Batteries Not Included

I was in two minds as to whether to write anything this week, it being Christmas and eventually decided that I would publish a day earlier than normal as my usual posting day falls on Christmas Day. No doubt tomorrow most of you will be too busy to read my musings. Too busy stuffing turkeys and peeling sprouts or frantically cannibalising remote controls and clocks for batteries because there is always one gift that gets opened bearing the legend "Batteries Not Included" which you didn't notice when you bought it. This probably explains why 27th December is the fifth biggest day for battery sales in the year with UK consumers buying 2.1 million of them that day. That said, it is estimated that about 400,000 people go off in search of batteries on Christmas Day itself with petrol stations and small convenience stores doing the bulk of the trade since stores of more than 3,000 square feet cannot open on Christmas Day.[1]

Should all shops be allowed to open on Christmas Day? It's an argument that surfaces from time to time;  should the shops be open, serving a need[2] or ought we to protect 25th December as a special day? Before the Sunday Trading Act of 1994 we got on pretty well with the shops being closed on Sunday, but since they have been allowed to open on the Sabbath we accept it and now find it strange to see a shop closed on a Sunday.[3] Christmas Day opening would probably be similar; if it were allowed we would soon reach a time when the idea of the shops not being open would be alien, but Christmas does not evolve in the same way as other aspects of our lives.

How we usually see the High Street on Christmas Day...

...would this be preferable?

When you look at Christmas it hasn't really changed much, certainly not in my lifetime. The traditional Christmas dinner is the same, we buy the same "treats" each year, watch the same TV programmes (by and large), The Queen's speech is still on at three o'clock and the Christmas songs are stuck in a time warp. Slade, Mud, Greg Lake, The Pogues, The Waitresses and Jona Lewie still get trotted out every year, few new Christmas songs emerge, or if they do they do not endure. The gifts change as fashions and fads wax and wane, but not much else changes, but having all of the shops open on Christmas Day would be less evolution and more revolution.

Ostensibly, Britain remains a Christian country. At the last Census in 2011, 33 million people in England and Wales (59.3% of the population) stated that they were Christians; the next largest religious group were Muslims with 2.7 million people (4.8%) while 14.1 million people (around 25%) reported no religion. I would suggest that of the 33 million people reporting as Christians, the number who practice is considerably lower. The argument that we should maintain the special nature of Christmas Day loses weight when we consider that relatively few people celebrate it as the birth of Christ (more worship Mammon) and that years ago, when a far greater proportion of the population were practicing Christians, there was far more happening on 25th December. At one time football matches were a regular part of the Christmas Day experience and there were trains and buses to get players and spectators to the ground too. Were the shops to open on Christmas Day they would be of little use without public transport to enable shoppers and workers to get to them (not everyone drives and places like Oxford Street are not somewhere many people would want to drive to anyway). Given the king's ransom that tube drivers expect to be paid to work on Boxing Day the Lord alone knows how much they would want to work on Christmas Day. But on the other hand, if Christmas Day became just like any other day, why should anyone expect to be paid any differently just because of the date?

The argument that Britain has become a multicultural society and many people do not follow the Christian faith and therefore need not be bound by its traditions and mores has some merit. However, while society remains a fairly tolerant one, I remain unconvinced that the rights and traditions of the majority should be subservient to the wishes of a minority. A reversal of roles would find many Christians living abroad having to adapt to and comply with the customs and laws of the countries they have chosen to live in. Small shopkeepers who open on Christmas Day do so legally and I imagine that the majority of them belong to faiths that do not celebrate Christmas as such, so what harm do they do by being open? It is estimated that a record £636 million will be spent online by UK consumers on Christmas Day this year,[4] so given that people obviously want to shop, why stop them from doing so in person?

We have seen a sea change in our culture in recent years and are fast becoming a 24/7 society. I'm not sure that many people need to go to a supermarket at 3 a.m. but some people, night workers for instance, probably find it convenient. In times of significant unemployment perhaps having shops, banks and other businesses open 24 hours a day, seven days a week, 365 days a year would be a boost for the economy. Plenty of people work shifts (I know someone who exclusively works nights) and the more people that worked nights the more demand there would be for services (night workers still have to eat, so restaurants and sandwich shops would have customers) and potentially more jobs would be created. Somehow, however I doubt that the potential benefits and possible demand actually exist and what would happen is that just a few more staff would be employed to do more hours. In an era when the Monday-Friday, 9-5 contract is increasingly being replaced by more flexible working arrangements, extended opening hours have become the norm and will probably continue to do so.

