Words That Make Me Go "Aaaargh!"

Sticks and stones may break my bones, but words will never hurt me. But there are words that offend me, or rather they irritate and annoy, infuriate and exasperate. There are some words and phrases that make me want to yell “aaargh!” whenever I hear or read them. These are some of them.

“Not the result we wanted. We go again.”

This one pops up frequently on Twitter, invariably posted by a footballer, to express their disappointment at a particular result. Usually it appears after a defeat, but sometimes it comes after a drawn game the tweeter expected to win. Since the object of most sports is to win, “Not the result we wanted” is clearly a truism. “We go again,” says no more than they will try and win the next game. We can therefore boil this down to “We lost today, but we’ll try and win the next game,” which in the immortal words of Basil Fawlty, is “stating the bleedin’ obvious.”

“Time to draw a line under it and move on.”

We’ve been hearing this a lot recently, what with the daily dose of Tory misdeeds sometimes involving more than one scandal of some description or another. In the aftermath of Wallpapergate and Partygate, and after the PPE procurement shenanigans and the eye-watering cost of the Test and Trace app, we are all implored to draw a line under events that embarrass politicians and the government and move on.

Tony Blair, attempting to draw a line under the WMD fiasco.

In fairness to the current government, this is nothing new: I’m pretty sure we heard similar after the Iraq war/Weapons of Mass Destruction debacle, for example. Time to move on has been wheeled out by politicians of all persuasions, seemingly since time immemorial and means, “Please, for the love of God, stop talking about this, I know I’m bang to rights but I’m not going to resign or apologise.” The regularity of the expression’s use is as tedious as it is objectionable, the belief of the entitled that their transgressions are too trivial to be pursued.

“Partygate”

Not Partygate itself, although goodness knows that is outstandingly bad enough, but the suffix “-gate” when added to some sort of scandal, outrage, or misdeed. Since the original Watergate affair, named for the Watergate Office Building in which the Democratic National Committee’s offices were burgled, there have been just shy of 300 '-gate' scandals or controversies, according to Wikipedia, and probably countless more that haven't been widely publicised. It is without doubt, time to draw a line under the expression, stop using it, and move on.

If we don’t stop, we might find that were Andrew Marr involved in some scandal, we’d have to call it Marrgate. If there were some outrage in the Kent seaside town of similar name, that would be Margategate. If Kew Gardens were embroiled in controversy, we’d have to call it Gardengate. And, if there was a further scandal centred around the Watergate Building, would we have to call it Watergategate?[1] Thankfully, when Bill Gates and his wife Melinda announced their intention to divorce, there was no Gatesgate, although inevitably that did get wheeled out to describe the story that some Americans thought that Gates wanted to use the coronavirus vaccine to microchip them.

Adding “-gate” to the controversy over incidents like the cost of decorating the flat in Downing Street (Wallpapergate), or Keir Starmer’s beer and curry in Durham (variously Currygate or Beergate), the parties in Downing Street (Partygate), and Boris Johnson diving into a fridge to avoid a reporter (Fridgegate), is lazy, trite, hackneyed, and so outmoded that it really needs to stop.

I imagine that many hacks who use’-gate’ are too young to remember Watergate, and genuinely think it is normal English usage – and perhaps now, it is (sadly).

“Let me be perfectly clear about this/We’ve always been perfectly clear about this.”

As soon as someone says “Let me be perfectly clear about this,” then you can be fairly sure that what follows will be opaque at best, will contain much obfuscation, and may be a downright lie. In the same way, “We’ve always been perfectly clear about this” will lead to a statement that claims to be in complete accord with previous pronouncements on the subject, but which totally contradicts them. In certain circumstances this leads to someone denying ever saying something even after being shown video evidence of them saying it, as you can see from the video embedded in this article on The Guardian website: https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2017/dec/23/us-ambassador-netherlands-apologises-fake-news-interview-muslim-no-go-zones)

The counter intuitive stuff

I’m not talking about any particular phrase or expression here, but rather the explanation that defies logic, the statement that bends facts into something so breath-takingly egregious that you have to pinch yourself to be sure you actually heard what you thought you heard.

It has been reported in the media in recent days that there are fears there could be power cuts this winter. A "reasonable" worst-case scenario predicts major gas shortages in winter if Russia cuts off more supplies to the EU, which could lead to power cuts for up to six million households. It’s easy to imagine a government spokesman spinning this as a positive rather than a negative, explaining that power cuts will help those on low incomes to budget their fuel bills more efficiently by reducing their energy consumption by as much as 180 hours per month, resulting in considerable savings.

In much the same way, in the event that there were food shortages and rationing had to be introduced (unlikely, I hope), then I have no doubt that, in answer to TV interviewers saying that this was a terrible state of affairs, some minister would proclaim that on the contrary, the British people were grateful for this opportunity to better balance their diets, to eat more healthily, and to have the strain on their budgets eased by being given the opportunity to buy less food.

Like Humpty Dumpty, when politicians use a word it means what they want it to mean, not what we mere mortals usually expect it to mean. Last week Chancellor Rishi Sunak said, with a completely straight face, that his ‘temporary, targeted, levy’ on the energy companies was not a windfall tax, but  actually a tax on windfall profits. Interviewer Chris Mason’s incredulity when Sunak said this was palpable.

Rishi Sunak - It's a tax on windfalls, not a windfall tax!

So inured have we become to alternative facts, fake news, and barefaced lies, that the Prime Minister lying to Parliament, or a government minister spouting falsehoods in TV interviews has become so completely unremarkable we don’t even notice most of the time, and nor do many interviewers, who seem content to allow such nonsense to be spouted, unchallenged.

For that reason, I believe that the time has come to have teams of full-time, real-time fact checkers in the House of Commons, and present in radio and TV studios, who could sound a QI style klaxon every time a falsehood is uttered. It would make PMQs very entertaining indeed!

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[1] If I thought that my idea here was original, but a quick Google search shows that David Mitchell and Robert Webb got there first (and funnier). 

Still Shirking From Home

Back in 2013 I wrote a blog about working from home (see Shirking From Home), in which I wrote that, “Some people are opposed to home working on principle and in my experience these people’s prejudices are based on their conception of how effective other people are when they work at home” and recent comments from journalists, radio and TV presenters, and politicians have given me no reason to change that view; if anything, it has reinforced it.

