Festive Greetings!

I probably won't be on here again until the New Year, so just to say Happy Festivities to all my blog pals, and anyone else who might happen to pass by.

Oh, and I receive this cheering message from Blogger every time I access it ...

... so can do no more than reciprocate their sentiments.

The Right Way Up

Here’s a pyramid.

 

 

 

The base is when you were born, the apex is when you’ll die.  You have no choice but to climb the pyramid, through inexorable time.

The substance of the pyramid is your potential – what remains for you to achieve?  As you climb, your potential will inevitably diminish; that’s the way pyramids work.

* 

So think outside the pyramid.  The higher you climb, the more you see.  And maybe by breaking off chunks of rock and throwing them, you’ll be able to change what you see.  (Sometimes they will bounce off other pyramids and come back.)

Of course, the worth of the climb will depend on how you do it.  You can go up the craggy, rough-clad outside, which will be hard but will increase your field of vision and focus your choice of chunks to throw; or you can crawl up the narrow inside tunnels, which may be easier but you won’t see so much, except through the occasional passageway that might lead to the outside.  Difficult to aim accurately through those though.

If you’ve chosen the outside path you can probably duck round a corner to a different route up (pyramids have four facets).  And of course there are many forks and turns in those tunnels too. 

Like the Pyramids of Giza, this metaphor is starting to crumble, so I’ll stop.  For now.

Can I be forgiven...

... for misreading the last word of this local paper headline?

Marx was right(ish)!

Bee said to me this morning: “I think I ought to stop buying from Amazon.” 

I agreed, which was easy for me as I hardly ever do.  (I only go there once all other avenues have been explored, usually for obscure stuff that it’d be hard to find anywhere else.)  But that wasn’t her point.

Later in the day, I read Carole Cadwalladr’s exposė in the Observer of the near-slavery working conditions in their Swansea warehouse (which I already more or less knew about).  That was Bee’s point.

I accept that, obviously.  But my extra point is concealed in an opinion lurking early in Cadwalladr’s article.  “Amazon is successful for a reason.  It is brilliant at what it does.”  This is where I part company.  Amazon is actually rubbish at what it does.  Let me explain.

A capitalist system, theory tells us, exists for only one purpose: to produce (duh) goods and services which can be sold in the market, thereby enriching the owners of the system (capitalists) whilst rewarding the producers of the goods and services (workers).  Marx’s argument was that the inherent bias of the system (because power leeches upwards towards ownership and away from labour) contains the seeds of its own destruction, via revolution. 

Well, he’s been proved wrong on that one – so far.  But what he couldn’t have foreseen, of course, was consumerism, household debt, and the internet. The new capitalism is based on the belief that the present isn’t a problem, because you can just push it forward into the future.  My* old metaphor of the inverted pyramid of piss still holds up. 

So that’s why I say that your Amazons are bad at what they do – they just don’t get it.  They don’t get true capitalism, which requires a balance of contribution from each direction.  Henry Ford got it when he worked out that he could use people to make his cars, but he needed to pay them money, so that they could buy his cars. 

*Kingsley Amis’s, actually, but I’ve adopted it as a fond mindchild

(9, 3)

Shed the end of a vigorous song - and a tear.  Monkeys may puzzle no more.

Lockout

We were running a bit late, for reasons I won’t go into.  The curry house was booked for quarter to nine, and it was twenty to, with a ten minute drive in between.  At this point, she performed one of her party tricks.

“Have you seen my keys?”

Several minutes later, “Doesn’t matter,” she said, “I’ll take one of the spares.”  It was a blue one.

(I should explain that Bee’s spare keys are colour-coded – blue for front door, red for back, yellow for patio.)

The curries were quite nice.  As were the Cobras and the entertainment.  (There was a football team in).  Indian restaurants do seem to be quite loud on a Saturday night, don’t they?  We had one of those inaudible conversations, paid the bill, motored back up to the house and unlocked the front door.  Except we didn’t.

I’ve never been locked out of my own house (except that one time I was), even less someone else’s.  The blue key didn’t fit the blue door.  Or the yellow door or the red door or even the green door.  (The Green Door doesn’t exist, despite what Frankie Vaughan might tell you.)

