Good Game, Good Game!

In the last year or so I have been to see a good number of radio and TV shows being recorded, mostly comedies and panel games, and this week I have been to see two contrasting TV gameshows. First it was off to Elstree to see The Edge, a BBC daytime show that will debut in September. The show is hosted by Mark Benton, who starred in Waterloo Road and appeared on Strictly Come Dancing but is probably best known for turning "New customers only" into an everyday saying in the Nationwide ads. By the by, that was one of those unfortunate ads where Nationwide probably actually lost business as viewers associated the "new customers only" phrase with them and not their competitors.

Mark Benton

The Edge is a somewhat unlikely mix of quiz show and bowling. Contestants answer questions to earn the right to bowl a ball down a lane to win cash prizes, but roll your ball over the edge and you lose. Now sometimes it can be difficult to get tickets to TV and radio shows, but  probably because it is a new show and recordings are on weekday mornings and afternoons, tickets for The Edge were not hard to come by and the audience was a bit thin on the ground. Actually at one point I thought there may be more people on stage than watching! Those of us who made up the audience were huddled together in a group but I'm sure that some judicious editing of the audience shots will hide the large number of empty seats. Chances are you may see me in some audience shots as the camera was frequently perched directly over me. As gameshows go it wasn't bad but I don't think it will be as long running as something like Countdown. As it hasn't been on yet, no one (including the contestants and at times, the host) really knew what to expect or sometimes what was actually going on, but I've seen worse (Tipping Point, for one).

That was Monday. On Tuesday evening it was off to The London Studios on the South Bank to see Trust Me, I'm A Gameshow Host being recorded. Now whereas The Edge appears to be an original BBC idea, Trust Me is an American show that ITV are piloting in this country. Sue Perkins (best known for The Great British Bake Off) and Frank Skinner (fan of George Formby and West Bromwich Albion) host the show in which they offer a series of wildly implausible stories to a contestant who has to guess which one is actually the truth in order to win a cash prize. Unlike The Edge, the studio was packed for Trust Me, which was just as well as it was filmed in the round, so floor crew were going about making sure there were no empty seats within camera range.

Interestingly we had seats in the second row (watch out when the show is broadcast, there's a good chance you'll see me), no more than six feet behind where Frank Skinner was standing and from where I could read his autocue. I say interestingly because while we were queuing outside the studio some priority ticketholders were ushered in ahead of us yet we ended up with better seats. On the whole going to the BBC Radio Theatre at Broadcasting House is a better experience than seeing a TV show at either Elstree or on the South Bank.

The view from the Media Cafe at BBC Broadcasting House, much better than queuing in the rain.

At Broadcasting House you wait to be shown into the theatre in the Media Cafe overlooking the newsroom whereas at the other studios most of your waiting is done outside (and I've stood outside in winter, in pouring rain too) and can't get a drink or a bite to eat or have a sit down. Also, the radio recordings tend to be quicker with few, if any interruptions (although there are inevitably retakes), whereas TV shows have breaks while make-up, lighting and set arrangements are changed and there are seemingly interminable pick-ups. As a result an important member of the team at TV recordings is the warm-up man to keep the audience amused during the breaks, in this case Ian Royce who frankly is funnier than most comedians you see on TV. Being near the front I kept my head down in case he picked on me as he was fairly merciless with most of his victims from the audience.

While we all know that TV shows are heavily edited, that pick-ups and retakes abound, I guess I thought that gameshows would be a bit, I don't know, more seamless. After all, in a comedy you can ask the audience to react to a gag again and again, but how easy is it in a game show to have audience and contestant repeat their reactions, especially their reactions to a wrong answer? Surprisingly easy as it turns out, especially in Trust Me, although you have to feel sorry for the contestant having to pretend, for the fourth time, that this is the first time that he has heard he has the wrong answer. That said, the contestant on Trust Me was not quite as ordinary a member of the public as the show's hosts might have had us believe, as a quick Googling of his name revealed the next morning. I suppose that for a pilot show one can forgive the producers a certain amount of poetic licence.

