One Night In Stratford - An Olympic Retrospective

When it was announced that London had won the bidding to host the 2012 Olympics, I suppose that I assumed that getting tickets would not pose too many problems. When the results of the first ballot for tickets was announced I realised how naive I had been because I was allocated precisely none; nada, zip, zilch, not a single one. I resigned myself to watching the Games on television, consoling myself that I had seen parts of the Torch relay and that I could perhaps see one of the “free” events like the marathon. Then along came the opening ceremony. I am not normally a fan of opening ceremonies but my elder daughter, who had got a job as a Games Maker, had been to a rehearsal and told me it was a bit special, so I watched it. I was dumb struck by its brilliance and was inspired; I now knew that I had to get tickets for something, anything.

Now it is well known that while most aspect of the Games were a success, the ticketing arrangements were heavily criticised and were something of a PR nightmare for the organisers, so it was with limited expectations that I logged on to the ticketing website. Within minutes I had been able to book tickets for the women’s basketball; not my first choice, but it was something. Then I noticed tickets available for the athletics on the evening of Saturday 4^th August. This was more like it! Frustratingly, although the website showed tickets available, when I came to book them it said there were none, but then a further search for tickets showed some still to be had. More in need of a whinge than anything, I phoned the ticket hotline (after a number of failed attempts) and was told that tickets were indeed available. The price quoted would probably have bought me a small house the last time the Olympics came to London in 1948. Was it worth it, I wondered? Would I regret it if I didn’t buy a ticket? After much dithering I gave my credit card details and stumped up £450, money well spent as it turned out. 

The obligatory shot outside the stadium, with Union Flag.

On Saturday 4^th August I collected my ticket at the ticket office at Stratford, passed through the airport style security and watched probably the greatest sporting event I have ever seen, or am likely to see. Awesome is a much overused word, but truly there is no greater superlative that can be used to describe that evening. Even half empty, the stadium itself looked magnificent. The spectators were enthusiastic and if largely supporting the British athletes, fully appreciative of the talents of the competitors of all nations. The atmosphere was overwhelming good natured, everyone was there to enjoy the spectacle, regardless of who won what event, unlike the partisan atmosphere at say, a major international football match.

As the stadium filled, the level of expectation palpably grew.

Of course Team GB was confident of at least one gold medal with Jessica Ennis leading the Heptathlon with just the 800 metres to go. In the build up to the Games and during the Games themselves, Ennis was pretty much poster girl for Team GB and the Games themselves. It is difficult to imagine the pressure that she must have been under; the weight of expectation was huge. That evening there was no possibility in the mind of anyone in that stadium that she would not claim gold and so it proved. I still find it difficult to watch a video of that race, or even replay it in my mind, without a lump in my throat. As Ennis crossed the line, the stadium rose and cheered with one voice. This couldn’t be topped, could it? Well, actually it could.

Jessica Ennis and her fellow heptathletes take a bow.

 There were high hopes that Mo Farah would claim a medal in the 10,000 metres, but he was nothing like as nailed on to win gold as Ennis apparently was. The twenty seven minutes that the race took will live with me forever. As Farah entered the last lap with a narrow lead the noise in the stadium was tremendous. As he flew down the back straight the cheering had been cranked up. As he came off the final bend, just twenty metres or so from where I was sitting (or standing by this stage), the cheering had cranked up still further. Everyone in the stadium seemed to be screaming at the top of their voices; I was, although by this stage I was incoherent, I have absolutely no idea what I was yelling! Somehow it occurred to me that when he crossed the line, and by now he was extending his lead and was certainly not going to be caught, the noise would increase still further, impossible though this seemed.

Mo duly crossed the finish line and the eruption of noise must be the loudest any group of human beings have ever made. Thinking back now, if Jessica Ennis’s race brings a lump to my throat, then I am likely to dissolve into tears when recalling Farah’s win.

While Ennis and Farah’s races were exceptionally emotional, Greg Rutherford’s win in the men’s long jump should never be forgotten either. In a remarkable period of less than an hour, Great Britain had amassed three gold medals, “quite remarkable” as David Coleman might have said.

This had been such a fantastic evening, such an emotional evening and such a successful evening, that when it was all over, it was with great reluctance that we left the stadium. Everyone present that evening knew that they had witnessed one of the greatest nights in British sporting history, that this truly was one occasion that we would never forget, and one which we wished would never end.

The crowd leaves the stadium with some reluctance.

Some people have been critical of the Games; many have doubted the supposed legacy that they have left. Surprisingly, it was Jimmy Carr who summed up the Games perfectly; “a summer off from cynicism,” he said, as Britain and particularly London, revelled in new found pride and pleasure. The Games did something exceptional; complete strangers talked to each other on the tube and at bus stops; the weather co-operated and one could actually be proud to be British!

I for one will never forget the Games and particularly the Saturday I was in the Olympic Stadium. It may have cost me an arm and a leg, but for the pleasure it gave me it was worth every penny.

Footnote:

As glorious and happy an occasion as the Games were, I find it impossible to think of them without recalling events of seven years previous. The euphoria that followed the announcement on 6^th July 2005 when London’s bid was announced as the winner was cut short by events less than twenty four hours later when bombs were detonated on the London Underground and buses, killing fifty two, injuring more than seven hundred and blighting the lives of thousands. 

Badminton, Big Toes and Bikes.

Last weekend the Woods family decamped to Center Parcs at Elveden Forest. We go most years and have done so since the late 1990’s. We like the familiarity of the place; we know where everything is, how it all works and we enjoy the various activities. Granted it isn’t cheap; however much you have paid, you only get your accommodation and use of the Sub-Tropical Swimming Paradise for your money. Everything else, from playing badminton or tennis; from archery to golf; from photography courses to cupcake making, costs extra. The price you pay includes no food either, so you cater for yourselves or you go to the restaurants (or, as most people do, a little of both).

A typical villa at Center Parcs

Some years ago the quality dipped; old fashioned villas, poor service and some cleanliness issues together with an inflexible pricing policy and difficulty booking activities before arrival put us off. Fortunately, Center Parcs got their act together on all of these issues. A more flexible pricing policy (we booked our stay during a "sale" period) meant that we had an Executive Lodge only a 5 minute walk from the Village Square for a very reasonable price. The villa was very well equipped (en suites to both bedrooms) with a modern kitchenette, television and DVD player and comfy furniture. Activities can now all be booked on-line before arrival and the park is clean and well maintained, and the service is generally good.