Motorists queue for petrol station gifts and batteries, Christmas 2015?

 The bottom line is, err, the bottom line. For many businesses if opening on Christmas Day is going to be profitable then they are going to want to do it. Historically we have seen the chaos of the January Sales, this year we have seen the pandemonium of Black Friday, no doubt if, or when, the shops open on Christmas Day we will see shoppers thronging Oxford Street and Westfield, Lakeside and Bluewater, all in search of bargains but mainly just bumping up the retailer's profits.

Personally I don't care one way or the other. To those who want the shops to be open on Christmas Day I would say, don't you care about the staff who might want to celebrate Christmas at home quietly with the families and friends? And can't you go one day a year without retail therapy? Or, to those who argue that the shops should stay closed I say if you don't like the idea, you don't have to go to the shops on Christmas Day.

Whatever happens in the future, the shops are open today (Christmas Eve), so off you go, get those last minute gifts and that extra bag of sprouts. Oh, and don't forget the batteries.

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[1] The Christmas Day (Trading) Act 2004

[2] Need is moot, who cannot go one day without shopping?

[3] The toy shop The Entertainer is an exception. Owned by Christian entrepreneur Gary Grant, the store is closed on Sundays.

[4] Source: Experian and IMRG, the industry association for online retailers.

"Unexpected Item In Bagging Area"

The self service checkout is now commonplace in supermarkets up and down the country. While critics may ask why the customer should do the shop's work for them and others may bemoan the fact that these tills probably cost jobs, there is no doubt that they are popular and almost certainly here to stay. They have spawned a whole new range of phrases that have entered our lives, such as:

"Please place you bags in the bagging area and press  Done when finished"

"Did you use any of your own bags?"

"Please scan your Clubcard"

And of course the ubiquitous, "Unexpected item in bagging area." That last is a somewhat ambiguous phrase I always think, either a gentle reminder that you have inadvertently put your umbrella there instead of on the floor, or a more urgent warning that something menacing has infiltrated the store and it is time to evacuate before it does something unspeakable.

When I go to the supermarket and just have a basket I tend to use the self service tills; if I have a trolley load I go to a cashier (some supermarkets don't allow trolleys in the self service area anyway). Inevitably the cashier will ask, "Do you want any help with your packing?" and invariably I say no, that I will be fine. One day I will answer, "Yes please, could you pack it for me, I'm not in the mood," although no doubt if I do I will find the eggs and soft fruit packed underneath 5kg of spuds.  But now my local Tesco have introduced Scan As You Shop, a system whereby the shopper  uses a hand held device and scans their purchases as they move round the store and then uses the scanner to pay for their goods. It isn't a new idea, Sainsburys had it some years ago and in fact are now trialling a version where the shopper scans their items with their smartphone instead of the shop's own device.

I picked up a leaflet from Tesco and decided it might be worth a go. There never seems to be anyone at the Scan as you Shop checkouts so it looks, at first sight, like a quick way of doing bigger shops.  I decided I would register (you have to have a Tesco Clubcard to use the scheme) and looked at the Tesco website. Nothing obvious there about how to register, so I Googled "Tesco scan and shop" and found that you have to do it instore, but more alarmingly, some of the other results and some of Google's autofills suggested some concerns, like "Tesco scan and shop problems."

So I read some of these links and some issues came to light. Now I fully appreciate why Tesco say that they will undertake some random checks when people use Scan as you Shop and also I understand that this may happen more frequently in the first few uses, but there were some somewhat disturbing posts. Some shoppers said that Tesco had treated them badly (like criminals, more than one person said) if they had forgotten to scan an item, or that the store's database was returning incorrect prices.  A few shoppers had been overcharged and some 3 for the price of 2 discounts were not being applied. Then there was the headline "Tesco branded me a shoplifter - and the same could happen to YOU" which brought back memories of the day that Tesco accused me of shoplifting.

It was a Saturday morning in late spring about ten years or so ago. We had been invited to a friend's birthday celebrations and I decided to buy him a nice bottle of Scotch, so when I went to our local Tesco I picked up a bottle along with some other bits and pieces. I wasn't sure which one to pick (and I can't remember now which one I finally settled on), and there was some humming and harring while I made up my mind. I paid for my purchases (including the whisky) and walked out of the store.

