a week, but phone next Monday if you haven't heard anything ... shame about this tank of a replacement car, lady last week checked in a Focus and got a Porsche' ... So now all I have to do is learn to drive the tank.

We're not at the end of this story yet, things still have time to go medieval on my ass and it's obviously just my experience, but it does seem to me that levels of service have got significantly better since the start of this so-called recession.

So what time is it exactly?

Tonight, the clocks go back. Every autumn this event triggers a chorus of complaints, from Guardian journalists and farmers, usually along the lines of 'why can't we keep British Summer Time all the year round?' - sometimes embellished with fancies about something called 'Double Summer Time' in the summer, so that we can preserve the biannual ritual of searching the house for those sneaky little clocks, watches or electronic devices which have to be adjusted even though we probably won't look at or use them for another six months. Oh yes, and don't forget the ones that craftily adjust themselves - but you need to know who they are, otherwise you'll go and reset them yourself and your microwave will get all confused and go into some kind of temporal denial ...

The whole thing's nonsense, isn't it? 'Noon' is the moment at which the sun is at its zenith at any given meridian, and no amount of faffing about with our clocks is going to alter that astronomical fact. Similarly, sunrise and sunset are determined by season and latitude, and are equally beyond our control. In Britain, until the 1840s, everywhere had its own local time (Cornwall is about twenty minutes behind Greenwich, I'm told). But that became impractical with the coming of the railways, which couldn't be expected to run to some kind of infinitely variable timetable as you moved east or west - so GMT was invented, and it seems most people were happy to settle for that. Then some clever civil servant invented 'British Summer Time', to give the farmers an extra hour of daylight in the morning (which they would, of course, lose in the evening). Nobody asked: why don't they just get up when it gets light? Then we go back to normal in October, and everyone moans because, guess what, it's darker in the winter, so we'd better bugger about with the clocks again ... It's robbing Eve to pay Dawn.

It did, however, strike me, years ago on an aeroplane halfway across the Altantic, to wonder 'exactly what time is it now, really?' I expect I could get an app to tell me this on my iPhone, if I had one.

Anyway, I need to get up early tomorrow, to do the great clock hunt ... gosh, is that the time?

The Unthanks - Here's The Tender Coming

The sole purpose of this slightly drunken late-night post is to instruct you all to acquire, by whatever means, this extraordinarily wonderful album, and listen to it over and over. My ears are full of it, and I want to go to Northumbria, now. Goodnight.

Rooks and crows

'If you see one rook, it's a crow. If you see more than one crow, they're rooks'.

The truth of this old bit of folk wisdom was brought home to me over the weekend. On Friday evening, as I was sitting in front of the caravan sipping the first aperitif, at least a hundred rooks suddenly wheeled in from the east, circling and cawing, lighting in the treetops then taking off again. Twenty or thirty of them perched on the power line which crosses the site between me and the sea. It seemed that they were all facing in my direction. I thought of 'The Birds' - Daphne du Maurier, not Hitchcock; at the time, I was the only person in White Park Farm ...

On my way home this morning, I encountered a single crow which was pecking at some roadkill in the fast lane of the A40, just before Carmarthen. There wasn't much traffic. As I approached, the carrion crow glanced up, and disdainfully stepped aside a couple of paces to let me pass.

Wrong word

In my post earlier this evening I used the word 'amorphous' to describe the culture mix of old Calabria, as documented by Norman Douglas, but it's not quite right. What I'm looking for is an adjective that captures the result, visual or saporous, of stirring various fruit syrups or purees - strawberry, blackcurrant, apple, lime - into a bowl of white yoghurt, enough to make them cross over into each other and be impossible to isolate back out, but not enough to blend them into amorphousness.

I know, it's a big ask! My new Roget's Thesaurus doesn't help at all, waste of thirty quid that was (although it did yield up 'saporous' just now).

As you can tell, there's bog-all on the telly tonight. Off to Spotify some music (Florence and the Machine, my current fave rave I think).