While the weather last weekend was cooler and duller than it has been of late, it was still warm enough and crucially, dry, so there was no chance of the weather spoiling our break. Don't believe the hype, despite often being described as “the holiday the weather can’t spoil,” a holiday at Center Parcs is just as susceptible to the weather as anywhere else as a lot of the activities are outdoors and no one enjoys a ten minute walk in the pouring rain to go for a meal!  Center Parcs covers about 400 acres,  some of the villas are a whole lot more than ten minutes walk from the Village Square, which is where the restaurants are and where the swimming and a whole lot of other activities take place, hence a lot of visitors bring or rent bikes. In fact, this year, for the first time ever we took our own as we have recently acquired a Brompton folding bike. The bike was ridden mostly by Val, although Sarah and Rebecca had brief goes. I however, refrained (more of which in a moment).

Val, with bike, near one of Center Parc's lakes.

At one point I thought that I might be refraining from the whole holiday, as the day before we departed I accidentally kicked a concrete step so hard that I thought that I had broken my toe. Actually, for all I know I did break it, since a couple of years ago I broke a small bone in my hand and when I had it x-rayed, was told that I had broken my hand before, something of which I was completely unaware. So anyway, my toe had turned an interesting shade of purple and was extremely uncomfortable, causing me to walk with a limp-cum-hobble sort of gait, grimacing every now and then and generally grumbling about the discomfort. Despite this I managed to play badminton and tennis, albeit from a more static position than normal. I decided that swimming, where I have a habit of stubbing my toe anyway, was probably unwise, so I stayed away from the pool (sorry, Sub-Tropical Swimming Paradise) and the rapids.

The source of some discomfort.

To return to the bike, even had my toe been in full working order, I would not have been riding. There is a popular belief that once we have learned to ride a bike, we never lose that ability. We even have a saying especially for it; “It’s just like riding a bike,” we say to suggest that a skill, any skill, once acquired, is never lost; that even after the passage of a number of years we can pick up an activity again and, with the minimum of effort, be as proficient as ever. I can honestly say that this is not the case; well, not for me anyway.

The Brompton.

On one of our early visits to Center Parcs, and having booked a villa that was a decent distance from the Village Square, we hired bikes. Now I hadn’t ridden since I was about ten years old, but I had little doubt that even after the passage of more than three decades, I would have little difficulty in picking it up again. I know that I am not renowned for my boundless optimism, but come on, how hard could it be?  When I had learned to ride as a child it had not been long before the stabilisers (training wheels) were off and I was whizzing about all over the place. As it turned out, learning to ride again was hard; very hard.

Rather than attempt to ride the bike from the Cycle Centre, I decided to push it a modest distance so that I didn’t have an audience when I took my first, undoubtedly very wobbly, first ride in over a quarter of a century. I got on, fully anticipating a false start or two, and tried to pedal. I didn’t so much wobble as topple, hopping along the path in an ungainly and inelegant manner. I tried again: more hopping ensued, but very little pedalling. It was then that it dawned on me that cycling has four key elements: pedalling, steering, braking and balancing, and this last one, balancing, is most easily achieved while actually moving. Almost at the same time it occurred to me that I could either pedal, or brake, or steer, but could not do all three, or even two of them, simultaneously. This meant that moving and by extension, balancing, was completely out of the question.

The remainder of that holiday was spent with my bike chained up outside the villa while everyone else rode and I walked everywhere, with the occasional attempt made, more in hope than expectation, to ride. I have never since bothered to hire a bike, even when the rest of the family have.

So now we have a Brompton folding bike, bought second hand through the internet and which my wife has encouraged me to try to ride. After two or three abortive attempts, I have concluded that “It’s just like riding a bike” is literally not true as far as I am concerned. I may have another go one day, so if you see a middle aged, balding man, hopping along astride a folding bike; cursing, swearing and sweating profusely, that may well be me.

From Bognor Regis to Bandos

In recent years I have been fortunate enough to be able to holiday in such glamorous, exotic and far-flung places as Tobago, Hawaii and the Maldives. I have been on cruises to Hawaii, Scandinavia and Mediterranean Europe: my work has taken me to Hong Kong (and, more prosaically, Scotland).  Rewind back as recently as the late 1980’s however, and a day-trip to France apart, I had never been abroad and I wasn’t alone in that. Whereas in 2010, fifty five million Britons went abroad (thirty six million of them travelled abroad on holiday), in 1980 it was just seventeen million and back in 1961/62 a meagre three million. [1]

Bandos in The Maldives

In the days when I was one of the majority who didn’t travel overseas, I would usually holiday on the South Coast with my parents, either at a holiday camp or guest house. The holiday camps had their spartan chalets, fixed meal sittings, their corny entertainment and forced jollity; the guest houses had shared bathrooms and the same fixed meal sittings, but tended to lack entertainment or jollity of any kind. Guest houses required their visitors to vacate the premises shortly after breakfast and not to return until tea-time. The vagaries of the British summer meant that a holiday staying at a guest house would necessitate many a day spent dodging the rain in cafes, cinemas or gaudy amusement arcades. Glamorous and exotic these holidays were not; the fact that they were not far-flung and therefore the travelling was not too onerous was one of the few points in their favour.

Guesthouses in Blackpool

If I didn’t visit anywhere exotic or glamorous in person, I did so by proxy however, and my guide was Alan Whicker, who sadly died aged 87[2] on 12^th July this year. Whicker was immediately identifiable; the thick rimmed glasses, the moustache, the somewhat mannered delivery and his attire (suit and tie, or on less formal occasions, the blazer) that made him an easy target for parody and impersonation. Who can forget the peerless Monty Python sketch, “Whicker Island”, a parody that asked “The whole problem of Whicker Island is here in a nutshell. There are just too many Whickers.”? Whicker spoofed the parody with his retort, that there were too many millionaires to interview and too few Alan Whickers!