TV game shows make a lot of money; if not always for the contestants then certainly for the companies that devise, create, make and market them. Who Wants To Be A Millionaire? has been licensed to over one hundred different countries and is hugely profitable; it genuinely turned its creators into millionaires. Gameshows have came a long way since the days of Take Your Pick, or The Generation Game with bigger prizes and spin-offs; lots of spin-offs. Board games, smartphone apps and in-show competitions that generate huge amounts through phone charges make the actual show itself quite peripheral in a way.

At one time the way to fame and fortune may have been to write a bestselling song, now there are vast sums to be made in devising a successful gameshow, so I'm off to put my thinking cap on!

I Shop, Therefore I Am

When did shopping become a pastime? I have no idea, but I do know that these days a trip to the shops, especially the out of town mall, has become an activity far removed from the way in which our parents shopped; shopping to them was not a leisure pursuit. I remember that as a child we might go to the shops on a Saturday afternoon, perhaps to buy some essential item like a mop or a washing up bowl or light bulbs. My Mother might do some window shopping while my Father and I tagged along tolerantly, he with limited need or expectation of buying anything, me coveting a toy or a comic book that sadly I would be denied on the dual grounds that it would "spoil" me and more pertinently, that my parents could not afford it.

In those far off days of the 1960's, Saturday afternoon was the only time that this sort of shopping could take place, what with my Father working Monday to Friday and Saturday morning and with the shops being closed on Sundays. Browsing around the shops was a different experience when the stores were lined up along the street and shoppers had to dodge each other, the weather and the traffic to get from one to the next; undercover shopping centres changed that. Combine that with the Sunday Trading Act of 1994 that allowed shops to open on Sundays and a trip to the shops suddenly became something to do for its own end.

South Street Romford in the days when shoppers and vehicles vied for the same space.

Romford today, undercover shopping for all.

When I talk of shopping I do not necessarily meaning buying, because although we may see people laden with bags from various stores when we visit the mall, we also see plenty of people who have bought nothing and will leave having bought nothing. Malls encourage us to visit them as an experience; apart from the shops there are restaurants and cinemas and of course ample, free parking. Open longer, open later, open every day apart from Christmas and Easter Sunday, the malls have taken over people's lives and while it is possible to visit and buy nothing, the objective of the malls and the retailers is to make us spend, spend and spend again. The aim is to make us buy not just what we need, not even what we want, but the things we did not know we needed, did not know we wanted. Increasingly the objective is to make us buy more of the things we already have, to continuously replace and upgrade, either by making new versions of old products more desirable or by actually making existing products that we have unattractive, obsolete or useless.

The concept of built in or planned obsolescence was popularised in the 1950's by American designer Brook Stevens, but can be traced back to 1924 and General Motors boss Alfred P Sloan Jr, who recognised that the American motorcar market was reaching saturation point and introduced annual changes to the company's range, encouraging consumers to buy new each year rather than when mechanically necessary. Stevens defined planned obsolescence as "Instilling in the buyer the desire to own something a little newer, a little better, a little sooner than is necessary" and nowhere is that desire generated more than in the mobile phone market and in particular with the iPhone. Every year Apple introduce a new model. This is preceded by months of speculation, most of which seems orchestrated by Apple themselves. Then the product is unveiled and launch date announced, and queues form outside Apple stores. After days of waiting in all weathers, the man (and it is invariably a man) at the head of the queue is admitted to the store to buy his coveted phone, which is only infinitesimally different from the device that he already owns. Similar hysteria grips large chunks of the male population when Sony or Microsoft or Nintendo launch a new games console.

Alfred Sloan

Shoppers queue at the Apple store, Covent Garden for the launch of the iPhone 4S. 

