You Can Take Me Out Of Romford...

I was born in Oldchurch Hospital, Romford in 1958. Romford was then part of Essex and had, since 1937, been within the Municipal Borough of Romford but as a result of the London Government Act 1963, Romford became part of the London Borough of Havering, along with Hornchurch, Upminster and Rainham in 1965. Ever since then there has been some controversy as to whether or not Romford is in Essex since the town has an RM postcode, not an E postcode for London, addresses are written to include Essex (even the London Borough of Havering's address incorporates Essex).  For many people, especially those who recall the migration of Romford into Havering, it is an important matter, one which irks them when Romford is considered part of East London rather than Essex.

Since Essex has been the butt of jokes for many a year, (for example, Q. How do you make an Essex girl laugh on a Saturday?  A. Tell her a joke on a Wednesday); you might think that Romfordians would actually prefer not to be associated with the county, except of course that many Essex jokes merely insert Romford instead anyway, while as far as I know there is no similar array of East London jokes. Supporters of the notion that Romford is in Essex will point to the postal address; opponents will point out that administratively, Romford is in the London Borough of Havering and that you have to drive several miles out of town to find a "Welcome to Essex" sign on the A12 or A127.

You won't find Romford here.

And does it really matter much anyway? Where you live (or wherever you lived that you consider "home", if you have moved away) is a state of mind rather than an address or a Post Code. I consider that I live in Romford; it is in my address, I have an RM Post Code, but I actually live in the London Borough of Barking and Dagenham (the boundary with Havering is a quarter of a mile up the road) and have an outer London telephone number, but Barking town centre is six and half miles away while Romford town centre is only one and a half miles distant.  Dagenham doesn't really have a town centre, for while Dagenham Heathway is just over two miles away, there is nowhere in Dagenham that has a sign saying "Town Centre." Inevitably when one is on holiday, or on a course from work and meeting new people, you will be asked where you are from. In those circumstances I usually go for wherever I think people will recognise, so variously it is London, or Romford or Essex. Even when I lived in Havering, I would never have thought to say that that was where I was from, though and would not have unless I had moved to the village of Havering-atte-Bower.

Boundaries, especially in the outer London suburbs, are becoming more blurred and less meaningful as time passes. London's boroughs are merging or at least sharing services; the municipal rubbish tip up the road where I take my waste that the dustmen don't take is in Barking & Dagenham, but Havering residents can use it, just as I can use the Havering site if I want to. Councils are considering combining some of their administrative functions and just recently children's minister Edward Timpson said that councils should join forces to match children and families far quicker, and that is the way many council services will go in future. Apart from the current ongoing refuse collectors' strike I have never really had any cause for complaint with my local council, certainly a lot of their services are better than those in Havering, from what I hear from residents of our neighbouring  borough, and for those people who would prefer Romford to revert to being part of Essex, I wonder if Essex County Council services would be superior. Being closer to Charing Cross than Chelmsford, Romford is probably better off as part of London than Essex, but I guess what you lose on the swings you might gain on the roundabouts. Administratively being where I live means coming under the control of the Greater London Authority and the local council as well as national government; sometimes it is difficult to really know where would be more advantageous.

There are rumours that boundaries may shift further in the future, that parts of what is now in Havering could be turned over to Barking & Dagenham, some of which makes sense considering the somewhat weird shape of the latter borough, which has tentacles into Havering already, and the parliamentary constituency of Dagenham is now Dagenham & Rainham, thus taking in part of Havering (Barking is a separate constituency).

The northern bit of Barking & Dagenham, making incursions into Havering and Redbridge.

If residents of Romford have an identity crisis, it is nothing as to those who say they live in Middlesex, a county which some might say no longer exists, although such alumni as Russell Grant will forever argue that that is where they were born and where they will always say they are from.

Born in Hillingdon, Middlesex.

No matter how many administrative changes take place, no matter that boundaries change and residents of Romford have been shifted out of Essex and into London, no matter that I live in Barking & Dagenham but call Romford home, it is all a state of mind. After all, you can take me out of Romford, but you can't take Romford out me.

A Midland Odyssey Part Three - An Inspector Calls

For centuries children have been terrified by stories of the bogeyman, of ghosts and ghouls, elves and goblins usually told to them by their parents to scare them into obedience. For a probationary Bank Clerk at Midland Bank, Gants Hill in 1976 the tales told by more senior staff, whether intended to scare or not, related to a creature less mythical but no less terrible than the bogeyman, that is to say The Inspector, or rather The Inspectors since they always came in pairs.