There remains a perception that working from home means skiving and shirking, that workers are more productive in an office, and management can only effectively monitor what is being done, and by whom, in an office environment.

The interesting thing about the negative and critical statements being made about working from home is that by and large, the comments and views are not being expressed by employers, but by commentators and politicians.

Thus, we have LBC presenter Nick Ferrari criticising civil servants for continuing to work from home and 'staying in their pyjamas,' and telling someone who called in to his show that they should be paid less because they weren’t working as hard at home as they would in the office. His fellow LBC radio show host, and sister of the Prime Minister, Rachel Johnson claimed on her programme that working from home actually meant being people were “on their pelotons” and “watching Netflix.”

On Good Morning Britain, Richard Madeley told viewers that workers need to be back in the office so that managers can monitor their work, while in a bizarre flight of fancy, Camilla Tominey, writing in The Telegraph, claimed that “Home working is a middle-class Remainer cult.”

As far as I am aware, Ferrari, Johnson, Madeley, and Tominey are not employers, nor do they provide any evidence to back up their comments. They are passing their opinions and prejudices off as fact in much the same way as a saloon bar bore regales his audience with ‘facts’ that are nothing more than the product of their febrile imagination.

We have heard from one employer however, Lord Sugar, who echoed Rachel Johnson by saying “It's time for everyone to get off their backsides — and their Pelotons — and get back to work.” According to Lord Sugar, the pandemic has unleashed a workshy, entitled culture in which people demand — and are allowed — to work from home. It’s true that the coming of covid accelerated the trend for working from home, and it’s just as well that it was possible for so many people, otherwise the effects of the pandemic might have been even more severe for businesses and commuting workers alike.

People who have spent most of the last two years working from home quite efficiently and effectively, should not be bullied into returning to offices by chat show hosts and journalists. Some employers will want to carry on as they are, some will want workers back in the office, and others will adopt hybrid schemes with some home working and some office working. All of these approaches are valid, and which is adopted should be on the basis of the best interests of employer and employee alike.

The idea that working from home is a skivers charter, that home workers are all on their pelotons or watching Netflix instead of working is a lazy and inaccurate trope. Okay, so some possibly are. There probably are people who work from home and don’t pull their weight, but they are also likely to be the sort of people who would do the same in the office.

In fact, I would argue that it is easier to look busy but do very little in a busy and fully staffed office than it is at home. It seems not to have occurred to Sugar, Johnson, Madeley and Tominey that the managers of people working from home monitor their output.

Naturally though, there are people who will take advantage of working from home to do the bare minimum, people who are easily distracted and wander away from the task in hand to do something not work related. Here’s what one man, whose home is also his office, had to say on the subject: “My experience of working from home is you spend an awful lot of time making another cup of coffee, and then you know, getting up, walking very slowly to the fridge, hacking off a small piece of cheese, then walking very slowly back to your laptop and then forgetting what it was you're doing.” Worryingly, the man who said that is our Prime Minister.

Perhaps the culture the Prime Minister describes is more prevalent in the public sector in general, and his office at home in particular, than it is in the private sector. It certainly seems to be the case that civil servants have been getting it in the neck for not wanting to return to the office, with Jacob Rees-Mogg recently touring his own department and leaving messages on the desks of absent workers lamenting their absence and looking forward to seeing them in the office soon. 

Mogg's tactics did not find favour even with some of his Cabinet colleagues as both Grant Schapps and Nadine Dorries – who appropriately called Mogg’s approach ‘Dickensian’ – disagreed with the Minister for Brexit Opportunities and Government Efficiency, not that we seem to have seen much in the way of Brexit opportunities, and – like military intelligence – Government Efficiency is an oxymoron if ever I heard one.

Mogg has hinted that civil servants who refuse to return to the office could see their pay cut, and that echoes Nick Ferrari’s comments. It could be argued that without the cost of commuting, home workers are better off than their office bound counterparts, but the home worker needs to heat and light their home and pay for broadband and office peripherals that they would normally be supplied with. You may remember that when the pandemic started, MPs were allowed to claim up to £10,000 to cover additional office costs incurred as a result of the coronavirus such as buying laptops and printers, a benefit not afforded to the majority of workers whom the government implored to work from home.

Working from home – either full-time or in a hybrid format – is here to stay, no matter what the Johnson’s and Rees-Mogg (who apparently doesn’t have a computer on his office desk and has the air of a man who requires his staff to transcribe emails onto parchment with quill pens for him to read) may say.

Pre-pandemic, views on working from home were, as I said back in 2013, based on commentator’s perception of other people, and the view – formed and enhanced more by opinion and prejudice than fact – has crystallised, but I would bet that those saying such things would, were they working from home, have a more favourable view of their own effectiveness while doing so.

The Nurse and the Chancellor

Elon Musk’s purchase of Twitter has set the cat among the pigeons (or perhaps that should be the Mountain Bluebirds, for that is the bird the Twitter logo is based on) with concerns raised that in the name of free speech, Musk’s version of the social media platform will mean less moderation and the reinstatement of previously banned individuals like Donald Trump, Katie Hopkins, and Steve Bannon.

A Mountain Bluebird

Musk has described himself as “a free speech absolutist,” which infers that Twitter will indeed reduce moderation and reinstate those previously banned Twitterers; absolutism suggests that nothing is off limits, and that in the name of free speech, anything goes.

Elon Musk is paying $45billion for Twitter. Picture: Financial Times

What constitutes free speech depends, to an extent, on who is saying what, and who is hearing it. One man’s free speech is another’s hate speech; free speech is not the right to say whatever you like about whatever you like, whenever you like.

Just as free speech must allow the publication and promulgation of views that are not universally popular, so it must also bar hate speech, viz the incitement to violence and racial, sexual, and religious discrimination. Musk’s absolutist stance does not automatically infer that Twitter will no longer moderate or remove such posts, as some are claiming, although the extent to which Twitter’s policies in this area changes, if it changes at all, will no doubt be closely monitored.

Social media allows anyone to express an opinion on absolutely anything; one might say it positively encourages and provokes people to express opinions on any subject, even those of which they are particularly ignorant.

