Alternative Histories

No one would have believed in the early years of the twenty-first century that anyone could make a duller, more boring, version of The War of The Worlds than Steven Spielberg’s 2005 film that starred Tom Cruise. That was until the BBC got hold of the HG Wells classic, and made a complete pig’s ear of it.

I have loved The War of The Worlds ever since I first read the book over forty years ago, and have always wished that someone would make a version set faithfully in Victorian England. I am still waiting. The BBC chose – for reasons that are unclear to me – to shift the narrative from the late nineteenth century, to the early twentieth; a minor cavil, and certainly very minor compared with the liberties they took with the story as a whole, and ultimately how dull they managed to make the whole thing.

Spielberg's version of The War of The Worlds had its flaws, but the basement scene in which Tom Cruise protects his children from the Martian tentacle had more menace than the whole of the BBC adaptation.

The first episode was promising, even if Wells’s unnamed narrator and his wife Carrie had been replaced by someone called George and his significant other, Amy. George is already married, his wife refuses him a divorce, and his brother disapproves of George’s relationship with Amy. But at least we have the Martians, and the first sight of the tripods, although the heat-ray – which features heavily in the book - barely gets a look in; perhaps the special effects budget got spent on the red planet scenes. Those scenes of Amy wandering through a barren landscape with her child, which do not feature in the book in any way, were at first sight, baffling. They tended to dominate the third episode, and first my inclination was to deem them unnecessary. On reflection, however they actually added something. In Wells’s book, once the Martians have been vanquished, everything returns to normal very quickly, however it makes sense that the red weed, having strangled much of the land, would leave the country in a state of disarray.

The biggest problem with the scenes after the Martians’ hold on the planet had ended was that they so dominated the third and final episode, which to put it mildly, was one of the most boring hours’ worth of television that I have seen for a long while. Amy’s pontificating got on my nerves and added little or nothing. Not everyone made it to the third episode, however. I had bigged the series up to a friend on the strength of the first episode, which he watched. He gave up after the second, and I can’t say I blame him.

Some reviews made reference to the ‘woke’ nature of The War of The Worlds (woke in Woking as it was described by some), and I guess making Amy – an unmarried mother as it turns out – the driving force behind the story and probably the strongest character, supports that notion. There was – perhaps inevitably – reference to the comparison drawn between the Martian invasion and British imperialism, although this was hardly original; Wells himself drew the analogy in the book.

Eleanor Tomlinson as Amy, with Rafe Spall, who played George.

 

The problem with TV or film adaptations of much-loved books is that the viewer will have their preconceptions; the producers have different ones. There is inevitably a certain amount of tinkering with any adaption, however the BBC took it too far with The War of The Worlds and managed to change the emphasis to the extent that the war element was dealt with in a very perfunctory manner, while greater stress was placed on the relationship between George, his brother Frederick, and Amy, and the struggle of the humans to live after the war. Of the battle between the tripods and HMS Thunder Child we saw nought, and the Martians’ harvesting of human bodies was alluded to but not included explicitly.

The Man In The High Castle is a very different kettle of fish. I have come a little late to the party as far as the series on Amazon Prime is concerned, and at the time of writing have made it only to episode two of the second season. Whereas the BBC spread Wells’s book over just three hour-long episodes, Amazon have taken forty hours to adapt Philip K Dick’s book. Inevitably this means a good many different plot lines, liberties taken with characters and a few fundamental changes to the storyline. I say that, although I have not read the book for many years, although I intend to revisit it before too long. So far I have to say I have enjoyed The Man In The High Castle very much, although as with many series – especially American ones – there are meanderings away from the main plot that smack of padding, and the character of Obergruppenführer John Smith does not feature in the book, and therefore much of the TV series that centres around him has nothing to do with Dick’s novel. None the more for that, it knocks The War of The Worlds out of the park.

Alternative histories in which Germany won World War Two abound, from Len Deighton’s excellent SS-GB (subject of a patchy adaption, again made by the BBC) through Robert Harris’s masterly Fatherland (probably the best of the genre), Jo Walton’s Small Change trilogy and of course The Man In The High Castle. These are just a few of the many novels that begin with that premise; an alternative outcome to the 1939-45 conflict is fertile ground indeed for authors.

Naturally, Philip K Dick’s version of an alternative reality would not be a proper Dick story if the real world – or at least another alternative – were not to be bleeding through. In the novel, this is signified by a book – The Grasshopper Lies Heavy – which becomes film in the TV series, a visual reference in a visual medium being more effective of course.

It is probably fair to say that one of the best adaptions of The War of The Worlds is actually Independence Day, which is thoroughly enjoyable in my opinion (the sequel is utter garbage, however), and which benefits from having Jeff Goldlum and Will Smith in the cast (I’ll happily watch almost anything that Will Smith is in. The bacteria that kill off the Martians in Wells’s book are replaced by a computer virus, and although the uploading of the virus from a laptop to the alien’s mainframe is of course ridiculous (the organisation I worked for couldn’t get two legacy systems to communicate with one another), it was a clever updating of Wells’s idea.

I live in hope that one day someone will make a version of The War of The Worlds that is faithful to Wells’s book, but in the meantime, I’ll have to content myself with Jeff Wayne’s musical masterpiece with its marvellous artwork by Peter Goodfellow.

