A Midland Odyssey - Part Six - The Midas Touch

It is difficult now to remember what for many people work was like before personal computers became ubiquitous, but less than twenty years ago many people went through their working day without having to use one. Oh yes, dumb terminals had been part of our working lives for many years, the famed Burroughs TC500, the Nixdorf terminal, and for me, having moved into international banking, IBM terminals to access payment and the wholesale banking systems. Having spent some time on admin I'd also been exposed to early incarnations of Windows, but working on  the queries team in Multicurrency Payments Department (MPD) and sharing one PC between thirteen of us (used fitfully to log stats and produce the odd letter), paper still ruled supreme.

Nixdorf terminal

The "green screen" 

MPD comprised three sections[1]. Ref 18, Sterling Payments (payments in GBP within the UK and incoming from overseas), Ref 24, Currency Disposals (payments in any currency within the UK and from overseas) and Ref 52, Outward Payments (payments in any currency, including GBP, going overseas) - which was where I worked. Everything was done on paper in Ref 52. Payment instructions came in from branches on Telegraphic Transfer or Mail Transfer forms, payments from other banks arrived by SWIFT [2]or telex and were printed and re-input manually and all queries involved writing out vouchers or SWIFT messages which were then entered into the relevant systems by a separate team. On average we must have had four or five hundred live files on the go (and thousands that were closed), all represented by paper, at various stages in the process of being prepared, worked on or waiting to be filed. Finding one you wanted among these could be a very time consuming and frustrating process (a phone call from a branch or customer asking for the current state of play on a particular query could often result in a protracted search, often fruitless). A solution was needed and so in 1996 (ish, I'm a bit hazy on dates this far on) The Midas Project was conceived.

Midas (it's not an acronym, just a name) was a project comprising IT staff and people from the business, some who became involved in the build and some, like me, who acted as subject matter experts and testers. Initially I joined the team on a six month secondment; somehow I never really went back to MPD and at some time during the following six years I ended up as full time member of the team.  It was a completely different world from the one I was used to. Gone were the daily deadlines (hourly even) and instead there were deadlines of weeks or even months to complete certain tasks. It was exciting, rewarding, stressful and baffling at times and one thing I learned was that you had to be flexible, especially over working hours. Early mornings, late nights, weekend working and all nighters came with the territory, especially in the run up to a software release or during contingency testing.

Midas Team cartoon, courtesy of Mus Huseyin

To build a computer system that could replicate the manual processes in place at the time the first requirement was to define the existing processes. This meant mapping out somewhere in the region of twenty query types[3] then designing workflows requiring users answering a series of questions and generating messages or accounting entries or payments based on the answers. Generating SWIFT messages to other banks systemically was relatively straightforward; creating accounting or payments not so. Initially the best we could do was generate more paper that had to be input into the appropriate systems; generating entries and payments directly to those systems was something that came along many years later. Naturally we had to have a query type for those that didn't readily fit into the usual pigeon holes; we called it Miscellaneous (original, eh?) and it had no workflow attached, it had to be worked in what we called "free format." This resulted in a conversation with a department manager which sort of foresaw the move towards proceduralising everything and devaluing common sense, expertise and experience. " How," I was asked, “does the user know how to resolve these queries?” I replied that they had to use their experience and judgement. “Oh dear,” came the response, “we can’t have that.” The movement towards procedures and guidelines outweighing experience and expertise had started.

I'm middle, right in this one.

While we now take for granted the PC, the mouse, copy and paste and toggling between windows, for the average query clerk in MPD in 1997 (the year Midas went live), these were a mystery. Believe it or not, courses had to be run to teach people about "point and click" and navigating on screen menus, and for some this came far from naturally. When it came to teaching the department's staff how to use the system we had built I was in for a shock as our manager dispensed with the services of the two people originally tasked with planning and delivering the training and asked me and my colleague Fakhra Brisby to take it over less than a week before the first session. We cobbled something together and it seemed to go down quite well, although how much of it was of any use and how much sank in, I'm not sure.

Midas went live in October 1997 and it is safe to say there were some issues at first. It was a complete culture shock for everyone; inevitably most people hated it. Some bits of it worked better than others and some coding changes and software releases were necessary to address some of the problems. Probably the best thing you could say about it was that it was no longer possible for files to go missing. But considering our lack of experience or a benchmark to measure ourselves by, it went rather better than we actually thought at the time, so much so that Midas was still going strong when I left the bank in 2012 (and as far as I know, still is), resisting attempts to replace it with anything else. The fact that it is now nearly twenty years old and runs on software ten years older says something creditable about it I suppose.

Working on Midas was one of the most satisfying things I did in HSBC, helped to no small degree by working with some great people, like Gavin Warner, Paul Mills, Steve Tucker, Steve Giles, Gary Cook, Mus Huseyin, the late Ron D'Castro and Raj Soni, to name but a handful of them (if I carry on this will be like an Oscar acceptance speech).

