I Can't Stand Currys

There is a dearth of electrical retailers on our High Streets these days. The Electricity Showrooms (not to be confused with the trendy bar/restaurant in Shoreditch), Powerhouse and Comet have all gone, and while there are a few independent traders,  when it comes to stores selling white goods, televisions and computers, Britain's retail parks are dominated by one name - Currys PC World. And I hate Currys PC World, or more specifically, I hate the Currys store on the Eastern Avenue in Romford, which has now incorporated PC World and Carphone Warehouse.

No fridges or PCs on sale here.

And the demise of Comet has limited competition, and choice.

PC World stores may be anonymous barns selling a fairly narrow range of middle of the road PCs, but I've generally found them OK in a 'you know what you're getting' sort of way, and I never had any complaints about the PC World that was, until recently, separate from the Currys in Romford. Similarly I've not had bad experiences in any other Currys stores, but now that PC World have moved in to the Romford store, I hope that I never have to set foot in there again.

PC World, Romford - as was.

I cannot now remember the reason for our first run in with Currys. It was many years ago and we had to return a faulty product - it might have been an MP3 player, although not an iPod - and we were made to feel, as seems to be case in most experiences with this store, not only wrong, but an inconvenience, and idiots. The next experience came when I went to buy a new camera for my daughter. Just a simple, compact, digital camera. The sales assistant wanted to sell me the extended warranty; I didn't want it. He persisted, I continued to refuse and yet he still wanted to try to sell it to me. "Mention it once more and I will walk out without buying the camera," I told him. His arrogance, or maybe it was stupidity, knowing no bounds, he again tried to convince me to buy a warranty: I walked out.

Then when I went there to buy a cheap DVD player for my other daughter I was made to feel like a cretinous cheapskate for not buying a top of the range Blu-ray machine. I went to Tesco instead, got what I wanted without being judged and got Clubcard points to boot. Next on the list was the visit to return a set of cordless landline phones because one was not charging properly (if you are wondering why I persist in buying things from Currys in light of experience, it is a question I often ask myself and I have no answer really). The assistant changed them, but could not do so without a little bit of attitude. "Course, you shouldn't leave these plugged in all the time, that's what ruins the battery," he said - I was surprised he didn't suffix his remarks with 'chief' or 'squire,' he certainly didn't say 'sir' - a statement that, for a cordless phone is such arrant nonsense when the manual actually says that the phone should be left plugged in all the time. I can only presume that there is so little job satisfaction to be had working there that the only way the staff can get any pleasure is by baiting the customers. And I am clearly not alone, there are several unfavourable reviews of the store online.

I hate this store with a will.

In contrast, while I wouldn't say they were perfect, the PC World store generally had helpful staff. They efficiently repaired our desktop computer and a laptop (the latter had a cracked screen, the faults with the former were many and various) and I had no problem shopping there.

My most recent visit was intended to be just a reccie[1]; I had nothing to return and absolutely no intention of buying anything - unless they were literally giving away the item I wanted - and that was just as well because the experience was, as per usual frustrating. We had already been to Currys PC World in Lakeside to look at computers - ours is on its last legs - and having given it some consideration, wanted to have another look. So rather than go to Lakeside again, we decided to go to PC World in Romford...which had moved into Currys. The first thing that was frustrating was that in comparison with the range at Lakeside, or what the range would have been if PC World were still a standalone store, the choice was very limited. Secondly, while most of the machines came with wireless keyboards and mouses,[2] none of these were connected, meaning that actually trying out any of them (apart from the touch screen machines, where some functionality could be tested) was impossible. So we tried to enlist some help from an assistant, who unsurprisingly was of no assistance whatever. She disappeared in search of a colleague, at which point we decided that she would probably either return with an excuse that none of the machines were capable of connecting, or just as likely, with a colleague who would know no more than she and who would make exactly the same point. So we left.

