You Can Take Me Out Of Romford...

I was born in Oldchurch Hospital, Romford in 1958. Romford was then part of Essex and had, since 1937, been within the Municipal Borough of Romford but as a result of the London Government Act 1963, Romford became part of the London Borough of Havering, along with Hornchurch, Upminster and Rainham in 1965. Ever since then there has been some controversy as to whether or not Romford is in Essex since the town has an RM postcode, not an E postcode for London, addresses are written to include Essex (even the London Borough of Havering's address incorporates Essex).  For many people, especially those who recall the migration of Romford into Havering, it is an important matter, one which irks them when Romford is considered part of East London rather than Essex.

Since Essex has been the butt of jokes for many a year, (for example, Q. How do you make an Essex girl laugh on a Saturday?  A. Tell her a joke on a Wednesday); you might think that Romfordians would actually prefer not to be associated with the county, except of course that many Essex jokes merely insert Romford instead anyway, while as far as I know there is no similar array of East London jokes. Supporters of the notion that Romford is in Essex will point to the postal address; opponents will point out that administratively, Romford is in the London Borough of Havering and that you have to drive several miles out of town to find a "Welcome to Essex" sign on the A12 or A127.

You won't find Romford here.

And does it really matter much anyway? Where you live (or wherever you lived that you consider "home", if you have moved away) is a state of mind rather than an address or a Post Code. I consider that I live in Romford; it is in my address, I have an RM Post Code, but I actually live in the London Borough of Barking and Dagenham (the boundary with Havering is a quarter of a mile up the road) and have an outer London telephone number, but Barking town centre is six and half miles away while Romford town centre is only one and a half miles distant.  Dagenham doesn't really have a town centre, for while Dagenham Heathway is just over two miles away, there is nowhere in Dagenham that has a sign saying "Town Centre." Inevitably when one is on holiday, or on a course from work and meeting new people, you will be asked where you are from. In those circumstances I usually go for wherever I think people will recognise, so variously it is London, or Romford or Essex. Even when I lived in Havering, I would never have thought to say that that was where I was from, though and would not have unless I had moved to the village of Havering-atte-Bower.

Boundaries, especially in the outer London suburbs, are becoming more blurred and less meaningful as time passes. London's boroughs are merging or at least sharing services; the municipal rubbish tip up the road where I take my waste that the dustmen don't take is in Barking & Dagenham, but Havering residents can use it, just as I can use the Havering site if I want to. Councils are considering combining some of their administrative functions and just recently children's minister Edward Timpson said that councils should join forces to match children and families far quicker, and that is the way many council services will go in future. Apart from the current ongoing refuse collectors' strike I have never really had any cause for complaint with my local council, certainly a lot of their services are better than those in Havering, from what I hear from residents of our neighbouring  borough, and for those people who would prefer Romford to revert to being part of Essex, I wonder if Essex County Council services would be superior. Being closer to Charing Cross than Chelmsford, Romford is probably better off as part of London than Essex, but I guess what you lose on the swings you might gain on the roundabouts. Administratively being where I live means coming under the control of the Greater London Authority and the local council as well as national government; sometimes it is difficult to really know where would be more advantageous.

There are rumours that boundaries may shift further in the future, that parts of what is now in Havering could be turned over to Barking & Dagenham, some of which makes sense considering the somewhat weird shape of the latter borough, which has tentacles into Havering already, and the parliamentary constituency of Dagenham is now Dagenham & Rainham, thus taking in part of Havering (Barking is a separate constituency).

The northern bit of Barking & Dagenham, making incursions into Havering and Redbridge.

If residents of Romford have an identity crisis, it is nothing as to those who say they live in Middlesex, a county which some might say no longer exists, although such alumni as Russell Grant will forever argue that that is where they were born and where they will always say they are from.

Born in Hillingdon, Middlesex.

No matter how many administrative changes take place, no matter that boundaries change and residents of Romford have been shifted out of Essex and into London, no matter that I live in Barking & Dagenham but call Romford home, it is all a state of mind. After all, you can take me out of Romford, but you can't take Romford out me.

A Midland Odyssey Part Three - An Inspector Calls

For centuries children have been terrified by stories of the bogeyman, of ghosts and ghouls, elves and goblins usually told to them by their parents to scare them into obedience. For a probationary Bank Clerk at Midland Bank, Gants Hill in 1976 the tales told by more senior staff, whether intended to scare or not, related to a creature less mythical but no less terrible than the bogeyman, that is to say The Inspector, or rather The Inspectors since they always came in pairs.

The arrival of The Inspectors was preceded by weeks or even months of gossip. Their progress was charted by rumours of their arrival at nearby branches until one day they would announce themselves at the Enquiry counter, having previously attempted to act nonchalantly in a near deserted Banking Hall in an endeavour to observe any procedural failings from afar.  High on the list of inspectors whose reputation preceded them was Chopper, who it was alleged was responsible for many disciplinary actions, demotions, sackings; the works. It was inevitable that he would be one of The Inspectors who undertook the first inspection that I experienced at Gants Hill. Actually I had little or no interaction with him as I was sufficiently far down the food chain not to attract his attention, although I do recall that whatever role I was undertaking at the time (probably Waste[1]) came under the scrutiny of his less intimidating colleague.