While men may scorn their womenfolk for buying yet another pair of jeans or another pair of shoes, for replacing barely worn items with this season's latest styles, many of them will think nothing of replacing a car or a phone or a games console or some other gadget because something newer, shinier, sleeker, but not necessarily better has come along. One reason is the desire to show off. Having a car with the latest registration plate, owning an iPhone 6 or an Xbox One confer status or more childishly, the opportunity to brag. Another reason is more insidious; manufacturers actually make it necessary for us to buy new by making the old useless.

Take the iPhone. If you had an iPhone 4 you may have wanted to upgrade the operating system to iOS7, except that if you had an iPhone with an 8gb memory then there wasn't enough capacity. This was not a problem; who cared that the icons looked a little different, it didn't matter did it? Except it did, because your favourite app updated and failed to work anymore because it needed iOS7, and those other apps that you wanted, well they need iOS7 too. So what do you do? You upgrade your phone of course.

Microsoft are past masters at making changes apparently for the sake of change, and of making that state of the art PC or laptop just a piece of plastic and wires within a few short months, of creating operating systems that they make redundant by withdrawing support. To give you an example, we have The Sims installed on our PC and my daughter Sarah has been playing this quite happily for a number of years when suddenly the game will not launch and the reason for this is that the launcher requires IE10 or higher. Try to download IE11 and the operating system on the PC (Vista) is incompatible with versions of IE higher than IE8[1]. Fortunately the internet reveals a number of cheats or workrounds that allow The Sims to be launched, although all of this becomes largely irrelevant when the PC has to be restored to its factory settings.

This is part of the syndrome where change is for the convenience of the manufacturer, the software vendor or the retailer rather than the consumer. Take TomTom. They recently emailed me and suggested that I update my sat-nav's software. Now I have been reluctant to do this since a previous attempt to do so wiped the device completely and it had to be returned to the manufacturer for repair, but since there are a number of roads that my device doesn't recognise (on part of the M2 it asks me to take the third exit at non-existent roundabouts and spends a lot of time believing me to be in a field), I thought it was worth the risk. Initially the update seemed to work, except that a piece of important functionality had been "improved" in such a way that rendered it if not useless then certainly less convenient. A few moments surfing the internet and it became apparent that this was a common issue with TomTom's customers and I was able to download a patch. It would not surprise me to find that the next time I am foolish enough to plug my sat-nav into my computer I will learn that a new, compulsory update is not compatible with my device and that I will therefore be encouraged to buy a new one.

And then there are print cartridges, but frankly I have neither the time nor the energy for that topic today!

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[1] We have IE on our PC through sufferance and the need to use Citrix through it; for everything else there's Chrome.

Just Like Watching Cowdenbeath

The 2014 World Cup is over and the quality of the football, the drama of the competition and the breathtaking backdrop that Brazil, particularly Rio, provided glossed over many of the misgivings that many people had before the tournament, for which I am sure Fifa, particularly Sepp Blatter, will be grateful.

In the end I managed to see 22 of the competition's 64 matches; some I missed through choice or conflicting engagements, some for other sometimes more surreal reasons. For instance I managed not to see any of the Quarter Finals, despite being particularly keen to see Brazil play Colombia. Instead I spent the evening coaxing our recently acquired pet hamster from under the bed where it had taken refuge after escaping from its exercise ball. I missed Brazil's crushing 7-1 Semi-Final defeat at the hands of Germany as I was at the BBC watching a recording of the radio show Wordaholics. Emerging after the recording I switched on my phone, checked the score and was astonished to see that Germany led 5-0.

Brazil's capitulation in the penultimate round, and their almost equally poor performance in the 3rd Place match have dominated media coverage of the tournament, almost overshadowing Germany's 1-0 win over Argentina in the Final. That game, whilst not a thrill a minute spectacle, was absorbing and entertaining in its own way. Much more so than the 1990 Final when the then West Germany also beat Argentina by the game's only goal.