The reason for our wanting a new PC is that our eight year old machine is positively decrepit. If switched off for any length of time - for instance while we go away on holiday, or just for a long weekend -  it shows a painful reluctance to work properly once it is switched on again. After switching it on it will often lock up completely, such that the mouse stops responding, the keyboard stops responding - even the on/off switch stops responding - leaving one with only unplugging it from the mains as a means of hard booting it. Often it will spontaneously reboot, sometimes in the middle of typing something. I have launched Startup Repair with monotonous regularity and more than once restored the damn thing to its factory settings, all to no avail, since just when complacency sets in and it seems that it is working properly, it reboots or - and this is really common - displays the dreaded blue screen of death.

Bad...

...worse.

Having walked out of Currys PC World we went to John Lewis, where a very helpful and knowledgeable chap sold us a PC which - as far as I can tell - meets our requirements. And he was able to let us test it out because unlike in PC World, the mouses and keyboards were connected. And as for the extended warranty, which I am sure PC World would have tried to sell with more enthusiasm than is decent, there was no hard sell, and since it was just £20 to extend the free, two year guarantee to three years with the added bonus of accidental damage cover for the whole 36 months, it was a simple decision, especially since I'd just spent about that amount in Caffe Nero without demur. And, unlike PC World, there was also no hard sell of Norton Ant-Virus or Microsoft Office, both of which I already have - not that that would stop Currys.

At present the new PC is still in its box, and I am not so complacent that I think I will be able to unpack it and install it seamlessly and without any issues, nor that there won't be some point in the lifetime of the machine that I have to run Startup Repair, restore it to its factory settings or take it back to the retailer. My consolation is that I didn't have to deal with Currys, and won't have to, and if I ever mention the possibility of shopping in that store again, you have my permission to physically restrain me.

---

[1] Reccie - short for reconnaissance.

[2] Debate rages as to whether the plural of computer mouse is mice or mouses, but since some people hold that mouse stands for manually-operated user-select equipment, I will opt for the latter; for the moment.

One Man's Trash

The first time I saw an advertisement for a car boot sale, I confess that I was mystified. Common sense told me that it could not be a sale of car boots, but otherwise I was perplexed. Today there can be few people who do not know what one is and there are literally hundreds of such sales up and down the country - there are over seventy regular car boot sales in Essex alone.

The car boot sale apparently originated in Canada - where, unsurprisingly, it was known as a trunk fair - and the idea was introduced into the UK by a Catholic priest from Stockport, as a charity fundraiser in the early 1970's. Val and I have done a few boot sales to sell off household items that have been surplus to requirements - most recently, we did one last weekend - and we are always amazed by the amount, and type, of things that people will buy. We have sold books, CDs, toys, clothes, furniture, jewellery, perfumes, shoes - you name it, it seems folks will buy it. Arriving at the boot sale and setting up, it was amazing how many other sellers (they must be sellers, as the sale wasn't open to buyers for another hour) descended upon us asking if we had particular items - watches and perfume were especially popular, not that we had any of either. These hardened sellers obviously know what things sell best.

The good old British car boot sale.

Five or six hours later we had made a few quid - not as much as the last time we did a boot sale, but an amount not to be sniffed at - and we packed up the remaining items and took them home, either to take to an unsuspecting charity shop, or to throw away. One reason for going to a boot sale last weekend was to coincide with our having hired a skip so that we could clear out our shed and garage, the latter being used for storing everything except a car. There are two reasons why our car doesn't go in the garage; firstly, even if I could get the car in it, the garage is barely wide enough to open a car door and get out, and secondly, the garage is full of the flotsam and jetsam we accrue and then dispose of on a regular basis. Annually it seems we accumulate piles of detritus; cardboard boxes and other wrappings from domestic purchases that we keep on the offchance that either we have to return said purchase or in case the box comes in handy, which it rarely does. After spending a few days last year trolling back and forth to the local tip, we decided to hire a skip this year, to save time, if not money,  and like the car boot locusts who descend the moment you arrive at a Sunday morning sale, our skip has attracted a few passing totters who have relieved us of sundry items like chairs, an old lawn mower, scooter and ironing board.