A lack of knowledge of a subject is no bar to expressing an opinion, it actually seems to be a positive incentive for some people. Thus, Bob, a retired bus driver from Barrelmouth-on-The-Woe, feels perfectly comfortable – entitled and obliged, even – to post his views on subjects as diverse as gender identity, Brexit, covid, Partygate, the tax affairs of the Chancellor’s wife, or the relative merits of Lionel Messi and Christiano Ronaldo. Funnily enough though, as soon as someone like Gary Lineker or Gary Neville posts an opinion on politics, Bob will tell them to “stick to football,” on which basis of course, Bob ought only to post on the subject of bus driving. *

For many people, being an ex-professional footballer means you can't comment on politics

Bob is wrong about the Garys, they have every right to make comments on any subject they wish, as does Bob. I suppose that Bob’s point would be that Gary Lineker (8.4m followers), and Gary Neville (5.1m) have much more reach than Bob (102 followers), but there is plenty of balance to views that Bob finds objectionable.

Meanwhile, Bob will post his views on topics like covid – perhaps on the effectiveness of masks or vaccines – and will do so in a thread started by an expect (an epidemiologist or virologist, perhaps), and will challenge that expert’s view. If Bob and his ilk are themselves challenged, they will doubtless claim that they have “done their research,” by which they mean they have searched online until they have found a random article from someone who is probably equally as unqualified in the subject, but which supports their point of view. This, they believe, adequately rebuts the argument of an eminently qualified and experienced expert. Google allows everyone to believe that they are an expert on a subject from reading a single webpage. In 1984, George Orwell wrote that “ignorance is strength” – he might equally have said that ignorance is knowledge.

Another interesting Twitter phenomenon relates to what might be called poverty shaming, whereby anyone who is finding it hard to makes ends meet is instantly blamed and shamed for their situation. A recent BBC news item about a part-time nurse who cannot afford enough food for her and her three children, meaning that she sometimes has to go without, provoked a predictably hostile response from some Twitter users. “She should go full-time, then“ wrote one. Another asked where the children’s father was, another suggested that she could adequately feed her family for 50p per day by eating nothing but Asda’s budget pasta, and that they would love to know what she spent her wages on, implying that they were being spent on fripperies rather than essentials.

Similarly, despite the cost of living crisis and the spiralling house prices that make it increasingly difficult for first time buyers, Kirsty Allsop thinks that giving up Netflix and take-away coffee will enable people to save enough to get on the property ladder, and plenty agree with her. I do take her point; giving up Netflix and a Starbucks a couple times a week ought to save you enough for a deposit on a one bedroom flat in my area – provided you’re prepared to wait 35 years.

People in the situation the BBC’s nurse find themselves in are often berated for owning a flat-screen TV (is there any other kind these days?), a smartphone (increasingly an essential rather than a luxury), and having a broadband connection (try working from home or having your children do their school homework without broadband). Perhaps our nurse and her children should come home from work and school and entertain themselves with books and board games until the lack of natural light forces them to go to bed sustained only by 50 grams of plain pasta.

Those who criticise our nurse and her ilk are probably just one pay packet away from being in the same situation themselves. The poverty shamed often find themselves in their situation through little fault of their own. Perhaps they have separated from their partner and had to reduce their working hours to look after their children, and now they are faced – as are we all – by an increase in the cost of living unlike any we have seen for fifty years. The poverty shamed are often depicted as feckless wastrels, demanding to be provided with luxury on benefits, but many are honest and hardworking, and have just fallen on hard times. That fact that 40% of Universal Credit claimants work FULL-TIME suggests that the problem lies elsewhere, and as costs rise and wages don’t keep up, this issue will get worse.

Oddly, those who criticise our impoverished nurse are equally likely to laud multi-billionaires like Elon Musk and Chancellor of The Exchequer, Rishi Sunak, and to admire the fabulously wealthy and their canny manipulation of tax laws to reduce their liabilities.

It has been suggested that instead of paying $44 billion for Twitter, Musk would have better used his money to give every one in America a million dollars; he would still have had $7 billion left. That was never going to happen, but now he has spent that money he will probably want to see a return on his investment, will we see some changes to the platform, like the introduction of adverts, or a fee to skip them, as is the case with Spotify and YouTube? (Edit: It has been pointed out to me that this maths is way, way out! To give everybody in America $1m, you'd need over 300 trillion Dollars. In my defence, these weren't my maths, but I should have checked rather than take them at face value. All a bit irrelevant in that no one is ever going to give everyone in a country a slice - no matter how large or small - of their fortune).

Finally, for those concerned about changes to Twitter, especially the platform’s policy on free speech, I leave you with these words from Curtis Stigers: “Oh damn now twitter isn’t gonna be friendly & warm & loving anymore.”

* Bob is a fictitious character, of course, but I'm sure we've all come across Bobs. 

 

Living With Covid

Government policy in England is now that we live with covid. If the success of that policy is measured by the number of people who are indeed living with it – that is to say, they have covid – then it has been a remarkable success.

One in thirteen people in England had covid during the week to 19^th March, that’s a whopping 4.9 million people, a record number for the pandemic.

When the next set of weekly figures are released, I would guess that that the number will be even higher. In all, there have been 21.2 million cases of covid in the UK since the pandemic began and the number of people we know who have it will soon be greater than those who have not. You'll be a member of a minority group if you haven’t had it. At present I know of more people who have covid, or who have recently had it, than at any time since the pandemic began in March 2020.

It came as little surprise to me that, after two years of successfully dodging covid, I succumbed a week or so ago, and I have a pretty good idea where and when I picked it up.

I first thought that I had something on Friday 25^th March, when I woke up with a sore throat. Whenever I get a cold, it starts with a sore throat, and I had a cold a few weeks ago that started with a dodgy throat. That cold was the mildest I can remember, but I had taken the precaution of doing a lateral flow test then, which had been negative.

On this particular Friday I was keen not to be positive as in the evening I was due to see Genesis at The O2. Having paid a princely sum for my ticket, and having had the show cancelled twice already, it was with some trepidation that I dropped the fluid into the LFT device, and waited. To my enormous relief, it came back negative, although I was quite probably positive already. Apart from the sore throat, which abated during the day, I felt perfectly fine.