Then I heard a voice, quite near, behind me: "Excuse me sir," said the voice, so I turned round to be confronted with two youngish, male, Tesco employees.

 "Have you got a receipt for all of the items in your bag," one asked. "Yes, thank you," I replied. "Well, we think you have items you haven't paid for. Would you like to come to the manager's office to discuss it?" he asked."No thanks," I said, "we can talk about it here." So we did, in the car park.

"My colleague here saw you pick up a bottle of whisky which you did not have when you got to the till," the chap said. The implication presumably being that I had secreted this bottle about my person and left the store without paying for it. Since it was a warm day and I was wearing a very light jacket, the sort that sags when you put as much as a box of matches in a pocket and which was not at that moment sagging (there was nothing in any of the pockets), I dread to think where they thought I had hidden this bottle.

"Yes," I replied, "he did see me pick up a bottle which I didn't have when I got to the till. Had he watched me a little longer he would have seen that this was because I put it back on the shelf and bought this one," I went on, indicating the bottle in my carrier bag.

There was an exchange of glances between the men from Tesco and it obviously dawned on them then that they were mistaken and off I went. Looking back I don't recall any sort of apology; perhaps I should have adopted a Basil Fawlty like tactic and said "I beg your pardon?" and when they replied, "We didn't say anything," I could have said, "Oh, sorry, I could have sworn I heard you apologise."

I don't bear Tesco any grudge, I still shop there. The staff made a mistake, that is all, although I wonder how tolerant their staff are when customers make a mistake and walk out of the store with items they have innocently not scanned when using the Scan as you Shop scheme. And it is for that reason that I really am in two minds on whether to sign up. I'm vacillating and prevaricating, dithering and wavering. On balance I think I'll wait till the New Year because there is no way I'm going to try Scan as you Shop for my Christmas food shopping.

Milkman, Coalman, Fly Fisherman

Readers of a certain age may recall the Yellow Pages TV commercial, first broadcast in 1983, featuring Norman Lumsden playing fictional author J R Hartley searching for a copy of his out of print book, Fly Fishing. After he has traipsed round an assortment of bookshops without success, his daughter presents him with a copy of Yellow Pages whereupon the old fellow is able to locate a copy of his precious book after just a few hours of frustrating phone calls. Nowadays he, or more likely a more tech savvy member of his family, would have been able to find his book in about a minute using Google, Amazon and eBay.

"My name? It's J. R. Hartley..."

Another author by the name of Hartley, a real one this time, that is to say L P Hartley, wrote “The past is a foreign country; they do things differently there," and the internet, being perhaps the most visible and obvious of changes that have happened in the last thirty years or so, is a indicator of how things were different, how foreign the past is. Ironically the internet has provided us with new ways to access the past by sharing our memories and photographs in a way we could not have years ago.

The changes that I have seen in my life time is something that I frequently mull over, especially when I see photographs posted on Facebook of how my home town has changed over that period. Equally interesting are the comments that some people post about the photos and how the town has changed because there are regular suggestions that things were better in the old days. It is easy to look at the past through rose tinted spectacles and edit out the unpleasant bits; equally it is not difficult to look at the present day, see the convenience and relative luxury that we have compared with days gone by and believe that everything is better now. As ever, the truth lies somewhere between these extremes.

I recently went to an event at our local library organised by Film London [1], whose project, London: A Bigger Picture, aims to collect and digitise film footage, professional and homemade, documenting life in the outer London boroughs over the years. Sadly there seems to be little film of Romford about, but one which we did see was Romford Traffic Problem (1963), in which Councillor Pat Ridley showed the horrendous traffic congestion in the town centre and the ring road and one way system proposed to alleviate matters. Now this is interesting because ring roads and other schemes that require the demolition of old buildings and the like do exercise a lot of people, yet looking at the film it is obvious that without the road schemes that have taken place there would be gridlock morning, noon and night not just in Romford but in many other towns.

Traffic in 1960's Romford before pedestrian precincts and the ring road.