If you now spend your working day in front of a computer you take it for granted, but just think, a little over twenty years ago you would have been working in an office where copy probably required carbon paper and paste had something to do with glue.

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[1] Technically I suppose there was a fourth, Ref 62, Drafts, but somehow they were on the periphery.

[2] SWIFT - Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunication see, www.swift.com

[3] Typical queries included Beneficiary Claims Non-Receipt, Unable to Apply Credit, Unable to Apply Debit, Amendment (of payment).

The Chinese Way

When Wayne Rooney retires from professional football it is unlikely that he will be writing any letters to the great and the good begging for work or money. Yet one of his predecessors in an England shirt was reduced to that as recently as 1970 when Tommy Lawton wrote to Chelsea director and film star Richard Attenborough, asking for a loan or a job. Lawton[1], whose career saw him score 231 goals while playing for Everton, Chelsea and Arsenal among others and who scored 22 goals in 23 England games, was by then trying to make ends meet in the furniture trade. When Lawton retired in 1956, the maximum wage for a professional footballer was fixed at £15 and it was not until 1961 that the ceiling, by then £20, was abolished. Too late for Lawton and a whole generation of top class players who extended their careers after they were no longer able to play at the highest level by signing for Southern League clubs like Romford who at various times were able to field such famous names as Ted Ditchburn, Trevor Ford and Malcolm Allison.

Tommy Lawton during his Arsenal days. Picture: Arsenal FC

While Malcolm Allison went into coaching and television, many retired players of his era, most in fact, had to find work outside the game. Ditchburn ran a successful sports shop in Romford and many of his contemporaries went into various other careers, becoming publicans or salesmen and the like. Common among them was the necessity to find paid employment after their playing days were over and while top players are now often sought after for jobs in the media, a lot do not have the pressing need to find a well paid job to maintain their lifestyles. And if today's top players ever feel the need to increase their earnings while they are still playing, there are always clubs somewhere in the world, sometimes in unlikely places, willing to give them another payday. At one time it was Italian clubs who represented the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow, Spain has always been another country where untold riches could be had by the top players and of course with sponsorship and Sky TV money the English Premier League has in recent years been a big draw for world class players. But now there is a new kid on the block, an unlikely one perhaps, but one which is attracting some big names and paying big money for them, and that is China.

Romford FC 1961 featuring Ted Ditchburn, Trevor Ford and Malcolm Allison.

Football the Chinese way has seen Chinese Super League side Jiangsu Suning pay a record £38 million for Alex Teixeira (who preferred them over Liverpool when he left Shaktar Dontetsk) and  Guangzhou Evergrande have signed Atletico Madrid’s Jackson Martinez for £31million, while former Lille and Arsenal forward Gervinho recently joined Hebei China Fortune from Roma for £13.7m. Ex Chelsea and Newcastle forward Demba Ba signed for Shanghai Shenhua for £9 million from Besiktas and Chelsea offloaded Ramires to Jiangsu Suning for £25 million. Apart from the players, Chinese clubs have also been able to attract top managers like Luiz Felipe Scolari (Guangzhou Evergrande) and Sven-Goran Eriksson (Shanghai SIPG). So while the Chinese economy may have hit the buffers in recent months there still seems to be plenty of money sloshing about, in football anyway. Take Hebei China Fortune, for instance. Formed only five years ago, they have been able to splash out £13 million on Gervinho and have also paid big money for the Brazilian, Edu thanks to their backing from real estate developers China Fortune Land Development, a company worth US$12.7 billion.

Alex Teixeira. Picture: Evening Standard

So why, with all that apparent wealth in Chinese football, did Chancellor of the Exchequer George Osborne announce a £3 million grant to grassroots football in the country last September? I confess that the story passed me by at the time, but it has gained more publicity since the recent transfer window saw Chinese clubs start waving their cheque books. Back in September, Osborne said "Grassroots football plays an instrumental role in UK life, and it is brilliant to be able to spread that to China. This fantastic scheme which will bring new opportunities to young people across China will also help bring increased awareness and investment into the UK football sector." Osborne is right; grassroots football is important in the UK, so rather than invest £3 million in the game in country five thousand miles away and where the game is already apparently very wealthy, why not invest the money here?

And if Chinese clubs can spend up to £38 million on a single player, can they not invest their own money in their domestic grassroots game? Meanwhile in England, grassroots football has seen player numbers fall, clubs disband, facilities and pitches fall into disrepair or be closed down and non-League clubs hit recently by appalling weather which resulted in non-League clubs  Ramsbottom United and Tadcaster Albion being flooded out of their grounds. Yes, there is money invested in grassroots football by the Football Association, last August they announced plans to spend £260 million in the next four years on what FA chief executive Martin Glenn said at the time would target "facilities, coaching, participation and developing the football workforce." To put that figure into perspective, Premier League clubs spent £859.25 million on transfers in the summer and a further £185 million in January.

