Timbo gets a quality haircut

I’ve been going to Duke Street Barbers in Reading for about eight years now.  Prior to that, a ladies’ hairdresser called Diane had come to the house every six weeks, done Viv’s hair and thrown in a trim for me, but once that couldn’t be sustained I took a friend’s recommendation and ended up at Duke Street.

It’s definitely a gent’s barber’s shop:  it says, or at least implies, as much on the signboard outside the door, which even sports the once traditional red-and-white barber’s pole (which is, as I’m sure you know, a relic from the days when barbers were also surgeons, and so bandaged wounded limbs, evidently not very efficiently).  It has eight chairs and, as far as I can tell, up to four barbers.  There are a couple of long-termers, but apart from them the staff turnover is high.  I’ve had my hair cut by lots of charming barbers, male and female – the unisex rule applies only to the clientele, not the operatives – but rarely the same one more than twice.

So I wasn’t surprised to find a new guy bouncing out of the back room when I called in the other day for my usual light scissor trim.  (I learned a few years ago that this was what to order, having disastrously experimented with the various grades of razor cut – they run from one (bald) to eight (nearly bald).)  He greeted me effusively, which usually puts me off, as making small talk whilst being gently tortured doesn’t come naturally to me.  But this guy disarmed me straight away by telling me how much hair I had, and by implication how much he was looking forward to sculpting it.  I alluded to the cranial bald patch, and he pointed out that I’m fairly tall, so people won’t usually notice it.  I thought it best not to argue the point.

He was a damn good haircutter (I’ve been complimented on the job he did) but also a very engaging conversationalist.  He’d spent some time in Spain before coming to England, loved it, learnt the language, had I ever been to Spain?  Given another twenty minutes, I like to think he’d have invited me to accompany him on a holiday to Marbella, but that wasn’t to be.  Turned out he was originally from Morocco.  We need more immigrants like him.

The best bit was when the chat turned back to my luxuriant rug.  I don’t understand why blokes who have a good healthy crop choose to reap it all off with a number one.  “They think it makes them look hard,” my friend said.  “They’re right, it does,” I replied.  “Yes,” he said.  “But it doesn’t make them hard.”

 

 

Compare and Contrast

From today’s paper:

“We can confirm that we are compliant with the tax regimes of all of the jurisdictions in which we operate.” – The managing principal of the London office of a US investment company which has, quite legally, transferred ownership of an east London housing estate to a Jersey-based shell company in order to minimise corporation and capital gains tax, whilst planning to triple rents and evict low-income tenants.  (The gentleman in question has just bought a £3.9m country estate for his own use, apparently using a similar offshore mechanism.)

“Actions permitted by unjust laws can be evil…” – Philosopher Nigel Warburton, on the seizure or compulsory purchase, quite legally at the time, of Jewish-owned works of art by the Nazis in 1930s Germany.

Best laid plans

It’s been an unusual couple of days, which has to be good.  Unusual is good.  About eleven o’clock Wednesday, as I was finishing my cold coffee and mapping out the plan, which entailed all sorts of domesticity, the phone rang.  Well, there’s an event!

Sam, who’s between jobs and delivering cars around the country to scrape a living, was stuck at Reading station, having missed the train to Newbury by four minutes.  (I was subsequently told that the timetables have been shifted forward by four minutes due to the absence of the scheduled leaves on the lines; I’m not sure I believe this.)  Could I help?  Course I could.  Pick you up at Reading station in about fifteen.

If you’ve been to Reading station recently, you probably need counselling.  There’s been a huge cosmetic makeover, which as far as I can work out has halved the number of platforms whilst doubling the time needed to get between any two locations.  (I’m probably being unfair; after all, they’ve only been at it for three years, hardly enough time to break something which was working fine, let alone repair it.)

I go there rarely nowadays, and he even less, so neither of us was particularly aware of the various  ‘pick-up’ or ‘drop-off’ points.  We had a hilarious series of phone conversations – “What can you see?”  “Cars in a car park.”  “I can see a pub called, um –“  “You’re in the wrong place…” “So are you!” – before we finally hooked up and set off for Greenham Common.  We had a really good chat, which wouldn’t otherwise have happened. 

Next day, Bee phoned me to let me know that someone had done a bit of road rage and seemed to want to reverse into her as she was parking, so she’d switched on her hazard lights, seen the aggressor off and caught the train to London.  When she got back six hours later, the hazards were still on, but the car battery  wasn’t.  She called the rescue people and spent some time wandering round Waitrose until they called back to suggest that she’d best be getting a taxi home. 

The taxi driver, on learning of her predicament, suggested that, instead of taking her home, he used his jump leads to start her car.  Naturally, she snapped this offer up.  He then thought he’d better follow her, just to make sure she didn’t break down on the way.  I don’t know yet whether he made any charge, I’ll find out; I suspect not.  Aren’t people decent?

The other good news is that Waitrose now do ossobuco cuts of veal, so that’s Saturday’s dinner sorted.  It does mean that I’ve had to buy a pack of the despised saffron, but hey! One in ten years is pardonable, innit?  Not even I would put turmeric in a risotto alla Milanese.

The Spirit of Free Enterprise

We are constantly battered from all directions with the instruction that our current economic woes will be overcome by an unleashing of the latent, suppressed spirit of entrepreneurship. 

A couple of true stories.*

Rob works in recruitment, or did.  He was made redundant last year, and spent months firing off CVs and travelling all over the country for interviews, until at last he was offered a three month probationary post, covering a field some way distant from his expertise and experience.  He took the job, but soon discovered that employers in this field just weren’t recruiting, anywhere, anyone.  So he thought, off his own bat, ‘well, I’ll look around a bit at my own area’, and managed to achieve quite a few placements.