I apologise profusely to anyone I may have I passed covid on to at The O2; clearly I must have had it, because the following morning, when I took another LFT, it came back positive.

The next step was to book a PCR test – a week later and that would have been more difficult, since free LFTs and PCRs have now been withdrawn, and all the testing centres have closed. Donald Trump was rightly ridiculed at the start of the pandemic when he said that the only reason the USA had record case numbers was because they were doing more tests than anyone, and our government seems to have taken that view on board – make it harder for people to test, and watch the case numbers tumble (or not, it seems).

Booking a PCR was simple, and half an hour after logging on to the government website, I’d booked a test, driven there, taken the test, and driven home again. Twenty four hours later I got an email – the PCR was positive, which was no surprise.

By any measure, I have been lucky. On the Saturday I was blowing hot and cold, had a sore throat, and a cough, and felt a bit weary, a bit like a cold.

Over the next few days, the sore throat abated, I felt less weary, and the only real symptom was the occasional cough. Unlike coughs I’ve had with colds, this one at least did not keep me awake. Not actually feeling tired did that. Sleeping was fitful to say the least. Overall, the symptoms have been very mild, for which, I thank the vaccines.

Unfortunately, having covid coal boxed things that I had planned. A recording of the BBC show, The Infinity Monkey Cage, and concerts by Simple Minds and 10CC all had to be missed.

Nine days after the original LFT, and I’m still coming up positive. I need two consecutive days with negative LFTs before I can officially stop isolating, but the NHS app says that I can stop on 5^th April, which is likely to be earlier (just), anyway.

I reckon that I caught covid at the Backyard Comedy Club in Bethnal Green on 22^nd March when I saw Paul Sinha’s radio show being recorded (see The Perfect Pub Quiz). Hardly anyone wore a mask at the venue, very few did on the trains and tubes going there and back.

The Backyard Comedy Club is owned by Lee Hurst, an outspoken critic of vaccinations, lockdowns and masks; the irony that I probably caught covid there is not lost on me. While Hurst is entitled to his views, I am sure that without the vaccine I would have been much more ill; had everyone at his venue worn masks, I probably would not have caught covid anyway.

Hurst is not alone in his opposition to masks. Many others are frequently on radio and TV repeatedly expressing similar views, some on the basis that masks don’t do any good; some believe that masks are a tool of government to control us. I am in favour of their continued use in some settings; public transport, shops, theatres, or indoor settings where people are in close proximity. It cannot be coincidence that case numbers have surged since mask mandates were relaxed.

Masks aren’t effective, some people say. I wonder, do those people use tissues, or handkerchiefs when they sneeze or cough? If so, why? If a mask doesn’t stop transmission, what use is a crumpled piece of Kleenex? Frankly, why not just sneeze in other people’s faces?

If masks are no use, then presumably, this age old advice can be ignored?

I confess that I have been wearing masks less since the rules were relaxed – there’s a sort of peer pressure, I suppose – and I now think that I was wrong to do so. To that extent, catching covid is possibly my own fault.

No matter how careful we are, the relaxation of restrictions, concomitant with a more transmissible strain means more and more people becoming infected. The degree to which they fall ill will depend on a number of variables, but there can be no doubt that if the percentage of infected people becoming seriously ill and possibly requiring hospital treatment remains unchanged, the actual number of people falling into those groups will continue to climb.

The herd immunity strategy proposed by the government in March 2020 was quickly discredited and dropped, but given that at that time it was held that it would be achieved once 60% of the population had become infected, increasing case numbers mean we seem to have readopted the policy, albeit by inertia.

Whatever the policy – and government seems not to have any sort of proactive covid policy at all now – we have without doubt reached the point where covid is regarded in much the same way as the common cold.

How appropriate a course of action this is for the unvaccinated or for the immunosuppressed remains to be seen: I have my doubts.

 

 

 

The Perfect Pub Quiz

You’ll be able to hear me on the radio soon, although you’ll have to pay careful attention because my appearance is brief. It’s during an episode of Paul Sinha’s Perfect Pub Quiz (Radio 4, some time in April, then on the BBC Sounds app), in which the audience ask him questions and he asks questions of them.

While most of his questions elicited a simultaneous response from many of the audience, it seemed that I was the only one who knew the answer to his question about two properties on a Monopoly board. That said, there were quite a few questions I couldn't answer!

The question was not untypical pub quiz fare, which was sort of the point of the show, to highlight the difference between the standard pub quiz questions and the slightly more obscure ones.

The point of pub quizzes – any quiz in fact, with the possible exception of University Challenge – is to pitch questions at a level where most people can take an educated guess, or – as Sinha himself said – they will at least have heard of the answer when they are given it.

I have always been a great fan of quizzes. Years ago, I used to take part in a monthly quiz at The Chichester Hotel in Rawreth, near Wickford, run by the local Rotary Club to raise money for charity. It was always very well attended, and very competitive. The team I was in won on quite a few occasions; we had some very intelligent people, with knowledge of a broad range of subjects.

Going back even further, in my teens and early twenties I played for the Romford FC Supporters Club team in a quiz league based on football (see Who Play At Annfield? And Other Questions). We used to take that quite seriously at times, going as far as to revise and practice during the season we actually won the league.

The football quizzes were all based on information in the Rothmans Football Yearbook, and access to the internet was not as ubiquitous as it is today when I stopped quizzing at The Chichester, so the questions were compiled from reference books. The internet has made quizzes easier, and harder. Compiling a set of quiz questions – and I’ve done it a few times – is easier with the internet, but somehow less satisfying. Even with the internet, verifying that you have the right answer to a question – assuming you’re not downloading an off the peg set but are actually making them up yourself – requires some patience and perseverance because, as we know, just because something appears on more than one website, that doesn’t make it right.

Having not taken part in a quiz for some time – years, maybe – I was at one with friends and family last Saturday. We came second (out of twelve teams). How close a second I don’t know, as the scores weren’t revealed, but we might have come closer had we known that a Jaffa Cake is a cake, not a biscuit (those binary choice questions are harder than they sound – well, they are if you don’t actually know the answer), or the name of Benedict Cumberbatch’s recent film, The Power of The Dog (I knew it was the something of the dog, but frustratingly couldn’t recall the full title).

