A Week Of Free Stuff - Mostly!

One of the perks of getting older is the opportunity to get things for free, or at least cheaper than before. I confess I have not yet had much chance to take advantage of concessionary prices - I recently made my first visit to the cinema in over twenty years and was somewhat disappointed to find that the concessionary price was the same as the normal price - but I have had a free eye test recently[1], and my 60+ Oystercard has been taking a caning recently.

Ok, so the Oystercard isn't free, but it was only £20 and expires in 2024 (when I get my Freedom Pass, assuming a future Mayor of London doesn't withdraw it) - that's six years at 27 pence per month - and it has paid for itself over and again since I got it. Take last week for instance, when I travelled up to London more times than if I had still been working! And on four of the days I travelled, the event that I was going to cost me nothing.

On the Saturday I went to see Polish prog-rock band Riverside at The Electric Ballroom in Camden. My plan was to walk from Liverpool Street to Camden - at just under four miles, that is a gentle stroll - but heavy rain put the kibosh on that idea, although popping my head above ground at Kings Cross tube, I saw that the rain had eased sufficiently to allow me to walk the last mile or so. I rather liked the venue, and as I've got older I've found myself liking venues where the audience stands rather than sits as it is easier to get to the loo during the performance, although bizarrely I find the need less when standing than sitting, which I think is psychological, not physical. Riverside were - as expected - brilliant, and support act Mechanism were better than expected.

Riverside at The Electric Ballroom

 Monday and it was off to Ealing to pick up a djembe drum that my wife had bought on eBay, and then on Tuesday it was a trip to Greenwich to the Up The Creek comedy club to see a recording of Angela Barnes' BBC radio show, You Can't Take It With You. Since the Docklands Light Railway (DLR) was extended to Lewisham, getting to Greenwich from our home north of the river has become much easier, and the DLR gives you the chance to get a driver's eye view of your journey. The show was in part a cathartic experience for Angela Barnes following her father's death, but principally just good old-fashioned observational comedy. The series is being broadcast in the New Year.

On Wednesday it was another BBC radio recording, at Old Broadcasting House (OBH) in Portland Place. Val and I go to plenty of BBC radio shows at New Broadcasting House, but this was our first visit to OBH, which is next door. The programme we went to see was World Book Club, which goes out on the World Service and in this episode featured one of our favourite writers, Lee Child, author of the Jack Reacher series, a set of books so successful that apparently one sells every fourteen seconds, worldwide with total sales exceeding 100 million. Val and I met Lee at a book signing a couple of years ago when he was promoting Night School, the 21st Reacher novel, but at World Book Club he was reading from, and speaking about, Killing Floor, which was the first in the series. The programme airs on New Year's Day.

Meeting Lee Child at Waterstone's in 2016

Thursday saw me take a trip to Wembley Stadium to see England play the USA in a friendly. I've not been to Wembley since it was rebuilt in 2007, in fact the last time I was there - as far as I recall - was for a Genesis concert in 1987. I used to go to Wembley for England games regularly until an uncomfortable experience at a match against the Republic of Ireland put me off. I probably wouldn't have gone to this game had it not been for my football club, Romford FC, being given a number of complementary tickets. Had the Football Association known in advance that Wayne Rooney would be brought out of retirement for a swan-song appearance, I wonder if they would have been so generous in handing out freebies; before Rooney's inclusion in the squad was announced they probably felt it prudent to 'paper' the stadium to avoid row upon row of empty seats. The new stadium is impressive, safe, modern and clean - which the old one wasn't - but it lacks the charm that the old arena had; it's a bit bland. My ticket warned that tier five - where I was seated - was not suitable for vertigo suffers due to the height and steep aspect; fortunately, this warning turned out to be a bit overdone, as, despite my aversion to heights, I had no issues. One thing that has not changed since Wembley was rebuilt, however, is the time it takes to get back to Wembley Park tube station. If I were a regular visitor, I would definitely be looking at alternative means of getting home.

The final freebie of the week was another BBC radio programme, of The Now Show this time, which was recorded on Friday lunchtime at The Comedy Store in Leicester Square, and which was broadcast that same evening, but is still available to listen to on the BBC Radio iPlayer.

Gary Numan at The Royal Albert Hall

My 60+ Oystercard probably saved me about £60 in fares that week - and continues to save me money, as Val and I were at The Royal Albert Hall to see Gary Numan this week - and of the shows and events we've been to this last week and a bit only that show and the Riverside gig cost me money. A caveat I'd add is that of course even the free shows involved some expenditure (food, drinks, a programme at the football, and t-shirts at the gigs - I'm a sucker for tour t-shirts), but if nothing else this week or so has once again proven, having seen three shows and a football match that cost me nothing, it's possible to travel around the capital and be entertained for free, or at least pretty damn close to free.

