The Scariest Domestic Appliance.....In The World!

You may recall the episode of Top Gear when Jeremy Clarkson attached a V8 engine to a food blender and made a smoothie from beef, chillies, Tabasco sauce...and a brick. Well if Mr. Clarkson had a Vitamix Professional Series 500 he wouldn’t have bothered with his experiment. To paraphrase Jeremy, this device is quite simply the scariest domestic appliance...........in the world!

The scariest domestic appliance......in the world!

If you’ve ever been to Starbucks and ordered a frappuccino you will have seen one of these in action. Milk, syrup (or coffee) and ice blended by a machine with a two horsepower motor that spins the blades at 240 miles per hour. Last week I bought one. It wasn’t my intention to do so, but Val and I went to the Ideal Home Show at Earls Court and after a couple of hours of mooching round the exhibits, including Virgin Media’s stand (and more of that later), we gravitated to the food section.

Among the demonstrations was the Vitamix stand. The demonstrator was making smoothies and soups, ice cream and coffees and the amazing thing was that the ingredients went in pretty much whole; a whole pepper (stem and seeds included), carrots, cabbage and ice. And that was in the ice cream (frozen yoghurt and some fruit as well). In fact if you have a problem with your children eating vegetables, get one of these and make some ice cream with carrot and cabbage included, I guarantee that they will not notice.

The demonstration was quite impressive and the finished products were really tasty. The bonus is that you can use pretty much all of the fruit or vegetable; skin, peel, stem et al included. Startlingly the machine makes soup without a heat source; the speed of the blades creates sufficient friction to heat the liquid in six to seven minutes.

Naturally, this being the Ideal Home Show the payoff is that they are trying to sell you something at every stand and a strong will is required not to spend a small fortune, but seduced by the prospect of smoothies, soups and ice cream pretty much to order we decided that buying one was probably a good idea, so we did. Not the top of the range machine you understand but the more modestly priced Vitamix TNC in black, which still weighs in at £450.00

So we dragged it home on the tube, skimmed through the recipes and the next morning, which was a Saturday, plugged the machine in and made a smoothie. This was when the infernal machine made its bid to be the scariest domestic appliance I have ever encountered. We added the ingredients and switched the machine on. Boy is it loud! The ambient noise at the Ideal Home Show had masked exactly how loud this thing is, so it was quite startling to hear it in our kitchen. The funny thing was that it was all sound and no action; the machine appeared to be labouring and the strawberries, banana, orange and ice didn’t seem to be blending terribly well. I turned up the speed and still it was labouring so I turned it up to the highest setting. There was a loud bang. Blue smoke emanated from the machine and the downstairs ring main fused. This was accompanied by an unnerving electrical burning smell. Something was quite obviously not right.

Having recovered our composure we decided that the best course of action was to return the machine to Vitamix. Over the years, Val and I have established a zero tolerance policy on faulty products and the like, so we packed the machine up and set off to Earls Court in search of a refund.  It being Saturday parts of the tube network were closed for engineering work and as it was snowing we decided to drive the twenty odd miles through central London to Earls Court. This had all the makings of an epic saga, fraught with difficulties. Remarkably it was a stress free experience; we even found a parking spot in a side road five minutes walk from the exhibition centre.

We lugged the box up to the Vitamix stand and asked for a refund on the grounds that we had lost a teeny bit of confidence in the product. We were initially offered an exchange; a deal we were reluctant to accept. The manager came and we explained what had happened; by chance the manager was the chap who had demonstrated the machine to us the day before. He took the machine into a back room. Suddenly we became aware that the demonstrations around us had stopped and it had all gone very quiet; we heard laughter. The manager emerged from the back room, shaking his head. He told us we had a duff machine; they had tested it and fused all of the electrics on the stand! He said we could have a refund or could exchange the faulty machine for a free upgrade to the professional model (worth an extra £150, this model is programmable). We dithered for a few moments then decided to go for the upgrade.

Back at home we plugged in our new machine, filled it with the ingredients for soup and somewhat nervously switched it on. Blessedly it worked perfectly, but boy is it unnerving! For a start it’s noisy; you can’t hold a conversation when it is running and although you know it must be safe, you fear that at any moment it will come adrift from its moorings and run amok around the kitchen. Once you get over that it does make exceedingly good soup!