We’re not ones to panic.  In this kind of situation, I almost wonder whether failure to panic is the most sensible reaction.  But we didn’t.  All sorts of options were considered, culminating in ‘Get a locksmith’.  Ever tried that in a semi-rural location at half-eleven p.m. on a Saturday night?  The solution is ‘Ask a policeman.’

The local police station was closed, of course, but there was a phone by the door, through which we got a couple of numbers.  About forty-five minutes later the super lock man turned up.  He had a magic device which opened the door without doing any damage (I won’t give details just in case any burglars read this blog – but “just as well you didn’t double-lock it”, he said).  Apparently, some locksmiths will smash the lock even if they don’t need to, for the extra revenue.  Not this one.

So then we spent the rest of the night filling in the insurance claim form.

(The keys were behind the radio.  The blue spare key was a red one.)

(There is a lie concealed within this post.  See if you can spot it.)

 

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.

Who knows?

Yes thank you, I’ve had a nice blogbreak, and flushed out a few self-inflicted misconceptions, such as that there were categories – rants, raves and trivia – into which each post had to exclusively fall.  Hence the changed headline.  So here goes.  Put this into a category of your own choice, if you like; though I’d rather you didn’t.

I was going to spend a lot of time and effort in researching some answers, but it’s too late (in every sense), so instead here are ten questions.

1.      What proportion of current cabinet ministers are Old Etonians?

2.      Of these, how many are women?

3.      What proportion of the population are Old Etonians?

4.      What proportion of the population are women?

5.      How many current cabinet ministers inherited their wealth?

6.      Of these, how many are women?

7.      How many current cabinet ministers have worked for their living?

8.      Of these, how many worked outside the fields of public relations, law, or media?

9.      Please rate the following qualifications for a politician: rhetoric; forcefulness; logicality; consistency; empathy.

10.  Why can’t a woman be more like a man?

Farewell to a good old friend

Graham Livermore, who died last week, was the trombonist in Dave Anthony’s Moods throughout their existence.  He was also, I think, my closest friend within the band.  All 1960s groups had their internal frictions and ours was no exception: it’s unlikely that eight randomly selected personalities are going to get on, all the time, all together.  So alliances would form, shift, split and realign.  But Graham and I, I like to believe, stuck together.

He was a talented musician; nobody who heard him would question that.  He could play anything you put in front of him, reproduce by ear a tune someone might hum or play to him, and (dare I say) improvise more thoughtfully than anyone else in the band.  His solos on ‘Summertime’, which became his showcase number, were always melodies in their own right – sung from the soul, as it were – and I don’t think I ever heard the same one twice.

These qualities were, I suspect, not fully appreciated, by either his audiences or his colleagues, because Graham was the antithesis of a showman.  The one time he had a crack at ‘mak show’, somewhere in the bleak Midlands, a stupid girl grabbed the end of his slide and did some damage to his trombone.  Typically, he laughed it off, forgave her, got it fixed and carried on.  I don’t think I ever saw him angry.

In Italy, we’d share rooms at whatever pensione we fetched up in.  At our base camp in Milan, we evolved a system whereby the speakers were either side of the two beds, so each of us got his fair share of the stereo.   We listened to one another’s music: I brought ‘Smiley Smile’, he brought Ornette Coleman.  Later (once we’d been told to shut down the noise), he would use a set of coloured crayons to draw exquisite abstract visions, which he’d then screw up and throw away.

I haven’t caught the best thing about Graham, which was his dry, sometimes almost undetectable humour.  Once, after listening to Coleman’s ‘Double Quartet’, he looked across at me and, with a straight face, enquired “Why do they play like that?”  Another time, he pointed out that you could catch Coltrane, Davis and the rest repeating, recycling, the same licks in their solos.  “I do wish I knew what they were,” he remarked.  

When I was between marriages in the late eighties, we briefly became close again.  He hadn’t changed in the intervening twenty years.  He’d grown a lot of hair and beard, and was living in his parents’ house in what some might consider squalor.  It didn’t matter to me.

I spoke to Graham once, on the phone, about three years ago.  We had a nice little chat about music.  He was, he confessed, “a bit stoned.”  He spent his time, he said, making sculptures out of waste materials, which he hung from the ceiling. 

“They’re all different,” he told me.  I believed him.