Whicker’s genius was his ability to bring the lifestyles of the rich and famous and the colourful locations they inhabited, into our living rooms; the living rooms of the ordinary man, in a way that did not patronise an audience who were, by and large never likely to visit these locations or meet these mega-rich and famous interviewees. By doing so he educated us, entertained us and ultimately, enriched us.  In an era when the BBC’s remit was to “inform, educate and entertain,” Whicker achieved all three with an effortless grace that is beyond the powers of many presenters today.

Today we may watch any number of documentaries in which T-shirt and shorts clad presenters, presumably with the “edgy” approach so beloved of documentary makers these days, visit faraway settings; they scuba dive, abseil or climb mountains, interact with the locals but ultimately fail to engage us in the same way that Alan Whicker did. Admittedly Whicker worked in a different time; a time when Bali or Hawaii or Hong Kong were beyond the reach or budget of most of us, but whereas now we may watch a travel documentary and know that the destination is within our reach, his programmes were so much more aspirational.

The instantly recognisable Alan Whicker in his natural habitat, the equally recognisable Hong Kong.

Whicker’s programmes went beyond the travelogue however. He interviewed the great and the good (and the not so good), among them Joan Collins, Peter Sellers, the Sultan of Brunei and the Haitian president Papa Doc Duvalier. There was a hard, journalistic edge to his programmes that made them more than merely entertainment and which many of today’s travel documentaries lack. Whicker noted that, when interviewing Papa Doc, he asked the dictator questions that no Haitian would dare do. The dictator, far from taking offense (or worse), apparently joked with him.

While we now may still not necessarily have the opportunity to meet the famous or rich, we are much more likely to have the chance to visit the sort of places that Whicker presented from. The world has shrunk, thanks to affordable air travel and package holidays, but we owe a lasting debt of gratitude to a man who brought these places into our homes, who made us curious about these places and gave us the urge to travel to them and to savour them.

There have been times, for instance when sitting on the terrace of a Maldivian hotel sipping a cold drink, I have thought of Alan Whicker. The next time I have the opportunity to do so in such a location, I will raise a glass of something cold, bubbly and expensive in toast to the man who beyond all others, was king of the travel documentary, the man who made us aspire to holidays beyond the dubious delights of a guest-house on the South Coast!

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[1] Source: Office for National Statistics.

[2] Some sources are of the opinion that Whicker “lost” a few years from his age and was in fact 91 when he died.

"I'm on the phone!"

A story emerged last week about a woman who was refused service in her local Sainsbury’s supermarket because she was talking on her mobile phone, (see here for the full story). In a nutshell, Jo Clarke, 26, was at the Sainsbury’s branch in Crayford, south-east London, when she was ordered to hang up before she would be served. According to Ms Clarke, it was implied by the unnamed Sainsbury’s employee that it was company policy not to serve customers who were on their phones. Sainsbury’s later said that they had no such policy, apologised to Ms Clarke and offered her some vouchers. Following an outbreak of outrage on Twitter, Facebook and the like, Sainsbury’s have decided not to discipline the unnamed assistant, although presumably have not rescinded their voucher offer to Ms Clarke.

As with all stories like this that make the newspapers, it probably isn’t quite as simple as it first appears. It is not in dispute that Ms Clarke was talking on her mobile; it is not in dispute that the cashier asked her to end her call before she would be served. It is not in dispute that Sainsbury’s do not have a policy of refusing service to customers who are using their phones. What we do not appear to know however, is the tone of the exchange between the Sainsbury’s employee and Ms Clarke.  Was the cashier rude? Was Ms Clarke condescending towards the cashier? We don’t know and in some ways it doesn’t matter, because the bigger truth that comes out of the story, if we didn’t already know it, is that mobile phones have become so all pervasive in our lives that many people are completely addicted to them, and their use of them in certain situations provokes quite strong reactions in other people.

Telephone etiquette is interesting and there are lots of different opinions on the matter. One of my bugbears, and this applies to all phones, not just mobile phones, comes when I am dealing face to face with someone and their phone rings. Inevitably they will answer their phone, leaving me to stew while they attend to the person on the other end of the phone. If the matter that the call is about is more important, then perhaps this is acceptable, otherwise it is queue jumping and in my view, plain rude of them to deal with the caller at my expense. Oddly, if were they on the phone and I tried to interrupt them, I’d likely get short shrift and they would continue with their call. A phone call, it seems, is always more important than a face-to-face conversation.

"Look, I've got a phone! Must shout to make myself heard!"

Debrett’s have a section on mobile phone etiquette on their website: It may be a little quaint in places and blindingly obvious in others, but it is worth a read. Particularly apposite to the matter which prompted me to write this, it says “Don't carry on mobile phone calls while transacting other business - in banks, shops, on buses and so on. It is insulting not to give people who are serving you your full attention.”

I suppose that in many ways I sympathise with the Sainsbury’s employee in Ms Clarke’s case, although they perhaps were a bit officious in refusing service until the call was ended, because unless the phone call was really important, there was no reason why it could not be ended or at least interrupted, while the transaction at the till took place. It is discourteous to the cashier and other shoppers patiently waiting to be served, to continue the call and likely delay matters. As an example, I was recently in the queue in the Post Office and in front of me was a young woman who was on the phone. She continued her conversation when she got to the counter (she was posting a parcel). The counter clerk took the parcel, affixed the stamp and charged the customer, who then asked, “Is that guaranteed delivery tomorrow?” “No,” replied the counter clerk, “you didn’t ask for that.” “Well, I want it delivered tomorrow,” the customer responded. So the original transaction was cancelled and a new one conducted, inconveniencing the counter clerk and holding up the other customers and all because the young lady’s telephone conversation was apparently more important than giving the face to face transaction her full attention.

A lot has been written about people using their phones on trains and a lot of the conversations I used to have no option but to listen to when I was a commuter were pretty inconsequential, but obviously people have every right to talk to other people on their phone when they are on the train, but I admit that I found it annoying, because I could not seem to tune them out. Two people sitting opposite me and chatting away I could ignore and concentrate on reading my book; somehow, however I could not seem to ignore the person on the phone. OK, it is more my problem than theirs, but it perhaps explains why I do not like talking on the phone when I am on a bus or a train; I just want to get the conversation out of the way because I feel that it will be aggravating other passengers who have to hear it, which means I can come across as a trifle brusque. (If you ever phone me and I appear a little terse, then I’m probably on public transport and feeling a little self-conscious).   