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[1] Not much of a concession, as it seems most opticians offer free eye tests with vouchers in newspapers, or to anyone who buys a pair of glasses from them.

The Theory and Practice of Boredom

"Mum, I'm bored!" How many times did  I utter those words as a child? How many times during the long summer holidays, or on Sunday afternoons when the weather prevented me from having a kick-about in the garden, and there was nothing on TV worth watching? I have no idea, but it was often.  That sort of generalised boredom - as opposed to specific boredom, which we'll come to shortly - ought to be far less common today, both among adults and children. In my youth there were fewer diversions, today, what with a multitude of TV channels, streaming services, video games, and social media, there are far fewer reasons to be bored; frankly, one ought to always be able to find something to do (and I'm discounting household chores and the like).

Specific boredom is another thing altogether. Being bored by one's job is something that has to be endured; being bored by a particular TV programme, or by some hobby or another can be dealt with by switching to some more engaging activity. Work - boring or not - has to be tolerated. Many times in my working life I had to do tedious, repetitive jobs, the sorts that are alright for the first few hours - the whole morning sometimes - but become stupefying after a while. I spent a long time checking payments - comparing written instructions with what had been input into the computer system - which was a task that after a while became so mind-numbing, that as the day progressed, trips to the coffee machine became increasingly regular, just as a means of getting away from the desk.

Boredom at work can be detrimental to performance; mistakes start creeping in. I recall vividly spending hours checking payments and at some point having no recollection of the last few items I had checked. Clearly, then was a good time to take a break. That was at least one reason why I always enjoyed jobs with plenty of variety, less opportunity to lose concentration and make an error. Sometimes, of course, a repetitive task, performed over and over again, can enable the mind to wander without any unfortunate consequence.

Generalised boredom - which, as I've said is something we all probably experience less these days - need not actually be a bad thing, although perhaps it is better to characterise this form of boredom as something else, by which I mean freeing the mind to simply wander, to daydream. We all lead increasingly busy lives, whether it is work or running a house, keeping up with our social lives - in real life or online - being busy, being engaged, we seem to be constantly on the go, our minds ever active.

The poet W H Davies, wrote:

What is this life if, full of care,
We have no time to stand and stare.
No time to stand beneath the boughs
And stare as long as sheep or cows.
No time to see, when woods we pass,
Where squirrels hide their nuts in grass.
No time to see, in broad daylight,
Streams full of stars, like skies at night.
No time to turn at Beauty's glance,
And watch her feet, how they can dance.
No time to wait till her mouth can
Enrich that smile her eyes began.
A poor life this if, full of care,
We have no time to stand and stare.

This poem is an encouragement to do nothing, to let the mind wander, to think not of something specific, but simply to pause and reflect. Doing so will often allow me to reach insights, solve problems, and be creative, without actively realising it. One thing I love to do is go for walks, preferably somewhere away from the hustle and bustle of the city, but even there walking frees my mind to take flights of fancy. One thing that eliminating boredom does is similarly reduce our capacity to daydream; walking allows me to do just that, and apart from the benefit of the physical exercise, allows my mind to order my thoughts and make decisions, or solve problems, even if I am not conscious of my doing so.

Most of us will have experienced the frustration of not being able to solve that last clue in the crossword, or of desperately trying to remember someone's name, only to find that the harder we think about it, the more elusive the answer becomes. Yet, by switching off that part of the brain, letting the mind wander, the answer will pop into one's head unbidden.  Many times during my years at work I would be faced with a problem that needed solving, and many times the harder I thought about that problem, the more difficult it became to pin down an answer, yet the solution to many of those problems came to me when I was not actively thinking about them, when I was walking to work from the station, or waiting for a train. The solutions came to me when I simply stood and stared.

To counter the stress we all encounter in our daily lives, many people are turning to mindfulness and meditation, which are not necessarily the same thing as submitting to the sort of generalised boredom that I have described, however generalised boredom, or allowing oneself the freedom to simply stand and stare works for me. A danger of this, and a trap that I find myself falling into is overthinking, but that stems from my actively thinking about something rather than engaging in the sort of freewheeling daydreaming that characterises what, for want of a better term, I'm going to continue calling generalised boredom. And overthinking is only one step removed from full-scale worrying, and we don't want to go there!

As a child, I hated being bored (I'm sure my Mum hated it too), but now I enjoy it and I embrace it; I have some of my best ideas when I'm bored. Taking the time to relish being bored enables one to daydream, to imagine, to be creative. Without boredom, our lives are poorer.