The arrival of The Inspectors was preceded by weeks or even months of gossip. Their progress was charted by rumours of their arrival at nearby branches until one day they would announce themselves at the Enquiry counter, having previously attempted to act nonchalantly in a near deserted Banking Hall in an endeavour to observe any procedural failings from afar.  High on the list of inspectors whose reputation preceded them was Chopper, who it was alleged was responsible for many disciplinary actions, demotions, sackings; the works. It was inevitable that he would be one of The Inspectors who undertook the first inspection that I experienced at Gants Hill. Actually I had little or no interaction with him as I was sufficiently far down the food chain not to attract his attention, although I do recall that whatever role I was undertaking at the time (probably Waste[1]) came under the scrutiny of his less intimidating colleague.

Despite the belief that they were trying to trick people into some indiscretion and get them sacked, The Inspectors were merely trying to make sure we did our jobs by the book, or books, principally the famed Branch Bookkeeping Manual (BBM) and Computer Instruction Manual (CIM), volumes that most people referred to only as a last resort. One of the BBM's sections related to the delivery of mail to the Post Office each evening. Being the office junior and having to walk past the Post Office each evening to get to my bus stop, taking the post was inevitably my job. Now the BBM stated that the post should be taken in a locked leather satchel especially designed for the task and that having used this to take the letters to the Post Office, it should be returned to the branch together with any receipts for recorded or registered mail, which should be stuck in the post book. Naturally this was observed in the breach. I took the post in a carrier bag or just tucked under my arm,  got the bus home and stuck any receipts in the post book the next morning.

Never used.

The arrival of The Inspectors prompted a frantic hunt for the satchel, which when located was found to be in brand new, unused condition albeit that it was covered in a layer of dust. This was a dead giveaway that it had never been used, a state that was remedied by the manager placing it on the floor and jumping up and down on it to give it that "lived in" look.  The post satchel had been found behind the post desk, a location that gave up one or two other goodies, including a cheque which should have been returned unpaid to the presenting bank some months before due to a lack of funds on the drawer's account...oops!

While The Inspectors were looking to ensure that jobs were being done "by the book" the fact that staff often weren't doing so (but obviously had to make out that they were), was usually because doing things by the book was often too long winded or impractical to enable the job to be done within given timescales. Throughout my banking career I often thought that the best way to have taken industrial action would not have been to go on strike, but to work strictly to rule, doing everything by the book. That would have brought the organisation grinding to a halt within a few hours.

Back in those days, even more than today, there were jobs that had to be done that no one questioned but which served little or no useful purpose, as I discovered when I forgot to do one. The Dishonoured Cheque Return was a monthly report sent to Regional Head Office (RHO), detailing cheques that had been returned unpaid for lack of funds during the previous month. One month the diary card that was supposed to remind me to complete this vital task went AWOL and only turned up a few days after the report should have been sent. I was told to compile the report as a matter of urgency and phone RHO to apologise for its late delivery. I phoned RHO, explained the situation and was told, "Oh, there's no hurry, we never look at them anyway." How many other "vital" tasks were there that we undertook in those days that were actually nothing of the sort, I wonder?

One task that was important, one which The Inspectors were keen to ensure we discharged properly, was that procedures relating to the bullion van's visit to the branch were observed. The bullion van would arrive at irregular intervals to pick up excess cash or deliver more notes and coin, and while it was parked outside someone, invariably the office junior (me) was supposed to walk up and down and be on the lookout for suspicious behaviour, i.e. bank robbers. If I saw any, I had a whistle to attract the attention of the police (yeah, right) and a short, rubber truncheon that I am sure would have stood me in good stead against a shotgun wielding thief (not). It is difficult to imagine this sort of thing being contemplated today.

Useless

 

Useful, but not for the purpose Midland Bank intended it.

One day, strolling up and down outside, pretending to look in shop windows and hiding the bulge of the truncheon about my person, I was very mindful of the fact that the previous day there had been an armed robbery on the other side of the road when Securicor were collecting takings from Bejam[2]. I had been cashiering that day, and despite never having previously heard a shotgun fired, knew immediately what the noise was, as did my fellow cashier as we slammed our till drawers closed in unison. A member of the public charged in and said, "Quick, phone the police, Bejam are being raided!" So this was on my mind as I sauntered up and down Cranbrook Road, vaguely aware that across the road a council worker in a cherry picker was fiddling with a street light, changing the bulb presumably. Now, I don't know if you have ever heard the sound made by a bulb from a street light being dropped and imploding when it hits the ground, but it is unnervingly like a shotgun being discharged, as I found out when the council worker dropped the bulb. This proved that had there been an actual raid my whistle and truncheon would have been completely superfluous as I stood rooted to the spot.

