The Norwegians Have A Word For It

The week between Christmas Day and New Year's Day - it's a bit like limbo: no one seems to know if it is a normal working week or a holiday. Most of the shops are open some of the time, but not all of them are open all of the time. Some companies shut down, some don't. Public transport enters into the holiday spirit by organising games that involve potential travellers having to guess what services will be running and when, and those people unlucky enough to have to work normally generally resent the fact that they are standing at the bus stop on dark, cold December mornings while it seems everyone else is having a nice lie in. This period, unlike Advent, or Lent or Ramadan or the like has no official name - well, not in English anyway - although the Norwegians have a word for it, it's Romjul apparently.

The City can be quiet this time of year...

Strangely enough, I generally enjoyed working during the few days between Christmas and New Year. Virtually empty trains - when they were running, which meant some alterations to my commute - a similarly quiet City of London, offices half empty as everyone who could take the week as holiday did so, nearly silent phones, few emails and the opportunity to get all those housekeeping jobs done that had been put off during the year. Things like tidying cupboards, sending old papers off to storage and generally pottering about. In the event that, at some point during the day, a phone call or an email comes in that demands immediate attention, this is of course much resented - the cheek of it, someone actually wanting something done, this week of all weeks!

...but the West End will be packed.

While the West End may be chock-a-block with tourists and shoppers, in the hiatus between one holiday and the next, the City can resemble a ghost town. Wander about at lunch time and there are few people abroad; many of the pubs and sandwich bars are closed - in fact the few places open are the banks, the building societies and other financial institutions. It's quite eerie, but I always like the feel of the City in this particular week: because everything was quieter and calmer than normally, there is less rush, more opportunity to talk to people who you would just nod to the rest of the year.

This week is often used as a time for taking stock, for looking back over the last twelve months and looking forward to the new year. And for many people, the striking feature looking back at 2016 is the staggering number of celebrity deaths that there have been. Arguments rage over whether there have been an excessive cumber of celebrity deaths this year or whether our perceptions are flawed: whether, in fact it is confirmation bias in action. But looking at some numbers produced by the BBC it seems that 2016 was a bad year for famous people, with the corporation running forty-two pre-prepared celebrity obituaries, up from thirty-two in 2015 and considerably more than in previous years. It was in the first three months of the year that the number of celebrity deaths soared to unprecedented levels: twice as many notable people (twenty-four in total) died in this period of 2016 compared to the same period in 2015, and five times as many as in 2012.

BBC's Obituaries Editor Nick Serpell, who compiled the data, thinks that the increase is no surprise, since now, fifty years after the explosion of TV and pop culture in the 1960s, there are considerably more people who we define as celebrities. It seems unlikely therefore that 2017 will buck the trend and sadly, we'll need to prepare ourselves for yet more celebrity deaths next year.

High speed boat trip in Cyprus.

Taking a personal look back at 2016, some highlights have been our family holidays to Cyprus and Center Parcs, some great shows at the BBC - Sarah Kendall's Australian Trilogy was a particular pleasure, although Val's unexpected contribution to Women Talking About Cars was another highlight - and watching Pointless being recorded - twice. There was watching Andy Murray at the O2 in the Barclays ATP World Tour Finals and meeting Lee Child (author of the Jack Reacher series of books) at a book signing. 

Andy Murray (nearest camera) at The O2

Me and Val with Lee Child at Waterstone's in Tottenham Court Road

Some lovely walks along the Thames and through the countryside. There were gigs at the Royal Albert Hall and the O2 Islington - Yes and Frost* respectively, happy away days watching Romford win at places like Cray Wanderers, Bury Town, Horsham and AFC Hornchurch. There was meeting up with old friends like Paul Calvert and Keith Markham and reminiscing about old times over good food and drink, and there was seeing our younger daughter embark on her university studies. But somehow there never seemed to be enough days in the week or hours in the day to do all of the things we wanted to: how I ever managed to get anything done in the days when I still worked is a mystery to me - a mystery that seems to occur to everyone who retires!

I'm not one for making predictions, so I'll say nothing about how I expect 2017 to pan out, and I'm also not one for New Year Resolutions - any I've made in the past have rarely survived the night, let alone the year - so I'm making none of them either. See you next year!