Task Manager Is Not Responding

Built-in - or planned - obsolescence has been with us since the 1920's; it first took root in the car manufacturing industry in the United States at General Motors, where annual design changes were introduced to convince consumers of the need to buy a new model each year. The idea grew through the 1930's as a means of stimulating a depressed economy, but really took hold in the 1950's, being popularised by an American industrial designer by the name of Brooks Stevens, who defined planned obsolescence as, "Instilling in the buyer the desire to own something a little newer, a little better, a little sooner than is necessary."

Brooks Stevens, 1911-1995. Picture: Industrial Designers Society of America

While planned obsolescence is still a feature of the automobile industry - I for one regularly receive emails, texts and phone calls from the dealership I bought my current car from, encouraging me to trade it in for a newer vehicle  - today there is barely anything that we buy that we are not encouraged to replace almost immediately with an upgraded model. Apple launch new iPhones seemingly every month, although in reality it's annually (except for the last three years when there have been - or will be in the case of 2018 - two). And immediately they launch a new device, they sew dissatisfaction among owners of older iPhones, even though those models may be just a year old and the difference between them and the newly launched product is minimal. But the mobile phone industry expects us to upgrade our handsets every two years, hence most contracts run for 24 months, but if you are not upgrading your phone after that time, it still makes sense to change your contract to SIM only to avoid continuing to pay for the handset, which your monthly payments will have made yours after that time; unless you bought it outright in the first place, of course.

Sadly, after two years most people are faced with having to change their handset anyway as degraded battery life means it spends more time plugged into the wall socket than being truly mobile, or the apps you use most often stop working without being upgraded, except you can't upgrade the apps without upgrading the operating system, which you can't upgrade because there is insufficient memory on the handset. Or in slightly sinister fashion, the release of a new model coincides with an abrupt falling off of performance of your handset, prompting much frustration and a burning desire to upgrade.

I've had my current mobile phone - a Samsung Galaxy S7 - for two years now, and have gone SIM only, which is not only cheaper but gives me more data too, and since Android updated the operating system, the phone's battery life seems to have improved by about fifty-percent, which seems counterintuitive but there again, it is Android, not Apple.

With newer phones seeming to have only marginally better functionality, it really is only battery life that would make me want to get a new handset at present, but the same cannot be said for my laptop. I am writing this on a Lenovo machine, which I have had since 2013. When I first bought it, I was quite impressed with it, particularly in comparison with our old desktop computer, but now, not so much. I don't ask much of my laptop, I only really use it for Word, Excel, email and web browsing; all I ask is that it is reliable and responsive. I don't even store much on it, my files and pictures are stored on a flash drive, which I periodically back up to an external hard drive. I don't use it for anything that really ought to impair its performance, yet as it gets older, it gets more and more sluggish and unresponsive.

The Lenovo G580

Surfing the net can be a frustrating experience when pages are slow to load,  and then it's tempting to blame one's internet connection, except the same pages that load at a snail's pace on the laptop seem perfectly normal on other devices we own that use the same connection. Mind you, as this tweet from James Gleave illustrates, there are plenty of annoyances that have nothing to do with either one's machine or connection.

Actually, it is programmes not responding that has become my biggest bugbear. All too often, clicking to open a programme like Word or Excel, or File Explorer is met with the computer equivalent of dumb insolence. Click once; nothing. Click again; still nothing. Click a third time (yes, I know, I should be patient); still nothing. Lose patience and try to invoke Task Manager with Alt+Ctrl+Del; nothing. And then, with what in a human would be excessively bad grace and a smug expression, three instances of the programme open. Meanwhile, where is Task Manager? Nowhere to be seen, that's where. Excel frustrates me with its simple stubbornness to do things in a timely manner. For instance, if I want to format a cell or range of cells, right-clicking and selecting Format Cells inevitably results in that annoying little blue spinning circle appearing and the words 'Not Responding' mocking you from the top of the screen. Then, miraculously, just as you give up hope, the dialog box appears. It happens every time, and it's very, very annoying.

As for Task Manager, that supposedly indispensable tool for closing recalcitrant programmes, it is frankly even more frustrating than the programmes it is there to help you with. Alt+Ctrl+Del eventually calls up a sky-blue screen; 'Preparing Security Options,' it says before grudgingly offering a list of options, one of which is Task Manager, but which invariably opens with the caveat, 'Not Responding.' This to me is the final indignity; Task Manager is supposed to be a help, not a hindrance. More often than not, by the time Task Manager has deigned to make an appearance, the unruly application has started to behave itself...for the time being.

Wait for it...

...finally!