Tadcaster Albion's flooded ground. Picture: Andy Charlesworth.

In comparison with the FA's £260 million grant and with the news that the Premier League will invest “at least £1billion” of its £5.1billion television revenue for 2016-17 to 2018-19 on grass-roots football and the like, the £3 million that Osborne is giving to China is small beer and perhaps it is churlish to begrudge it, given Osborne's justification of the spend, that it is "just one example of the ways we can work together with China to benefit both our nations." Except of course that the aim of increasing Chinese awareness of football in the UK inevitably means awareness of the Premier League and is going to be of very little benefit to any part of the game outside the top flight. As far as I can see, neither Ramsbottom United nor Tadcaster Albion received any financial help from the football bodies nor the government in putting right the storm damage to their grounds and one has to question exactly how effectively these large sums of money are being spent sometimes.

The Football Association's investment is scarcely new money anyway; they already spend £50 million on grassroots football annually with very little evidence of tangible benefit given the fact that it continues to decline. Unless at some point in the next few years there is feedback provided on how the FA's £260 million and the Premier League's £1 billion has been spent, with proof that these funds have resulted in clear and sustainable benefits, and confirmation that the £3 million lobbed in China's direction has been of benefit to the English game I am somewhat cynical as to how effectively these monies are being spent. Money flowing from China into English football is only likely to benefit the very top clubs anyway, as the purchase of a 13% stake in Manchester City by China Media Capital Holdings (CMC) and Citic Capital at a cost of US$400 million tends to prove. Certainly I cannot see Chinese entrepreneurs and companies queuing to help Ramsbottom United and Tadcaster Albion repair their flooded grounds.

This is where money is needed...

...this is where it goes. Picture: Manchester City FC.

Given the hand to mouth existence of many clubs outside the top flight of English football, it won't be ex-players like Tommy Lawton writing begging letters in future, more likely it will be clubs; perhaps they should start mugging up on their Mandarin.

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[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tommy_Lawton

Lies, Damned Lies...and Photoshop

They say the camera cannot lie. Regardless whether or not this was originally meant literally or has always been laced with irony, now more than ever it is clearly a falsehood, never more so than with the almost ubiquitous use of Photoshop. We have become used to seeing magazines, movie posters and billboards featuring film stars, models and celebrities whose images have been Photoshopped to within an inch of their lives and these sort of images seem to take up a significant portion of our Facebook News Feed too.

The picture on the left won a photography competition run by Nikon, but was subsequently shown to be an example of Photoshopping. Picture: Facebook.

There is one that has been doing the rounds for a while and which popped up again recently that purports to show a CCTV camera outside a house where George Orwell once lived. Oh, the irony, the post proclaims, a surveillance camera outside the one time home of an author whose most famous work features the all seeing eye of Big Brother. Being somewhat sceptical about the nature of this, I reverse Googled it[1], and guess what? Yes, the house pops up on Google (it's on the Portobello Road in Notting Hill) but if you look at Street View, there is no CCTV camera. There may be some CCTV cameras in the area, but the nearest is apparently about 200 yards away.

This picture has been doing the rounds on Facebook. 

Same house, sans CCTV camera courtesy of Google Street View.

Apart from the blatant Photoshopping of images to introduce imaginary CCTV cameras, another fairly common sight on Facebook is the picture with a caption making some outrageous claim, like the one below.

Not quite the whole truth...

Again, a quick check searching on Google for the image reveals that this incident has been somewhat exaggerated. The school, in Maldon, Essex, did indeed prohibit the pupil wearing the wristband, but solely because it violated the school's dress code, which says that children "are not allowed to wear jewellery, and that includes wristbands, for health and safety reasons because they could get caught." Whether you agree with that or think it is "health and safety gone mad" is a completely different matter from the fact that they did not ban it being worn in case it offended Muslims.

Similarly, the story that Tesco refused to serve a soldier in uniform for fear of offending Muslim customers is another hoax.

...anything but the truth.

Tesco were sufficiently concerned to issue a denial, pointing out that they don't even have a store in Oak Street, London. In actual fact, if you check your A-Z or Google Maps, you will find that in the whole of London there is only one road called Oak Street, it's in Romford and there is no Tesco there.

If your Facebook News Feed is anything like mine, I've no doubt you also come across stories from time to time warning of scams, carjackings, frauds and other nefarious goings on. You probably saw the story that Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg was giving away millions of dollars to random Facebook users. This one was perhaps too big for anyone to swallow and it was quickly debunked, but other stories, stories that have more credence but which are essentially untrue, spread through social media with incredible speed and spread; here are a few I have seen recently.

There's the one about the rat urine for a start. The story alleges that a family (unnamed) on a picnic (location not disclosed) fell ill after drinking from soft drink cans contaminated when rodents urinated on the lids and that one of them died from Leptospirosis, a potentially fatal illness contracted by exposure to the urine of diseased animals. This story began circulating in 1998 and while it is probably prudent to give a soft drinks can a clean before drinking directly from it, there is no evidence that the events described in the story have ever happened.