My Generation

Labels are for clothes, and it has always struck me as rather unsatisfactory to lump together a diverse mix of people and apply a glib title to them. Which is why terms like Generation Z, and Millennial have always puzzled me somewhat. I now know (although am likely to forget) that Millennials are people born between 1980 and 1994, and Generation Z comprises those born from 1995 to 2015.

This means that in my immediate family we have a Millennial, a Generation Zer, and two Baby Boomers (that's me and my wife, obviously, the other two being our daughters).

The Baby Boomer graphic actually looks uncannily like me.

The Baby Boomer generation (those born 1944-1964) is, unlike the names for the other cohorts, a title that I've been familiar with for many, many years. With a spectacular lack of interest, it never really occurred to me that subsequent generations would be given titles too.  And the Baby Boomer moniker is accurate enough, describing the post-war prosperity that was particularly enjoyed in America and which resulted in a growth in birth rates. I'm not entirely convinced that in the UK any baby boom was driven by prosperity as many people - my parents included - led a financially precarious existence (my Dad had many different, often shortlived jobs when I was growing up).

After the Baby Boomers came the group dubbed Generation X (born 1965-1979, and of whom little reference ever seems to be made as far as I can tell), then Millennials, then Generation Z. None of this is of any great importance to me, but to some - social scientists and marketing men especially - the difference between generations is key.

Marketing products by appealing to key elements of a particular generation's characteristics will help maximise sales of whatever product we are talking about. Baby Boomers are unsurprisingly the biggest consumers of traditional media such as the TV and newspapers; they are more likely than any other generation to prefer to do their banking in branches rather than online, and many have concerns about the security of their finances as they pass into retirement. Generation Z, on the other hand rarely, if ever, visit a bank branch, have grown up in a world where the internet is ubiquitous and therefore have become entirely reliant on their smartphones and other devices. Streaming services and online content have replaced traditional methods of watching TV for them, and they have probably never even read, let alone bought, a physical newspaper.

The application of specific titles for different generations and the psychobabble that surrounds it is merely a more complex way of saying that we are different from our parents and different from our children. Which is the same as it ever was, way back to the generation that saw the sabre tooth tiger become extinct and told their offspring that they didn't know how lucky they were not to have to contend with such big cats.

New life has been breathed into the generational gap thing this year with the entry into our language of the phrase, "Ok, boomer," which allegedly came into being when - in a TikTok video[1]  - a grey-haired man (presumably a Baby Boomer) says that “millennials and Generation Z ... don’t ever want to grow up.” On a split-screen next to him, a young man silently holds up a notepad on which is written “OK Boomer.”

Inevitably, 'Ok boomer' went viral and has even spawned a range of clothing. The phrase itself is used by many who belong to Generation Z to target those of particular political persuasions - think supporters of Donald Trump, or Brexit - those who resist technological progress and hold unreconstructed views on climate change and the like. I guess that if you wanted to put a face to this generation it would look like Piers Morgan or Jeremy Clarkson. This whole 'ok boomer' thing is of course, terribly ageist and a sweeping generalisation; it's also true to a large extent.

I consider myself to be relatively enlightened - I've embraced many of the new technologies, I rarely go into a bank branch, I'm comfortable with streaming services, read online or downloads rather than buying  physical newspapers or books - and I think that I have a relatively young outlook. In short, I don't think that I am a typical boomer, however, I have to admit to exhibiting a few of the traits that apparently define my generation.

For one, I am likely to launch conversations with the phrase, "In my day,"  for example making comparisons with the three channel television coverage that I had to endure when I was growing up with the multiple channels and exponentially growing number of streaming services available today. I am also likely to sit, stewing quietly and muttering complaints, in restaurants when I see people who came in after us get their order taken and their food served more quickly than my group.

Baby boomers hold their phones in one hand and text with their pointer finger (I think they mean index finger): Yep, that's me. Boomer culture is lining up to board a plane 30 minutes early: Again, yes, although 30 minutes sounds like cutting it a bit fine if you ask me.

There are a lot of stereotypically boomer traits that I don't have, however. I don't invoke the Second World War as a justification for being right - or for anything else, come to that. WWII was over for more than twelve years before I was born, how on earth is it relevant? I don't find it necessary to mention the ethnicity of everyone when I relate an anecdote, I don't double space after full-stops, and I don't assume that every screen is a touch screen. Oh, and I am not offended by the whole 'Ok boomer' thing and I don't think it is ageist, I actually think it's rather amusing (if a bit boring now), and completely normal inter-generational banter.

Double spacing after a period (full stop)? Rees Mogg's your man, and
having been born in 1969, he's not even a boomer, he's part of Generation X

Just to prove that there is nothing new under the sun however, I read this morning that today's teenagers  have started accusing millennials of being out of touch, as it seems that  they are making fun of the younger generation, by romanticising older TV programmes, and beginning sentences with, "kids these day." Furthermore millennials think that their music is better than modern music, that today's teenagers "don't understand the 'pain' of rolling up a car window with a handle instead of a button."

Perhaps most tellingly, millennials are slowly losing their innate gift for understanding technology - my younger daughter has admitted as much to me - and just like the baby boomers, they are finding the pace of change and new technologies bewildering.

If all of this is true, then millennials and baby boomers have much, much, more in common than either of them thought. The fact that we have gone from 'ok boomer' to teenagers mocking millennials in the blink of an eye is something I find really rather reassuring.