For Brazil, probably the most iconic of all national teams, it was a strange tournament. They remain under the weight of expectation that the nation, and much of the rest of the world, piles upon them to win and win with style, to emulate the 1970 team. That side's almost mythic status is  something of a millstone for the current crop of players, many of whom are not in the same league as the team of 44 years ago. In fact taking Neymar out of the equation (as Colombia did), the England forward line of Rooney, Sturridge and Sterling does not compare too unfavourably with Brazil's trio of Jo, Fred and Hulk. For once the terrace chant, "It's just like watching Brazil " might have been applied to the Three Lions without irony. [1]

Cowdenbeath, not Brazil; Central Park not the Maracana.

England's failure to qualify from their group was sadly no surprise. So much so in fact that the expected fuss that met their elimination from the tournament never materialised. Like me I think that many people did not expect England to progress from the group, although the performance against Italy actually augured quite well. England looked more positive than we normally expect and created more chances than we are used to seeing. They still lost though and reverted to type against Uruguay. Fortunately I was not able to see the Costa Rica match, which sounds as though the word turgid was invented for it.

Daniel Sturridge's goal against Italy was about as good as it got for England. Photo: BBC

There were many things that stood out in the World Cup, some good, some bad; some major, some trivial. Here are a few of the things that struck me.

Vanishing spray - It has been used in South America to mark the relative positions of ball and wall at free-kicks for a number of years and like many of the best ideas it's major virtues are it's simple effectiveness. It is definitely an idea that should be brought into the game throughout the world.

Black boots - Whatever happened to good old fashioned black boots? There were players wearing pink boots, blue boots, orange boots, spotted boots, even odd boots. At first it was distracting but after a while I thought, what does it really matter what colour the boots are?

The ball - At every tournament, Fifa unveil a new ball and almost without exception there are complaints. This year they managed to bring out a new ball that was remarkable in its normality.

Sponsors - Fifa rely on their sponsors and behind the scenes have, I am sure been building bridges with them following the controversy over the alleged bribes that were part of the process that awarded Qatar the 2020 World Cup. The power of the sponsors is frightening and perhaps has gone too far. For instance Sony supplied headphones to all the players in the competition and they (the players) were not allowed to be seen with any other brand inside stadia or at media events. Will we ever see the day when sponsors like adidas dictate that teams may only where their kit, that players may only wear their boots?

Fifa has many sponsors to keep happy.

Fifa - You could write a book about the antics of the game's governing body (and people have). Some stories may be exaggerated but there is little doubt that Fifa bring a lot of the opprobrium upon themselves. Again, due to their sponsorship deals, this time with Budweiser, all stadiums had bars selling their sponsor's product despite the fact that in Brazil the sale of alcohol in football grounds is illegal. Fifa's requirement that they are granted tax free status in the host country means that they have trousered millions of pounds profit while Brazil basically picks up the bill, not least for the new stadia that Fifa insisted they build that will become derelict now that the tournament has ended.

Luis Suarez - Controversy follows him around like a bad smell and after his third episode of biting an opponent he received a lengthy ban but still came up with the aroma of roses by negotiating a move from Liverpool to Barcelona. It surprises me that some people still make light of his biting antics by comparing them with a bad tackle.

Simulation - Or cheating as we should more properly call it. It is sad that players as talented as Arjen Robben resort to it and shamelessly so as he openly admitted to diving. Marcello of Brazil was another culprit, who added the brandishing of an imaginary card to his performances. It was a shame that Marcello did not play in the 3rd place game as a coming together between him and Robben had marvellous comic potential.

Robben in typical pose.

Goalkeepers - Neuer and Romero of Germany and Argentina respectively in the final and Ochoa of Mexico to name but three of the World Cup's fine goalkeepers and yet Brazil had Julio Cesar (who is actually a fine goalkeeper) a player who could not get in QPR's first team.