This isn’t an advertising puff (I’m not being paid to say this), but the Vitamix is quite exceptional and now that we’ve got used to the noise and fury we are producing gallons of delicious smoothies and soups.

Finally, while we were at the show we also visited the Virgin Media stand, more out of devilment and the opportunity for a rant than anything. Would you like to sign up for Virgin Media? we were asked. We explained (briefly) our experiences last year with Virgin[1]. The salesman said he couldn’t see why we couldn’t have their broadband installed (well he would wouldn’t he, he’s probably on commission), so we have a surveyor coming in a couple of weeks to see if cable can be connected to our house, which should be interesting. I am not getting excited after last year’s debacle!

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[1] See my blog, “Virgin On The Ridiculous.”

The Eighth Deadly Sin

Apparently (according to my wife) I’m a bit of a control freak. If she’s right, and I’m not a reliable judge on the subject, my control freakery goes into overdrive when it comes to time. I admit that I do have something of a problem with time; some might say it’s an obsession but whatever it is it’s definitely a problem. My problem with time is that I do have a tendency to be ruled by it; I have a mortal fear of being late. Shakespeare said “Better three hours too soon than a minute too late” and while I agree with him in principle, even I think that three hours is a bit strong; an hour is probably about right.

I’m not joking, I have been known to arrive an hour early for just about everything you can name because of my terror at the thought of being even one minute late. I hate the idea of going to a football match or a film or a concert and missing the first few minutes, this results in me kicking my heels waiting for whatever it is to start. That’s not to say that I haven’t ever been late, and sometimes it has been my fault, which I find absolutely mortifying. As far as I am concerned, if I’ve agreed to be somewhere at say, ten o’clock then the latest I would expect to arrive would be about ten minutes to ten. Not everyone subscribes to this protocol however, it is perhaps almost de rigeur for some people to arrive late and while they may call it fashionably late, I would have a very different word for it.

Basically the world is divided into the Punctual and the Tardy. Within each of these groups there are sub-groups so we have:

The Obsessively Punctual

This group of people have a pathological mania with time. They will arrive at airports two hours before the check in desk opens, let alone two hours before the plane leaves. They will arrive at railway stations early enough to catch the train before the train before the one they need to catch to get to their destination very early indeed. These people will arrive for a dental appointment with enough time to spare to read all of the magazines in the waiting room. These people will arrive at work progressively earlier and earlier, to the extent that some people think that they live in the office. These people will be outside shops waiting for them to open, outside theatres waiting for the doors to open, not because they are making sure of their place in the queue, but simply because they allowed an hour for a five minute journey and are now standing in the cold and the rain while their more tardy cousins are still in bed.  I am one of these people.

The Healthily Punctual

These people have a healthy respect for time but refuse to take things to extremes. They will be found in airport check in lines a sensible half hour or so before the desk closes, they will wait two or three minutes for a train that gets them where they are going with a tolerable margin of error. They are the people at their desk at a sensible time in the morning. They are the people that sit next to me five minutes before the curtain goes up when I’ve already had time to count the fibres in the back of the seat in front of me (twice). How I envy these people!

The Healthily Tardy

There isn’t much to chose between these people and the Healthily Punctual, except that they do cut things a bit fine sometimes. They will occasionally miscalculate and have to catch a later train; they will sometimes arrive somewhat breathless in the office at five past nine,  they will reach the airport check in desk puffing and panting just as the attendant is about to close. They will be the last on the plane, they will squeeze through the closing doors on the train as it is about to pull away from the station. For the Obsessively Punctual, or even for the Healthily Punctual, travelling with these people can sometimes be a white knuckle ride, a will we or won’t we experience.

The Habitually Tardy

These people can be relied upon to be late or at best have their more punctual colleagues and friends fretting that they will be. These are the people who arrive at work late more often than not. These are the people who arrive at meetings fifteen minutes after the appointed time and are surprised that everyone is waiting for them. These people always have a reason for being late and it’s never their fault.  The train was late. Well there has been heavy snow overnight, didn’t you notice and think it may be a good idea to leave a little earlier? I missed my bus, yes because you left the house late. These people believe that because it should take an hour to get from A to B, it will take an hour. They don’t factor in any contingency and always assume the best case scenario. In extreme cases these people think that their lateness is endearing; it isn’t. Some senior managers have a tendency to be late, subconsciously they probably think it’s justified because their time is more precious; this isn’t always true. The Habitually Tardy don’t get stressed about being late however, it is everyone else, everyone who is waiting for them that gets stressed (well I do).