By the time I left the bank The Inspectors had become Auditors (at least they had in the departments I worked in) and were less feared since most of them were well known to us. We all knew that they knew how things worked, and audits were (in my experience) generally collaborative rather than confrontational, but no doubt there is still someone out there carrying Chopper's baton!

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[1] Waste, or Remittances to give it its proper name, was the batching up of cheques and credits paid over the counter and preparing those relating to accounts at other banks and branches for despatch to Head Office.

[2] Now Iceland.

Where Does The Time Go? Or, Parkinson's Law In Action

In the weeks and months before I retired, my employers engaged an outside company to provide help with our transition from full time worker bee to full time retired sloth and one of the key things that kept coming up was how would we fill all of those extra hours? I imagine that anyone on the brink of retirement wonders what they will do with this newly freed up time and whether they will get bored, having too little to do? Yet conversations I had previously had with friends who had already retired were frequently along the lines of them now  having too little time, in fact they all wondered how they had previously found time for work.

Now the division of labour in various households will differ, but a recent study by Thomas Leopold at the University of Amsterdam and Jan Skopek at the European University Institute found that in homes where men worked, they did about two hours of housework per day but this only increased to 3.9 hours after retirement. Women's contributions to housework fell only 0.8 hours (from 6.8 to 6 hours) following the man's retirement. What I'd like to know is who are these retired men only doing 3.9 hours housework a day and where can I get a piece of that action?

Considering that pre-retirement I was trying to cram a whole load of household chores into the weekend it occurred to me then that these could in future be spread throughout the week, but it never crossed my mind how much they would spread. It now seems that I have become an embodiment of Parkinson's Law, the adage that "work expands so as to fill the time available for its completion" because there always seems to be something to do. Far from finding myself bored and with little to do, quite the opposite is the case. Actually I do find I get bored from time to time but it is rarely through having nothing to do, and with a wife who works from home, any admission that I am bored and have nothing to do would surely be greeted by her saying, "Well I've got some jobs you can do."

So then, 3.9 hours of housework per day? I don't know how the household tasks are divided up in your neck of the woods, but in ours, pre-retirement I did the cooking, the cleaning (kitchen, bathrooms, vacuuming but not dusting), gardening, shopping, chauffeuring and general odd jobs; Val's responsibilities lay with dusting and the laundry. As you might expect with one party working full-time and the other retired, the division of labour shifted a bit and I now have added laundry and dusting to my repertoire. So 3.9 hours per day seems a little on the low side except for two things. One is that there are some days when I seem to be on the go all day; the laundry in our house tends to get done twice a week and when it is done it takes probably eight hours end to end. Now granted on the days I do the laundry I'm not working for eight hours, the washing machine and the tumble drier are, but that's eight hours of the day that mean I can't stray very far. But then there are other days when I don't have to put so much effort in; probably over the week 3.9 hours may just, on average be about right. So how do people spend six hours a day doing housework? If you do the laundry every day, clean every day and so on I suppose one might stretch it to six hours (especially if you include cooking and shopping).

But how many hours a day count as "work" anyway? Is shopping work (and here I'm only thinking of essential shopping, like groceries and the like)? Is cooking really work? A lot of cooking could be thought of as a hobby; any cooking can be a creative experience and might not really be a chore. A key difference between housework when one has retired, and one which I think makes the Leopold/ Skopek study a bit misleading, is that when one is in full-time employment, then housework is clearly defined as an activity that you cram into the hours when you are not pursuing your paid employment. Once you have retired housework expands, or rather the time available to accomplish household chores increases; and of course given more time there is the opportunity to undertake tasks with greater care and with more rigour than when it all had to be done over a weekend.

Now that winter is over and the weather is improving, albeit with its normal unpredictability and occasional totally unseasonal outbursts, I need to change the pattern of the housework into fewer days and free up some spare time to do some more frivolous and entertaining things since the effects of Parkinson's Law seems to have taken over. Instead, I need to adopt Horstman's corollary to Parkinson's law, which is to say, "Work contracts to fit in the time we give it." I'm going to see if I can reduce that 3.9 hours a day, or at least not do 3.9 hours every day.