---

[1] TikTok is a social media video app for creating and sharing short lip-sync, comedy, and talent videos. The app was launched in 2017 by Chinese developer ByteDance (Wikipedia). I offer this for the benefit of Baby Boomers who probably think that TikTok is the sound a proper clock makes.

A Question Of Identity

In this week's Queen's Speech, Her Majesty announced that her Government (and I suspect that she would rather they were not her Government), intended to introduce legislation that would require voters to produce photographic ID at Polling Stations in order to vote at general elections and English local elections. Predictably, this provoked much opposition on the twin grounds that it was a “blatant attempt by the Tories to rig the result of the next general election," (Cat Smith, Shadow Minister for Voter Engagement and Youth Affairs), and that it would disenfranchise thousands of people, because, as Darren Hughes of the Electoral Reform Society (ERS), said “these plans will leave tens of thousands of legitimate voters voiceless”.

According to The Independent, a Cabinet Office spokeswoman said: "Electoral fraud is an unacceptable crime that strikes at a core principle of our democracy." But, isn't potentially disenfranchising thousands of people even more of a threat to democracy? The answer really depends on how much of a problem electoral fraud actually is. Personation - that is 'assuming the identity of another (person) in order to deceive' - at the ballot box is extremely rare; during 2017 there were 336 cases of alleged electoral fraud and only one of those was for personation at a Polling Station, while there were two for a similar offence relating to postal votes. While the majority of alleged offenses resulted in no action being taken, in 165 cases where action was necessary, these were all alleged campaign frauds, and nothing do do with voters.

Cynics might say that these low numbers do not prove that there is little or no electoral fraud, as there are (obviously) no numbers for how many frauds have been successful and undetected. The Metropolitan Police's much criticised investigation into electoral fraud in Tower Hamlets in 2014, following which former mayor Luftur Rahman was found guilty of corrupt and illegal practices, suggests that we should take these figures as advisory rather than absolute. Nonetheless, they do imply that the scale of the problem is minuscule and that the Government's proposals are taking the proverbial sledgehammer to a microscopic nut.

One might imagine that assessing the scale of the problem vis a vis voters potentially disenfranchised by requiring them to produce photo ID at Polling Stations would be difficult, but it is actually easier than one might imagine. In 2015, the Electoral Commission said that about 3.5 million electors did not have an acceptable form of photo ID, and in May this year, a trial at local elections in ten areas across the country where voters were required to produce photo ID found that 819 people were turned away from Polling Stations for a lack of such ID. None of the 819 subsequently returned to vote. The net result is that in a limited number of constituencies, at one election, the number of people unable to vote for lack of photo ID was more than double the number of cases of electoral fraud in the whole of 2017, and more than 270 times the number of instances of personation in that year.

It's not compulsory to take a dog to a Polling Station...

 

...but in Northern Ireland you need one of these, or something similar.

On the face of it, those numbers suggest that requiring voters to produce photo ID - especially when so many people have none - is deeply undemocratic since the risk of fraud is so greatly outweighed by the risk of disenfranchisement. To mitigate that risk, however there are proposals that anyone lacking photographic ID would be able to apply for a free document proving their identity. This is already the case in Northern Ireland, where along with the usual form of photo ID that can be used - passport, driving licence, bus or rail pass, among others - the local Electoral Office issues an electoral identity card, which serves the dual purpose of authenticating voters and providing proof of age when the holder wishes to buy age restricted products such as alcohol and tobacco. This scheme was introduced in 2002 and has improved public confidence in the electoral process and reduced instances of suspected electoral fraud. The number of registered voters in Northern Ireland declined in 2002, with the number of voters turned away because someone had already voted in their name, and of people voting under more than one name both falling. This certainly suggests that requiring photo ID reduces risk of fraud, but that may only be because the instances of fraud were higher in Northern Ireland than those on the mainland in the first place.

Compulsory - or even voluntary - identity cards are something that, in general, the British public views with some suspicion. The Identity Cards Act of 2006 proposed a national identity card that would serve as a personal identification document and European Union travel document. There were objections on the grounds of cost, effectiveness, and data protection. Given the amount of data that would have been harvested and subsequently stored in the associated National Identity Register (NIR), and especially in view of successive government's track record on major IT projects, these concerns were probably well-founded. The scheme died a slow death and the Identity Cards Act was repealed in 2010 and the NIR database destroyed.

While photo ID may not be compulsory in the UK (yet), life without it can be inconvenient at best. If you want to rent a flat, apply for a job, open a bank account, or take a domestic flight, you'll need photo ID, and apart from buying an alcoholic drink, many pubs and most clubs now want photo ID just to get through the door.  And, if like me, you want to go to the BBC to see a radio show recorded, you'll need photo ID for that too.

In England and Wales, 76% of the population hold a passport.

If - and it's a big if, given the fact that we currently have a minority Government and a General Election within the coming months is quite probable - legislation passes to require voter ID, I would seriously hope that all of the 3.5 million people lacking such ID apply immediately for whatever state-issued ID the Government proposes, and for two reasons. Firstly - and obviously - to prevent those people from being disenfranchised, and thereby allay fears of any future election being 'rigged' (beyond the not unreasonable concern that campaign methods might be achieving that outcome anyway, although that is a whole different bouilloire de poisson), and secondly to watch the carnage as an under-prepared government department using an inadequate IT system goes into complete meltdown trying to cope with a tsunami of applications.