That’s enough, for now

When I started blogging, five years ago, it was from two motives.  Firstly, I’d recently lost my wife, and although the support from family and friends couldn’t have been stronger, I felt a need to reach out in new directions.  Secondly, I saw it – blogging – as an opportunity to exercise what I know to be one of my skills, writing.

Both of these aims have been more than achieved.  Through blogging, I’ve met many delightful people with whom I would never otherwise have had contact.  I’ve even met several of them face to face.  And, modesty aside, I know that I’ve been able to write, occasionally, some pretty good stuff – which would otherwise have been confined to the fading pages of a notebook to be read only by me.

So it’s been a good experience.  But I’m moving forward in my life.  So I’m going to take a break from blogging.  My ambitions are moving elsewhere.  Writing will certainly figure, but not here.  So will music, which I’ve shamefully neglected for too long.

I’m not disappearing in any sense – continue to expect comments!  In fact, I might become a comment pest…

Oh, and me being me, I’ll probably change my mind tomorrow. 

A warning re some nasty malware

I've been away, in several dimensions, about some of which I'll update you later, but in the meantime I need to share the following with everybody.

Last Saturday, something calling itself  ‘Antivir*ouss Sec*urity Pro’ (I have deliberately garbled that name, you can guess the real words) appeared uninvited on my computer.  I have no idea how it got past my security filters – I suspect it somehow piggy-backed on a software update.  I’ll try and research this further.

Anyway, it immediately ran a ‘scan’, which reported 23 supposedly corrupt files which it couldn’t fix.  It then started to report apparent invasions, attacks etc. which it also couldn’t fix.  Finally, it effectively blocked my access to the internet, by advising me that the site I was trying to access was suspect and could damage my computer.  This included my home page, Wikipedia, and Google.  If I clicked the ‘continue anyway’ button, it got worse – I won’t scare you with the details.

At every step, I was told that I had to upgrade my protection, by giving them money and card details.) Naturally I declined to do this.  I tried to uninstall it, but it seemed to have craftily hidden itself away so as to make this impossible.

This thing is evil!

I called my software support service, who were aware of this Trojan.  I was advised that the only safe way to get rid of it is to reset the computer to ‘factory settings’.  You have to make sure you have a full external back-up of personal files before you do this, because you’ll have to restore them, along with everything else that didn’t come with the computer when you bought it.  (I started at 2.45 today and have just finished.)

This is obviously a seriously malicious bit of malware.  I don’t know how you can avoid it, but just thought I had to alert you to its existence.  If I find out any more about it, I’ll let you know – please do the same.

As an update, my brilliant brother has provided the following guide to how deal with it if you do get it:
http://malwaretips.com/blogs/antivirus-security-pro-removal/

 

They’re closing in on me!

Since I posted this over a year ago, the range of targeted adverts has narrowed drastically.  No more solar panels, female fashion accessories or baby buggies.  No, now they’re homing in on the fundamentals.  I am desperate for life insurance, private health insurance and payday loans.  And Amazin’ are even more convinced of my need for yet another copy of ‘The Essential Jerry Lee Lewis’.  (Can’t have too many of those, can you?*)

Isn’t it good when you see technology working as it should?

The spam is even more impressive – I now know that I need ophthalmic treatment (true), in Dallas Texas (less true), and that several effusive admirers of my blog would love to enhance certain aspects of my anatomy.**

But this morning brought a real delight.  Yesterday afternoon, I’d booked transport to Jersey, for Christmas with my relatives there, with a small, very customer-friendly airline.  They try so hard, you almost feel sorry for them, because in my inbox was an offer, as a new customer, of a discounted Christmas break, in Guernsey.

* I may just have given myself a theme there for tomorrow’s post.

** I’m not convinced.

 

You can’t beat a good cliché!

Len Deighton once put into the mouth of one of his characters the thought that the cliché was a much-maligned means of instant communication.  (‘Billion Dollar Brain’, I think it was.)  But the character was, if I remember correctly, the baddie.

The trouble with clichés is that they almost always get drained of any meaning or relevance once you look behind them.  Let’s take the current favourite, here in British politics:

“We are going to fix the roof while the sun shines!” 

This boils down to “We’re going to save some money, because another crippling economic crisis is going to happen and we need to be ready.”  There are a few things wrong here. 