Likewise there is the tale of a lady being approached by a man in a shopping centre car park and being asked if they would like to sample some perfume, perfume which turns out to be some substance that induces immediate unconsciousness resulting in the victim being robbed. Now this story dates back to 1999, when a woman in Alabama claims to have been the victim of a robbery that was perpetrated in this manner. Toxicology tests on the victim found no trace of any drugs and there are no credible reports of people being robbed in this manner. Outside the pages of fiction it is unlikely that an airborne drug, in the outdoors, could immediately incapacitate someone, well not without similarly incapacitating the person delivering it..unless they were wearing a gas mask, which might provoke some suspicion on the part of the victim, don't you think?

Then there is the story of the woman who is driving along when she is pulled over by what she initially assumes is an unmarked police car. Concerned that this may be a carjacking, the woman attempts to call the police using her mobile phone, but has no signal. Quickly, she dials 112 and is connected to the police, who rapidly surround her and the other car; the man in the unmarked car, the story alleges, is a convicted rapist. This story has been debunked by Dorset police (the incident described was supposed to have happened in Dorset)[2] and while it is true that calling 112 (or 999) from your mobile will connect to any available network if your provider's network is not available, if there are no networks available at all, then there's no way of making the call.

Some stories do have a grain of truth, however. But even these suggest that a single incident, that may have happened many years ago, is still occurring regularly. Take the tale of the courier and the unexpected gift. This states that the victim receives a phone call from a courier company telling them that a package is being delivered for which they have to sign. Shortly afterwards a courier arrives with a basket of flowers and a bottle of wine, but because alcohol is involved and the courier must prove delivery to an adult of legal drinking age, a small credit card payment is required. The courier produces a Chip and Pin device, takes a nominal payment and hey presto, the victim's card is cloned and their bank account emptied. This actually happened to a number of people in Sydney, Australia in 2008 and subsequently a man named David Hennessey was charged with stealing A$30,000 from various local residents. Since then no similar events have been reported but the story continues to circulate, with various other Australian cities, together with cities in Canada and Asia being named as locations for comparable frauds, so while the warning may have had some validity eight years ago, its continued repetition makes it outdated and redundant.

Finally, there's the tale of Dorval, a suburb of Montreal, where in 2015, the mayor is supposed to have refused to remove pork from the menu in school cafeterias despite demands from Muslim parents to do so. This is just a subtly altered version of a similar story set in Belgium that is equally untrue. The city of Dorval denied such claims on their website and the mayor of the town of Ath in Belgium was moved to make a similar denial  when the story about his town began circulating in 2013. Neither mayor ever received any such requests to remove pork from school canteen menus.

From www.ville.dorval.qc.ca

Apart from the obvious harm and distress that urban myths like these spread when they get shared and start to become widely believed, they can be also like the boy who cried wolf, and real warnings may be dismissed. Sometimes it can be difficult to separate fact from fiction, after all so much information on the internet gets plagiarised and checking for the veracity of a story can be tricky; just because two apparently independent websites report the same story doesn't make it true. Too often one site may publish a story based on false information on another site without enough checking taking place.

They say that the only thing you should believe in a newspaper is the date, and that you should check that first. Same goes for the internet.

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[1] If you've not done this, right click on the image and click "Search Google for image."

[2] http://www.dorset.police.uk/default.aspx?page=1417

The Trump Omnishambles

Before Peter Capaldi regenerated as the twelfth Doctor Who, his most well known role was as Malcolm Tucker, the fictional Director of Communications for the British government in The Thick of It and In The Loop. Spin doctor and Prime Minister's enforcer, Tucker uses  rumours, smears, or threats of violence to achieve his twin aims of spinning the party line and keeping ministers out of trouble. I thought of him this week when Donald Trump popped up on television and in various parts of the internet and tried to imagine exactly how Tucker would have handled him. I imagine there would have been lots of swearing and many reference to Trump's barnet; it would not be pretty.

 Warning! This video contains language that some may find offensive...very offensive.

If opinion polls are any guide then Donald Trump appears to be gathering more support than might be expected from someone with what can only be described, from this distance at least, as extreme views. A lot of what he says seems to be prefaced with a disclaimer that he is not "politically correct." Much of what he says could equally be prefaced by a similar statement omitting the word "politically." Look at Trump's thoughts on the internet. He wants to "close it off" to certain groups, children and the so called Islamic State (IS) in particular, without having the foggiest notion of how or if that could be achieved. Like a company director instructing his IT department to develop software to do something that is impossible or impractical or cost prohibitive, he imagines that if he can think of a thing then it can be done. Up to a point he is right that the internet could be closed off, in part. Countries like China and North Korea have done it, but crucially, only for their own citizens; if Trump thinks that because he can imagine blocking IS from using the internet then it can be done, then he is going to have to think again. And blocking the internet, or parts of it, to his own citizens could violate rights of free speech protected by the First Amendment.