What really is remarkable is the amount of stuff we manage to amass these days and how much of it is rubbish. Outside our back door we have four wheelie bins; one for normal waste, one for recycling and two for garden waste (we have a large garden and the first lawn cut of spring will easily fill both bins) and they are always full come collection day. Contrast this to fifty years ago when I was a nipper and my parents had one bin, small in comparison to any of my wheelie bins, which was for all of their refuse and which was emptied each week.

Today, a row of wheelie bins has replaced the single bin and the old fashioned dustman:

These days we, and I'm sure many of you, have more rubbish than we can cope with. There are innumerable reasons for this. Firstly there is packaging. Everything that my parents bought loose now comes in layers of packaging. My Mother would go to the greengrocers and have pounds of potatoes, onions, carrots and whatever, weighed loose by the shopkeeper and tipped directly into her shopping bag. Nowadays supermarkets insist on selling everything in plastic, with some fruit or veg sitting on polystyrene trays in the bags, and while I try and buy as much loose as possible, with some things there is no choice. Convenience foods when I was young were tinned, by and large. Ravioli and rice pudding out of a can were the nearest thing to ready meals that my Mother ever cooked (or should that be heated?), whereas nowadays you can see shoppers' trolleys piled high with microwave lasagne or paella all of which generate obscene amounts of waste card and foil containers. My parents' generation cooked more food from scratch, meaning that the waste they generated was more likely to be potato peelings and the leaves from a cauliflower (both of which were of course compostable).

Secondly there is the conspicuous consumption that many people indulge in and from which few are immune. Despite the undoubted hardships that many people have suffered and continue to suffer as a result of economic downturn and austerity measures, a good many things are cheaper, both relatively and actually, than they were twenty or thirty years ago. Look at video recorders, which I wrote about recently. The first one I bought, in 1989, cost £350; fast forward (pun intended) to the days when the last ones were on sale in the High Street and they were going for under fifty quid. And clothes: thanks to shops like Primark, the price of polo shirts, shorts, lightweight jackets, even winter coats, are lower than they were in the days when I had a full head of hair (about 1985).

We live in an increasingly throw-away society, even though that term is hardly new, having been first coined in 1955 in Life magazine. Few people 'make do and mend' like our forebears, we dispose of things because they bore us rather than because they are worn out. Manufacturers of consumer items like mobile phones, televisions games consoles, all forms of computers and tablets - most electronic devices really - constantly bring out new versions of their products, encouraging us to upgrade, upgrade, upgrade.

The amount we throw away is astonishing. This graphic shows the domestic waste from each home in the London Borough of Barking & Dagenham.

At one time many people would fight shy of buying used goods - there was a certain stigma about doing so. Today, with the proliferation of boot sales, the rise of the charity shop and the stores selling pre-owned or vintage, cherished items, and the incredible popularity of websites like Gumtree and eBay, buying second-hand is to some extent fashionable - and cheaper. We all generate more rubbish and things we simply tire of or outgrow than any previous generation, which means  that anything we can do to reuse or recycle more and more must be a good thing. Today more than ever, one man's trash is another man's treasure. 

"We Are Sorry For Any Inconvenience Caused"

The most mealy-mouthed, insincere apologies you will ever encounter are those that routinely accompany announcements made on public transport systems, tacked on the end of messages informing you that your train is formed by only four coaches instead of eight, delayed for some reason, or simply cancelled outright.

The number of times the average commuter hears that sort of apology is so great that quite quickly they are tuned out, thus it is only the more remarkable, ad hoc apologies that stick in the mind. One of my favourites has to be the apology from the driver of a train as it ground to a halt at Goodmayes Station en route to Liverpool Street, to the accompaniment of a loud bang. The delay in our service, and the cause of the bang, he told us was due to a pigeon landing on the overhead power cables...and exploding. Fortunately this did not cause sufficient delay for me to be late, although the pigeon was very late.