So, This Is Christmas?

Here we are again, just a few short, wintry days before Christmas Day, and as usual I am in that half panicked state of knowing that I still have things to do (buying the fresh foodstuffs for Christmas dinner for one thing), but also vaguely aware that there are probably some things that I haven't thought of but which may only occur to me when it is too late. It is the same most years, and I'm sure I am not alone in this; Christmas creeps up on us like a ghost in Scooby Doo cartoon. Every year when the first signs of Christmas appear in the shops and on television, be it in the middle of summer or more reasonably in mid-autumn, I always think to myself that there is plenty of time to get organised and then suddenly Christmas Day is less than a week away and it's panic stations.

Although the supermarkets are more crowded in these last few days before Christmas and customers are prowling up and down the aisles with trolleys laden with enough food to endure a siege rather than cater for just a day or two, they seem to be fewer  in number than in years gone by, and having visited my local shopping centre, the crowds there also seem smaller than in recent years. Are people scaling back this year, I wonder? If they are, why? Money could be a reason, after all we are told that we are still in a period of austerity, wage rises are modest at best, and many people's domestic budgets are under pressure. But that doesn't normally stop people splashing the cash - or maxing out their credit cards - during the festive season. Perhaps it is the political situation - uncertainty has a habit or reining in people's spending, especially if they are pessimistic about their prospects and the future in general - but frankly, we've had austerity Christmases before, we've had political and economic uncertainty before and I don't recall those Christmases being any less frenetic.

Could it be a religious thing? A couple of years ago, I wrote in my Christmas blog (Batteries Not Included) that "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." Now, however an article in The Spectator in May this year claims that for the first time in recorded history, there are more people who claim to follow no religion than there are Christians in Britain.[1] This is probably not, as some might expect, due to an upsurge in the numbers of people following other religions as those who claim to follow a religion other than Christianity account for 8% (44% claim to be Christians) but rather it is the 48% who claim no religious affiliation who account for Christianity's decline.

This forty-eight percent presumably includes those who have at one time or another declared themselves to be Jedis, although this week the Charity Commissioners had some bad news for the 177,000 who claimed that religion at the 2011 census. The Charity Commissioners rejected an application to grant charitable status to The Temple of the Jedi Order, saying that Jediism did not "promote moral or ethical improvement" for charity law purposes. Off hand, I'm unaware of any references to Christmas in any of the Star Wars films, but given the amount of toys related to the franchise that are available and which are presumably still a popular gift at this time of year, I assume that being a Jedi is not incompatible with celebrating Christmas.

"Religious icon I am not."

Apparently the chairman of the Equality and Human Rights Commission felt it necessary this year to tell employers it is acceptable to celebrate Christmas, and that doing so is not offensive to non-Christians, which tells you something of the way in which many people's views on Christianity have been shaped and altered over the years.  And let's be honest, if aliens from outer space descended on Britain come December, any list of things that they believed we worshipped would include alcohol, food, pine trees and a man with a white beard and wearing a red costume way before Jesus got a look in. So secular has Christmas become, so much a celebration of conspicuous consumption and excess,  that frankly the people most likely to be offended by celebrating it nowadays would be tee-total, vegan, chrometophobes.[2] The spread of a secular Christmas has meant that in countries like Japan, where Christians are very much in the minority, the holiday is celebrated and presents and cards are exchanged, but without the religious apsects.

Fifty years ago, declaring oneself to be Church of England was the default for most people who were not devout, nowadays similar numbers would declare themselves not religious or prefer not to answer. But on the whole, any scaling back of Christmas spending and celebrating has probably no connection with a decline in Christianity, since the holiday and the celebrations have long since ceased to make more than a passing reference to religion. Many of us make token efforts at some sort of Christian celebration, but it rarely goes much beyond Christingle and Midnight Mass, so on the whole I really don't think that this year's somewhat muted run up to Christmas is anything to do with any decline in religious observance.