Unfortunately, the Obsessively Punctual also stress everyone else out too, I know because I do it to other people (my long suffering spouse especially). I know that she understands that when we have a real deadline like a plane to catch, there is some justification in my anxiety to get there on time. I do accept that on some occasions, when it really doesn’t matter about the time, the artificial deadlines I create in my own mind are unreasonable and unrealistic. I’ve tried to fight it, I’ve tried to be more laid back and sometimes it works (for about a nano second, then we’re off on the spiral into nervousness). I think that I am probably too old to change now, you can’t teach an old dog new tricks.

I suppose my obsession with punctuality goes back to childhood and my early days at work. As a child I seemed to be forever waiting for friends who were late or never turned up at all. I would anxiously pull back the curtains and peer down the road waiting for someone when we had arranged to go somewhere and on more than one occasion I would end up going wherever it was alone, arriving in the nick of time. Nonchalantly, my friend would later tell me that they had not been able to go; in those pre-mobile phone days (in fact we didn’t even have a landline when I was young) it wasn’t possible for them to let me know. In my early days at work being late was considered a particular offense. We would have to sign in each morning and at 8.55 each day the signing in book would be taken to the manager’s office and the letter “L” would be written in red ink against the names of those who had not yet arrived. There was a stigma over the walk of shame to the manager’s office and the red letter.

So Ladies and Gentlemen, I was going to propose an Eighth Deadly sin; Tardiness but re-reading what I’ve written, I’m not sure whether there isn’t a ninth, Obsessive Punctuality!

The Cult of Ignorance

Last week, millions of my braincells turned up their toes and died, my IQ fell by about 50% and I could actually feel my intelligence oozing away and all because I watched a TV programme. The programme in question was The Only Way Is Essex (TOWIE to those people for whom The Only Way Is Essex contains too many syllables).

The only reason for me watching TOWIE was that the particular episode was filmed in part at Eastminster Riding school, which is where my elder daughter rides on a Saturday afternoon and I thought that it would be interesting to see somewhere I'm familiar with on TV. Of course to get to the part of the programme filmed at Eastminster, I had to wade through the rest of the programme (since I didn't record the programme I was watching it on ITV Player which doesn't appear to have the facility to fast forward). Anyway, at first it was quite interesting, in a ghoulish, car crash TV sort of way, but after about 15 minutes it became by turns sad and also a little bit scary.

TOWIE is one of those programmes that isn't a soap opera, nor is it a fly on the wall documentary, rather it's pretending to be one while masquerading as the other. The people are real, the dialogue is real (sort of) but the situations are manufactured to some degree. Manufactured it appears, with the twin aims of generating conflict and proving how vain and sometimes stupid the participants are. So, in the episode that I watched, we had a discussion take place in the hairdressers about Tintin's hairstyle which confused the boy detective with the Tin Man in The Wizard of Oz, while another character confessed almost with pride, that his GCSE grades were a D and an E.

Fortunately perhaps, TOWIE's star appears to be in decline. Viewing figures, which peaked in 2011 at an average of 1.72 million had declined to about 834,000 in October 2012. At the show's peak, it won an Audience Award at the BAFTA's. Quite what other BAFTA winners that year like Colin Firth, Natalie Portman and Geoffrey Rush thought about being mentioned in the same breath as the cast of TOWIE is anyone's guess.

Perhaps I shouldn't be too harsh on the cast of TOWIE, they cannot be the only examples of what is a general dumbing down of society, it's just that being on TV they are more visible. Come Dine With Me is another programme in which the contestants, particularly the younger ones, exhibit some spectacularly ignorant misconceptions about food, history and well, just about everything else.

The cult of celebrity, the promotion of people who are famous merely for being famous is nothing new. Channel Four's Big Brother, which when it began was advertised as a social experiment, had that myth exposed in later series which became progressively more voyeuristic and confrontational. If the dumbing down of society in general and TV in particular had already started, it was Big Brother that accelerated the trend; it gave any wannabe the opportunity to become a celebrity and spawned more and more similar programmes that have made more and more people famous, not because they have any talent but simply because they appear on the telly.