More frustrating than the disingenuous apologies, however are the complete lack of announcements - useful or otherwise - when things are not running properly. When I worked at Canary Wharf, the Jubilee Line station there would resound to frequent announcements stating the obvious, that "A good service is operating on the Jubilee Line" when the trains were running properly. There would be signs reinforcing the statements made on the public address, and cheerful Transport for London (TfL) staff would be (superfluously) manning the ticket barriers and generally milling about. On the day you arrived on the platform to find the indicator board blank, or one suggesting that the next train would not be for another twenty minutes instead of the usual three or four, announcements there would be none and TfL staff would be conspicuous by their absence, having probably barricaded themselves in their offices to avoid the wrath of the thousands of disgruntled commuters.

Station staff are not responsible for signal failures, broken down trains or people trespassing on the tracks, which are the sorts of reasons that services grind to a halt, so I cannot say that I blame the staff for going into hiding.  After all there is nothing worse than being subjected to abuse from unhappy would be passengers  when the problem is not of your making; and having worked in customer services I've experienced the shoe being on that particular foot; and if running away is not an option, then grinning and bearing it is the only recourse.

Less easy for rail travellers to sympathise with are the occasions when rail workers take industrial action. There are at present at least two industrial disputes on the railways, one on Eurostar and another on Southern railways. I don't pretend to know all of the ins and outs of either dispute, but on a very basic level the first appears to be about the detrimental effect on the work-life balance of train managers caused by what the National Union of Rail, Maritime and Transport Workers (RMT) call " the company’s failure to honour a 2008 agreement" on unsocial hours and duty rosters. If the union are to be believed, and the company have not honoured an agreement that presumably forms part of the employees' contracts then you have to have sympathy with their position.

Southern rail trains have been going nowhere recently.

The second dispute seems to stem from a desire by Southern rail's train operating company, Govia Thameslink Railway, to introduce driver only operation on their services, which the RMT oppose on health and safety grounds (not, apparently, as the cynic in me might have thought, in order to preserve jobs where one no longer exists). Concerns over health and safety are, like accusations of racism, hard to resist. Everyone, from management to unions to passengers must consider that health and safety are not areas anyone should be skimping on. Except that other rail networks run one man operated trains - and have done for many years - without any undue problems, and only yesterday (Wednesday, 10th August 2016), two-hundred passengers were evacuated without incident from a C2C train at Dagenham after a fire onboard caused by overheating brakes. C2C operate without guards; why they can do so without compromising health and safety but the RMT maintain that Southern rail cannot, I do not know.

Whatever the wrongs and rights of these disputes, one thing is for sure, the transport unions in general, and the RMT in particular, remain the most confrontational of Britain's trade unions. There is no doubt that trade unions are generally a good thing, going all the way back to the 1830's and the first real union, the Grand National Consolidated Trades Union (GNCTU). But while it is generally believed that the withdrawal of labour should be the last resort, it all too often seems that the railway workers' unions are way too trigger happy when it comes to initiating strike action. And, as is so often the case, it is the general public that suffers the most when they do. Shop workers, cleaners, office workers, teachers, nurses; you name it, there is hardly an occupation unaffected by a rail strike.  However, while the travelling public may have little sympathy with the unions, then the rail companies don't get  much either, generally being held in fairly low esteem by commuters anyway. You might say that rail companies and the unions are a match made in heaven - or hell.