Midnight Mass

A major reason that I have formed the impression that Christmas is more low-key this year based on the thinner crowds round the shops may be the inexorable increase in on-line shopping. If the number of parcels that have arrived in our household is anything to go by, my daughters are doing their best to make up for any shortfall in Christmas spending on the part of the rest of the population. This has been in part fuelled by my elder daughter suffering such a frustrating time at Westfield in Stratford that she ended up doing virtually all of her shopping online.

The lights in Regent Street.

Of course it is entirely possible - probable, in fact - that my perception of Christmas is a factor of age, and not just mine (although I cannot deny an increase in ennui), but that of my children. Christmas for children is such a magical time but we've scaled back, particularly on the decorations, as they have got older - but now they are grown up, and the dynamic has changed somewhat. Whereas in years past our younger daughter's excitement about Christmas was driven (like most children) to quite an extent by her anticipation of the presents coming her way, this year she is more excited by the prospect of the rest of us opening the gifts she has bought.

Of course it is entirely possible that my view of Christmas this year is out of tune with yours, or indeed the majority of people, and that while Christmas 2016 seems to me to be much more low key than Christmases past, for everyone else it is full steam ahead.

Despite the possible 'bah humbug!' impression you may have formed about my feelings on Christmas, I will enjoy it in my own way. I will enjoy the present opening, and the cooking and eating the usual lunch - turkey, sprouts, stuffing, roast potatoes, etc, etc. I'll enjoy nodding off in front of the telly. I'll enjoy the odd glass of wine and the board games. And then I'll enjoy getting back to normal once it is all over.

However you are celebrating the season, here's wishing you a Merry Christmas!

---

[1] http://www.spectator.co.uk/2016/05/britain-really-is-ceasing-to-be-a-christian-country/

[2] Chrometophobia (or Chrematophobia) - the fear of money.

The Latest Dirty Word

By definition it is the job of a radio phone-in host to be controversial - disagreeing and arguing with callers makes for much more interesting broadcasting than meekly listening to and accepting their views - and if the degree of controversy the host courts is a measure of their success, then I imagine that LBC's Katie Hopkins must be considered fairly successful. Ms Hopkins espouses some views which many people find objectionable - to say she is a bit right-wing is like suggesting that water is a bit wet - and if I'm honest, I cannot say I can recall anyone of my acquaintance finding much she has said agreeable, but this week I read of a call she took on her radio show where I admit to having some sympathy with her view, even if the outrage she displayed was perhaps tired and stagey. By the by, am I the only person becoming more than somewhat bored by the way in which these sorts of exchanges between broadcasters and either members of the public or politicians now seem to have to be described? Ms Hopkins was said to have 'destroyed'  the man and it seems that callers have to be destroyed or slain and their arguments shredded, rather than having their opinions dissected and rebutted with logical argument.

It's no longer enough to rebut or refute someone's argument, they have to be 'torn apart.'

Almost inevitably, the subject of the call was Brexit, and the caller - whose opinion was to some extent rejected on the basis that he was from South Kensington almost as much as for the view he expressed - said that there were two groups of people who voted for Brexit, namely " the elderly people and then you have the uneducated and ill-informed…" This fits the mindset of many disgruntled Remain voters who view the elderly as not entitled to have voted (unless they voted Remain) since the consequence of their actions will impact more significantly on future generations than their own, and everyone else who voted Leave as an intellectually challenged bunch, suckered by false promises and fallacious arguments, as though this were the first time that politicians had ever tried to pull the wool over the electorate's eyes. It really is condescending and insulting to categorise 17million people - nearly a quarter of the population - as stupid. I know plenty of people who voted Remain and I know plenty of People who voted Leave: I wouldn't call any of them stupid. But then it seems that vilification is now more than ever regarded as a legitimate form of opposition than is formulating a cogent argument. It is far easier to call the Tories 'scum' than propose alternatives to their policies, simpler to call Jeremy Corbyn a 'lunatic' and criticise his dress sense than listen to his proposed policies and rebut them.