First, and most obviously, fixing roofs in sunshine calls for a guaranteed spell of fine weather.  (As it happens, the roof of the house opposite me is being fixed, but it’s been raining for a couple of days, so they’ve stopped.  Luckily, they got the felt installed, otherwise water would presumably be dripping into the bedrooms by now.) 

Secondly, you need to make sure the walls can bear the weight of the new roof. 

And thirdly, using this cliché equates to admitting that ‘There Will Be Rain.’  In other words, we can’t control the economic weather, we can’t stop it raining when it chooses to.  This is such an abject confession of political failure that you have to wonder where they keep their brains.  Talk about shooting yourself in the foot!  It’ll come back to haunt them.  And bite them in the bum.  I don’t believe it!!

Okay, one more, which I haven’t heard recently (Ed: you will, Tim, you will):

“You can’t make an omelette without breaking eggs.”

I can’t be bothered to deconstruct this one right now, just to say it boils down to “The end justifies the means.”  Hmm, heard that somewhere before.

Alien Invasion

It had been a slow morning, and I was starting to wonder how I’d fulfil my self-imposed daily blog quota.  I hadn’t even been out of the house, except down the paper shop (and there’s rarely any bloggable material in that trip).  I’d done a bit of housework, including ironing (ditto).  And though the newspaper and the radio contained several rantable idiocies as usual, my rant mojo seems to have gone a bit limp lately, and besides, I did one yesterday.

Just after lunch, I went outside to put the wheelie bin out.  When I came back, I noticed that the back door, and some of the surrounding brickwork,  was covered in ladybirds.  And I mean covered.  I didn’t do a precise headcount (carapace count?), I’m not quite that dedicated, but there must have been, ooh, sixty or seventy.

It was the first time I’d seen a ladybird all year, indeed I’d been wondering about this, especially compared to last year when they were around for days on end.  Just when you’re pondering whether the lack of a single ladybird can be worked up into an entertainingly informative blog post (Ed: prob not), seventy turn up at once, a coccinellidaeous flashmob.  I can use this, I thought, and went inside to get the camera.  I noticed that several had already made their way into the kitchen.

Just then the phone rang, as a result of which I had to do some business on the internet involving aeroplanes, so it was an hour before I could make my way out again, camera in hand.  Guess what, they’d all gone!  Well, there were about four left, to convince me I hadn’t imagined the whole thing.  Oh well, I thought, another blog idea gone carapace-up.  (Or down.  Or something.)

I remembered the ones who’d snuck into the kitchen.  Gone too.  I’m not particularly paranoid by nature; but I will confess that I went up to check the bedroom.

 

I’m a bit cross

 Now that you’ve opened this post, I can expand on that – I’m fucking fuming!  How much lower can that bunch of filth-brained scumbags lower themselves?  (Just in case you hadn’t guessed, I’m talking about the Daily Mail.)  How dare they slander a good man (read his biography) in that scurrilous way, purely in the hope that some of their lies and innuendoes will rub off on his son, twenty years after the father’s death?

Congratulations, Dacre, you have shown your true colours.  Cameron can wriggle and squirm all he likes, but this may just have lost him the election.  You have to wonder at the stupidity, don’t you?

The Mail claims, by some kind of weird osmotic process, to speak for something it sees as ‘Britain’.  If this is the case, then I have to say that I, too, hate ‘Britain’.

Wild in Wales? Not sayin’

On reflection, I don’t think I should tell you too much about that balmy summer evening in the tiny Welsh seaside village of ■■■■■■■■ back in 1993.  We were young (I was only 51) and foolish, and indiscretions were all too easy.

So, I’m not going to write about the note that was left on the cottage door (“Where are you, you bastards?  We’re THIRSTY!!!”), or the rushed curry and the leap over the wall to the pub next door, or the intense conversation, some while later, possibly concerning the disjunction between divergent views (one English, one Welsh) of contemporary Welsh art which narrowly evaded damage to both artists and artworks.  Nor am I going to write about a brief decamp by a few parties to the (closed) restaurant across the road, for music, dancing, wine from the cellar and nearly forcible separation of inappropriate pairings; nor the bemused expression on the face of the bartender back in the pub when asked, at half-one, whether they were still serving; nor about the difficulty, sometimes, to tell the difference, by sight, between whisky and brandy, and the consequences.  Especially, I’m keeping quiet about the insistence, in the face of adamant dissuasion, by one party at about three that it was perfectly all right to drive the mile back up to their caravan because “I drive best when I’m drunk; besides, I really enjoy it.”