Communication Breakdown

In the 1980s, while I was working at Midland Bank in Barking, if the telephone wasn't answered within three or four rings, one of the managers would bellow, "Telephone!" and the call would be picked up immediately. In those days customers could actually ring the bank branch where they held their account and speak to someone whom they had quite probably met face to face at the counter at some time or another. They might have had to call on a landline from their home, or work, or a call box, but aside from the occasions when the lines were engaged, the chances were good that within a few minutes of placing their call, the customer would have had whatever it was they were calling about dealt with.

Today, this seems positively quaint, because although the channels of communication have improved since the 1980s, with phone calls now possible from anywhere thanks to the ubiquitous mobile phone, and with other methods of contact such as online chat being introduced, actual communication has broken down and become poorer in my opinion. Instead of the customer calling their branch and speaking to someone who knew them, their business and their account as was the case thirty-odd years ago, customers now have to navigate interminable menu trees, and identify themselves by whatever method their bank employs before being able to talk to a call handler. In these days of identity theft, the need for a bank - or any other organisation - to be certain they are speaking to the right person is of paramount importance, of course. In the 1980s, methods of identifying customers who called were much more informal, and we would often do so simply because we recognised the voices of frequent callers, but I never heard of a case of someone calling and impersonating a customer. Although the phrase 'identity theft' seems to have first been coined in the 1960s, it wasn't even thought of as a problem until recently.

Having held on the phone for a period of time much greater than my manager back in the 1980s would have tolerated, today's bank customers will end up speaking to someone who is not only not in their branch, but are probably not even on the same continent. And the person at the other end of the line in whichever bank's call centre it is will never have spoken to the customer before, far less met them in person. Chances are, customer and bank staff will never speak to one another again. Which is just part of the problem. Who among us have not rung a bank, insurance company, or energy provider and having taken the name of the person at the other end of the line, and wanting to speak to them again, either because they have provided good service and we would like to have them help us again, or because we have a supplementary question, been thwarted in our attempts to contact that person and had to go through the disheartening business of explaining our problem once again, this time to someone else?

It seems that in many cases organisations are actively placing barriers between themselves and their customers. It isn't uncommon to head to a website, click on the Contact Us option and be presented with the options to email or use some sort of messaging facility, but find no telephone number. Amazon's website doesn't even have a Contact Us option that I can find on the home page, although it can be found - eventually - through their Help page, and if you want to speak to them, there is no number to call, just the option to ask them to call you. The impression is that they really, really, don't want to talk to you.

I had to use Fitbit's Live Chat facility a few months back, and as is the case on more than one occasion when I've used these sorts of services, I got the impression that I was chatting with a bot. While I am sure that this is fairly common these days, the experience was vaguely unnerving and not really very satisfactory. By the by, I have noticed that no matter how unhelpful or generally useless people (or bots) have been in a chat or telephone conversation, they invariably ask, "Is there anything else I can help you with today?" at the end of the conversation. I am often tempted to point out that they haven't helped me with my initial problem, so in answer to that question, probably not.

The barriers that organisations erect between themselves and their customers mean that many people, even when they have a complaint, simply give up and move on. The cynic in me says that this could easily be a deliberate policy that drives down complaint volumes and when an organisation's key performance indicators are published, low volumes of queries and complaints can be proudly cited as demonstrating how well the company is doing, even though this is not strictly the case.

In the last few months it has been my unfortunate experience to have to contact one particular bank, and various agencies such as the Royal Mail, Citizens Advice, Action Fraud, Trading Standards, and the police. I won't go into the reasons here, as the matter is ongoing, although I can say that this doesn't relate to something that has happened to me, but to someone else on whose behalf I have been acting. I have spent hours on the phone to people - mostly on hold - with a 90 minute wait to 101, the police's non-emergency line particularly frustrating, especially when at the end of it, I was told to contact Action Fraud. And no one, but no one ever calls back (with the honourable exception of the police, although even they needed some cajoling). Trying to obtain a simple letter from the bank took four phone calls over a period of six weeks, despite having been promised at least three times that it had been sent. The Royal Mail turned the simple task of delivering a special delivery letter into a complete farce, by mis-delivering the first one to the sender and not the addressee, and then taking weeks to return it once the addressee had refused to accept it, and that despite claiming that, had it been returned, we would have had it back by the time I had to have a long, and very unsatisfactory telephone conversation with them in an attempt to locate the missing letter.

According to Citizens Advice, Trading Standards do not, under any circumstances, provide feedback, and neither do Action Fraud. It seems that communication with these organisations is purely one way, so the public can have absolutely no confidence whatever that they are actually doing anything after a matter has been raised with them. The Times ran an expose of Action Fraud recently (August 2019), in which they revealed that "staff had been trained to mislead victims into thinking their cases would be investigated even though most were never looked at again," and this - together with the impression I got from speaking with the police that Action Fraud are not held in very high regard by them - reinforces my belief that organisations actively impede the public in their attempts to make complaints, or even to simply communicate with them.

Technology has moved on a-pace since my days at Midland Bank in Barking, but whereas it should have made communication between organisations and their customers easier, along with the resolution of complaints and queries, it seems that the reverse is actually true. From experience, it seems that the poor old customer is all too often on their own as the agencies they ought to be able to depend on are either indifferent to their problems or incompetent in dealing with them. The last thirty years might have seen progress, but not necessarily any improvement.