But the latest dirty word to throw at someone is 'populist.' It isn't just the EU referendum result, it is also Donald Trump's victory in the US Presidential election, and the outcome of the recent referendum in Italy that have been described in dismayed tones by many - including David Cameron and Tony Blair - as victories for populism. A populist, which seems to have become such a pejorative term, is defined (in my dictionary at least) as "a member of a political party claiming to represent the common people" and "a believer in the rights, wisdom, or virtues of the common people." Who, apart from the common people, would a politician wish to represent? The elite, perhaps? Now that would go down well with people for whom 'elite' - literally, those who are "superior in terms of ability or qualities to the rest of a group" - is such a derogatory term. Funny, isn't that both Tony Blair and David "Call me Dave" Cameron tried to cultivate the image of being regular guys, yet  seemed singularly to fail to win over the majority of regular guys and thus attributed their failures to populism, that is to say, the vote of the regular guys. Still, holding two diametrically opposed views at the same time is not unheard of, and I am certain that many of the critics of Boris Johnson's comments about Saudi Arabia - he accused the Saudis of abusing Islam and acting as a puppeteer in proxy wars - will have been equally fierce opponents of Britain's close ties with a country accused of human rights abuses.

A lunatic in an ill-fitting suit, or more properly, the Leader of The Opposition.

Not that Boris has been entirely constant in his views either. Despite being the poster boy for the Brexit campaign - a role in which I felt his lack-lustre performances betrayed a lack of conviction - Boris had expressed support for Britain's continuing EU membership as recently as October 2016. It struck me that, in the interests of fairness, Parliament felt that a personality like Johnson was needed on the Leave side to dilute the more pungent views of Nigel Farage and to oppose the heavyweight Tories on the Remain team. He was very much like the skilled player forced to even up the teams in a pick-up game of football by playing with the less able, and resenting it.

Another politician apparently holding two completely contrary views following the outcome of the referendum is John Major. “The tyranny of the majority has never applied in a democracy," he said, an expression first coined by John Adams in 1788, and one that reminds me of doublespeak: Major might just have well have said that the referendum result was doubleplusungood. He added that he found it difficult to accept that “48 per cent of people who voted to stay should have no say in what happens.  I don't recall Major saying anything similar when 62% of those who voted in the last general election did not vote for the Conservatives. A quite salient point was made by Communist Party general secretary Rob Griffiths (and I admit that those are words I never thought that I would write) when he said, "Tories have never been big fans of elected democracy, especially when they lose. So it is no surprise when those who support the anti-democratic European Union are more contemptuous of the voice of the people when they don’t agree with them.”

Two former Prime Ministers unable to accept their lack of current relevance. Picture: Jeff Mitchell/Getty Images

He might equally have said that no one seems to be fans of democracy when they lose, since we now seem to have descended to the politics of the school playground, where insults are more common than rational argument and twenty-five percent of the population are decried as 'stupid' and the majority of those who voted in the referendum are apparently 'tyrants' simply because they did not bow to the wishes of those who consider themselves their betters.

Have You Turned It Off And On Again?

In the days when I had occasion to phone our IT Help Desk at work, I would inevitably start - after indicating the general area of my problem - by telling whoever I was speaking to, "Yes, I've turned it off and on again, yes someone else has tried to log in on  my machine and yes, I've tried to login in on a different machine." This circumvented the first three questions asked by virtually all IT Help Desks everywhere and usually meant that my problem would get referred up the line, because in a disproportionate number of cases, if the answer to the first question was No, then rebooting the machine would resolve the problem on many occasions, and the answers to the next two questions would help identify the seat of the problem: user profile, hardware trouble or software glitch.

One of the problems faced by anyone with a user on the other end of the phone and being expected to fix their problems, is actually understanding the problem. For many years I worked in an IT department but I'm not a programmer, I was a user representative, so I understood what the users were trying to do but rarely how the system they were using actually worked - well, not the nuts and bolts, just the general principles - and the major problem I had was that when a user described some behaviour that was unexpected, I could rarely recreate the issue, which was usually the first step in trying to either explain what they were doing wrong or identifying that there was actually a real defect. Sometimes, if the user was located in the same building, I would go and visit them and see what they were trying to do - not that that always helped, because sometimes the behaviour of the system was inexplicable and not something I had encountered during testing. Fortunately there was usually a workaround of some kind, but sometimes there would be a defect that meant a fix was required, usually because the scenario they had created was not the sort of thing that the design had catered for or which had not been encountered during testing.