Given my frustration with my laptop, I started Googling the expected lifespan of a laptop. Apparently, assuming no physical damage occurs (like lobbing it out of the window in frustration when Word refuses to open), a mid-range laptop like mine should last three to five years, so on that basis, I have reached the end of this machine's useful existence. But why? As I say, I'm only using it for quite simple and straightforward tasks, I haven't installed any power or memory hungry applications and all I really ask is for it to be reliable and responsive. Five years seems a pitiful amount of time, but I guess we're entering the realms of planned obsolescence here.

I'd prefer not to go to the expense of buying a new machine, especially since these days Microsoft Office - which is pretty much essential - now has to be bought separately, so more cost there, and anyway, I'm happy with the 2007 version I am using. It's taken me enough time to navigate around that, without having to learn how to use the latest incarnation. Eventually, I suppose I'll have to bite the bullet, but in the meantime put up with this increasingly petulant machine.

Postscript: Since I wrote this, the laptop seems to have bucked its ideas up. Whether this is coincidence (perhaps it has read my words and decided to behave better for fear of being junked), or the update for Windows 10, version 1803, I cannot say, but I'm keeping my eye on it; any backsliding and I'm off to PC World.

Without You

"Without fans who pay at the turnstile, football is nothing" - Jock Stein

Jock Stein. Picture: The Scottish Sun

The lower down the football pyramid one descends, the more important the fans become. They may be fewer in number than in the Premier League, but they are no less passionate. They may not have to spend quite as much of their disposable income to watch their team in action, but they tend to be more generous - voluntarily - both with their time and their money when they do. The Premier League fan has pretty much a one-way relationship with the club they support; in non-League football fans and clubs are much more connected. The Premier League clubs can recruit and employ professional administrators, the non-League clubs rely on fans to volunteer for the vital jobs that keep the clubs ticking over. In short, without fans, football is nothing.

Conversely, the higher up the football pyramid one climbs, the less important the fans become, or so it seems. In fact, it has reached the point where a BBC study has revealed that during the 2016-17 season, half of the clubs in the Premier League would have turned a profit even if they had played all of their home games in empty stadiums. For those clubs, the fans could truly be said to be irrelevant, thanks to the huge amounts of revenue generated by television. Dr Rob Wilson, a sports finance specialist at Sheffield Hallam University, told the BBC "From a revenue generation perspective, clubs do not rely anymore on matchday ticket income."

When you read things like that the frequent complaints from fans about matches being scheduled at inconvenient time - or rescheduled at short notice after they have made their travel arrangements and in some cases booked hotels and time off work - are thrown into perspective: Given a choice between looking after their fans or satisfying the broadcasters, the clubs inevitably choose to please their paymasters. From a business point of view, it makes perfect sense, not that it will placate the angry fan of a club whose game that was originally on Saturday at three is now on Monday at eight, and two-hundred and fifty miles away to boot. Just this week, Manchester United supporters have complained - justifiably - about the decision to put back their game against Everton from its original Saturday lunch-time slot to the Sunday afternoon, solely due to the demands of television. Apart from getting their grievance off their chest, it is unlikely to achieve anything.

Then: The first Match of The Day in 1964 featured Liverpool and Arsenal, with highlights after 10pm

Now: Stream live games; why bother going to the ground?

Television's relationship with football has changed beyond all recognition during my lifetime, and the last quarter of a century has seen the most profound and far-reaching of those changes thanks to Sky TV. Football became a regular part of TV's programming in 1964 when the BBC launched Match of The Day, but not everyone was happy with the idea. 

Bob Lord, chairman of Burnley FC from 1955 until his death in 1981. Picture: Northern Life magazine.

When Match of The Day began, Burnley chairman Bob Lord - a man for whom the word irascible might have been invented - banned the BBC's cameras from Turf Moor for five years, and he also convinced the chairman of his fellow Football League clubs to adopt the concept of the three o'clock blackout. That blackout prohibits the broadcast of any matches between 2.45pm and 5.15pm on a Saturday afternoon. It is a principle that even Uefa have adopted, with Article 48 of their regulations allowing national football associations to specify a two-and-a-half hour period on a Saturday or Sunday when no live games may be broadcast on their national TV networks. And it has worked fine until recently, but a challenge was issued by the Football League during last weekend's international break. 

Last season the Football League launched iFollow, a subscription channel that allows anyone outside the UK to watch Football League games live on Saturday afternoon for a fee of £110 per season. This season the channel has been made available to fans in England and Ireland, but only so they could watch games played outside the 2.45 to 5.15 blackout, however that changed last weekend. On Saturday 8th September the Football League broadcast all of the games that kicked off at three o'clock in Leagues One and Two through iFollow, much to the dismay of Accrington Stanley chairman Andy Holt, who claims that no discussion of this took place at the Football League's AGM, and that the broadcast exceptions were not made clear to clubs.