The Value Of Nothing

Most of us take it for granted that we can pop along to a supermarket and buy pretty much whatever food takes our fancy, and increasingly we can do this at almost any time of day or night. I'll caveat that by saying that there are hundreds of thousands of people in the UK living in food poverty, that 1.8 million emergency food parcels were handed out in 2016/17, and there are over 2,000 food banks across the UK, which is nothing short of scandalous.

For those people who live in food poverty the bad news is that this year food prices have hit their highest rate of inflation in five years, 2.5% in March 2019 according to the BRC-Nielsen Shop Price Index. UK crops such as onions, potatoes, and cabbage showed the greatest increases, while increases in global cereal prices have led to increases in the cost of bread and cereals. Despite this, UK farmers increasingly find it hard to make ends meet, with the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Defra) predicting that incomes are expected to fall across almost farm types in England in 2018-19 with pig farms likely to be the hardest hit.

Some sources predict that food prices will rise as a result of Brexit, although not everyone agrees. On his LBC Radio show, Nigel Farage told one caller who said as much that equally, prices could fall, due, he said "to terminology." Quite what he meant by that I have no idea; I'd be grateful if anyone could enlighten me. But whatever happens to food prices, one sector or another of the population will suffer. Increasing prices put even more pressure on those who rely on food banks, while falling prices squeeze farmers profits and will inevitably drive some out of business.

Wandering around my local supermarket, one could be forgiven for gaining the impression that we truly live in a land of milk and honey judging by the trollies laden with food of all types and from all nations. Sadly, a whole lot of the food that gets wheeled out of supermarkets gets binned, and a lot of that is food that isn't even partly used. Around 18 million tonnes of food, with a value of around £23 million ends up in landfill every year in the UK. In part, the relative cheapness of food (even in spite of the food inflation we are experiencing) is to blame. Simply put, too many people do not value the food they buy. In our house it causes almost physical pain for us to throw out uneaten food, although there are times when it is unavoidable. I have found that doing smaller, regular shops cuts down the amount of food that gets thrown out, although for many people the weekly bulk shop remains the default option, either through choice or necessity.

Food is not the only thing that we buy that we treat in a somewhat cavalier manner. Around 300,000 tonnes of clothing, worth £12.5 billion ended up in UK landfill sites in 2017, with one in ten people surveyed saying that the cheapness of clothing meant that they regularly threw clothes away after a few wears, with clothing considered 'old' after twenty washes or fifty days. Looking at the prices of retailers like Primark, it is easy to see why people would think that. According to a survey conducted for the charity Barnardo's, Britons will this year spend £2.7 billion on over 50 million summer outfits that will get worn just once. This will include £700 million spent on 11 million items bought for holiday trips that will then never be worn again.

Few people consider the environmental impacts of buying and discarding cheap items of clothing. A t-shirt from Primark can cost as little as £2, so it is little wonder that they will be bought, worn a couple of times and then discarded. I admit that is an attitude that I have adopted in the past. Back in 2007, we went on holiday to Tobago, and I bought some cheap polo shirts. They cost £2.50 each and my thoughts were that I wouldn't be heartbroken if I never wore them again, say if they were ruined in the sea or discoloured by sun-tan lotion. As it happens, brought home and washed, there was nothing wrong with them and I still have them, and still wear them. Which is probably just as well when one considers what goes into the production of the average t-shirt.  The production of one cotton t-shirt requires 2,700 litres of water in growing sufficient cotton (about the amount one person drinks in nearly three years). A pair of jeans requires about 7,600 litres. By throwing out perfectly wearable clothes, we are not only bunging the country up with landfill, we are wasting precious resources such as the water that is required to produce them in the first place. The low cost of clothing might give us incredible choice at affordable prices, but it does nothing to instil in us a sense of value of what we are buying.

I recently read Marie Kondo's book, The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up, from which I learned that I, like millions of other people, own too much 'stuff' and that includes clothes, so what I am about to say somewhat contradicts what I have just said about throwing stuff away,  especially clothes. Looking at the amount of clothing in my wardrobe, I know that there is plenty of stuff that I am unlikely to wear again. Like most people, I sometimes buy clothes to which I am attracted, but find that I have little occasion to wear, either because they do not really suit me, or there is little opportunity or justification. There is a school of thought that clothes one hasn't worn for a long time - usually a couple of years - are ripe to be disposed of. Kondo (pictured below) doesn't subscribe to that, preferring the idea that we should dispose of things that no longer give us joy. The problem with that is that it conflicts with the justification that most people have for keeping things, either the sentimental value attached to possessions, even if they will never be used again, or fear that as soon as they are thrown out, a need for them will be found.

There is a balance to be struck, whether it is in food or clothes that we buy. We should buy what we need, and value what we buy. Oscar Wilde said that a cynic is a man who knows the price of everything and the value of nothing; whether it is cynicism or not, as a society we are increasingly losing sight of the value of things.

"And Here Is The Draw"

The FA Cup is probably the only sporting competition that has as much interest and mystique invested in its draw as it does in its matches themselves. The anticipation and excitement as the day of the draw approaches is palpable, and speculation about who players, managers, and supporters want to be drawn against puts all thoughts of league games, or any other competitions, to the back of everyone's minds. These days the draw becomes a TV spectacular once the competition reaches the First Round Proper (and where else other than in England would we deem a competition to have a 'proper' stage?)  Where possible this involves holding the draw in the bar of a non-League club that is still in the competition, with tenuous links that anyone at the club may have with a Premier League club drawn out for all they are worth, while young supporters wave tin-foil FA Cups around. It's all a bit of harmless hokum, but a million miles away from the gravitas that surrounded the FA Cup draw in days long gone past.