Paul Sinha’s Perfect Pub Quiz, although a BBC show, was not recorded at the BBC Radio Theatre in Broadcasting House, but at the Backyard Comedy Club in Bethnal Green, a more informal venue that better lends itself to the sort of audience participation the show thrives on.

The Backyard Comedy Club was founded and is owned by Lee Hurst, who those of you with long memories will remember as a panellist on the light hearted sports quiz, They Think It’s All Over, in the 1990s. Hurst has some forthright views on covid, and in 2021 he was banned from Twitter for sharing abusive tweets about England’s Chief Medical Officer, Professor Chris Whitty. His many covid-sceptic, and often wildly ill-informed, tweets have frequently provoked ridicule, like this one likening covid to the plague:

Given those forthright views - he opposes masks, vaccinations and lockdowns, for instance, and seems to think that covid is a hoax - I wonder how he feels about the BBC’s requirement that everyone attending provides proof of a negative lateral flow test (LFT) taken within the previous 24 hours when attending their shows, even at his venue?

I guess that the BBC – and other venues that have similar requirements – will have to stop asking for proof of a negative LFT soon, as the provision of free tests ends at the end of March 2022, and I believe that the government website stops accepting such test results then as well (although I may be wrong on that, I can’t find definitive proof either way).

Some people will have no choice but to pay for tests. NHS frontline workers – among others – will likely still be required to take regular LFTs after 1^st April, at a cost of around £50 per month. At a time when many people’s finances are being squeezed to the bone by paltry pay rises and rapidly increasing energy, fuel, and food prices this could be the straw that breaks the camel’s back for many.

On the other hand, I have little doubt that our Members of Parliament, whose pay will increase by £2,200 in April, and who – if they represent seats outside London – can claim the cost of their electricity and gas on expenses (in 2020-21, 316 MPs claimed for their energy bills, many claiming more than the average household’s bill of £1,100), will get their LFTs free if they need them.

Energy prices have got so out of hand that, according to Iceland supermarket boss Richard Walker, some food banks are rejecting potatoes and root veg because people ‘can’t afford the energy to boil them.’

Meanwhile, despite the widespread belief that covid is behind us and that we really no longer need masks, social distancing or testing, cases and deaths remain stubbornly high. As at 23^rd March, the last week has seen 592,459 new cases (up 20%), and 836 deaths (up 122). Is covid over? Seems not; saying it is does not make it so.

Having veered somewhat off-topic, I’ll finish with a thought about quizzes that will have no doubt occurred to many of you.

There are only so many questions that can reasonably be posed in quizzes – especially TV game shows with members of the public as contestants – and only so many question setters for those shows.

As a result, questions get recycled over and over again – it’s not unusual to hear the same question, modified slightly perhaps, but still the same question – in different shows, even two shows on the same evening.

As the blurb for Sinha’s show explains, ‘The problem with quizzes is that the same questions keep coming up… the more quizzes you do the more predictable they get.’ The show ‘kindly explains why the questions are a bit rubbish, before offering up not only a better question, but also the fascinating stories behind the answer’.

For those reasons, I recommend you have a listen to Paul Sinha’s Perfect Pub Quiz, and not just because you’ll hear me.

Music In Cars

Back in the day when I first started driving, car stereos were stolen from cars with alarming regularity. It was just as easy to buy a car stereo in a dodgy pub car park as at Halfords at one time.

We had the stereo removed and stolen from our old Vauxhall Astra once. My brother-in-law was borrowing the car at the time and was mortified, but the funny thing was, the tape deck had packed up and we were about to replace it, so the insurance paid for a new one rather than us having to!

These days the theft of car stereos has dwindled, and car stereos are no longer just radio/cassette players anyway, motor manufacturers now call them infotainment systems, and as well as playing music, they incorporate your sat nav, and depending on your make and model, include all sorts of apps and features that connect to your phone and the broader internet.

Personally, I wouldn’t be without the sat nav in my car. There wasn’t an integral one in my previous car, so I used a TomTom attached to the windscreen instead, except it had a habit of falling off and rolling around the footwell at crucial moments, so I was very pleased when my new car (I say, new it’s seven years old now) came with an inbuilt sat nav.

I was slightly less pleased that whereas my old car had a six CD changer, my new one takes just a single disc, but chances are that if I bought a new car now, it wouldn’t have a CD player as standard, at all. The music industry has pretty much decided that owning physical copies of music is old hat, and only for collectors of oddities, like vinyl, and that we all want to stream or download our music, and motor manufacturers seem to have agreed. Well, I don’t.

Car infotainments systems come with a DAB radio and a means of connecting to your phone and hence Spotify, or Deezer, or whatever streaming service you favour, but maybe no CD player, and certainly no cassette deck!

As far as listening to music in cars is concerned, the audio cassette is the best method there has been, and the best there will be, I’ll brook no argument on that. CDs are great, but cassettes were the peak of in-car musical entertainment.

The best thing about cassettes was making a mix-tape specifically for the car. I did have a small collection of pre-recorded cassettes, but most were either old ones that I later replaced with CDs, or were from bargain bins – the 99p for 20 Great Electronic Hits of the 80s sort of thing – most were carefully curated from my CD collection, and usually had some sort of theme to them.

One might be proggy – Yes, Genesis, Pink Floyd, Peter Gabriel et al – and another poppy – ABC, Human League, Duran Duran – but many were an eclectic mix where Dire Straits would rub shoulders with Luther Vandross, while Kate Bush would ride in on the coat tails of Michael Jackson. Then there would be the live album featuring all the bands I’d like to see in a single setting.

My favourite though, was a mixture of covers and their originals, and different songs with the same title.

It included Comfortably Numb by Pink Floyd, and the Scissor Sisters’ cover version; Lay Your Hands on Me, two different songs of the same name, by Peter Gabriel and Thompson Twins; and Doctor, Doctor, also different songs, by Thompson Twins again, and UFO.

There was an art to fitting as close to 45 minutes of music onto one side of a C90 cassette without chopping off the end of the last track or leaving two minutes of dead tape. And when recording had to be done in real time, there was much more of a personal investment than just creating a playlist in Spotify.