As the person at the end of the phone when users called with a problem, my busiest times were often on the Monday after a weekend when there had been a software release. On occasions, particularly in the early days when the system was new, there were genuine problems, but more often than not issues stemmed from the fact that the users were either unaware of the changes, didn't understand them or simply didn't like them. This, despite my best efforts in issuing release notes detailing the changes, which were either not cascaded to the users or not read by them if they were. Dealing with people who didn't like the changes was probably trickiest, because while you cannot please all of the people all of the time, there were always people you couldn't please even some of the time. Best  to develop a thick skin and not to take it personally.

If anything, my experiences in dealing with user problems has made me a bit more tolerant when I have to throw myself on the mercy of technicians to fix problems at home. In recent years I have been indebted to Apple (twice), Microsoft, and TomTom help desks. Apple once released an update to iTunes that rendered the application unusable. Checking out user forums (often a great source of fixes) led me to the conclusion that this was a tricky problem. And so it proved, as an Apple technician spent an hour with me uninstalling iTunes (which had to be done in a very specific way, uninstalling elements in a particular order) and installing a previous version of the software. Then more recently they helped us transfer iTunes to a new PC - not an onerous task in theory, but not so easy if you want to keep your playlists. A Microsoft technician spent the best part of an hour resolving an issue we had with Internet Explorer and after an upgrade banjaxed my sat-nav, I spent another hour with a TomTom technician resolving that little problem.

Recently, my internet service provider (ISP) have had some serious issues with their webmail. Fortunately most of my email traffic is through Gmail; my webmail through my ISP is legacy stuff that is too much hassle to switch, so I've not been unduly inconvenienced, particularly since although webmail kept coming up as unavailable or displaying server error on my PC, it was working okay - if slowly - on my iPad. But reading the ISP's user forum it is clear that some customers have been seriously inconvenience, causing them frustration and no little anger. Some users obviously recognised that the ISP were working on the problem and that it really is in the company's interests to get it up and running properly as quickly as possible, but from my experience sometimes easier to fix the problem than it is to identify what the problem is in the first place. If I have any issue with how my ISP handled the matter it would be with their communication, which was intermittent and sometimes vague. The fact is that we are now all so reliant on technology, particularly our computers, the internet and email - both for work and in our personal lives - that any outages become serious problems and it isn't just how quickly and efficiently our providers resolve these that matters, it is how well they communicate to us what they are doing to fix the problem and what the likely timescale is for that fix. Not that they always know, of course: as I say, sometimes the time it takes to fix depends on the problem, and if you can't identify the problem, telling people how long it will take to resolve it is nigh on impossible.

Seen too much of this message on my email recently.

Ironically, producing this week's blog has not been without its technical issues. After writing about four-hundred words, Microsoft Word stopped responding. After ending it through task manager, the same problem occurred, then my laptop refused to open the document as it steadfastly refused to find not only the file, but the drive it is stored on. And when the document opened, naturally some of what I had written had been lost. Given the title of this blog, I don't suppose you will need too many guesses to work out how I fixed the problem!

However, in another instance of something not working this week, my Panasonic HDD recorder has "lost" all of the programmes I have recorded on it (and some go back a while and are cherished old favourites that get watched over and again)and no amount of powering off and back on again is having any effect. Looks like that's one problem solved only by trashing the thing!

Eat In, Or Take Away?

Whether it is drooling over Nigella Lawson spreading avocado on toast, watching Jamie Oliver make a meal in fifteen minutes or following Rick Stein on a culinary voyage around the Mediterranean, we Brits love our cookery programmes. And as the proposed defection of The Great British Bake Off from BBC to Channel 4 proved by generating as many column inches as Brexit, we love our cookery contests too. Television executives have long seen the reality show or fly-on-the wall documentary as audience grabbers, and when combined with our love of food , they know they are on to a winner. 

Many of these shows, whether light-heartedly or more seriously, attempt in some way or another, to educate us about the dangers of high fat, salt laden, highly calorific dishes and encourage healthier home-made alternatives to the ready meal or the takeaway. How effective they are is open to debate: we may be shocked by the amount of sugar in our Starbucks Frappucino, or the amount of salt in our soup from Greggs as revealed in the Channel 4 programme, Tricks Of The Restaurant Trade, but that doesn't seem to put us off spending the best part of £30million pounds on takeaways and fast food every year, food that is generally high in calories, salt, fat and sugar.