A draw made by ex-players like Ruud Gullit and Paul Ince, and overseen by someone such as Mark Chapman, is some way off, although the FA Cup will reach its third stage - the First Qualifying Round - this Saturday, when 232 teams will do battle; 344 teams have already been eliminated from the competition, and the cricket season hasn't even finished yet!

In these early stages of the competition, there is no glamour, nor pomp and circumstance to the draw. I don't know exactly how the Football Association administers it, but without the glamour of it being live on TV, it is quite possible that it is an unwelcome chore for some FA employee responsible for the competition's Preliminary and Qualifying Rounds, and who has other pressing concerns on the day. He (or she) will groan as their PC pops up a reminder "12.15pm, FA Cup draw, post online 1pm." They will then look around the office for a collaborator, and having found some unfortunate person whose eye they caught, will drag them off to a break-out area with a box containing three hundred and fifty odd-numbered pieces of paper representing the teams still in the competition. At the conclusion of the draw, there will inevitably be one team left over, which prompts a frantic search for the missing numbered piece of paper, which if not located, requires a process of elimination to determine which team will complete the final tie. That may not be the way it works, but the FA would endear themselves to me no end if there was a smidgeon of truth in this.

There was a time when the FA Cup draw took place religiously at one o'clock on Monday afternoon following the previous round's matches. In the days I'm talking about, all of the ties would have been played - if not settled - on Saturday afternoon, unlike today, when at least one tie will be outstanding when the draw is made. The BBC would announce that they were taking us over to FA Headquarters, then located at Lancaster Gate, saying "The first voice you will hear will be that of Ted Croker," whereupon he (Croker), the secretary of the FA, would announce, "Here is the draw for the Third Round of the Football Association Challenge Cup competition," and introduce two FA officials that no one outside the room from which the draw was being broadcast would ever have heard of, to make it. A rattle of the numbered balls in the velvet bag, and we were off, with football fans up and down the country, in offices and factories, listening intently to someone's transistor radio. Even for people with either little interest in football, or those who supported teams already knocked out of the cup, the draw on the radio - especially for the Third Round - was always a high spot of the football calendar.

Ted Croker

I know that times change and the FA Cup draw was always destined to move away from radio and on to television, but at least it still retains a degree of integrity, not least because the draw remains free of seedings.[1] The draws for the World Cup, and the Champions League, as well as having seedings, also have an excess of pomp and circumstance that makes them virtually unwatchable - except this year of course, when Eric Cantona brought an element of surrealism to the Champions League draw by (mis)quoting from King Lear. The only comparable performance to Cantona's is probably the time Rod Stewart assisted at the Scottish Cup draw having clearly been well refreshed beforehand.

Eric Cantona at the Champions League draw.

The Champions League format looks likely to change in future if the rumours are true. Instead of eight groups of four in the qualifying round, from which sixteen clubs will win through to the knock-out stages (the competition proper, if this were the FA Cup!), there is the very real possibility of four groups of eight. The upshot of this would be fourteen games for each team at the group stage, and a total of twenty-one matches needed to win the competition, as opposed to six, and thirteen respectively at present.

If this comes to pass, then the managers of English clubs playing in the competition will complain even more bitterly about congested fixture lists than they do now, and will place even less importance on the Carabao Cup and FA Cup than they do now. Chances are, they will be fielding entire sides lacking even a single first-team player in those competitions, or suggest that their clubs withdraw from them altogether. And four groups of eight might merely be the precursor to two groups of sixteen and an eventual European Super League, an idea that has been around for many years.

A well refreshed Rod Stewart at the Scottish Cup draw in 2017

It's probably fair to say that the BBC have managed to strike just about the right tone with the televised version of the FA Cup draw, with a nod to the gravitas of the draw when it was only on the wireless, and a dash of entertainment, but without the pomp and circumstance of the Champions League's effort. Mind you, if they want to hire Eric Cantona and Rod Stewart for a future draw, I'm sure it would do their viewing figures no harm at all.

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[1] You may say that exempting teams from qualifying rounds and the fact that the Premier League sides don't enter until the Third Round proper is a form of seeding, but by my definition, the fact that in each round there is no filtering to prevent the supposedly two best sides left in the competition from being drawn against one another.

The Wonder Of Woolies

When I was young there were only a few shops that I would willingly go to; at best I was indifferent about the majority of stores I was dragged to by either or both of my parents. The exceptions were WH Smith,  the Apex Libraries, and Woolworths. WH Smith needs little introduction, and it was there I would peruse the paperbacks and the stationery, making the odd purchase here and there when my meagre resources allowed. Apex Libraries was an independent bookseller in Romford's Quadrant Arcade and is likely the shop referenced in Ian Dury's song, Razzle In My Pocket. Apex Libraries had a different range of books compared with Smith's, I can remember there were paperback compilations of Batman comic strips that were not to be seen anywhere else, and apparently, they also stocked magazines that catered for niche interests which the more mainstream booksellers, like WH Smith, did not. 

I distinctly remember owning a copy of this.

For almost everything but books, however it was Woolworths that drew me in time and again. 