Another thing that riles me is people playing music through the speaker on their phones. Have you noticed that it is never music you yourself would listen to? Why do they have to play it so loud? And why can’t these people use headphones?

I suppose that I should not be too sanctimonious on the matter as I am something of a fidget with my own mobile. When I worked and had a company BlackBerry, I would check it frequently and with both it and my personal mobile I suffer the phantom call/text/email syndrome whereby I am frequently sure it has rung or bleeped and have to check it only to find that there was no incoming message or call.

While there is no doubt that mobile phones are now integral to most people’s lives and, for many people essential, we all probably know one or two people who don’t have them and don’t we consider them eccentric?  

The last working phone box in England continues to do a roaring trade.

Life was simpler before mobile phones, but those of us of certain age will remember searching for a public telephone in an emergency, how we would be stranded on a broken down train unable to let friends or family know we were safe but delayed and we wouldn’t want to return to those days, but perhaps we all ought to remember that mobile phones should be a means to an end; they should not end up ruling our lives and their convenience to us should not be an inconvenience to others.

My Intolerance

Between 1% and 2% of the British population suffer from a food allergy: estimates suggest that up to 20% have, or believe that they have, a food intolerance. Symptoms of allergies tend to appear within minutes of consuming a particular food; they can be provoked by even very small amounts of the particular foodstuff and in extreme cases may be life threatening. They can, however be easily diagnosed by testing. Intolerances on the other hand tend to be slow to appear and very rarely life threatening. Larger portions are required to cause a reaction and I can vouch for the fact that intolerances are much more difficult to diagnose than allergies. 

The symptoms of allergies and intolerances are different too.  Allergies can provoke itchy sensations in the mouth, throat and ears; urticaria (hives, or nettle rash) or angrioedema (swellings to face, lips, and tongue among other sites). In extreme cases, allergies may cause anaphylaxis, which can be fatal if not treated immediately. Intolerances, on the other hand more usually cause symptoms like stomach cramps, eczema, fatigue and diarrhoea.[1]

A problem with both allergies and intolerances may be diagnosis, unless the allergy is severe and medical treatment is required; in my experience a fairly routine allergy or intolerance will not be taken particularly seriously by your doctor, who may merely suggest that you to keep a food diary and then eliminate the problem food from your diet. Private testing is expensive and can be fairly generalised in terms of identifying the specific cause of an allergy.

At about the age of seven, I could not have eaten this.

I have twice suffered food allergies. Once, when I was very young, I developed an allergy to fish and then, when I was in my twenties, became allergic to chicken and other poultry. The chicken allergy was mysterious and difficult to identify at first. It began one summer and was exhibited by the appearance of wheals (raised areas of skin), usually around my rib-cage, which were hot, red and incredibly itchy. At first I thought this might be a reaction to insect bites, but after a while different symptoms appeared. These included swollen fingers and hands: on one occasion my wrist swelled up so alarmingly that it threatened to engulf my wristwatch.

It was only when, one Christmas and after a purely coincidental period of abstinence from eating poultry during which I had not suffered any of the symptoms, I suffered a reaction and concluded that poultry was the cause of my allergy. It was therefore fairly easy to control the problem by simply not eating chicken or turkey. Generally this was easy to achieve, although I did suffer a severe swelling of my upper lip one time after eating what was allegedly a beef paste sandwich. Close inspection of the list of ingredients revealed that the beef paste contained “other meats” of which one was presumably chicken, hence the reaction I suffered. This does beg the question of whether we always know what goes into our foods, a topic I touched on in a previous blog (“Little Bags of Mystery”).

In my twenties, this would have caused me real problems.

Like the fish allergy I had suffered as a child, the poultry allergy eventually went of its own accord, which I discovered when I accidentally picked up a chicken and bacon sandwich in Marks & Spencer. I only noticed this when I got back to work and as it was raining, could not be bothered to go back and change the sandwich, so I ate it anyway. There was no adverse reaction; the allergy had gone.

Nowadays I seem to have developed an intolerance; it may be a gluten intolerance, it may be a wheat intolerance (it may be something else entirely), because as we know, food intolerances are quite difficult to diagnose. I am not convinced that my intolerance is to wheat; I can eat normal pasta quite happily, but some shop bought sauces, which usually contain wheat flour can sometimes, but not always, cause a reaction.

 What I do know is that when I suffer a reaction I will wake up in the early hours of the morning (oddly, normally at 1.30 a.m.  give or take a few minutes),  feeling at first uncomfortable and usually with a metallic taste in my mouth, this is followed by painful stomach cramps and sweats, then diarrhoea. Fortunately this episode usually passes quite quickly, although it can be very painful; this week, for instance, I had a particularly violent reaction, I think it was to a shop bought cooking sauce, to the point where I near as damn it passed out.

On other occasions the symptoms are less obvious, and not physical:  I have been told, and have sometimes noticed myself, mood changes and irritability that may occur, usually if I have eaten bread.

There are now many more people with wheat or gluten intolerance, or people who suffer from the more debilitating and more serious celiac disease and I cannot help feeling that modern bread making methods may be to blame. Because I can sometimes eat bread, or other foods containing wheat or gluten without any problem it may be that some of bread’s other ingredients, ingredients we are not even aware of, may be to blame or it may be the baking process itself that is responsible.

In 1961, the Chorleywood bread process was developed by the British Baking Industries Research Association. This intense, mechanical working of the dough reduced the fermentation period and time taken to produce the loaf. Instances of yeast and gluten intolerances have undoubtedly increased in the years since 1961; it is difficult to believe that this is a coincidence. In addition there are ingredients in modern bread that legislation does not require listing on packaging. These include amylase, which can cause asthma, and calcium propionate, which may be responsible for some cases of eczema and some behavioural problems in children.

Is this making us ill?

It is frustrating for me that I cannot pin down the exact cause of my food intolerance; it makes it quite difficult to decide whether or not I should avoid certain foods and I am sure there are hundreds of thousands of people in the UK who suffer similarly. Whether the 20% figure is accurate or not, there certainly seem to be more people suffering food allergies and intolerances these days. If you are one of them, or indeed if a member of your family is, I sympathise.