A Starbucks Frappuccino contains as much sugar as two cans of Coca Cola - that is to say about 13 spoonfuls.

We all eat out or order takeaways much more than we did when I was growing up. As a child I rarely ate out -and this was largely for economic reasons, my parents simply could not afford restaurant food and takeaways were largely confined to the occasional fish and chip supper. It was only usually on holiday that we ate out, and then it was more likely to be at a Lyons Corner House or a fish restaurant at the seaside than at a 'proper' restaurant. In fact, in my youth, the opportunities to eat out were further restricted by the fact that in most High Streets there was a dearth of eateries. Compare that to today, when wherever you go there are Indian, Chinese and pizza restaurants while town centres and out-of-town shopping centres are dominated by chains like Pizza Hut, Frankie and Bennys, or Prezzo and the like, with McDonalds and Burger King seemingly everywhere. Meanwhile for the snackers, coffee shops such as Starbucks, Costa Coffee and Caffe Nero stand alongside Pret a Manger, Eat and Krispy Kreme to the extent that no shopping expedition is complete without indulging in a coffee and panini, or a fruit cooler and a cake.

We often visited The Royal Fish Bar in Southend when I was young.

As a nation, our eating habits have changed immeasurably over the last forty years - even over the last twenty years. When I started work at Midland Bank in 1976, virtually everyone had breakfast at home, brought sandwiches for lunch and were restricted to a couple of cups of tea or coffee in the office during the day, courtesy of the manager's secretary, or at larger branches one of the messengers, whose job description included the supply of liquid refreshment. Today it is very different: the majority of workers seem to pick up a coffee and bacon roll or a pastry on their way to the office. In 1976, the sight of a takeaway coffee being brought into the office was a rarity, now it is the norm. In 1976, the alternative to a packed lunch brought in from home was a trip to Bartons the bakers, who supplied cheese or ham sandwiches, sausage rolls or tomato soup, and very little more. Pop into your local sandwich bar or coffee shop now and a plain cheese or ham sandwich is rarer than hen's teeth and your choice is more likely to be from such esoteric  combinations as Beetroot and Radish on Rye (Pret a Manger) or Houmous and Falafel (Eat).

In 1976, the idea of an avocado and egg open sandwich would have been unthinkable

 

Having bought their takeaway lunch, workers today are more likely to eat it at their desks than not: it used to be the case that seeing someone eating at their desk was a rarity, now it is the norm. In offices I worked in, eating at one's desk was at one time frowned upon, and when it became more accepted it usually came with some strictures. No hot food for instance, or no 'smelly' food (what counted as smelly was open to interpretation). Some foods defined as messy - even down to biscuits or crisps that might result in crumbs and therefore place more of a potential burden on the cleaning staff, or might attract vermin - have been banned in offices I worked in. In fact, I worked in one office where we did actually find that we had had nocturnal visits from rodents, resulting in an enterprising colleague investing in a mousetrap that did in fact catch one of our furry visitors.

So lunch at our desks has become, for most people, so accepted that the thought of going out at mid-day, eating a leisurely lunch and returning to the office an hour later, is but a distant memory. Work for many people in this 'always connected' world we live in rules their lives almost exclusively from the moment they get up till the moment they go to bed. Even when people take a break, they are never far from their mobile phone or their laptop, we never get away from those emails or calls. In the days before email became ubiquitous, we wouldn't go on holiday, come back to the office and find four-hundred memos waiting for us, but I remember vividly returning from vacation to find that sort of number or emails in my inbox. The fact that we can rarely get away from the office -whether we are physically there or not - contributes to that feeling that if we are not constantly monitoring our mail we are missing something. Just as the phenomenon, the fear of missing out, affects our social lives, so too does the fear of missing some vital piece of work related information affect our working lives.

One day we may look back at the fashion for lunching al desco and remember it as just a fad, but with most employers looking to do more with less, and most employees not wanting to look anything but fully committed and conscientious, I can't see that happening anytime soon. Another reason to be thankful for being retired.