 

Trump. Picture: businessinsider.com

But there again Trump has views on free speech; on the one hand he would restrict it for people whose views he disagrees with while maintaining his right to speak as freely as he wishes, even if the views he espouses are objectionable to a lot of people. His views that many Mexicans in the US are criminals and rapists for instance, or that Arab Americans cheered the 9/11 attacks, that Muslims should be banned from entering the US purely on religious grounds, are all opinions that many find repugnant, but the US constitution that he would ride roughshod over for others protects him when he voices his own particular beliefs. His outspoken views have resulted in  some in this country calling for his being banned from entering the UK, which while it might be questionable while he remains simply a Presidential candidate, would be even more problematic should he be elected. And there is the gauntlet that you run when you advocate free speech; sometimes you have to listen to things you find objectionable, but as the saying goes, sometimes you may object to what someone says while defending their right to say it.

There is a popular belief that the USA is quite an insular country; that may well be a myth, but Trump's pronouncements do little to discredit that view. Given the chance he would build a wall to keep Mexicans entering the USA illegally...and he believes he can get the Mexicans to pay for it. Trump wants Apple to build their computers, their iPads ,and their iPhones in the States. Forget the costs involved (Apple manufactures their devices overseas at costs they could not compete with at home), forget the changes to laws necessary to prevent Apple (and others) outsourcing their business and it could be done...but at what cost?

About 670 miles of fencing already exists along the US-Mexico border. It cost $2.4 billion. The entire border runs for 2,000 miles. Picture: Getty Images

Trump's popularity, he leads a number of opinion polls after all, may confuse and surprise many people, but an article in The Washington Post goes some way to explain it. In a nutshell, it said that Trump has simple answers to everything, taps into a dislike or mistrust that many people have of immigrants, that many Americans are sick of the political establishment, and lastly, he says things that people have been afraid to say. Terrorism and other threats to a nation's wellbeing are very real and reasonable fears. Demonising people, exploiting people's fears and their lack of understanding have served many politicians well in many countries for centuries. Trump is just another in a long line of them.

Should Trump's apparent popularity translate itself into nomination as Republican Presidential Candidate and ultimately lead him to the White House, would he be forced to tone down his controversial statements and proposed policies on the world stage? Behind all politicians are a raft of civil servants who understand better than their elected leaders how the world works, how diplomacy works. The real life Malcolm Tuckers wield as much power and influence as elected leaders and would doubtless reign him in should he ever sit in the Oval Office. Even so, based on his pronouncements so far, it seems probable that a Trump administration would be more confrontational than its predecessors.

Trump's appeal seems to be largely with people who feel marginalised, impoverished by a remote, elitist cabal of business moguls and politicians (ironic, since Trump is one of the former and wants be become one of the latter). He promises solutions to problems without asking his supporters to consider what cost they will come at, what sacrifices will be needed.

To those of us on the eastern side of the pond, Trump's campaign has all the hallmarks of an omnishambles[1] and the first real test of his popularity comes this Monday in the Iowa caucus. As popular as the polls suggest Trump is, his advocates might consider that it is wise to be careful what you wish for; sometimes the solution can be just as unpalatable as the problem.

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[1] Omnishambles: A situation that has been comprehensively mismanaged, characterized by a string of blunders and miscalculations.

There's A Place In The World For A Gambler

In 2007, Novak Djokovic earned US$3,920,000 playing tennis. That same year, he alleges, someone offered him US$200,000 to lose a first-round match at a tournament in St. Petersburg, Russia, a tournament in which he did not, in the end, take part. A player ranked as highly as Djokovic, earning the sort of money that a top tennis professional can earn, is unlikely to risk his (or her) career even for a not insignificant amount like $200,000. But lower down the rankings, the temptation to throw a match for a sum that may exceed a player's earnings from not just one tournament, but several, must be huge. When you consider tennis, it is a game ripe for match fixing. Young, up and coming players, or older, journeymen players have to find the money to travel round the world, or at least across continents, to take part in tournaments they have little chance of winning and where the earnings barely cover their outgoings. To have someone offer you a large wad of cash to lose a match has to be extremely tempting.

Novak Djokovic says he refused to take a bribe in 2007. Picture: Sky Sports

Tennis is just the latest sport to find itself involved in scandal. Most recently we saw the International Association of Athletics Federations (IAAF) embroiled in allegations of not just doping, but of covering up doping. This has resulted in Russia being banned from all athletics competitions, putting their participation at this summer's Rio Olympics in doubt, and three senior IAAF officials have been banned for life. A report by the World Anti-Doping Agency's (WADA) independent commission heavily criticised IAAF president Lamine Diack, whose 16-year tenure ended in August 2015 when he was replaced by Lord Coe, who had been vice-president since 2007. Lord Coe has denied knowledge of the corruption that WADA has said was "embedded" within the organisation, and while former WADA president Dick Pound views Coe as the best person to clean up the IAAF, one has to look at that with a certain amount of scepticism, especially when Pound's own report says, "The IAAF council could not have been unaware of doping and the non-enforcement of applicable anti-doping rules," given that Coe was on that council.