"Humiliation" - If ever there was an overused word it was this one in the wake of Brazil's Semi-Final defeat. The British media, having been deprived of the normal soul searching and gnashing of teeth that accompanies England's tournament exit thanks to its sad inevitability, seemed to adopt Brazil as surrogates and latched onto their failure as a sort of proxy shame. Furthermore on the subject of the media, I managed to avoid all but the smallest dose of the studio punditry and watched games with the sound turned down low to avoid the constant babble of the commentators and their sidekicks. Someone should remind them that it isn't radio, dead air is not a problem and a little silence now and then would go a long way. I saw forty five minutes of the Italy versus Costa Rica game sitting on a bench at Lakeside shopping centre opposite the Sky TV stand where the commentary was completely inaudible. Far from spoiling my enjoyment of the game it in fact enhanced it.

Brazil's showing disappointed almost as many people in this country as England's did. After years of admiring them, this time round it was more like watching Cowdenbeath. It may be some time before "It's just like watching Brazil" rings around the terraces anywhere as a compliment.

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[1] "It's just like watching Brazil" stems from an over excited Cowdenbeath fan who dubbed his team The Blue Brazil in the wake of their 3-1 win over Stranraer in a Scottish Cup tie many years ago.

Any More Fares Please?

Transport for London (TfL) pushed the capital in the direction of becoming a cashless city this week when they withdrew the option for passengers to pay their bus fare in notes or coins. This decision was made on the basis that cash payments represent less than one percent of fares and that cash handling costs of £24m per year will be saved, but despite the result of TfL's consultation with their passengers which saw fewer than a third of the 37,000 respondents agree with the proposal to go cashless.

Over 43 million Oyster cards have been issued by TfL

From TfL's point of view the benefits are obvious. Cash is bulky and expensive to handle; fewer people are paying cash so why not remove the option? On the other hand, as opponents of the scheme have pointed out, those without an Oyster card or a contactless payment card have no means to pay their fare. Unlike shops and bars who offer customers the alternative of using card based payments alongside cash, TfL have potentially disenfranchised and disadvantaged a large chunk of the travelling public, especially the occasional traveller or tourists. That said, my experience of bus travel shows that very few people pay cash anymore[1] and those who try are normally unable to do so anyway because they tend to proffer a £20 note for their £2.30[2] fare and end up being turfed off the bus by the driver who has no change. That in itself raises concerns; how will London's bus drivers deal with passengers who have no means of paying their fare but do have sufficient cash? How will the driver of the last bus deal with a vulnerable passenger, for instance a teenager or an elderly person, who has lost their Oyster card? Bus drivers are supposedly receiving additional training in how to handle such situations; we shall see how effective that is in due course.[3]

It makes no difference to me whether TfL accept cash or not as I have an Oyster card and a contactless debit card and before that, when I commuted, had a season ticket. I have not paid cash on the buses for donkey's years. I can however see why some people will complain about the change, but as with many changes it may not be long before it is difficult to remember what it was like when cash was accepted. This is actually not the first time that London's buses have tried to wean their passengers away from paying fares with cash and the last time was not as successful as they might have wished. In 1978 London Transport introduced the Multi-Ride ticket for bus fares. This was a cardboard strip that the passenger bought in advance and used in self-service machines on buses. The benefit to the bus driver was that it reduced boarding times and for the passenger there was a considerable saving as cash fares were 10p, but the same journey using the Multi-Ride ticket cost just 5p. At that time all of London's buses were supposed to be One Person Operation (OPO), but the roll out of OPO buses was slower than expected and represented only 42% of the fleet. The RT or Routemaster buses were still commonplace, with their open platforms and conductors with their ticket machines and cries of "Any more fares, please?" I'm sure I'm not the only one who remembers the open platform on the back of the bus with both affection and astonishment at the way we all viewed them with a complete lack of risk. Nor can I be the only person whose nonchalant grasp of the pole while standing on the platform became a vice like grip as the bus swung round a corner and threatened to launch me into the oncoming traffic.

The iconic Routemaster, complete with platform and pole.