An Impatient Man

Patience, they say, is a virtue. I don't know if that makes me virtuous or not since over the years I have been described as both exceedingly patient and also as very impatient. One manager of mine told me that I was impatient with people who didn't meet my standards, a case of not suffering fools gladly possibly, but actually my impatience was usually more often borne of frustration, and sometimes with myself, that I couldn't get my point across or couldn't get someone to understand how to do something. In actual fact, I think that I am usually very patient when explaining things except when the person to whom I am explaining them should understand but doesn't.

It is a widely held belief that we get more impatient as we get older and in some ways that is true; in others the benefit of experience can make us less impatient. The so called impetuosity of youth is merely an expression of impatience and in my case I think that I was more impatient thirty years ago[1] and looking around, I see more impatience among people younger than I than those who are older. What is possibly more common among people of my age (ahem) and older is a certain intolerance, not always the same thing as impatience, but sometimes it's difficult to distinguish one from the other.

Impatience in any age group, but particularly among younger people, is being driven these days by the increasing pace of life and the expectations that people have. Take a simple and trivial example, the internet, or more especially the mobile internet. When the internet was dial up and 2Mbps was the norm, we waited with varying degrees of patience for our pages to load but as speeds have increased there is a tendency to become impatient with our 3G or 4G phones loading pages "slowly" even when we now have speeds of around 15Mbps on 4G.

 Less trivially, it is impatience on the roads that seems to have increased, or at least I seem to have become more and more aware of it. I regard myself as a competent driver, if somewhat risk averse as exhibited by the fact that my usual abhorrence of being unpunctual goes out of the window when I'm on the road, where better late in this life than early in the next is my motto, and so some of the sights I see make me wince. I guess that every motorist has, at some time, hooted at the driver who hasn't noticed that the traffic lights have changed, but impatience seems to have crept in with many people to the extent that if you haven't moved a whole nanosecond after the lights have gone green then they are sounding their horn. When it has happened to me I have had to fight the impulse to put my hazards on, get out of the car and enquire of the other driver if there is anything I can help them with? Only the likelihood of physical violence and the thought that I am actually inconveniencing myself and other non-hooting drivers just as much as the horn happy driver behind me stops me from doing so.

Actually in all the years that I have been driving I think that I have sounded my horn no more than once a year on average, but when I do it seems that I have to aim it at pedestrians more than any other type of road user. Unlike the USA, jaywalking is not an offense in the UK, but I am increasingly wondering if it should be considering that standard of road crossing that I see more often these days.  Just round the corner from where I live is a college, served by a bus stop within ten yards of which is a Pelican crossing and every day, rather than walk those ten yards from the bus stop to the crossing, hordes of people take their lives in their hands and cross behind the bus. Perhaps they think they are saving time, but typically with the amount of traffic on the road they have to wait longer for a gap than they would take to walk to the crossing. And when they do cross they saunter casually across with scant regard for the cars and other vehicles, either engrossed in the music playing through their headphones or by their phones, or as I saw recently, pausing in the middle of the road to light a cigarette. One day there will be an accident and doubtless it will be blamed on the motorist despite the suicidal manner in which these people cross the road. So it is with these people that I get impatient, more for the staggering arrogance that they display in expecting me and other drivers to look out for them rather than taking their own safety seriously.

Another group of people with whom my patience is limited are the shoppers who appear to be constantly taken by surprise when it comes to paying for their purchases. Now I tend to be the type of person who has their money or card ready to pay even when there are five people in the queue in front of me, but at the head of this queue is normally someone who suddenly realises, when the assistant tells them the price, that they ought now to start digging out their purse or their wallet.

My patience also expires when dealing with those people who don't call you back. You know how it is, you phone someone, be it the school or the bank, or a shop and the person you speak to can't help but promises to call back. In these days when being out of contact is nigh on impossible you would think that one would never suffer the frustration of yesteryear when we couldn't stray too far from our landlines for fear of missing that call back, but now with everyone having mobiles there should be no excuse for not getting a call back, and yet so often I have waited for a call, not got one and phoned again. Same goes for people who don't reply to emails, people who claim that my email must have gone to their spam folder, or who swear blind that they have replied even though they patently have not: just how difficult is it to reply to an email?

There is one thing that I have learned over the years though, and that is being impatient is generally unproductive. The people with whom I am impatient don't change because they know I'm impatient with them and my being teed off with them does nothing except put me in a bad mood and raise my blood pressure. The fact that I know this on a rational level does not stop me from being impatient, rather I think that the causes of my impatience have changed; sadly I think that I will remain An Impatient Man.

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[1] "My God," said Val, "just how impatient were you then?"