Is Lord Coe the right man to restore the IAAF's image?

The four time Olympic gold medallist and now broadcaster Michael Johnson believes that the IAAF scandal surpasses that which has engulfed football's governing body, FIFA, in recent years and the goings on at FIFA have generated enough column inches and involved more high ranking officials than any sporting scandal of previous years. Add to football and athletics the spot fixing scandal that cricket found itself in during the 2010 England - Pakistan test series, and the frequent resurfacing of similar allegations, the scandal involving cyclist Lance Armstrong and the widespread belief that doping is endemic in that sport, and it begins to become increasingly difficult to believe that any sport is completely clean. Indeed, who would believe that sports in which huge sums of money can be won, either by participation or, more significantly, through gambling, could be anything other than tainted?

Personally, I have little interest in gambling, the odd flutter on the Lottery or the Grand National aside, but even if I did, I am now effectively barred from gambling on football matches or football related events anyway. In my capacity as a (very) part-time  and voluntary official of Romford FC, a club currently playing in the eighth tier of English football, I am technically prohibited by the Football Association (FA) from placing a bet with conventional bookmakers, spread betting companies, on betting exchanges or even with friends, on the outcome of any match, or any event during a match, or on any other football related matter (for example, the identity of the next manager of Leyton Orient), anywhere in the world. Yes, the FA actually prohibit a player or official of a football club playing at the eighth level of English football from placing a small wager on the outcome of the World Cup Final. You may consider this disproportionate, a very large hammer wielded at a very small nut, but it leaves no room for doubt, no capacity for interpretation, and for that reason, it is difficult to argue with.

All sporting bodies have uneasy relationships with bookmakers. There can be no doubt that the amounts of money that can be made by organised gambling syndicates through the manipulation of events leave all sports open to corruption. Long gone are the days when gambling was by and large limited to the actual outcome of a race or match, now there is so much in game betting on the next corner, the number of red or yellow cards, the next no ball, the next double fault, that bets can be fixed with no one the wiser. One might think that given the vast number of opportunities for manipulation of events that bodies like FIFA or the Association of Tennis Professionals (ATP) would lobby for greater controls to limit the spread of gambling within their sports. The truth is far removed. Sporting bodies seem to have adopted an "if you can't beat 'em, join 'em" philosophy, even if like the English FA, they frown on their members participating in the bookmaker's activities. So while a footballer with Stoke City or West Ham United may be prohibited from placing a bet on any football match, his clubs are allowed to be sponsored by bookmakers, (Bet365 and Betway respectively). The Championship and Leagues One and Two are sponsored by Sky Bet and in 2012 the FA made bookmakers William Hill the "official betting partner" of the England team and the FA Cup while Norwich City have one stand sponsored by Coral, who offer fans mobile betting and at kiosks in the ground during matches. It may be hypocritical for an organisation to bar many of its members from gambling with a firm that it has as an official betting partner, but I suppose they are simply accepting the reality of the situation, that the bookies would exist and would make money from them anyway, so they may as well get some of it back in sponsorship.

 

Football fans can now place bets in grounds during games.

But what could sporting bodies do anyway? Back in 2013 more than £1 million was staked on Asian betting exchanges on a non-League game between Welling United and Billericay Town and while there was never any indication of wrong doing by players of either club, it just goes to show that any sporting event, anywhere in the world, will be gambled on by someone, somewhere else in the world. Any rules put in place by the FA to stop players or officials with English clubs gambling on games are not going to stop the gambling going on in the Far East or other parts of Europe and by extension, risking players being approached with financial inducements to influence events on the pitch.

Welling United's game with Billericay Town attracted more wagers than a Champions League game involving Barcelona played the same day.

To quote Dan Fogelberg, " There's a place in the world for a gambler" but increasingly it is looking like sport is not that place, well not if we want to maintain the illusion of integrity anyway. We all want to watch sports and believe that they are straight, that the outcome has not been fixed in advance either because an athlete has taken drugs or a tennis player has taken a bribe, but while there is money to be made from gambling on sport, I wouldn't bet on it.

As I Get Older

Janet and John taught me to read; Ladybird taught me about the world. The first Ladybird book was published in 1914 and the hardback format, comprising 56 pages (chosen so that book could be produced from a single 40 inch by 30 inch sheet) has been a familiar and comforting sight to millions of British children. That format has gone the way of many things that the early books were written about, like steam trains, but old style Ladybird books remain highly collectable, and it is probably for that reason, and to tap into a seam of nostalgia, that the imprint has been revived with a series of books for adults.