Last week, his probation expired, and he was informed that his position would not be confirmed.  It was recognised that he had delivered some results, it was explained to him, but they weren’t within his agreed key result area, so didn’t count.  The CVs are out again.

 

Christine had been working for her company for fifteen years.  One day, she came up with a clever idea to reorganise her department in order to increase throughput and save costs.  She took this to her bosses, who were enthusiastic and charged her with working the idea up into a detailed proposal, which she did, over a two month period.  She presented her plan, which was accepted wholesale.

A few days later, she was called in.  The savings she had identified would indeed be realised.  One of these was to eliminate a layer of management, and Christine’s job had been selected for this purpose.  She wasn’t sacked, she was offered a sideways move into another department, which of course she accepted. 

*I’ve changed the names and blurred the details, obviously.

Word Verification

Please type the following three words to prove you’re not, for any reason whatsoever, exploiting my innocent efforts to keep my comments safe:

Don’t be evil

No?  Try again:

Don’t be evil

Still can’t get there?  Let’s try something easier:

  

Don’t be evil

Rescue

The following is reconstructed  from first-, second- and third-hand reports during and after the event, so I can’t vouch for the details.  But it seems it went roughly like this:

Just to recap, a lot of snow fell over the Peak District last weekend as people were trying to make their way to Buxton for the wedding.  I was lucky, or skilful, or both, enough to get across from the M6, via England’s most dangerous road, ahead of the worst of it.  Others were less so.

The bridegroom’s uncle R and his family had driven up from Brighton.  They hit the High Peak at about six, two hours later than me.  By then the snow must have been four or five inches deep on the road, and staying frozen as it settled.  As R described it, 4x4s were struggling.  A Jaguar didn’t stand a chance.  I don’t know anything about his snow-driving skills or experience (I learnt mine on Italian mountain passes back in the sixties), but in the event it was the car that let them down.  For some reason, the transmission locked itself in ‘park’ and refused to let go.

The groom’s brother (who I’ll have to call E because  he’s actually another R) volunteered to go and fetch them.  It seems that a decision was reached, up in that icy wasteland, that R and S would stay with the car and await the rescue services, while E ferried the two kids back down to Buxton.  Probably a bad decision with hindsight, they should all have gone.  A good decision, however, made twenty four hours earlier, now emerged:  the daughter, L, had taken it upon herself to load some blankets and sleeping bags into the car – ‘Just in case,’ as she put it later.  Wise girl.

By now, the snowplough had been through, and the road would probably have been passable, if the car had been capable of movement.  R and S wrapped up and waited.  At one point, she had to get out for a pee – ‘That slowed some of the passing cars down,’ she told us next day, ‘but they didn’t offer us a lift.’  After about an hour, the rescue man turned up.  (To be slightly fair, he’d probably been quite busy.)  He took a look at the shift lever, went off to his vehicle and returned with a screwdriver, which he proceeded to apply to something invisible to the non-technical naked eye.  It didn’t work.

‘Have to call technical support,’ he announced.  This took some time, after which he returned with a bigger screwdriver.  That didn’t work either.  Rescue man announced that there was nothing more he could do, and prepared to leave.

‘Well, can you drop us off in Buxton?’ asked R.  ‘Please?’  Rescue man shook his head and said – and this is a verbatim quote – ‘No.’  And drove off.

They got there in the end, of course  – because E, another true hero, went out again – again!  There were complications even at this stage, but I lost track.  The wedding was attended by R and S, who both eventually got thoroughly and appropriately … rescued, is that a useful new euphemism?   And the car got recovered and repaired on Monday, I’m told.  So it all ended well.  (Except for that rescue man, of course, who broke down on his way home and caught pneumonia … No, I made that bit up.)

Blogiquette

It’s easy for me to say, because not many people read my blog, and I don’t regularly read that many others.  But I can’t help but become aware that, even within my narrow range, some odd things seem to happen.  People apparently masquerade.  So-called ‘blogmeets’ are arranged and, sometimes, end in tears.  And there are creepy people who visit frequently (sometimes for hours) but never ever identify themselves or comment.  (I'm not counting casual passers-by or one-off search results; I'll even let googlebot off the hook, even though I'd rather it didn't exist.)

So here are some of the rules I play by:

·         I won’t instigate a ‘blogmeet’.  If anyone wants one, they can easily contact me, and I’ll take it at face value and consider my response.  But I’ve concluded (from just my one experience) that it’s a risky endeavour.  It’s very easy for false expectations to set in when the written word is the only medium of contact. 

·         I will never pretend to be someone I’m not.  I really don’t understand why anyone would do that  – leaving aside that they’re obviously sick, they’re going to get found out, aren’t they?  So if I see someone who I suspect might be false, I’ll find them out, believe me.

·         If I find a blog that interests me and I feel inclined to read more of it, I’ll consider ‘officially’ following it, so that the author knows who I am.  (It’s not nice to feel stalked.)  And I’ll post a quick comment, introducing myself, even just a ‘hello, like your blog’.  It does no harm – they can always tell me to blog off.

·         And if I post a comment, either on my own or someone else’s blog, which I later think is inappropriate, or offensive, or plain point-missing, I’ll delete it asap (possibly replacing it with a better one).

But within that framework, I will continue to fire off my rants, raves and trivia, like it says on the tin.  I think nearly everyone conforms to these simple norms of decency.