The last Woolworths store in the UK closed its doors for the final time in 2009, and there are still times when I feel its absence. Woolworths - or Woolies as we all knew it  -was one of those shops that was nice to just wander around, even if you didn't buy anything. Too many people doing that might well have been part of its downfall. Woolies didn't specialise in anything - again that might have been part of their problem - but you could buy almost anything there, from sweets (the almost legendary Pick 'n' Mix section was, for many people, good enough reason alone to visit Woolies) to televisions, from clothes to garden furniture.

It was at Christmas that Woolworths really came into its own, especially if you were buying for children, as its range of toys and games was almost unmatchable other than in speciality toyshops. One year, it must be about fifteen years ago now, Val and I went Christmas shopping at Lakeside and spent most of our time, and a large proportion of our festive budget, in Woolworths, buying presents for our children. Our children are now grown up, but I guarantee that if Woolworths were still going, a good number of their presents would still come from there, come Christmas.

Woolworths, Collier Row, shortly before it closed.

The Woolworths store in Collier Row, just ten minutes walk from my childhood home, was somewhere I visited regularly. School supplies - boring, but essential - were frequent purchases, with notebooks ('rough books' as they were known at my school), pens, pencils, rulers, protractors and compasses all being sourced there. 

Many of these were bought for school.

Then there were things to play with or more specifically, one thing that I played with a great deal, the famous Wembley Trophy Football. I used to spend hours kicking a ball around our back garden. We lived in a block of flats when I was young, it had a large communal garden with the back wall of a block of garages at one end, against which I would habitually kick the ball. While this was great fun, it did have a detrimental effect on the structural integrity of the plastic footballs, which inevitably would puncture, truncating my game and meaning that I had to abandon playing football until such time as I had saved up enough pocket money to buy a new one.

Apart from footballs, I would regularly purchase scrapbooks from Woolies. I was actually quite surprised when re-reading Fred Eyre's wonderful book, Kicked Into Touch, recently when the author said that when he embarked on his football career and wanted a scrapbook to keep his press cuttings, he had to search high and low in Manchester's stationers before finding one. Why, I wondered, did he not go straight to Woolies? I'm sure they must have had a branch in Manchester. 

My first scrapbook was purchased, from Woolies, in 1968 for a school project. The Olympic Games in Mexico was the subject, and my class was tasked with producing a scrapbook about the event, which I did assiduously. I think that I must have enlisted the help of my parents' work colleagues to supply me with daily newspapers to collect cuttings, as I won a prize, not so much for the quality of my work, but for what my teacher described as "the sheer volume" of it!

The year of the Mexico games was also the year I started going to watch my local football team (see Romford 1, Manchester United 0) and I started keeping scrapbooks. Over the years I collected almost every press cutting about Romford FC from our local newspapers, namely the Romford Recorder, the Romford Times (later, Express), and the Romford Observer, which was a bit of a latecomer on the scene, but had the novelty of including colour pictures. Occasionally there were small features to be found in the national press. I had an extensive collection of scrapbooks covering the ten years that I supported the football club until they folded in 1978, but at some point thereafter, with there seeming to be little or no point in keeping them anymore, I threw them all out. Now, with the football club having been resurrected in 1992, I dearly wish I had kept them.

Were I just starting to support a football team now, I doubt very much whether I would bother starting a scrapbook, especially for Romford, since local newspapers coverage of local sport has changed immeasurably over the last fifty years, and largely not for the better. Back in the 1960s, the Romford Recorder had match reports, features, previews and photographs galore of local football, but today the coverage is meagre. This week's edition has just four pages covering all the local teams, and a good deal of that is about the nearest Premier League side, West Ham United, which is syndicated in the Recorder group's newspapers that cover East London. The paper pretty much gave up including formal match reports years ago; a scrapbook of cuttings about Romford FC from its pages would be quite thin these days. That is an inevitable consequence of the changes to the way we consume news these days, not just sports news, but all news. 

Still going, but the Romford Recorder is but a shadow of the paper I remember from my youth.

In 1968, the local paper was an invaluable source of news; many is the time I would have to wait till the Recorder came out on a Friday to learn of Romford's result from a game they had played on a Tuesday; not so now. And the Recorder was legendary for its classified section, with pages and pages devoted to car adverts, job adverts, and estate agents' listings, yet more areas of our life where the internet has taken over from the print media as our primary source.

No doubt there are stationers up and down the country that sell scrapbooks, but even if I saw the point in buying one now, getting it from anywhere other than Woolworths just wouldn't seem right.  That was the wonder of Woolies.

And Then Came Mogg

The Roman Empire, the reign of Henry VIII, and the two World Wars of the 20th Century. Periods of history that have long intrigued and inspired historians and academics, novelists and playwrights. In Britain, if nowhere else, the 1939-45 conflict continues to affect our language, and dare I say, our relationship with the rest of Europe. The Battle of Britain, Dunkirk, the D-Day Landings and the Blitz spirit all get used as metaphors for football matches, the weather, and increasingly, Brexit. I imagine that in time, Brexit itself - from the day that David Cameron announced the referendum in 2015 to whenever Britain leaves the EU - will become a subject and a period that academics will revisit and about which they will write scholarly tomes analysing its causes and effects. And no doubt, there will plenty of fiction that uses Brexit as its premise.