Finally, I’d better not mention the cliff walk next morning, and how one party was unable to partake for, let’s say, annular reasons, whilst another mistook a low-flying coastguard biplane for a high-flying eagle.

No, best draw a veil over all that.  Apologies to those readers who were anticipating something salacious.  You had to be there.

 

A week not in Chicago.

Bee is off tomorrow to Chicago for a week, with her best friend.  I’m anticipating some exciting reports about the waterfront, South Side blues, a trip out to the prairie and up the Sears Tower, and much more, but I won’t be getting these until she returns.  In the meantime, I’ve resolved to blog every day, to keep me out of mischief.  Or get me into it.  Or something.  Tomorrow’s will be about a ludicrous night in north-west Pembrokeshire, in 1993.  Or something.

Do the math…

Do the math… please, government, before you embark on this HS2 project.  Otherwise, in twenty or thirty years’ time it will come back to haunt you, or your descendants.   I won’t be around, nor will my own descendants (I don’t have any), but I promise this will happen.  There are two things you need to do, or have done, before you irrevocably turn on the green light.

The first is called a cost-benefit analysis.  There are two parts to this, which I’ll call tangible and intangible.   The tangible ones are those directly related to the project, to which you are sure you can subsequently ascribe monetary values.  What you do is divide a piece of paper down the middle, with a line.  On the left, you list the costs of the project, on the right, the benefits.  Obviously, at this stage these aren’t quantified, nor should they be.  The point is to make sure you’ve covered everything, every quantifiable cost and benefit, and that you will later be able to put a monetary value on it which you’ll be able to substantiate’: otherwise, it’s intangible.

Intangible costs and benefits are those you recognise you won’t be able to monetise, but which nevertheless have to be factored into the broad picture.  They’re the ‘what if’, ‘blue sky’, ‘OSINTOT’ factors.   Hint – if you’re using bullet or numbered lists, always leave an empty one at the bottom, there’s bound to be something else no-one had thought of.

Once you’ve done all that, then you can plug in some numbers.  This means putting monetary values on all the tangibles and, if you choose (and in this case you should), the intangibles too.  All these numbers, of course, have to be properly assessed, peer reviewed, and consensually accepted.  And then you can run what’s called a discounted cash flow calculation.  Here's how it works, but don’t worry – there won’t be a test at the end of this post.  Basically, what a DCF does is demonstrate, given the best estimates of all the variables, when this project is likely to go into profit.  It takes into account, crucially, the opportunity cost of the bottom-line option, which is always ‘don’t do it.’

Being an optimist, I assume the government (or whoever’s really in charge) has done all the above.  Well, you’d have to be really stupid not to, wouldn’t you?  So why don’t they just publish the results?

Oh.  I see.

Big Apple

 

1 lb 6 oz to be exact.  I'm so Proud!

Unlikely but true (#s 1 & 2)

I’ve had several events matching the description in the title recently, but I can’t remember them all, so here are just a couple.

1.      I make a certain 30 mile journey, from L & A’s to my home, via dropping off K, most Tuesday mornings.  I’ve been doing this for a few years, so I know the details of the trip quite well.  In particular, for the purposes of this post, that there are exactly seventeen sets of traffic lights along the way.  Many of these are components of fairly complicated junctions and roundabouts.  (By the way, what’s with this craze for putting traffic lights around roundabouts?  The whole point of a roundabout is to avoid the need for traffic lights, isn’t it?)  

Anyway, this (last?) Tuesday, I went through all seventeen sets of lights on green.  All seventeen, green.  This has never happened before, and never will again.  It’s a logistical impossibility.  I’m elated.  Or was.

2.      Today, the tree fellers came to chop down the half-dead pigeon toilet.  No, I’m not going to explain, except to say it’s the toilet that was half dead, not the pigeons.  They (the tree people, not the pigeons (although they can be too)) were very efficient.  I love watching those huge Magimix wood-chewing things. 

When they’d finished, the boss feller knocked at the door.  “Do you want to pay?”  He asked.  I toyed with the question for a moment, then said: “Um, yes.  Cash?”

Here’s the unusual bit.  “I’d rather have a cheque.”