Romford Market is a prime example of how the town has changed. The market has been operating since 1247 (it was originally a sheep market) and is protected by a royal charter granted by King Henry III under which no other market is permitted to set up within a day's sheep drive (six and two-thirds miles). The livestock element of the market closed half a century ago and traffic no longer edges between the shoppers and the stalls and through the middle of the market place, but the market carries on...just. It is an indicator of the way shopping habits have changed that the market survives rather than thrives.

Romford Market then...

...and now.

Then there is the milkman. When I was a child no one bought milk from anywhere else, but imagine now having to wait for your pint to be delivered each morning rather than picking some up at the supermarket. Yes, jobs have been lost (how often do you see a milkman these days) but no one has to wait for the milkman to turn up so they can make a cup of tea or have their cornflakes each morning. When I first married we had milk delivered; it was the norm and we did so because it was what our parents had done. As demand fell and milkmen lost their jobs, those who remained found their rounds increased. We would frequently not have our milk delivered till lunchtime, sometimes we came home to find birds had pecked through the lids, we even came home to find that our milk had been stolen from our doorstep. We once waited until late in the afternoon for the milkman to come one Saturday so we could pay him. Eventually we gave up and bought our milk from the supermarket. I still see a milk float around our area occasionally, but it is rather forlorn. Even rarer is the coalman. I'm sure you can still get coal delivered to your home, but whereas in 1960 it was commonplace, today I would be surprised if any of you reading this have coal delivered or even know anyone who does.

People may look at quaint old cottages that have stood for hundreds of years and be outraged when they are demolished to make way for something more modern but have little or no understanding of the inconvenience of living in such a property. A property which may have no heating or double glazing and, until recently perhaps, no inside toilet. Believe it or not, just thirty years ago I lived in a house that had neither central heating nor double glazing and in winter it was so cold that each morning ice would have formed on the inside of the windows in my bedroom.  When I exhaled  I could see my breath condensing: wearing a hat in bed was the norm in January and February.

This was a common sight for me when I woke up on a winter's morning just thirty years ago.

It is understandable and quite normal that as we get older we become less tolerant of change, keener to see things stay as they are, although strangely enough I seem to have actually become far less resistant to change as I have got older. My mother is now over 80 years old and some things that have changed bewilder her; the internet is a mystery to her for example, but I hope that when I get to her age I will want to continue to embrace new technologies. The internet has become so all pervasive that living without it is, if not impossible, certainly inconvenient at times and the day will come when not having access to it is going to make life difficult. For that reason it is important to look at changes, at innovations, at new ideas and products and make an informed choice about whether you will integrate them into your life or not, and if the latter, how you will compensate.

The J R Hartley ad was about introducing something innovative into someone's life, saying don't trudge around loads of different shops, stay at home and use the Yellow Pages and your phone to trace what it is you want. Today that ad would be about getting someone onto a computer and searching and shopping online. Today we may think the Yellow Pages ad quaint, in years to come our children may be saying the same about Google.

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[1] http://filmlondon.org.uk/

It's All Rover Now!

Considering that I have been an avid football watcher since the age of ten and an avid reader for even longer, it is remarkable how few books about the game that I have read. Of those I have, very few stand up to much scrutiny. There is The Glory Game by Hunter Davies of course, which was groundbreaking in its depiction of Tottenham Hotspur in 1972. Davies was allowed unprecedented access to the players and staff and to show how times have changed, incurred the wrath of then manager Bill Nicholson by revealing the ages of the Spurs players. With the intense scrutiny of footballers today it is quaint that such an apparently trivial matter should have caused any grief, but it did. The Glory Game remains probably the finest book written about football.

Quite possibly the best book ever written about the game.

The Miracle Of Castel Di Sangro by American journalist Joe McGinniss is another classic, following as it does the trials and tribulations of small town Italian side Castel di Sangro, who improbably reached Serie B, the second tier of Italian football. It is certainly a world apart from the well trodden path to the stadia and histories of the Manchester United's and Barcelona's of this world.

Photo: Dario Riccio

Footballer's autobiographies are, by and large, fairly anodyne, bland offerings documenting the player's rise to fame and fortune and concluding with him selecting his World XI. Eamon Dunphy's Only A Game? is an exception. Perhaps the antidote to football biographies, Brian Glanville described it as "The best and most authentic memoir by a professional footballer."