If you are interested in learning more about gluten intolerance, I recommend the following article, my reading which was the reason for this week’s blog: The Whole GLUTEN Story-With The Science.

http://bodytypenutrition.co.uk/blog/the-whole-gluten-story-with-the-science/

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[1] See http://www.allergyuk.org/home/home for detailed information on allergies and intolerances, and their causes and symptoms.

"Invalid User Name or Password"

Time was when passwords were something that you read about in spy novels but never actually came across the need to use.  As far as I recall it wasn’t until the early to mid 1990’s that I needed a password at work to access a particular system, but gradually as the decade progressed more and more work migrated from paper to PC, there was a proliferation of new systems and applications, each with need of a password.

By the time I left work at the end of last year I had access to twenty odd systems that required passwords; a fairly modest number compared with some people, but still enough to make remembering them all quite exacting. IT policy in most organisations regarding passwords tends to require users not to share passwords, not to record them anywhere and to have unique passwords for each system. Add to this last recommendation the fact that each system has different requirements vis a vis password construction; fixed length, variable length, upper case and lower case letters, numbers, special characters and it is little wonder that most people record at least some of their passwords somewhere, somehow.  My favoured method, and one which even IT security would grudgingly agree was just about acceptable, would be to have two spreadsheets in my personal drive; one with a list of systems or applications and user names, and another with a corresponding list of passwords. These spreadsheets should have innocuous names that don’t make it obvious they are password lists and of course, these spreadsheets need to be password protected!  There are propriety apps like Dashlane or Password Caddy that can be downloaded to a smartphone to store passwords, although I imagine that many companies would have IT policies that would not approve their use. Some of these types of apps are free, but some do charge and personally I would be somewhat wary of trusting my passwords to a third party app, regardless of how secure they appear to be.

The fact that passwords in most business systems expire regularly (I had some that expired every ninety days, some that expired monthly and one that had to be changed daily) makes remembering them all without some sort of prompt difficult in the extreme, especially the ones not used every day. Inevitably this means that your typical IT helpdesk spends a disproportionate amount of time resetting passwords for frustrated users who cannot remember them.

The need for multiple passwords is avoided by the adoption of something like Active Directory, a single sign-on (SSO) that allows the user access to sub-systems once they have logged on to the domain. Obviously a weakness of Active Directory is that any would be hacker needs only to get through one password instead of many, so single sign-on types of access control really need two factor authentication, supplementing the user’s password with a one-time password (OTP). This type of authentication is now fairly commonplace in internet banking.

On top of our work passwords we now all have innumerable passwords for our private transactions. Internet banking, various shopping sites and social networks all require passwords and again these may all be in different formats. Often these do not have expiry dates but Clifford Stoll, an astronomer and author, says “Treat your password like your toothbrush. Don't let anybody else use it, and get a new one every six months.” Hmm, not sure how many people follow that advice, and if they do how often they have to click the “Forgotten Password?” link, unless of course they recorded their new password somewhere. This becomes even more pertinent as so many applications on your tablet or smartphone now automatically log you in without needing your password and most web browsers offer to remember you passwords for you to the extent that when you do need your password, say when you’ve had to log out of the site, can you remember it anyway?

A further problem that I find is that, depending on the website or application, my log on name may be my email address or something else entirely. While I have no problem remembering my email address, the other log on names are rather more tricky as they vary wildly and I have lost count of the times when I can remember my password but not what creation I came up with as my user name and have to ask for it to be resent to me.

When nearly half a million Yahoo! users had their accounts compromised last year, research of the passwords that were revealed showed that the top ten most commonly used included gems like “Password1”, “welcome” and “123456”. Interestingly, “Incorrect” is not among the top ten; the joke doing the rounds says, “I set my password to "incorrect" so that Windows reminds me every time I get it wrong.”

While Yahoo!’s list contains some obviously guessable passwords, it appears that even apparently “strong” passwords are actually easily hackable. Well, easily hackable if you employ the sort of talent that Ars Technica did when they cracked over 15,000 passwords this year, including the memorable 16 character string, “qeadzcwrsfxv1331.” Actually, if you test that password in a site like Password Meter (http://www.passwordmeter.com) it only scores 65% (rating, Strong). A password such as “Password38” rates 66% on the same site!

Following other advice that IT security experts give, you should not use family or pet names, car registration numbers or the like as passwords. Some recommendations for password construction include the idea of making up a phrase, such as “My friend, Dorothy, was 35 last year!”  which is in itself easier to remember than an apparently random character string. Taking the initial letters from this sentence gives a password of Mf,D,w35ly! which Password Meter rates as 100% (Very Strong) although I reckon that Ars Technica would have broken it.

No matter how secure we believe our passwords to be, they will be broken by someone with sufficient incentive or opportunity. In the workplace this will probably be the internal fraudster, but they won’t try and guess a password, rather they will wait for their prey to leave their PC unattended and unlocked, and/or will “shoulder surf” to acquire their victim’s password. Similarly at home it may be that some unscrupulous visitor, friend or even family member who has nefarious intentions will obtain a password in the same way.

The ways in which our passwords become compromised are normally due to negligence or forgetfulness, either ours or that of the owners of the application or website we are using. The easiest ways to have your access to whatever system, application or website compromised appear to me to be either being the victim of a phishing attack, or a data protection breach such as the theft by hackers of over six million LinkedIn user passwords in June 2012. Keeping a list of your passwords on a Post It note stuck to your PC monitor is another good way and apparently more people do this than you would imagine!

Identity theft is now sadly a fact of life and if someone wants to break your password badly enough they will probably do so; I guess the trick is to make their life sufficiently difficult that they move on in search of someone who hasn’t been quite as rigorous in protecting themselves.

Oh, and by the way, my password is...

A Question of Grammar

“The greater part of the world's troubles are due to questions of grammar.”

― Michel de Montaigne, The Complete Essays

Every so often there will be a piece in a newspaper, or a feature in a television news programme about English usage. Sometimes, normally in the newspaper article, this will be a tirade bemoaning the decline in the standard of spoken, but more usually written English. Television features on the subject tend to be more even handed, with proponents of the view that English is evolving and that the perceived decline in standards is merely a feature of that evolution on one side and those critical of these slipping standards on the other.