Ladybird Books for Grown-Ups are written and produced in a style that will be immediately recognizable to anyone who read Ladybirds as a child. The content, although presented in that familiar manner, is very different from what we remember. The illustrations may have been taken from earlier editions, but the text, while it mimics the manner of the old, is a parody...or is it? Well, yes of course it is a parody, but one that is just one step removed from the truth. As is so often the case with the absurd or the surreal, it needs to have enough of a root in reality to both amuse and make its point.

I bought Val How it Works: The Husband (Ladybird Books for Grown-Ups) for Christmas, and at 56 pages of large print text and alternate pages of illustrations, it isn't a challenging read, nor a long one, but it is a book that genuinely makes you laugh out loud (there are plenty of books that claim to make you laugh out loud, in my experience very few do). And the main reason it makes you laugh (well, made me - and Val - laugh) is because some of it is uncannily accurate. The husband, it says, "has a very big memory. He can remember football scores (and) all his old car number plates," however, "he cannot remember what his wife asked him to bring back from the shops. This is because his brain is full up, not because he was not listening." 

Easy to remember.

There is a grain of truth here; research suggests that women speak about 20,000 words a day, while men get by on 7,000. Men's brains may not be full up, but there's a possibility that after a certain point, we run out of temporary memory because we cannot assimilate that many words in a day.

Difficult to remember

Apparently, the husband "finds some things very difficult. Being wrong is one of these things." Amen to that, although I somehow think that most people, man or woman, husband or wife, find being wrong difficult, although there is I suppose a corollary, that being wrong should be quite easy, considering how we usually get better at things with practice.

While I find that as I get older I become increasingly like my father (I think most men, for better or for ill, eventually start to morph into their fathers), I have not inherited his DIY skills. Now my father was a man who, coming from a generation for whom 'make do and mend' was a way of life, was adept at most jobs around the house. He was a fairly decent woodworker for instance, making bookcases and frames for home made secondary glazing, skills which I have singularly failed to inherit. I have always felt (and you may consider this a self serving justification if you wish) that DIY is a task which is more likely to be performed successfully if you have the right tools, but given that the cost of buying the right tools might be an expense that cannot be justified for the occasional task, it is often more cost effective to pay someone to do a job. An alternative, as suggested by The Husband , is to improvise, thus a screw driver may be pressed into service to open a jar of pickled onions and a shoe may be used as a substitute for a hammer when putting up pictures. In my experience there are few jobs that do not require the services of a bradawl, while I also find that a screwdriver is probably the most versatile  tool a man can own...sometimes it can even be used for tightening screws.

Men, as the book accurately tells us, find it difficult to talk about their feelings. If you gather a group of men together they will talk about anything but their feelings, even if this means talking about a subject they know nothing about (not that any of them will admit such ignorance). When I have met up with some of my old friends, Val will ask me later about their wives and children; on most occasions I have to admit that beyond being able to confirm that they are OK, I know little or nothing. It is comforting to know that I am by no means unique in this respect, because our invaluable guide suggests that this is typical of the husband.

The Husband also reveals that as he grows older, "he starts to make lots of funny little noises," for instance he "pom-pom-poms as he goes from room to room." I have to confess I do make odd noises at certain times; sitting down or getting up, reaching up for something or just randomly. I also find myself singing (reciting might be a better term for it) random snatches of songs. This does seem a uniquely male trait; I have never heard a woman do it, but I have worked with many men who, in an otherwise quiet office, would suddenly burst into song. It would always be the same song, always the same line - I do it myself, it's a sort of verbal tic, or as the book says, is done to prove you are still there.

As well as this book, I find increasingly that there are things I read, or quizzes that I complete, that prove that as I get older I am becoming more set in my ways and at the same time (and somewhat contradictorily) slightly eccentric, but I am comforted by the fact that while on the face of it some of the character traits described in this book may be thought odd, I am obviously not unusual in exhibiting them. I was going to say that I'm normal in displaying them, but then I remembered that just because something is common or not unusual, it is not necessarily normal.

One of the things that I have always prided myself on is my memory. Increasingly however, I find that it is becoming an unreliable, if not hostile, witness. The only succour I can take is that again, I am not unusual, as this list proves, as apart from any others I find numbers five and ten to be particularly true.

To address number five I have a little notebook for things I need to remember. Now if only I could remember where it is, I'd be laughing.

No Static At All

I bought a DAB radio recently. I didn't intend to, it came with the new car I bought. And I'd not previously considered buying a DAB radio for use in the house because there has never been an incentive to do so.  I'm not alone in that it seems, because while the UK currently has the world's biggest digital radio network, less than half the UK's adult population owned a DAD radio in 2013 (the last year I can find figures for). In fact, in 2013 sales of DAB radios were lower than they had been in 2009. Indications are that, unlike television, which went digital in the UK in October 2012, a complete switch to digital radio in this country is unlikely before 2020.