Andy Holt. Picture: Manchester Evening News

Generally, fans are opposed to the idea of games being broadcast at three on a Saturday afternoon, with nearly 73% of eight and a half thousand supporters who completed the Football Supporters' Federation's 2017 survey opposing the removal of the blackout, but we know that fans are increasingly becoming marginalised in the considerations of clubs in the Premier League and the Football League. The Football League's decision to view the international break as an exception and to allow games to be broadcast on Saturday afternoon - and the Football Association's decision not to stop them - is contrary to the spirit of Uefa's Article 48, if not the letter.  It also looks ominously like the thin end of the wedge. Be prepared for the Football League to trumpet the success of the broadcast and to announce further 'exceptions' to the blackout rule. And if the Football League's iFollow channel proves successful, can the day be very far away when the Premier League clubs recognise the money-making potential of live-streaming games on a Saturday afternoon that are currently not broadcast under the existing agreements with Sky and BT Sport, regardless of the blackout?

English football's blackout dates, with international weekends now excepted.

If clubs in the Premier League can turn a profit without you, they will do so. If they can make even more money by broadcasting games during the blackout, they will do so, and if Manchester United v Liverpool is live on TV at three o'clock, it would be naive not to expect the uncommitted or the casual supporters of many clubs to skip watching their local club in favour of seeing the big guns. The Premier League clubs will be well insulated from loss if televised football at three on a Saturday afternoon becomes the norm, whatever platform it is on, be it iFollow, or Sky, after all some of them don't even need fans at their games to make big money, but the clubs in the lower leagues, and in non-League football may well suffer as gates dip when there is a live game on TV.

Somewhere in a Lancashire cemetery, Bob Lord is spinning in his grave.

"As per my email..."

Anyone born since about 1990 will have little idea what life without email was like, and for most of us - regardless of when we were born -life without email now would be hard to contemplate. Both in business and in our private lives, email has gone from novelty, to useful, to pretty much indispensable. For most people working in an office environment, an email account is a necessity, and in our private lives, online activities such as shopping or maintaining a social media presence would be nigh-on impossible without one. Yet as recently as the late 1990's, an email account in the workplace was a privilege rather than a right or necessity, and I remember having to put forward a strong business case to be granted one by my employer, and had to be even more insistent that it allowed me to send and receive external emails rather than just within the company.

Remember the days when accessing your emails meant starting with a menu that looked like this?

Because of the era in which I started work, and because of the organisation I worked for, my letter writing has always been rather formal in nature; it was not just the norm, it was expected, and use of vernacular would be discouraged, or removed from letters that went for signature by a manager. As a result, I carried that style forward into my email writing, so that my messages would be peppered with expressions like, "As per our telephone conversation," and "I should be grateful if you would," or "Many thanks in anticipation of your prompt reply." I find myself still using this sort of language when writing emails, usually to the Customer Service departments of various organisations, and especially if I am making a complaint. 

My email writing style would probably fall foul of the participants of a recent survey conducted by software company Adobe, who found that the most annoying phrase used in emails is, "Not sure if you saw my last email," closely followed by "Per my last email," with "Per our conversation," and "As discussed" also featuring prominently. Since three of those appear in a great many of the emails that I compose, I figure that I would be seen as somewhere between quite irritating and very annoying.

The most annoying phrases used in emails, as per the tardy, inefficient, and work-shy.

 

One thing that the apparently annoying phrases have in common it seems is the fact that they are most likely to be used in an email that is sent by someone who has not received a reply to a previous message. In that case, the recipient has less cause to be annoyed than the sender, as in my opinion, the most annoying thing about emails and email users is the inability that some people have to respond to straightforward requests. While email has made our ability to communicate so much easier, it has also made us less effective in doing so. When I think back to the various roles that I had in my career, one thing that strikes me is how much more correspondence I received with email compared with the amount I got before. Before email - and regardless of what job I was doing in the organisation I worked for - I would come back to work after a fortnight's holiday and be faced with a couple of memos or letters that were for me to deal with personally, a couple of bits of work that my stand-in had not had time to complete, and perhaps a couple of phone messages. By the time I left the bank in 2012, I would be faced with somewhere approaching 400 unread emails in my inbox when I returned to the office after a couple of weeks off. As a result, I would probably spend most of my first day back sorting out the wheat from the chaff, filing or deleting the superfluous and the duplicates, paring that 400 down to the fifty or so that actually needed some sort of action.

Some people's inboxes would look like this if translated into actual bits of paper.

Plenty of people that I worked with seemed incapable of keeping on top of their inbox, however. There were people whose screen you would see with their email a sea of red, with something like 'Inbox (655)' appearing prominently. Of course, if you know anyone like that, it is pretty pointless sending them an email in the first place, let alone a chaser.