Naturally languages evolve (apart from Latin), otherwise we would all still be speaking like Geoffrey Chaucer but there is a world of difference between a language evolving and it being mutilated. There is a notion that surfaces from time to time, that grammar, spelling and punctuation are to some degree redundant and that as long as an idea is communicated clearly, these do not matter. The problem with this belief is that to communicate clearly and unambiguously, grammar, spelling and punctuation are actually quite important.

I recently saw on television a piece where commentators were talking about the difference between there, their and they’re:  three words that sound the same but have different meanings depending upon spelling. Would it really matter if we had only one spelling? A sentence could become, “There was a time when parents would walk there children to school, now there taking them by car.” Albeit it looks odd, it still makes sense, but I’m not sure that I could accept it in substitution of the correct form.

What I cannot abide however, to the point where I almost have to be restrained, is the apparent belief that “have” and “of” are synonyms. I have seen, even in newspaper articles, the use of “of” in place of “have,” as in “He should of taken an umbrella.” The idea that these two words are synonymous, and that belief appears to have gathered some momentum, could lead to absurd sentences like, “I of bought some bananas, but some have them of gone bad.”

In fact “have” appears to be a word that is being excised from language by degrees and with it goes “may” which is being supplanted by the more aggressive “can”. An expression, heard commonly in coffee bars and which seems to have migrated across the Atlantic, substitutes “get” for “have” as in “Can I get a tall, skinny latte?”  instead of the more orthodox “May I have...” I await, not too optimistically, for the day when a barista answers, “I don’t know; can you?” or “No, but you may have one, which I shall get for you.” When I say that this is an expression, or form of usage, that has been imported into the UK I imply no criticism of our American cousins, who can evolve the English language as they see fit, it is just that it jars with me when I am queuing in Starbucks in some small English town and hear someone order coffee as though they were a member of the cast of Friends. [1]

Every generation bemoans what they see as a decline in standards as exhibited by the young and in language those of us of a certain age have ammunition aplenty as a result of the explosion in the use of texting and Twitter. Texting and tweeting, with the limited number of characters available, make brevity crucial, but although brevity may be the soul of wit, it is not a guarantee of clarity in communication.

Texting in particular has generated any number of acronyms, abbreviations and indeed entirely new words. By now there can be no one left on the planet who doesn’t know what “LOL” means, even if David Cameron has only come up to speed relatively recently.[2] Some po-faced commentators will cite the use of expressions like “OMG”, “YOLO” , and “IMHO” as examples of sheer laziness on the part of the users and use them as evidence that today’s teenagers will not be able to cope in the world of work where more formal English will be required, but the truth of the matter is that every generation invents or adopts words and phrases that infuriate their elders and they do so, in part at least, to create a language which acts as a code that their parents cannot break! These same commentators will, I’m sure, have used expressions and words in their youth that similarly exasperated their parents’ generation.

You will be pleased to know that I do not intend exploring the use of the apostrophe in this blog. There is a whole industry out there discussing the use of the apostrophe and at any given moment there will be someone expounding on the subject on radio or television and there are any number of websites devoted to this single piece of punctuation. I do not believe that there is anything I can usefully add to the debate.

Although I hope that I have a reasonable command of English, I accept that I am by no means perfect.[3] I confess to an addiction to commas and a tendency to throw them in, apparently at random, in the hope that they make what I am writing clearer. I pepper them throughout my writing before going back, editing and excising half of them, adding new ones, re-inserting ones I have deleted and generally bewildering myself as to whether or not the ones that remain make a valid contribution.[4] I have therefore sought help by ordering Lynn Truss’s book “Eats, Shoots and Leaves” from Amazon. I probably should have done so years ago.

As someone who enjoys the English language, relishes a well turned phrase and hopefully can tell good English from bad, you might expect me to side with those who feel that English is in decline, however I actually think that it is holding up quite well. Yes, it is changing; it is evolving as it has done for centuries and will continue to for centuries to come and I do not have a problem with that. Where I do have a problem however, is with carelessness or laziness, where “have” becomes “of”, “may” becomes “can” or “have” becomes “get.”

Thank you for reading; that’s all I of to say this week, of a good week and I’ll of a new blog for you next Thursday.

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[1] A small confession here. Once, at Los Angeles airport I ordered a coffee at Starbucks with the words “Can I get...” and I can only excuse myself on the grounds that I was using the expression in its native land. I have never used this form of words in the UK.

[2] To my eternal chagrin, I have to admit that the first time I saw this expression I was of a like mind with Mr. Cameron.

[3] My wife will be relieved to hear this; she thinks that I think that I am (perfect, that is).

[4] This article began life with 63 commas; after editing this number became 68. I have no idea whether or not they are all necessary.

The New Fridge

I bought a new fridge freezer last week. I concede that buying a new fridge, or washing machine, dishwasher or tumble drier is pretty mundane but with my track record in this field there is ample scope for drama and mistakes. Last year for instance, I bought a new vacuum cleaner which has proved to be less than ideal. Because of my past experiences it is often some time between a piece of equipment going wrong and a replacement being bought while I try and weigh up the pros and cons of various appliances (and still occasionally get it wrong), but with the old fridge going doolally (temperatures in the fridge swung wildly from the optimum five degrees centigrade to the alarming fifteen degrees, with similar unexpected variances in the freezer temperatures), a repair or replacement was called for pretty sharpish because being without a fridge is beyond inconvenient.

A fridge. Exciting isn't it?

As the old fridge was seventeen years old the maker’s guarantee and the extended warranty had long expired and I was quoted a minimum of £140 repair charge by the manufacturer, so buying a new fridge freezer was a more attractive proposition. It is remarkable that prices of white goods, televisions and other electrical appliances have actually fallen over the years. The old fridge, purchased in 1996, cost £599.99 but a visit to Currys established that a virtually identical new model could be had for £329.99 and looking back there are other examples of similar price drops. For instance, the first VCR that I bought cost about £350 in 1990; the last one I bought before they became redundant cost fifty quid.