Recently, however I have made an exception and read a footballer's autobiography, because while every generation spawns its own footballing hero, from Matthews and Finney to Charlton and Moore, there is one player who spans several generations, a man who scored 481 goals in a career that covered nearly four decades. This man won ten league titles, lifted the FA Cup no less than eleven times and won the European Cup on three occasions. He was kidnapped nine times,  survived an assassination  attempt by a disgruntled soap opera star and his career was only ended by a helicopter crash. Yes ladies and gentlemen, I give you Roy Race. The life and career of Roy Race, born 21st October 1938 and now living in Upper Cobdon near Melchester, has been documented in his autobiography, Roy: My Life. The Official Autobiography of Roy Of The Rovers, and what a truly remarkable book it is too!

Prior to reading this book I was no expert on Roy Race's career  but a little investigation  reveals  one or two inconsistencies in Roy's account of his life in the game. The number of times Roy led his Melchester team to FA Cup glory varies between eleven and eight, and the number of kidnappings he endured swings from nine to five. The Mel Park earthquake, according to Roy's book, occurred in 1965 while other sources  place it in the 1988-89 season.  Mel Park supposedly had a capacity of some 56,000 yet in describing a friendly against Austrian side Flaudermitz, Roy confidently asserts that the crowd was 213,455 and this with the West Stand out of action following a fire.

Roy Race in typical action

Perhaps this is the effect of having such an eventful career, with several similar events inevitably blurring into one, together with the passage of time. Some of Roy's early family life is marked by naivety and a complete lack of self awareness in his observations. For instance his father's war service was apparently cut short by the same groin strain that curtailed his career in football. Roy's father eloped in 1967 with Bethany, the eldest daughter of the Race's next door neighbour, Mr Sexton who subsequently took it upon himself to keep Roy's mum company.  Roy seems  to have accepted these events without question, as he did Mr Sexton's apparent fascination with young Roy's bath times.

Another groin strain, this time suffered by Roy himself, was to keep him out of the 1970 World Cup squad. In fact for a player of such repute, his international career was patchy, being disrupted by a number of seemingly minor injuries including an ingrown toenail and a sprained wrist.

Nonetheless Roy Race is one of the few players for whom a phenomenon has been named; "It's Roy of The Rovers stuff!" is something commentators have been bellowing into microphones for decades, usually to describe a last minute winner achieved in a thrilling comeback. Indeed, for a team as apparently all conquering as Melchester Rovers it is remarkable how many time Roy had to come up with a last minute winner, after which the referee didn't  even have time to restart play, without which the Mel Park boys would have been heading for defeat.

With all of the controversy surrounding FIFA's decision to award the 2022 World Cup to Qatar it is unsurprising that Roy was at the centre of a similar experience with the oil rich Middle Eastern state of Basran. He was offered a job coaching the national team by Sheikh Ibn Hassan, who harboured a dream of his country hosting the tournament. When Roy expressed concern over the 40 degree heat encountered in Basran during the summer, the Sheikh countered that air conditioned stadiums would resolve the problem. As the Sheikh said, "With money, anything is possible." Of course it was in Basran that eight of Roy's Melchester team mates were killed in a car bombing, just one of a number of tragedies that attended the life of the great man, including the death of his wife Penny in a car crash and the helicopter accident that cost him his famous left foot and prematurely ended his glorious career.

Of the Rovers other famous players I was startled to learn that Tubby Morton, who I had always considered to be a goalkeeper, was in fact a centre-half when Roy made his Rovers debut. Tubby's spiralling weight (at one time he tipped the scales at 34 stone) meant that he lost a yard or two of pace, but Roy spotted that his bulk could be turned into an asset and at his suggestion Tubby became Rovers regular goalie in place of Len Dolland who was appeased by his demotion thanks to Roy's brainwave of putting him in charge of the team's Tuesday evening bingo sessions.

Roy's depiction of his  relationship with his best friend and team mate Blackie Grey has been criticised by some reviewers and certainly Roy's depiction of his boyhood chum is of a gifted player but not an especially bright fellow perpetually in the shadow of the great Roy Race. The fact that Grey is now in a nursing home and has relatively few lucid moments probably means that his version of events will never be known, which is a pity.

In fairness I can't describe Roy: My Life as a great book, the somewhat one dimensional characterisation and internal inconsistencies see to that, but if nothing else I did learn that apart from being the genius on the pitch that he undoubtedly was, he was an accomplished plumber and plasterer and I don't ever recall that being mentioned before!