By and large the travelling public has become so accustomed  to the inconvenience that is caused to them by strikes that they simply ignore them and make alternative arrangements. Back in the late 1980's a series of weekly strikes by railway workers meant no trains and no tubes in London for six consecutive weeks. My employers, Midland Bank, ran coaches from all points of the compass to ferry staff to Central London. On week one they underestimated the number needed and my first wife June (who worked with me at Threadneedle Street) and I were left standing on the pavement (largely because June insisted we went to the back of the queue!)  In weeks two to five the bank ran sufficient coaches, but our working day was condensed between 11am and 3pm, although there were four hours stuck in traffic either side of that period. In week six our coach took us to North Woolwich where we were decanted onto a boat to sail to Tower Pier. Having got used to truncated hours on Wednesdays, we actually arrived at the office earlier than was most people's normal arrival time, much to the chagrin of many!

Under BR, Liverpool Street was dirty, smokey and dingy.

Nowadays, Liverpool Street is a much more pleasant place to be.

Some people may say that if it were not for the parlous state of the railways since they fell into private ownership, the unions would not have to act in the way they have. That if the railways were in public ownership and not in the control of companies interested primarily in the return to their shareholders, there would be peace and harmony between bosses and unions. Except, of course that during the days of the nationalised British Rail the railways were chronically underfunded, rolling stock was dated, uncomfortable and unreliable, stations were dirty, dingy and potentially dangerous, and industrial action was a regular occurrence; more regular than it is now, in fact.

At the Labour Party conference in 2015, nationalisation of the railways became official party policy and Jeremy Corbyn, speaking recently about the Southern rail dispute reaffirmed his party's commitment to nationalisation. European Union law, and in particular the First Railway Directive, make competition in the rail industry compulsory - under the directive, multiple train companies must be allowed to use the same track, making nationalisation difficult, if not impossible. Ironic, isn't it, given that they were ostensibly in the Remain camp during the EU referendum debate, that a central plank of Labour Party policy will become much easier to implement now that the UK has voted for Brexit.

Frost* In July

To use a sporting comparison, if the Royal Albert Hall (RAH) is like Wembley Stadium, then the O2 Academy in Islington is more like Dagenham & Redbridge's ground. With a capacity of just 250 (all standing), the O2 holds about a twentieth of the number of punters that can fit into the RAH and while the RAH is an eye-pleasing piece of Victorian design, the O2 is a somewhat featureless hall in a shopping centre that is unlikely to win any prizes for architectural merit.

Frost* in July (and June).

Both fulfil similar purposes as concert venues, and I've been to both in recent months. In May I was at the RAH to see Yes (see A Fragile Drama), last Saturday I was in Islington to see Frost* and as well as a contrast between the venues, there was some contrast between the experiences and the shows themselves. The show that Yes put on at the RAH was, as one might expect from a band that have been recording and performing for nearly fifty years, thoroughly professional but - and this was probably due more to the fact that I was way up in the circle - lacking a certain intimacy. No such risk of a lack of that at the O2 Academy where I ended up about ten feet from the stage, which inevitably put me at a similar distance from one of the speakers, hence the fact that from the moment I left until nearly twenty-four hours later I was afflicted with partial deafness and a ringing in the ears.

My (somewhat distant) view of Yes at the Royal Albert Hall.

My rather closer view of Frost* at the O2 Academy, Islington

For those of you unfamiliar with Frost* (and that asterisk is part of the name, not a reference to a footnote in this blog, by the way), they are a prog-rock act formed in 2004 by singer-songwriter Jem Godfrey, who has written for acts such as Atomic Kitten, Shayne Ward and Holly Vallance - about as far from prog as one can imagine. Frost*'s first album, Milliontown, was released in 2006 and was on repeat on my CD player for quite some time after I received it. Experiments In Mass Appeal followed in 2008 and then there was a hiatus until Falling Satellites came out this year. As you might expect, the most recent album featured heavily in the live show, meaning that in the weeks leading up to the gig that album got a number of spins so that I could acquaint myself with it. And how joyous was the sound of tracks like Signs and Closer To The Sun, but for me (and I suspect I was not alone), the highlight of Frost* at the O2 Academy was the encore, consisting of Black Light Machine and The Other Me from the Milliontown album. I left the concert buzzing, metaphorically and in the case of my ears, literally.