But if you do need to chase someone, how to do it? Certainly, the respondents to Adobe's survey seem more upset that you, the sender, have had the temerity to chase them than they are about the fact that they haven't responded to you. If "Not sure if you saw my last email," and "Per my last email" are frowned upon, how do you address the matter of non-response? William Hanson, etiquette expert and author of The Bluffer's Guide To Etiquette, suggests that the writer makes it look as though their own email is at fault (yes, really). He proposes that one writes, "I don't think you got my last email as my email server has been having a bit of a meltdown."  A mealy-mouthed "Not sure if you saw my last email," is too much of a cop-out without straight up lying and shifting the blame and responsibility away from the person who is actually at fault, i.e. the recipient, and placing it squarely on one's own shoulders - and that of your IT department or email provider. The thinking behind this is that it gives the person who has not responded, an 'out' as Hanson describes it. This is frankly, nonsense and is presumably driven by the desire not to upset the person you are writing to, or to put it more bluntly,  accept their tardiness and inefficiency.

 If I send you an email and you don't respond within what I think is a reasonable period of time, be prepared to receive one that starts, "I refer to my email of (date) regarding (insert subject matter). To date I am unable to trace a reply from you and shall therefore be grateful if you will acknowledge receipt of this message and respond to my enquiry as soon as possible, and by (insert date) at the latest." Now you may think that somewhat formal - pompous even - but I am unapologetic. I am not going to let you off the hook for not replying, nor will I accept responsibility for it, and while I understand that sometimes a full, comprehensive response can take some time, an acknowledgement takes seconds and keeps me off your back until such time as you can give me a complete response. This is especially true these days when email clients, particularly on mobile devices, have pre-formatted replies and acknowledgements that can be sent with just a couple of taps of the screen.

If I receive an email that includes one of these phrases, I am more annoyed about the fact that someone has had cause to send it to me than I am about the phrase itself, which after all is merely a way of introducing the core of the message. For my money, Adobe's survey is more damning of the people who are receiving these messages than it is of the people who are sending them.

I Had A Dream

I had a dream about Jeremy Corbyn last night. Well, I think it was Jeremy Corbyn, it could have been Keith Allen, to whom he bears a passing resemblance. On balance, though I think it was JC, since in return for my borrowing his Kindle (yes, really), he treated me to a lecture on Labour Party policy, not that I can remember any of it, although I do know that it went on  long enough for me to miss my bus. Dreams are weird, aren't they?

The leader of Her Majesty's Most Loyal Opposition, and an actor/comedian.

Why did I dream about Jeremy Corbyn? It could have been a surfeit of cheese too close to bed-time, but more likely because he is rarely out of the news. In fact, if you are like me and glean most of your news from Apple's News aggregator, you would believe that Corbyn is one of only a handful of newsworthy politicians on the planet, the others being Donald Trump (inevitably), Boris Johnson, and the late John McCain, with Theresa May, Emmanuel Macron, and Justin Trudeau trailing in their wake.

Rarely out of the news, regularly decrying it.

On the face of it, Jeremy Corbyn and Donald Trump have little in common; their politics are, after all, poles apart (no pun intended), but one thing they share is a fragile relationship with the press, or more specifically, the so-called Mainstream Media (MSM). Donald Trump regularly rails against what he calls 'Fake news,' i.e. anything published or broadcast that either criticises him or does not share his worldview, while Jeremy Corbyn has recently acquitted himself less than impressively by displaying no little contempt in front of the cameras on a couple of occasions. Questioned about his involvement in a wreath laying at a Palestinian Martyrs Cemetery in 2014, Mr Corbyn rolled his eyes and sighed in exasperation at the interviewer's temerity in asking a question of significant interest to the public. Then, when asked by Channel 4 news if he honestly thought that the UK was better off outside the European Union, he responded no less than six times with evasive answers. And let's not even get started on the furore about allegations of anti-Semitism in the Labour Party.

"I'm not rolling my eyes! Have you seen that cobweb up there?"

If I give the impression of singling out Jeremy Corbyn for dissembling and providing disingenuous answers, it is only to illustrate a universal truth about politicians, that they only want to give answers to questions they wished they had been asked, not the more difficult ones that interviewers throw their way. An exception, of course, is Fox News who in interviewing Donald Trump lob him a few easy balls that he proceeds to attempt to knock into the next parish, albeit that he sometimes comes close to failing even with these dolly-drops.