Goodness knows how many of these I happily filled with music over the years.

Spotify is perhaps a necessary evil, personally I use it for two reasons only. Either to sample artists I’ve been recommended, and to then buy their CD if I like them, or occasionally to play stuff I want to listen to, but I only do this if I already own the physical material. It’s relatively cheap, I suppose - £9.99 a month for Premium (which I won’t pay, so I’ll tolerate the ads, thanks) – but that is reflected in the insultingly small amounts that Spotify pay the artists. Not that they are alone, as the table of royalty rates below, shows.

In 2021, Spotify generated revenue of over €9.67 billion, up from €7.88 billion in the previous year, so their sponsorship deal with Barcelona, worth €340 million over five years won’t make much of a dent in their profits, but there again, neither do royalties.

Streaming sites royalties, pitifully small...

...so that this sort of sponsorship deal can be finaced.

Bands in the UK have been hit by a triple whammy in recent years. Derisory royalties from streaming services, Brexit, and now covid (the latter two have ripped the heart out of touring in Europe for most bands). I read recently of one musician who made more money from merchandise at the first live gig he had been able to play after lockdown than he had in the previous twelve months of streaming service royalties put together.

Income from merchandise is vital for many bands, and I tend to buy a t-shirt  when I go to a gig (hence I have a cupboard groaning at the seams with them). Sadly, even this income stream is being squeezed as many venues now charge bands a percentage of merchandise sales, and I’ve even heard of headline acts charging support acts for merchandise sales, which if true, is completely outrageous!

My preference for a physical copy of the music I listen to means I’ll only download if that is the only format available, and I’ll buy my CDs either direct from the band, or an outlet like Burning Shed or Inside Out before I go to Amazon or HMV, even if it means paying a couple of quid more.

I can understand the appeal of Spotify (I’m using it to listening to Luminol  from The Raven That Refused To Sing, by Steven Wilson as I type – but I do own the CD), but as recent events have proven with artists like Neil Young and Joni Mitchell removing their material from the platform, and the fact that some bands are not represented at all – Prince, The Beatles, Adele, and Coldplay among others – it’s not as comprehensive as a proper music collection, and never can be, and it’s so much more enjoyable to listen to music from a physical source.

No matter how listening to music evolves in the coming years, the joy of creating a mix-tape cassette and playing it in the car will never be beat, and that’s a fact.

"So long as it is safe to do so"

The introduction to The Highway Code says,” It is important that all road users are aware of The Highway Code and are considerate towards each other. This applies to pedestrians as much as to drivers and riders.”  While HGV drivers and car drivers will have read The Highway Code, horse riders and cyclists should have read it, and so too should have pedestrians, it is probably only the drivers of motor vehicles who actually have done so (and most only read it so far as was necessary in order to pass their driving test).

 

I’d go as far as to say that if you polled a random sample of a thousand non-drivers, you would be lucky to find ten who have actually read The Highway Code, even though everyone should be aware of it and abide by it.

Although The Highway Code is something that everyone has a vague awareness of, it doesn’t often come to the fore, except when there is some fundamental change, and fundamental change is what we have recently had.

Last weekend, a number of changes to The Highway Code came into force. There is now a Hierarchy of Road Users, ranked as follows:

1. Pedestrians
2.  Cyclists
3. Horse riders
4. Motorcyclists
5. Cars and taxis
6. Vans and minibuses
7. Large passenger vehicles or courier vehicles like buses and HGVs.

Fairly uncontroversial, that: Makes perfect sense, doesn’t it? Pedestrians are obviously the most vulnerable group of road users, although in some ways I’d think that horse riders are even more vulnerable than cyclists, after all a horse is unpredictable and its rider more exposed than a cyclist, but I guess that’s moot and a matter of opinion. This hierarchy may upset some cyclists however, as I’m sure we have all observed some who believe that they are the most important and entitled of road users.

 More contentious however, is the change in priority for pedestrians and drivers at junctions and zebra crossings. Drivers, motorcyclists, horse riders and cyclists should now give way to pedestrians crossing or waiting to cross a road into which or from which they are turning. Road users should also give way to pedestrians who want to use a zebra crossing. The previous rules were that pedestrians only had priority when they had actually started to cross the road.

I do hope that any cyclists who have become aware of these changes to The Highway Code take note and stop for pedestrians who want to cross the road, as I’m sure we’ve all experienced the cyclist whizzing past by a hair’s breadth as we cross on a zebra crossing. It would also be nice if cyclists refrained from cycling on pavements, except where mixed use is allowed, and where that is the case, give priority to pedestrians; that would be a novelty.

Naturally the change that requires motorists entering or leaving a side road to give way to pedestrians waiting to cross has provoked many people to voice the opinion that if a motorist turns into a side road and has to stop sharply to allow a pedestrian to cross, they are in danger of being rear-ended by a vehicle that may have followed them round the corner, and thus this new rule may cause more accidents than it prevents. That was my immediate thought on learning of the change, but I think (and hope) that the problem has been overstated.

 

One of the things about driving, or riding a bike, or simply being a pedestrian, is that our behaviour is ingrained; changing how we behave will take time, hence I’m inclined to think that there will not be vast numbers of pedestrians modifying their behaviour and stepping out into the road with the expectation that motorists will simply stop for them. I’d better caveat that though, since in my experience (and probably yours if you are also a car driver), there is, and has always been, a risk that a pedestrian will blithely step off the pavement and into the road and expect motorists to have predicted this and act accordingly.

Anyone who has driven for any length of time will have quickly reached the conclusion that every other road user is an idiot, likely to do something unpredictable and dangerous at any time, and that it is therefore your responsibility to be aware of that, to predict what they will do, and take the necessary action to prevent an accident. Having said that, I am of course not immune from making errors of judgement on the road, and when I do, other road users may mistake those for being dangerous or unthinking, even though I’m not,

If there’s one change I can certainly get behind, it is the one that bans the use of mobile phones for any purpose. The use of mobile phones for calling or texting was banned in December 2003, but as the number of functions on smartphones grew, this created a loophole as things like scrolling through social media, or taking pictures or videos were not expressly forbidden. Now, use of any mobile device is banned, except for hands free phone calls. Given how often I see other motorists looking down at their phones, engrossed by them and not paying any attention to the road, this can only be a good thing – assuming anyone takes any notice of it.