One of the things that I find tiresome about buying new appliances is the inevitable question from the salesman which is “Would you like to take out the extended warranty?” At one time this was something that I had some difficulty in refusing, but in recent years my attitude towards these warranties has hardened and I refuse to countenance them. On one memorable occasion, when buying a new camera, the salesman’s persistence in trying to sell me a warranty was such that I told him that if he mentioned it one more time I would walk out of the shop and not buy the camera. He mentioned it again, so I left and bought the camera elsewhere. Refreshingly, the salesman made only a passing reference to an extended warranty for the fridge and was not at all disconcerted when I declined to purchase one.

The problems with extended warranties are twofold.  Firstly, even though there is a manufacturer’s one year guarantee thrown in automatically, the warranty kicks in immediately, so even though you pay for three, or five years you only actually get two (or four) year’s additional cover. Also these days domestic appliances like washing machines have a pretty long life span; five years is the minimum you would expect one to last, so the probability is that you will pay a fair sum of money, never make a claim and then have to pay to replace or repair the machine anyway, long after the warranty’s expiration.

Secondly there is the cost. Seduced by the prospect of paying say £7 a month for a warranty on our new fridge, dishwasher or whatever, we may feel that this is a small price to pay for peace of mind, but when you consider the number of appliances that most people own on which they may be paying that sort of amount, it soon adds up to a pretty penny. For instance the extended warranty on the old fridge cost me £166 for which I received absolutely no benefit whatever. Looking around my house I find that there are at least seven appliances for which I could in theory have extended warranties. The total cost of replacing those appliances is about £1,800 (based on like for like replacements, not upgrades). The annual cost of extended warranties for these would be in the region of £450 (or £1,350 over three years). For that sort of money I could replace five or maybe even six of the said appliances. Far better, were I disciplined enough to do so, to transfer £35 a month to a savings account to be used in purchasing any replacements (or, if not spent on such, to splurge on a holiday or similar treat at the end of the year).

Some manufacturers and retailers are much more straightforward about their products. For instance, back in 2005 we bought a Miele washing machine and it came with a free ten year warranty covering parts, labour and call out charges. Last year we bought a television from John Lewis and they provide a five year guarantee free, gratis, for nothing. They probably do so because they recognise that the chances are they will not have to make good on that guarantee within the five years; other retailers would do well to follow suit.

Naturally my aversion to extended warranties could come back to haunt me if two or more of my appliances need replacing at the same time. There are companies like Warranty Direct who provide guarantees for three items at a pretty reasonable £12.75 per month plus £3.25 for each additional appliance so I could in theory insure my seven appliances for £321 per annum, but that is still £70 more than the average replacement cost of those pieces of equipment.

There are some things, like cars and central heating boilers, where warranties make better sense as the repair or replacement costs can be eye watering, although that isn’t to say that these warranties are perfect. We will all have experienced or at least have heard of instances where a fault was not covered by the warranty; as with any insurance there are the dreaded exceptions but overall these are two items where peace of mind is probably worth the cost.

Despite the fact that in 2005 the government tried to regulate extended warranties on household appliances and electrical goods, the Office of Fair Trading still receive complaints about the way warranties are sold, or their failure to pay out if the item develops a fault. As with most purchases, when considering taking out an extended warranty it really is a case of caveat emptor.

Through France on a Cheese Sandwich

My father, Richard Woods, was born on 24^th November 1923; he was the youngest of nine children. He died, following an aneurism, on 3^rd July 2004.

While those are dates when I will always remember my father, 6^th June is probably the day on which I think of him most.

June the sixth will forever be remembered as D-Day, the day in 1944 when Allied Forces landed on the beaches of Normandy in Northern France during World War Two. Over 160,000 servicemen landed in France that day; 61,000 were British and my father was one of them. It is difficult for those of us born years after the cessation of hostilities to imagine what it must have been like to live through the years between 1939 and 1945, when war raged throughout Europe. Those of us with parents who did live through those years will have heard tales of deprivation, horror and bravery, and indeed the mundane, that were associated with those years. My father, just twenty years of age when the D-Day landings took place, was fond of telling tales of his experiences and for that reason today is the day when I will always think of him.

From what my father related of his days in the army with the Essex Regiment and the Seaforth Highlanders, most appeared to have consisted of route marches (fortified by little more than a cheese sandwich, apparently),  journeys by rail or road from one end of the UK to another, peeling potatoes in the cookhouse and cooking the sergeant’s breakfasts. Presumably at some stage some basic training must have been involved. The culmination of all of this was the crossing, in landing craft, of the English Channel.

Private Richard Woods. I think that the cap badge is the Seaforth Highlanders

If my father was to be believed, and given his character as something of a joker some of what he said must be taken with a pinch of salt, he ate all of his field rations during the sailing. This was probably unwise as he then brought them all back up again. Landing in France, the first and only time he ever set foot on foreign soil, he dug in and was pinned down by German artillery for some time. Advancing through France once the initial German resistance had been overcome, my dad would recall his unsuccessful attempts to beg or buy eggs from local farms, his knowledge of French being non-existent, but wax lyrical about the glass of calvados he drank in some long forgotten French village. Some years ago I bought him a bottle for his birthday; sadly it did not taste quite the same at home compared with his original experience.

Although he must obviously have engaged with the enemy from time to time and must have fired shots in anger, he was fairly sure he didn’t actually kill anyone. He must have come into quite close contact with the Germans at one point however as he acquired some souvenirs, in particular a German flag, helmet and officer’s firearm. Having carried these for some time, his battalion’s kit was picked up and carried by lorry. All was sadly lost when the lorry convoy came under fire from German aircraft and was destroyed, leaving him with just his rifle and the uniform he stood up in.

Fortified by nothing more than the aforementioned occasional cheese sandwich (so he said), he eventually made his way on foot into Belgium, where he was promptly shot and shipped back to England. Fortunately, his wound was relatively minor; shot in the arm, he made a full recovery but was left with an interesting scar running from elbow to wrist that remained visible for the remainder of his life.