Taken to its logical extreme, will we end up with a society not unlike that described in the film Idiocracy? For those of you who haven't seen or heard of it, Idiocracy begins with an experiment to place a US Army librarian and a prostitute in suspended animation for a year. The project is canned and they remain in suspended animation for 500 years; when they wake they find that civilisation has dumbed down to the extent that average IQ is in the low 20's and they are the most intelligent people on the planet. This has resulted from the fact that,as a generalisation, the intelligent put off having a family to the point where it is too late, whereas the dumber elements of the population are doing the only thing they can do well, which is reproduce. The most popular TV programme by this time is "Ow! My Balls!" a sort of exaggerated version of You've Been Framed. The fact that "Ow! My Balls" has a contemporary reference point is one of the scary aspects of Idiocracy. Indeed I'd go so far as to say that Idiocracy is one of the scariest films ever made, not in the horror movie sense, not like The Omen or The Exorcist, but scary in the sense that it is prophetic, it paints an all too plausible picture of what civilisation could become; how much dumber, how much more shallow and superficial.

TV is not solely to blame for the general dumbing down we see around us. In part we can blame technology. The general availability of pocket calculators began the trend. No longer did we need to do long division or use log tables, but as with anything the answers that came out of a calculator were only as good as the information entered. Years ago at work I can recall checking calculations that were spectacularly incorrect because the person who made them trusted what came out of the machine without any sanity check; garbage went in, garbage came out.

Nowadays spell checkers in word processing applications have made the ability to spell redundant. Text messaging, with its abbreviations and acronyms positively encourages bad spelling. To some degree it is valid to say that this is merely the evolution of language, that just as English is now radically different from that spoken or written in Chaucer or Shakespeare's day, so it will continue to develop and that this is not a bad thing. I'd agree if language were enriched and evolving in a way that improves communication and understanding but my fear is that language is instead changing in a way that is debased and devaluing.

Google, a tool that has become so powerful and so all embracing that it has actually become a verb and a generic noun, enables us to access information on almost any subject with just a few key strokes. There is no doubt that the internet and Google are fabulous tools, but by making the acquisition of knowledge so simple they have devalued the process itself. We are creating a generation that knows nothing except how to find things out. This to my mind is a bad thing because the actual process of acquiring knowledge is a gift in itself, learning and remembering facts and figures, language and art, are infinitely more valuable than the ability to type a phrase into a search engine and copy and paste the result into something else.

The internet itself holds two dangers which propagate the dumbing down we see around us. Firstly, how much of what you read on the internet can you trust? If, to quote Mark Twain, "A lie can run around the world six times while the truth is still trying to put on its pants," think how much more quickly falsehoods or simple inaccuracies can spread thanks to the worldwide web. Verifying facts in days of yore might mean referring to an encyclopaedia or two, now people are only too willing to take as gospel what they read on the 'net, particularly if two independent sites quote the same information, even if one may have plagiarised the other. Thus there can be a tendency for the careless or less discerning user to be either unable to find the information they want or to trust the first thing they see, making them vulnerable to ignorance, mistakes, half-truths and falsehoods, or more dangerously to con tricks and scams.

Secondly, the internet encourages superficial reading and the tendency to hop from one link to another, moving from an article on a news website about the political situation in the Middle East to pictures of cute dogs in three clicks. Research has shown that a consequence of the internet has been that concentration levels and the ability to read anything other than bite sized pieces of text have been seriously compromised in recent years.

I suppose to some extent I have found myself in the same position that every generation does eventually, being sceptical of the intelligence of the younger generation. Over thirty years ago, in 1980 (which I confess seems positively recent) Isaac Asimov wrote that “There is a cult of ignorance in the United States, and there has always been. The strain of anti-intellectualism has been a constant thread winding its way through our political and cultural life, nurtured by the false notion that democracy means that "my ignorance is just as good as your knowledge.”

Prophetic words; I cannot imagine what Asimov would have made of TOWIE.

Now That’s What I Call a Crisis!

When it comes to reporting sport the media do love their hyperbole. No win is too trivial to be labelled a heroic triumph over adversity, no setback too small to be called a crisis. So we have seen with Chelsea, a club who have apparently been lurching from one crisis to the next. Champions of Europe last season, their failure to qualify for the knock-out stages this season is a crisis. The sacking of popular manager Roberto de Matteo, who led Chelsea to their European win, was a crisis. The appointment of interim manager Rafa Benitez having proved unpopular with the fans is a crisis. Reports of a bust-up between Benitez and Chelsea defender John Terry have been labelled a crisis. With Chelsea fourth in the Premier League at the time of writing, no chance of winning the title and the possibility that they may not qualify for the Champions League next season, another crisis is upon them.