One of the reasons that Mr Corbyn featured in my nocturnal subconscious may have been thanks to a speech that he gave last week at the Edinburgh Television Festival in which he raised some interesting, but ultimately worrying points. To a large degree I go along with his idea that the BBC's licence fee needs reviewing, although I'd take issue with his view that in part this needs to be done to reduce the cost of the licence fee to poorer households. A year's TV licence is £150.50; the cheapest Sky package is about £480 per annum - to which many families who fall in the category of poorer households subscribe - and that is before additional services like Netflix, Amazon Prime, and the like are factored in. If the BBC loses its ability to raise funds through the licence and does not take on advertising, then revenue generation is probably going to come in the form of subscriptions or Pay-Per-View, rather than Mr Corbyn's proposal that 'tech giants and Internet Service Providers' pay a digital licence fee. Such a fee may be difficult to implement or would be passed on to customers in the event that it was introduced. None the more for that, Corbyn is right to raise the matter; licence fee reform is long overdue, and while his proposals may not fly, they will at least spark debate.

The TV Licence; an anachronism these days?

Mr Corbyn's speech included a Trump-like criticism of the press and came with a proposal that journalists be given the right to elect their editors once newspaper or broadcaster becomes “particularly large or influential," which I guess would encompass most of the current British press even now. It exposes a typical politician's support for a free press, which exists only as long as the free press is being nice to them and not asking awkward questions.

The digital information age we find ourselves in today has changed the way we consume news irrevocably. There is little that I have read lately that sums this up better than an article on The Conversation website written by Doug Specht of the University of Westminster [1]. "In the “old” media landscape of even just a few years ago, Specht writes, the public was able to collectively develop ways of identifying bias and distinguish truth from lies and propaganda. But today that’s much harder – not just because of the volume of information, but also because algorithmic curation makes it increasingly difficult for laypeople to develop strategies that successfully identify bias."  He goes on to say, "While a certain amount of scepticism is useful when deciding what sources to trust, the level of ambivalence, distrust and cynicism on display today is something else. Thanks to the sheer volume of information with which users are now inundated, compounded by skewed algorithms and bellicose Trumpian rhetoric railing against fake news, readers and viewers are increasingly unable to discern that which demands scepticism from that which doesn’t. The net result is a terminal sense of ambivalence."

Ambivalence is most certainly something that I feel on reading the news these days (along with cynicism and distrust). You know how it goes, a newspaper or website reports something uncomplimentary about someone - usually a politician, often POTUS45 - they decry it as fake news, and then they or their cronies come out with some rebuttal that contains as many, if not more, inaccuracies, unsubstantiated statements and even downright falsehoods as the original statement they were complaining about. Donald Trump has gone so far as to claim that Google is showing only fake news stories about him. When politicians complain that the free-press is giving them a hard time,  we surely are only a step or two from them deciding that state intervention in guiding the news agenda is a desirable goal.

Perhaps Mr Trump, who once claimed that he could call up Bill Gates to help him shut off the internet to curb radical extremism, should get together with Mr Corbyn, who in his recent Edinburgh speech floated the idea of a publicly owned social media platform to rival Facebook. The free-press, so called because it is free of government influence and control, may be in the hands of 'unaccountable billionaires,' and may not report on politicians in the way they would like, but how much more damaging would state-controlled media, in which I include internet companies and social media, be? Facebook may have faced scandals recently over the harvesting of personal information by Cambridge Analytica, and we may reasonably have concerns over what data the social media giant has on us and how they use it, but how much scarier would it be if our social media accounts were state-run, state-controlled? How much more likely would data be lost, compromised or misused?

Graphic: bestdroidplayer.com

On reflection, we would probably have nothing to fear. Given the track record of successive British governments in large IT projects,  a state-run equivalent of Facebook would be so awful that no one would use it, and if they did, it would probably crash immediately and never recover.

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[1] http://theconversation.com/nicaragua-crisis-how-democracy-dies-in-the-era-of-fake-news-101403

The Freedom To Choose

As at October 2017, 85% of the UK population had a smartphone;[1] bog standard mobiles are passé, and feature phones are in many ways a pointless compromise between the devices that can only call and text and those that have all the bells and whistles, but the smartphone juggernaut trundles on. The smartphone is now so fully integrated into the lives of millions of people that if they were suddenly removed, or simply unusable for any reason, it's difficult to see how many people could actually function. And our reliance on them, both from a practical point of view and from an addictive perspective, is increasing. The flip-side of that is a marginalisation of groups within the population who, for whatever reason, do not embrace the smartphone and its various uses.