If Brexit were a work of fiction I believe that many readers would describe the characters on the British side of the story as too farfetched[1]. There is Nigel Farage, the privately educated former commodities trader who is unable to get elected to any Parliament other than the one he professes to despise, a self-styled 'man of the people' who rails against a political elite of which, having been an MEP since 1999, he is a long-established part. Real-life Farage is very much a Marmite figure, and audiences would be equally ambivalent about a fictional version. Good guy, or a bad guy? You could make the case for either.

Next up, the New York-born Alexander Boris de Pfeffel Johnson. One can imagine an editor, on reading a first draft, demanding that 'de Pfeffel' go as it is an implausible name - ludicrous even - albeit it is a real one, with roots in Germany, and from which family Johnson is descended. Johnson has cultivated the persona of an amiable buffoon over the years, which would be all very well if it cloaked a razor-sharp intellect and a proven track record of success, but having been sacked from The Times for making up a quote, he admitted that when working for The Daily Telegraph in Brussels he invented negative stories about the EU. As Mayor of London, he spent over £50million on a bridge that got no further than the design stage, bought three unusable water cannons that were scrapped at a loss of £300,000 and introduced an updated and much-derided Routemaster bus to London's streets. He may talk a good game, but his failures speak even louder.[2]

And then comes Mogg. Jacob Rees-Mogg is beyond parody, impossible to lampoon. Here is a man who dresses like an extra from a Victorian melodrama, peppers his speech with Latin, and who has been dubbed "the Honourable Member for the 18th century." Rees-Mogg has been described as "the stupid kind of Tory’s idea of what a clever kind of Tory ought to sound like." Superficially, he appears an intellectual, a man of gravitas, although how much of this is mere affectation is moot. His recent book, The Victorians: Twelve Titans who Forged Britain  has been described as "12 turgid essays" and "mindless incoherent drivel." It is perhaps the only book I have seen reviewed on Amazon where there are more one-star reviews than all the others put together. He is, by all accounts, a learned student of parliamentary history, which will no doubt be of value in the coming weeks and months as the byzantine rules of engagement in parliamentary debate and procedure take on great importance in how Brexit is implemented, but of little practical value in helping the populace deal with the fall-out from it.

Rees-Mogg's recent appointment as Leader of the House of Commons coincided with his issuing a set of rules on style to be used by his staff. Were I working in his office I fear that I would frequently fall foul of his rules vis a vis banned words and phrases as most feature in my normal vocabulary. How, for example, he expects his staff to refer to the Equal Opportunity Act of 2010 when 'equal' is one of his banned words, I cannot imagine. I can, however, understand why 'lot' and 'very' may be irritants, these can be lazy variants substituted for specific, but perhaps unknown, amounts or quantities. 

What's the point in satire when real-life surpasses it?

A requirement to use double spacing after full stops (not fullstops) might have made sense in the days of manual typewriters but has little value today. Few writers of style guides favour a double space; most agree it makes writing look dated - which may be exactly what Rees-Mogg is trying to achieve.

Preferences on style and the use of certain words may be harmless matters of taste, but the rule that imperial measures should be used is somewhat unfathomable. I just checked my fridge and cupboards, and the only item that has an imperial measure is a bottle of milk, where both imperial and metric measures are shown. Will Rees-Mogg's younger staff - to whom some imperial measures may be a complete mystery - be expected to use conversion tables to refer to items measured in solely metric weights, volumes or distances by their imperial equivalents? Imagine the hilarity, not to say contempt, in another government department (for instance the Department for Transport) receiving a missive from Rees-Mogg quoting the price of petrol as being £5.72 per gallon instead of £1.26 per litre. Or why not go the whole hog, revert to pounds, shillings and pence,  and call it £5.14s.5d per gallon?

Britain has long been a country in which imperial and metric measures have caused controversy - remember The Metric Martyrs? - and both systems sit in uneasy juxtaposition. We measure distances in miles, and yards... until we get below three feet, when suddenly everything is metric. We dispense beer and milk in pints, but all other liquids in litres, including petrol, for which we quote fuel consumption in miles per gallon.  Rees- Mogg might be more comfortable in a world of imperial measures, but, like pounds, shillings and pence, it is a bygone age. Except that Britain has actually been going metric since the 1800s, with the introduction in 1849 of the florin (one-tenth of a pound) - the first step towards decimal currency - and  the Weights and Measures (Metric System) Act of 1864, which permitted the use of metric measures for ‘contracts and dealings.’

One of the Metric Martyrs. Personally, I buy bananas by number not weight anyway.

As I have my own quirks and foibles about the English language, it might be a bit rich of me to question Rees-Mogg's rules, except my quirks and foibles apply to me and me alone. It would be beyond arrogant of me to expect other people to conform to them. I agree with David Mitchell, who suggested in an article in The Guardian that Rees-Mogg is entitled to enforce these rules if they apply to letters written in his name, but unreasonable otherwise. Quite how Rees-Mogg would react to letters written by members of the public - or, heaven forbid, other departments within Government - that do not conform to his particular standards would probably be a joy to behold. One imagines - hopefully - that he would regard them as unacceptable and a disappointment and, should they lack double spaces after full stops, very much not fit for purpose.

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[1] Aside from Jean-Claude Juncker, who has on occasion been accused of being drunk in charge of a continent, the EU officials who have been engaged with Brexit seem to be unremarkable in character; staid and bland even.

[2] Even the successful public bike hire scheme in London, sometimes dubbed 'Boris Bikes' was actually the idea of his predecessor, Ken Livingstone.