The walk back to Liverpool Street (engineering work on the Northern Line meant that Angel tube station was closed) took me through parts of Shoreditch that were also absolutely buzzing. The area, which has undergone considerable gentrification in recent years, has become one of  London's most popular and fashionable quarters, even if the hipster sub-culture that has become synonymous with the area has courted some controversy, viz the protest at the Cereal Killer Cafe in September 2015. The walk also gave me time to reflect on Frost*'s support act, which actually consisted of fifty per-cent of Frost* themselves, namely Jem Godfrey and John Mitchell, playing under the name Twats in Hats and who played, among other songs, the fabulous Losers Day Parade.

The night before the Frost* gig, and back at the Royal Albert Hall, the BBC Proms featured what the corporation's website described as "A celebration and reinterpretation of the music of David Bowie with the Berlin-based, genre-defying musicians’ collective s t a r g a z e and its Artistic Director André de Ridder." Following Bowie's death in January this year, this show was both eagerly awaited and tickets sold out within an hour. Had I had the opportunity I would have loved to have been there, but as it happened watching it on television was in the end probably preferable, since it was a show that was quite difficult to enjoy. In truth, had I been there for it I would quite possibly have walked out before the end.

Now, I don't have a problem with weird stuff, and given that David Bowie was a great innovator and an artiste who constantly reinvented himself, it was both inevitable and appropriate that the concert was anything but a slavish copy of his material; it was fitting that it reinterpreted his songs, showcasing them in a new light. But much of this was not a reimagining, more a mutilation. It started well enough, though. Despite the fact that Neil Hannon of The Divine Comedy looked disconcertingly like a young David Blunkett, his performances on Station To Station, and particularly This Is Not America were excellent, even if the rapping from Kid Elf on the latter song did not contribute much. But thereafter it went downhill. 

David Blunkett - sorry, Neil Hannon, performing Station to Station

Marc Almond's rendition of Starman was slightly better than his attempt at Life on Mars (which was terrible), but not much. John Cale, looking like Billy Goat Gruff in a skirt, performed a version of Space Oddity that might have sounded fine in his head, where there was obviously a tune quite different from that being played by the musicians going on,  not that the tune being played by the orchestra bore more than a passing relation to the one penned by David Bowie. Meanwhile a highly truncated version of Rebel, Rebel concluded with the conductor,  André de Ridder, asking the audience, "Recognise it?" to which the answer in our household was a resounding "No", and judging by the lukewarm reception given it by the audience in the RAH, a similar one was on their lips too.

John Cale, whose arrival on stage was greeted more rapturously than his performance.

But the highlight of the concert in the Woods household (one which reduced Val to tears of laughter), was the performance of Jherek Bischoff. Bischoff is an American musician whose album, Cistern, was partially recorded in an empty two million gallon underground water tank under Fort Worden in Port Townsend, Washington. It's that sort of fact that immediately makes me think that the resulting output is going to be pretentious twaddle with more than a shade of the Emperor's new clothes, although having now heard parts of it, I'd just say it is more dull than anything else. Bischoff's performance at the Prom was bizarre, although I imagine it was quite normal for him. Playing guitar with eyes tightly closed, his melodramatic style of playing was at times quite out of keeping with the music. Looking like the tune playing in his head was Johnny B Goode rather than Blackstar, he seemed poised to burst into a Chuck Berry style duck-walk even during the most sedate passages.

Jherek Bischoff (centre), contemplating a duck-walk.

There's a school of thought that Bowie would rather have enjoyed the adaptation of his music as performed in the Prom; I suspect he would have enjoyed the concert more than the audience at the Royal Albert Hall did, but I doubt there was an audience anywhere in the country who enjoyed a gig last weekend as the one that saw Frost* in July.