The majority of people under the age of twenty-five - the generation that has not known a world without mobile phones -  are comfortable with the increasing number and variety of uses for their smartphones, whether it is messaging, social media, navigation, payments, or games, their phones are their world and mobile phone dependence is now accepted as being as real as a substance addiction.[2]  Contrarily, one of the things that they use them for less and less is making phone calls. This addiction is fed by the number of new ways in which smartphones are being enabled to perform everyday functions, provide solutions to problems we didn't know we had, and generally replace the means by which we have traditionally performed those everyday functions in the past. Want to pay for your coffee? Use Starbucks' app (or Costa's or Caffe Nero's, depending on your coffee shop of choice). Travel on the tube, or the bus? Use TfL's Oyster Card app to pay your fare. Popping into Tesco for some groceries? Pay with one of the payment apps like Apple Pay, or Google Pay. Then there are the car parking apps; increasingly car parks are offering pay by smartphone options through apps like RingGo and here is one area in which the future may come with some frustrations.

I downloaded the RingGo app after entering a car park where paying by cash was not possible. Living in London I have been long familiar with the fact that if you want to travel by bus, then cash is no longer king and it's an Oyster or contactless payment card or nothing, but my visit to one car park recently offered me the option to pay for my parking by phone only. Vending or parking machines that do not accept cash, but do accept cards, are one thing, but no machines at all means that to pay for parking it is phone and pay, or use the app. So I downloaded the app, and in fairness I have no complaints - in fact it's almost faultless - except for the lack of choice; without a mobile phone of some kind it is not possible to pay to park, and this increasingly has to be an area of concern for people who would prefer not to use their phone for that purpose, don't have a phone capable of the task, or simply don't have a phone at all, although that last group is shrinking every day.

In the name of progress, and conceivably in the name of convenience, more and more functions are migrating to our phones, which is fair enough, so long as alternatives that do not require a smartphone continue to be offered, which is where I have an issue. Don't get me wrong, I have no problem in embracing many of these apps; I habitually use coffee shop apps to pay for food and drinks, I use Google Pay more than any other payment method these days (I can go the best part of a week sometimes without paying cash for anything), I use the RingGo app in car parks that offer it, and of course I use my phone for browsing retailer's websites and buying stuff online. But - and here's the nub of the matter - I like to have a choice, and increasingly our choices are being taken away from us - slowly, perhaps, but being taken away nonetheless.

More and more companies, and more and more local authorities and utility companies are becoming like secret societies. Look at any number of websites and click on the Contact Us link and one thing that is either missing or nigh on impossible to find is a telephone number. Amazon's website doesn't even have a 'Contact Us' option, preferring instead to bury any contact details behind a whole series of pages and innumerable clicks that eventually offer the promise of being able to contact them by phone, but don't provide a number to dial. From experience, the best way to find a phone number for most companies is to ignore their website and just Google it.

Spot (or not) the Contact Us link in Amazon's website.

One of my hobbies is watching my team, Romford FC, play football, and when I go to a game I like to get a programme. There has been a trend in recent years for clubs to move away from the traditional programme towards digital offerings; some clubs, like Barnet FC in the Vanarama National League, Cheshunt FC in the Bostik League, and Hashtag United of the Eastern Counties League Division One publish online programmes only, so no paper programmes at all.[3] With increasing print costs, this move is understandable, but for many people, there is little or no appeal in reading a programme on their phone, and if you don't have a smartphone, or can't get a signal, you'll not be able to read the programme where most people read them, at the ground. And speaking of Hashtag United, when Romford played them in a friendly recently, one of their followers had no cash with them and expected to be able to pay to get into the ground using a card, so just as some people may be excluded from certain services by their inability to access them using a smartphone, so some people may be excluded for exactly the opposite reason, having embraced technology so completely that they have no 'old-fashioned' alternatives.

The online only programme...

...personally, I prefer the old-fashioned paper variety.

Amazon, Tesco, and Sainsbury's are all trialling stores where the customer uses their phone to scan and pay for their purchases[4] and till-free stores are clearly considered to be the way forward by many large retailers. I am happy to use the self-service tills that are to be found in many stores and use contactless or mobile payment methods to pay, and it's probable that when they are more widespread, I'll use the till-less stores too. But, I like to have the choice not to use my phone, I like to be able to buy a physical programme at a football ground, I like to go to a till and interact with a human being to exchange my cash for their goods and services. In a nutshell, I like choice. Progress is good, change is good, but freedom of choice is better.

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[1] Source: https://www.consultancy.uk/news/14113/uk-smartphone-penetration-continues-to-rise-to-85-of-adult-population

[2] Source: https://www.news-medical.net/news/20121207/Cell-phone-dependence-e28098just-as-real-as-substance-addictione28099.aspx

[3] This move has angered and disappointed a lot of people; some people won't even watch a game if there is no programme; http://rulesfoolsandwisemen.blogspot.com/2017/08/chasing-paper.html

[4] See https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-45172631