The Multi-Ride ticket was a boon as far as I was concerned. In 1978 my commute consisted of a bus ride and even though I had previously had a monthly bus pass, the Multi-Ride ticket considerably reduced my fares. It did not, however improve the efficiency of the buses. On one never to be forgotten evening I left work shortly after five o'clock, waited patiently for a 247 bus from Gants Hill to Collier Row...and was still waiting (albeit less patiently) two hours later. Why, you may ask, did I stand there for that long? These days I could have consulted the display at the bus stop telling me how long I would have to wait until the next bus, or if the stop didn't have one, looked it up on my smartphone. Equally I could phone home and say that I was going to be late. None of those options were available to me then and it seemed inevitable that the moment I walked away from the stop to find a phone box or seek an alternative means of getting home, a bus would appear. After a certain period of time one thinks "There has to be a bus soon..." and so I stood there...and stood there...and stood there. I like the fact that today I can get to a bus stop and know exactly how long I have to wait for a bus; I can even use my smartphone to check when the next bus arrives at my nearest stop before I leave the house.

The Multi Ride ticket

Mobile payment systems like Paym and PayPal already enable smartphone owners to pay for goods and services with their phones, although neither of these would be practical for paying a bus fare due to the time it would take to complete a payment, but the Near Field Communication (NFC) technology that contactless cards and Oyster use is found in most smartphones so the idea that we may soon pay our bus fares by waving our phone at a reader is one that is likely to become reality before too long.

By and large I am a proponent of changes that are taking place in the means by which we can pay for the things that we want. Paying our fares by Oyster card or contactless debit card are quick, convenient and safe. The ability to pay by using one's phone would be a similar benefit, but...and there is always a but; not everyone has an Oyster card, not everyone has a debit card and not everyone who has a debit card has one that is contactless. Not everyone will have a compatible smartphone if that is the way paying for your bus fare eventually goes. Oyster cards can fail, get damaged or lost; so can contactless cards. Smartphones can go wrong and run out of battery, and of course all electronic payment methods are at risk of some sort of system failure. Just about the only drawback with cash is that frankly I never have enough of it!

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[1] Including tourists, who are usually a lot more aware than people give them credit for, having researched the city they are visiting. In fact some tourists are more clued up than some of the indigenous population.

[2] The £2.30 cash fare compares unfavourably with the "discounted" £1.45 Oyster or contactless card fare. The cynic in me wonders whether that discount will be maintained now there is no cash fare and how long it takes Oyster fares to creep up to meet the old cash fare.

[3] Doubtless stories of drivers refusing late night passengers without valid means to pay their fare will be diligently reported in the local and national press.

My Computer Makes My Head Hurt

Last weekend we went to Center Parcs, which we do most years. Among other activities we played badminton, where we have reached a fairly respectable standard and tennis, at which we are getting better! Sadly we plumbed new depths with our table tennis, though in my defence the last time I played that particular game was over 15 years ago and then it was on a moving ship (which is an interesting experience). 

This year our accommodation had no wi-fi and as the phone signal at Center Parcs is virtually non-existent I switched my phone off and left it off, which was actually quite liberating. 

Our accommodation, like the lodge above had no wi-fi.

Later, when we were in wi-fi range in Rajinda Pradesh, all three other members of the family whipped out their phones or iPods and started scrolling through Facebook and I suppose I might have too had I not left mine in the villa. On the whole not being permanently connected is not, contrary to what some people may think, the end of the world.

Connectivity was restored with the curry.

On returning home I found that our PC had gone into sulk mode and was refusing to co-operate. I switched it on and it threw some sort of fatal looking error.

I launched repair mode and it booted up, only to totally lock up with nothing responding. A couple of repairs and reboots later and it looked OK, but the next morning it played up again. I was trying to transfer some photos to a memory card when it froze. It refused all attempts to use Task Manager, it refused to respond to the mouse or the keyboard. It refused to respond to bribes or threats, to pleading or to begging. I ran the repair tool to no avail; it even actually rebooted in the middle of repairing itself and said the error was terminal, fatal even. Then it wouldn't switch on.  