DAB Radio

 

New car

Despite the anecdotal belief that DAB radio has better sound quality, the fact is that in the UK the majority of radio stations broadcasting digitally do so using a bit rate level of 128 kbps with the MP2 audio codec, which provides poorer sound quality than FM[1].  The techradar website says that "many DAB radio stations in the UK are broadcast at just 64kbps mono using the MP2 codec. That really is mono not stereo. That really is MP2 and not MP3."[2] Not, I'll be honest, that that means much to me in terms of what I'm listening to in the car. Since my stations of choice for listening while driving are generally talk stations like BBC Radio 4 and Radio 5, the difference I am enjoying is that the latter station, which is only otherwise broadcast on Medium Wave, has lost the "snap, crackle and pop" that you associate with MW. I cannot detect any discernible difference in sound quality between FM and DAB, however, except that DAB has a tendency to break up when I drive into a multi-storey car park and the signal disappears for a split second or so every now and then. But then listening while driving is perhaps not the best time to compare audio fidelity.

What I do like about DAB is the choice. Scrolling through the list of available stations I have found a few that speak to me as a man of my age, principally Absolute Radio 80's, which, as the name suggests, plays music from the 1980's. We all probably have a decade that we remember with more affection than any other, a decade we would happily travel back to and experience again, given the chance, and for me that decade would be the 1980's, for a whole host of reasons. And it's the music that evokes such memories and transported me back thirty odd years, music from Prefab Sprout and Aztec Camera, Culture Club and Queen, The Rolling Stones and The Cure; a sound track to years when I was in my 20's.

There was some great music produced in the 1980's with Thompson Twins and Steve Winwood just two of the acts that would get in my all time Top Ten, but surpassing them all, the album that for me is the 1980's, would have to be The Lexicon of Love, by ABC. In fact I would go further than to say this is the album of the 1980's, it has to be in my personal top five; if I ever had to compile a list of Desert Island Discs, this would be the first one on the list, which may come as a surprise to those who know me and my particular taste for prog, from Genesis to Big Big Train, from Yes to Porcupine Tree.

What is it about The Lexicon of Love that is so special? Firstly it is the medium it was initially released in, that is to say, vinyl. The norm for a vinyl LP being around twenty minutes per side, ABC's album comes in at 37 minutes 25 seconds. Concise, lean and without a wasted second or any padding, this album is an exemplar of how to make a pop record. The tendency today to pad a CD out to over an hour with superfluous remixes and demos of dubious merit did not apply in 1982 when this was released, because although the first commercial CD was released that same year[3] it wasn't until 1985 when Dire Straits released Brothers In Arms that the UK CD market took off.

Secondly there's the sound. The lush strings and sax combine with the more typical pop sound of guitars and keyboards in a way that no other album before or since has achieved in my opinion. And it's infectious, the sort of album that you want to sing along to (in my case, in the car, alone, as my singing is terrible). I'll admit that the lyrics aren't especially deep, although they are at least better than on a subsequent ABC album, Beauty Stab, where "mustn't grumble" is rhymed with "apple crumble" (the song is That Was Then But This Is Now), however this album is testament to the saying, "the whole is greater than the sum of the parts," and the parts are pretty damned good anyway. After the austerity of the 1970's, aka the decade that style forgot, the 1980's bands like ABC and Duran Duran were at the forefront of the fashion parade and the whole package of The Lexicon of Love, including the album sleeve screams "style!"

In 1978, Steely Dan promised "FM (No Static at All)" and despite the claims made by DAB's supporters, I repeat that I haven't detected any real difference in sound quality between the formats. Whether the future is FM, or DAB, or internet radio however, there are two elements of music radio that tend to have me reaching for the off button; adverts and DJs. Television adverts are bad enough but there must be a special place in Hell reserved for those who write or produce radio ads, although given the fact that by the sound of most of them they are done on a budget of a couple of quid, it should come as little surprise that they are so dreadful. As for DJs, even the best of them spout such inane drivel and give the impression that needletime[4] is still in place (or more probably they just like the sound of their own voices). I once heard a critic (it may even have been an actual DJ) state that ultimately all DJs chatter is as interesting as the temperature of their coffee and it is difficult to argue with that.

If nothing else, DAB radio, or more specifically Absolute Radio '80s has taken me on a nostalgic trip down memory lane and made me dig out some CDs that hadn't seen the light of day for a while, but The Lexicon of Love is the one playing in my head.

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[1] Source: Wikipedia (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_radio_in_the_United_Kingdom#Criticisms_of_DAB_in_the_UK)

[2] http://www.techradar.com/news/car-tech/why-dab-radio-in-the-uk-is-broken-and-how-to-fix-it-1217586

[3] Billy Joel: "52nd Street" was released in Japan in 1982.

[4] Needletime was the restriction that existed limiting the amount of recorded music UK radio stations could play in a 24 hour period. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Needle_time