The Highway Code changes received remarkably little publicity until about a week before they came into force, and when they did appear on newspaper websites they were treated somewhat sensationally. Take this clickbaity headline from the Evening Standard:

 

Referring to the so-called Dutch Reach, in which a driver – or passenger for that matter – opens their car door with their hand furthest from the handle, the paper implies that failure to do so will automatically result in a fine, which is blatantly untrue. It is important to read exactly what The Highway Code says, which is:

 

The purpose of this is to make anyone opening a car door more likely to see a cyclist or motorcyclist and avoid them either riding into the door, or swerving to avoid it. Even before the change it was and offence to open a car door so as to cause injury, punishable by a maximum fine of £1,000 but that doesn’t make such a sensational headline.

While some people have reasonably sounded a note of caution about the changes to The Highway Code - there has been some hysteria in the media, as the Standard headline proved - but what it all boils down to is taking the rules and applying the caveat that appears in more than one place within the Code, which is that whatever you do, you should do it only “if it is safe to do so.”

The last couple of years of covid have proven that British common sense, so often praised by our politicians, is often in short supply, but The Highway Code is largely based on common sense, and if all road users were to apply it a little more, be more considerate to other road users, and apply the “if it is safe to do so” caveat a little more, the roads would be a much safer place. I’ll not hold my breath.

 

 

Thank You For The Music

Going to gigs was what I missed most during the 2020 lockdown. In the few weeks before the country closed down in March that year, I managed to attend two musical events, neither of which were the type of thing that I normally go to see, so it was a relief to get back to seeing the live music that I enjoy in 2021.

Covid naturally made it all a little weird. At the Eventim Apollo I had to show proof of vaccination or a negative PCR or lateral flow test; the Royal Albert Hall asked me if I could prove my vaccination status if I was asked (which I wasn’t). At the Royal Albert Hall, many people were wearing masks – including those sitting next to me – so I wore one too, as I did at the Apollo.

This isn’t a review of the shows I saw, more a brief impression of the year, and in some small way, to say thank you for the music and the bands that played it.

First up, in September 2021, was Fischer-Z at Nell’s in Kensington, a small venue where the audience was quite sparse; not great for the band, but comfortable for my first indoor live event for over a year.  It was just so good to hear live music again, even if the set list featured a lot of tracks from albums I don’t own, but The Worker formed part of the encore, and it was worth going just for that. The only real fly in the ointment was the journey home – it’s a long way on the District Line, and a mile and a half walk home at the end of it.

Fischer-Z

A week later I was at The Congress Theatre in Eastbourne for Go West, who were supposed to be supported by T’Pau, who didn’t appear due to illness and were replaced by Katrina (of Katrina & The Waves). This gig was my wife’s choice and I know only a few Go West Songs (The King of Wishful Thinking, Faithful, and We Close our Eyes, all of which, fortunately, they played), but they were enjoyable, if a little repetitive. Katrina was better. Playing a varied set of her own material – old and new – and covers, I could have happily sat through a whole evening listening to her and her band.

Katrina (& not The Waves)

Go West

Having gone over a year without live music, it was three gigs in ten days as Steve Hackett brought his Genesis Revisited tour to the London Palladium, playing a selection of his solo material, plus the whole of Seconds Out, the seminal Genesis live album. With his band in fine form and singer Nad Sylvan in best Gabrielesque voice, it was – as expected – a brilliant concert. It’s funny though, how frequent exposure to some songs changes one’s attitude to them. I’d never before been a great fan of Shadow of The Hierophant, but for the first time, I really enjoyed it that night. Oddly, Supper’s Ready, a glorious song that all Genesis enthusiasts love, may just have outstayed its welcome – the novelty of hearing it live has worn off a bit - but it featured at The Palladium and it will feature on Steve’s 2022 tour too, as he’ll be reprising Foxtrot.

Steve Hackett

At the end of October it was off to The Royal Albert Hall for Level 42, supported by Johnny Hates Jazz. 

Johnny Hates Jazz

Level 42 are not a band I know especially well – or so I thought. On the night they basically played their greatest hits, and there was little I didn’t at least recognise. They finished their set (pre encore) with Heaven In My Hands, a song that for very personal reasons, I can’t listen to without having a little weep, as I did on the night. Other songs likely to have the same effect, and for the same reason, are A Groovy Kind of Love by Phil Collins, and Marillion’s No One Can (more of which later).

Level 42

From the cavernous Royal Albert Hall to the somewhat smaller and more intimate Chinnery’s in Southend, for my next gig, Lifesigns, at the end of November. Southend sea front in November is a bit bleak, there’s no getting away from it, but the venue – which I’d not been to before – was really rather nice. 

Lifesigns

These days I much prefer a standing venue to sitting – three of 2021’s seven shows were standing – and  this this was my favourite gig of the year. Then again, Lifesign’s most recent album – Altitude – was one of my top two albums of 2021 (Nad Sylvan’s Spiritus Mundi, an at first sight unpromising musical adaptation of the poems of WB Yeats, runs it a close second). I feel a little proprietorial about Altitude, it has to be said, as I made a pledge towards its production.  On the night, John Young and his band played some old material and then the whole of Altitude – glorious stuff. The economics involved in producing an album (even without Brexit and Covid, both of which have seriously affected many bands) and especially for bands like Lifesigns, who are not signed to a major label, make pledges and crowdfunding important means of raising the capital to finance making records.

My favourite new albums of 2021

The night after Lifesigns it was off to my all-time favourite venue, the Eventim Apollo – or the Hammersmith Odeon as I still prefer to call it – to see Marillion (with support from Antimatter). Included in their set was No One Can (mentioned above), a song that has the power to move me to tears. When June died in 1993, the song somehow became inextricably linked with that event, and the wonderful, emotional power of music means that 28 years on from June's death, it made me cry, and amazingly, I'm grateful for that (I’m tearing up just writing this).

Marillion

To round off the year it was a venue that is new to me, 229 The Venue, at the top of Great Portland Street. Another standing venue, and I have to say, one I look forward to visiting again in the near future. IQ were the band I went to see, and as usual, guitarist Mike Holmes donned the angel wings for part of the set.