When it did switch on it suggested that I do something that required it to be working properly in the first place if I were to comply with its suggestion. Then it wouldn't reboot at all; the mouse and keyboard wouldn't work and the power button was neither use nor ornament so I had to crawl around on the floor and unplug it from the mains. Having plugged it back in I straightened up and cracked my head on the metal corner of the shelf that the keyboard sits on, drawing blood. Desperate to avoid another trip to Accident & Emergency with a head wound, I plastered a piece of wet kitchen roll to the wound and ploughed on. Eventually, the best part of two hours and about twenty reboots later, the PC was working although for how long is anyone's guess. 

At this point I peeled away the dried up kitchen roll and examined my forehead, where there was an inch long abrasion (it would be too dramatic to call it a cut really), that was very tender to the touch. Moving to the kitchen I emptied the dishwasher and promptly bashed my head in exactly the same place on an open cupboard door. This is by no means the first time I have done this. Fortunately this time I did not draw blood but my head did hurt quite a bit. Since these things tend to happen in threes I spent the next few hours waiting for the other shoe to fall, and yes I am aware that the maths don't quite add up in that sentence.

You may be wondering what I mean when I say I wanted to avoid another trip to A&E with a head wound; well, a few years ago I was supposed to be going to work late on a Friday night to do some out of hours contingency testing. At eleven o'clock, coming in from the garden though the conservatory, I forgot that I had closed the patio doors. I remembered this when I whacked the door with my knee, before a fraction of a second later clouting it with my forehead. Nothing seemed to happen at first, then there was a sound like distant rain as intricate networks of cracks appeared in the glass and the window shattered, cascading almost delicately from top to bottom. My head did not actually hurt that much; in fact I barely felt anything, but I was aware that there was something dripping. Very quickly I realised that it was coming from my forehead, that it was blood and it was less dripping than pouring. It was quickly evident that this was a cut that it would take more than a Band Aid to remedy and that a trip to A&E was required, so it was off to Oldchurch Hospital in Romford via taxi (driving was clearly out of the question what with having to hold a towel to my head).

Now I don't know how often you have had cause to visit the casualty department of a hospital in the London suburbs at the time the pubs are closing on a Friday evening, but if you have not previously had that dubious pleasure I suggest that you keep it that way. On that particular Friday the only person in the department who was sober was me, apart from the staff of course, and they all looked like they needed a drink. The patients were in various stages of drunkenness; the young women were by and large clutching sprained or otherwise damaged ankles from falling off their high heeled shoes or tripping in the gutter, while the young men were generally nursing head wounds from being glassed in one of the town's various watering holes; visually at least I fitted right in. I think that I was given some sort of priority on the basis that I wasn't drunk, well it seemed that way as I was on my way home relatively quickly, sporting a large bandage on my forehead. Suffice to say I did not make it to work.

Patients groups and nurses have regularly proposed that drunks either be barred from A&E or charged for using casualty departments and I can see why these proposals surface from time to time. An A&E department full of drunks can be intimidating for other patients and for the staff and if the inebriates are there directly or indirectly as a result of their alcohol consumption then it is difficult not to argue that they are an avoidable drain on resources. On the other hand, the taxes on alcohol (and on tobacco for that matter) make up a large portion of government excise revenue, part of which is in turn spent of the NHS, so in a perverse way the smokers and drinkers are already paying for their treatment.

A&E: Clearly this picture was not taken on a Friday night.

Some of you may recall that last year when my family and I went to Center Parcs it was shortly after I had all but broken my toe after kicking a concrete step very hard, so this year's head wound is a mere trifle, barely to be considered except for the fact that almost every Woods family holiday appears to be accompanied by some injury or mishap or another. In previous years we have had to spend time in a Tobago hospital while Val had stitches applied to a nasty leg wound and in the Maldives emergency dentistry was required when Val's wisdom tooth erupted. Most memorably of all, we had to cancel a cruise holiday in 1996 when I caught chicken pox. Still, it makes taking out travel insurance worthwhile.