In reality these events are minor setbacks, bumps in the road that will be mere footnotes in the club’s history in years to come. Up and down the country there are dozens, or more likely hundreds of football clubs for whom Chelsea’s crises would be welcome diversions from the mundane, day to day task of fighting to remain in existence. Many of these clubs are unregarded by the majority of football followers and the press, for many of whom football below Championship level is rarely considered.

Two stories have come to light that illustrate the trials and tribulations faced by non-League clubs as they continue to struggle and struggle to continue.

Firstly, as reported in The Non-League Paper recently and on the BBC website, Deal Town of the Kent Hurlimann League are facing a potential five figure bill to replace their kit and re-brand the club. The club’s badge comprises a Roman centurion, a Royal Marine and Deal and Walmer castles. This emblem was awarded to Deal Borough Council in 1968 but local government re-organisation that took place in 1974 removed the right for the emblem to be displayed and now both the local council and the football club have been told to stop using it. The football club reckon that replacing their kit, merchandise and all other items using the badge will cost many thousands of pounds, costs that they can ill afford. Meanwhile the local council face having to change all of their stationery and signage; I love the statement made by Deal mayor Marlene Burnham, who told the BBC that this was an example of "heraldry gone mad".

While it’s quite understandable that clubs and organisations should protect their logos and badges, after all from the point of view of clubs like Manchester United and Real Madrid there are huge amounts of money involved, I can’t see for the life of me how Deal Town using a badge that is now obsolete harms anyone, financially or otherwise. I hope that common sense prevails and that the football club (and indeed the council) are given a period of grace in which to make the necessary changes and minimise the cost involved. Meanwhile, someone down at Deal Town needs to design a new badge.

This story makes you wonder how many other clubs up and down the country may unwittingly be in a similar situation. Lurking somewhere in the Court of Chivalry, deep in the dusty archives there probably sits a clerk, hopefully  with some Dickensian name like Speckle, scrutinising each football club badge and determining the club’s right to use it.

Secondly and more seriously, the very existence of one football club is under threat, ironically from a company who have sponsored both the Premier League and until recently, the Football League Cup. Alton Town are members of the Wessex League and play their home games at the Bass Sports Ground. The club, who are nicknamed The Brewers, were originally know as Courage & Co and subsequently went under the names Bass (Alton) and Bass Alton Town before dropping the Bass prefix in 1992.

The brewers Molson Coors, who now own the Bass Sports Ground have called time and told the club and the several youth teams that share the site that they must leave at the end of the season.  The site is supposedly protected by a covenant made in 1935 between Courage and the local council protecting the land for sport and recreation. Molson Coors apparently believe that they can circumvent the covenant by funding leisure activities elsewhere, a suitably vague undertaking that probably would come too late to save Alton Town if indeed it comes at all. Previous schemes to redevelop the land for housing or a supermarket have been turned down and it is to be hoped that the company are given short shrift on this too. It is of course bitterly ironic that a company that invested millions in sponsoring the Premier League, The League Cup and the Scottish national side should have such scant regard for a small town football club. This is a company whose net income in 2012 was $1.2 billion and who say, in their company values that their aim is “Treating others as we would like to be treated.” No living up to their ethos here methinks.

It wouldn’t surprise me to learn that the beers served in Alton Town’s club house are brewed by Molson Coors; if so the Carling probably has a particularly bitter taste at the moment.

Alton Town have been undertaking a number of initiatives to try and save their club, including an on-line petition which you can sign at http://www.altontownfc.com/saveus.php.

To put events into perspective, Chelsea have been experiencing events that are today’s crisis and tomorrow’s chip wrapper. Two other clubs who are admittedly much smaller but no less important to their officials, supporters and local communities, suffer from real crises that threaten their very existence.

I’ve no axe to grind with Chelsea, but next time you read of a Premier League club in crisis remember Alton Town; now that’s what I call a crisis.

This blog is adapted from the article that appeared under the title “A Raw Deal” in the programme for the Romford v. Thamesmead Town game in Ryman League Division One North on 27^th February 2013