IQ

I rarely go to gigs without buying some merchandise – usually a t-shirt – and this year was no exception, with additions to my wardrobe from the shows involving Steve Hackett, Level 42, Marillion, and IQ (I already have most Lifesigns t-shirts, and there were none to be had at the other shows, although it’s doubtful I would have bought a Go West shirt even had there been one to buy).

If all goes according to plan, then 2022 should see me at shows from The Musical Box, John Mitchell, Genesis, Sparks, Frost*, Yes, Transatlantic, Steve Hackett, Level 42, and the eagerly awaited return of Porcupine Tree.

Five of those shows have been rescheduled from 2021 – or even 2020 – and, I think you’ll agree, are a somewhat eclectic mix of bands and musical styles – add a ballet and an opera into the mix, and I’m not sure that even eclectic does it justice. My fingers are firmly crossed that they all go ahead.

 

The Quiet Desperation of Christmas Present Buying

On a scale of 1 to 10, where 1 is woefully unprepared and 10 is putting the sprouts on over a low light, how ready are you for Christmas?

Me, I’m about 2, edging 3. The Christmas cards are posted and the decorations are up, which is an improvement on this time last year when, although the decorations had been put up, no cards had yet been written.

There is a trend these days towards not sending cards. Many people prefer to make a donation to charity instead, and from next year, that is what I will be doing, although there may be a few distant and elderly relatives to whom I will still send a card. I said this last year too, but this time I mean it.

Christmas cards mainly benefit the card manufacturers and the Royal Mail. Most years I buy charity cards, but out of the twenty-odd quid I spent on them this year, I suspect that only a tiny percentage actually reached the charities concerned; far better to cut out the middleman and donate directly to the charities.

And the cost of stamps! A First Class stamp is 85p these days (the price of stamps always comes as a shock as I only buy one or two books a year before December). This year I spent over £50 on stamps, money that would be much better employed going to charity.

In these covid affected days it’s nice to receive cards from people you don’t see for months (or years) on end, as at least you know they are still alive (I know that that is terribly cynical, but sadly, it’s true). Less nice is opening a card and half a pound of glitter falling out: If I had my way, glitter would be banned from Christmas and birthday cards, it’s probably not good for the environment anyway. Any pleasure there might be in opening the cards is offset by the immediate need to get the vacuum cleaner out to clear up the mess.

There’s a lot of brinkmanship involved in Christmas card sending as well. This year you didn’t send one to Fred and Nora because they didn’t send one to you last year, when lo and behold, one turns up from them, provoking a scramble to see if there are any cards left you can send and hoping you’ve not missed the last day for posting.

So, bottom line: If you got a card from me this year you’re unlikely to get one in twelve months, and it’s nothing personal. If you didn’t get a card and you usually do, it’s lost in the post I’m afraid, although given that the cards I got the other day had about five different dates in the postmarks, it’s more likely just delayed: I imagine that the Royal Mail are under even more pressure than usual this Christmas.

When it comes to presents, my major problem is a complete lack of imagination. I don’t mind spending the money, but I have a problem with wasting it on presents bought simply ‘for the sake of it,’ or for things that people simply don’t need, or want. We have all felt that quiet desperation of browsing shops with an increasing sense of despair, trying to find a present for someone when we have no idea what they want. Just ask them what they want, you might offer. But half the time people don’t know what they want.

With more and more people downloading or streaming music and films, my old standbys of CDs and DVDs have rather gone out of the window, while online shopping and low prices enabling people to get what they want, when they want it, means that come Christmas, they have most things they need, and can’t tell you what they want. And me, I don’t even know what I want, so how does anyone else? This explains why socks, toiletries, chocolate, and alcohol feature heavily when I open my presents, but all of these things are good, because they will all get used.

Up and down the country there must be millions of pounds spent every year on presents that, once opened, rarely see the light of day again. You know the thing; stores like Debenhams used to have shelf after shelf of gifts that were overpriced novelties, bought by shoppers (including me some years, it has to be said) desperate to buy something for someone for whom they otherwise had no idea what to buy.

The sort of 'hilarious' novelty bought in desperation on Christmas Eve.

Despite (or perhaps because of) Boris Johnson’s best efforts to save it, last Christmas ended up being all but cancelled (unless you worked at 10 Downing Street). How many families up and down the country obeyed the rules and avoided visiting friends and family, only to lose loved ones to covid, meaning that this year, restrictions or not, they will have lost their last chance to see them? Johnson is at it again this year, but as someone tweeted as early as September, “Boris battles to save Christmas 2 is the sequel no one wanted.”

'Boris battles to save Xmas 2020'

'Boris battles to save Xmas - 2021, The Sequel'

We all hoped that this year would be better than 2020, our defence mechanisms couldn’t countenance it not being back to some semblance of normal, but it doesn’t look like our hopes will be fulfilled. A second covid struck Christmas makes one wonder, will it always be like this now?

News of parties in Downing Street and at other Tory locations means that should the government go beyond Plan B this Christmas, the patience of the British public will be sorely tested. Or, to put it another way, if it is announced that Christmas is cancelled again, most people will stick two fingers up and do their own thing, and who can blame them?

I shall be exercising that thing that various politicians laud the British public for having (in spite of overwhelming evidence to the contrary in many cases), and that is common sense, and will be spending Christmas accordingly.

Meanwhile, Dr Nikki Kanani, medical director of primary care for NHS England, is among those who have suggested people limit their interactions with others in the run-up to Christmas. Despite there being no legal limits on crowd sizes (although in stadiums with capacities of more than 10,000 covid passports are required), Dr Kanani advised supporters to stay away from football stadiums. People are advised to ‘prioritise events that matter to them.’ For the diehard football fan, going to the game is the event that matters to them, of course. Going to football, and Christmas with your friends and family - anything emotive in fact – doesn't always go hand in hand with common sense and pragmatism. There are no easy answers and like 2020, Christmas 2021 is going to be hard for many people.

Anyhoo, this is my last blog of 2021 so it only remains for me to wish you all as Merry Christmas as is possible, a Happy New Year, and let’s hope that things improve in 2022.