Returning to civvy street after the war, my dad took up French polishing as an occupation but later in life worked as a school caretaker and then as a store man for a firm of pneumatic engineers. He was a man of simple pleasures; he would take great satisfaction from a glass of home brewed beer or wine and a day spent in the garden, where he kept an immaculate lawn and cultivated vegetables.  His home brewed beer, made largely from ingredients supplied by engineers from Romford Brewery, his customers at the pneumatic engineers where he worked, was potent stuff although it would have been a much smoother ale had he had the patience to allow it to mature longer in the bottle before drinking it. Now, if ever I smell hops I think of my dad.   Sadly, when he was in his sixties he developed macular generation which left him virtually blind in one eye and with seriously impaired vision in the other, to the point where once we passed within just a few feet of each other in the street without him recognising me.

His eye problems frustrated him greatly; he was always a practical person who, coming from a generation that made do and mended, was adept at repairing and making things. From scratch he made such diverse items as bookcases and secondary glazing units but such activities became increasingly difficult as his eyesight failed.

Probably because of the generation that he came from, and the family within which he was brought up, my dad was not given to frequently expressing his emotions; nor was he one for great displays of affection, but I know that he particularly loved his grand-daughters and would be immensely proud of them as they grow up.

In life, he was not a man to whom I could easily show him the affection that I felt for him. Today, as we remember D-Day, 6th June 1944, I will raise a glass to my father, smiling as I recall the stories he told of his experiences that day, wishing he was still here to repeat them in person.

Any Other Business

There’s a man who lives along the road from me who washes his car with clockwork regularity, every Sunday afternoon.  Setting aside for the moment the fact that washing a car every week seems somewhat excessive, I imagine that this chap has got into the habit of cleaning his car over a number of years and now it has become so habitual that he does it without a second thought.

Things like cleaning the car on a Sunday afternoon, doing the weekly shop in the same supermarket every Friday evening, or always doing the laundry on a Saturday morning start out as expediencies; these are the best (or perhaps only) times available to complete these tasks, but over time they become routine and habitual. We may carry on doing the same things at the same times even though the original reason for doing so no longer applies.

Now, I confess that I am a creature of habit, that I like my routines and that when I retired at the end of last year, no longer having the routines imposed on me by work, I realised that I needed to create new routines as a coping mechanism (see my blog, “It’s life Jim, but not as we know it”). That said, we should not be slaves to routine; we should not be so inflexible that we cannot break them because doing so would stifle our ability to be spontaneous and can lead to missed opportunities.

In part we carry into our personal lives a methodology of routine, of habit, of structure that we get from work and structure is particularly important in the workplace. Nonetheless it is important to question routines and structures that add no value. The idea that because a thing has always been done a certain way it must always be done that way needs to be challenged and nowhere is this more so than in the area of communication in general and meetings in particular.

A regular complaint that was made by people when I was working was that communication within the organisation was poor; I would guess that that is a fairly common gripe in many companies. Unfortunately, in my experience the way in which this issue was most commonly addressed was merely to communicate more without much regard for quality. Thus certain information which was available on the intranet, would also arrive via email (and not just one email either, commonly the same information would arrive in two, three or even four separate mails), be posted on notice boards and advised in meetings (formal and informal). Other information, sometimes very important information, would somehow slip through the net and only be acquired by some happenstance.

Nowhere are there more examples of ineffective communication than in meetings. Over the years I was involved in enough meetings to know that some meetings are necessary but that some are pointless and simply a waste of time.

Effective meetings have an objective; effective meetings involve only those who need to be involved and take up the minimum amount of time.

All meetings should have an agenda but having an agenda isn’t the same as having an objective; having an agenda doesn’t mean that the meeting will be effective. Ideally the agenda should be short and limited to what has to be discussed. The best meetings are those called to discuss a single specific subject; meetings that ramble on and attempt to cover too many disparate topics tend to bore all of the participants some of the time and some of them all of the time. Which brings me to the point of who to involve. Only those people who really need to be there should be invited; sometimes people are invited to meetings when they really need not be. These people then sit in the corner; mute, uninvolved and wishing they were somewhere else because they didn't feel that they were able to decline the invitation. More power to those who decline invitations to meetings they see no point in attending, I say.

And time! So few people realise how much time an hour long meeting consumes. Eight people at a meeting that lasts an hour have consumed a whole working day! And never forget that an hour’s meeting actually lasts a lot longer if you factor in travelling time (even if everyone works in the same building) and time is wasted afterwards while people relate the meeting to those who weren’t there and then have to get up to speed with whatever work they were doing that was interrupted by the meeting.

The meetings that really exercise my patience are the regular team meetings. Rarely does anything new come out of these, after all if they are held monthly and something important happens a couple of days later, no one waits the best part of a month to communicate the information (well, they shouldn’t anyway).

The agenda for these meetings, if there is one at all never changes; the same tired old topics get aired and the only people who benefit are the workshy and those with too little to do who relish the opportunity to get away from their desks. Management guilt about poor communication is assuaged by holding these meetings but really they actually communicate very little and certainly nothing that could not be broadcast more effectively by other means.

Talking of agendas, there is one item that regularly appears on them that should never, ever be included and that is the dreaded “any other business.”  If attendees have an item they want to bring up at the meeting then they should ask for it to be included in the agenda. If they don’t but want to talk about it anyway, the meeting leader should be the arbiter of whether or not it gets discussed. Yes, sometimes something urgent will crop up that needs discussing but all too often any other business is an excuse for someone to saddle up their particular hobby horse and ride roughshod over the meeting with it.

Worse yet are the meetings that don’t have any other business as an agenda item, but where the meeting leader feels obliged to go round the table asking if anyone has anything they would like to say, usually on the grounds of wanting to include everyone. Ye gods, if they wanted to say something they should have asked for it to be on the agenda! I was once the unfortunate participant at a meeting with about a dozen people present and after an hour (of which only about fifteen minutes had any real relevance or importance), we were all asked if there was anything we wanted to bring up. Had everyone done so and had each topic occupied five minutes, the one hour meeting would have stretched to two (or 24 man hours, or three and a half man days). Blessedly the topics raised took only (!) half an hour, but still not the best use of anyone’s time.

So the next time you get an invitation to a meeting, think whether or not you really need to attend before accepting and if you do decline, make it clear why. If you accept an invitation to a meeting and the agenda includes “any other business,” question it, you never know you could be saving yourself, other people and your organisation a whole heap of time.