Despite the belief that they were trying to trick people into some indiscretion and get them sacked, The Inspectors were merely trying to make sure we did our jobs by the book, or books, principally the famed Branch Bookkeeping Manual (BBM) and Computer Instruction Manual (CIM), volumes that most people referred to only as a last resort. One of the BBM's sections related to the delivery of mail to the Post Office each evening. Being the office junior and having to walk past the Post Office each evening to get to my bus stop, taking the post was inevitably my job. Now the BBM stated that the post should be taken in a locked leather satchel especially designed for the task and that having used this to take the letters to the Post Office, it should be returned to the branch together with any receipts for recorded or registered mail, which should be stuck in the post book. Naturally this was observed in the breach. I took the post in a carrier bag or just tucked under my arm,  got the bus home and stuck any receipts in the post book the next morning.

Never used.

The arrival of The Inspectors prompted a frantic hunt for the satchel, which when located was found to be in brand new, unused condition albeit that it was covered in a layer of dust. This was a dead giveaway that it had never been used, a state that was remedied by the manager placing it on the floor and jumping up and down on it to give it that "lived in" look.  The post satchel had been found behind the post desk, a location that gave up one or two other goodies, including a cheque which should have been returned unpaid to the presenting bank some months before due to a lack of funds on the drawer's account...oops!

While The Inspectors were looking to ensure that jobs were being done "by the book" the fact that staff often weren't doing so (but obviously had to make out that they were), was usually because doing things by the book was often too long winded or impractical to enable the job to be done within given timescales. Throughout my banking career I often thought that the best way to have taken industrial action would not have been to go on strike, but to work strictly to rule, doing everything by the book. That would have brought the organisation grinding to a halt within a few hours.

Back in those days, even more than today, there were jobs that had to be done that no one questioned but which served little or no useful purpose, as I discovered when I forgot to do one. The Dishonoured Cheque Return was a monthly report sent to Regional Head Office (RHO), detailing cheques that had been returned unpaid for lack of funds during the previous month. One month the diary card that was supposed to remind me to complete this vital task went AWOL and only turned up a few days after the report should have been sent. I was told to compile the report as a matter of urgency and phone RHO to apologise for its late delivery. I phoned RHO, explained the situation and was told, "Oh, there's no hurry, we never look at them anyway." How many other "vital" tasks were there that we undertook in those days that were actually nothing of the sort, I wonder?

One task that was important, one which The Inspectors were keen to ensure we discharged properly, was that procedures relating to the bullion van's visit to the branch were observed. The bullion van would arrive at irregular intervals to pick up excess cash or deliver more notes and coin, and while it was parked outside someone, invariably the office junior (me) was supposed to walk up and down and be on the lookout for suspicious behaviour, i.e. bank robbers. If I saw any, I had a whistle to attract the attention of the police (yeah, right) and a short, rubber truncheon that I am sure would have stood me in good stead against a shotgun wielding thief (not). It is difficult to imagine this sort of thing being contemplated today.

Useless

 

Useful, but not for the purpose Midland Bank intended it.

One day, strolling up and down outside, pretending to look in shop windows and hiding the bulge of the truncheon about my person, I was very mindful of the fact that the previous day there had been an armed robbery on the other side of the road when Securicor were collecting takings from Bejam[2]. I had been cashiering that day, and despite never having previously heard a shotgun fired, knew immediately what the noise was, as did my fellow cashier as we slammed our till drawers closed in unison. A member of the public charged in and said, "Quick, phone the police, Bejam are being raided!" So this was on my mind as I sauntered up and down Cranbrook Road, vaguely aware that across the road a council worker in a cherry picker was fiddling with a street light, changing the bulb presumably. Now, I don't know if you have ever heard the sound made by a bulb from a street light being dropped and imploding when it hits the ground, but it is unnervingly like a shotgun being discharged, as I found out when the council worker dropped the bulb. This proved that had there been an actual raid my whistle and truncheon would have been completely superfluous as I stood rooted to the spot.

By the time I left the bank The Inspectors had become Auditors (at least they had in the departments I worked in) and were less feared since most of them were well known to us. We all knew that they knew how things worked, and audits were (in my experience) generally collaborative rather than confrontational, but no doubt there is still someone out there carrying Chopper's baton!

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[1] Waste, or Remittances to give it its proper name, was the batching up of cheques and credits paid over the counter and preparing those relating to accounts at other banks and branches for despatch to Head Office.

[2] Now Iceland.

Where Does The Time Go? Or, Parkinson's Law In Action

In the weeks and months before I retired, my employers engaged an outside company to provide help with our transition from full time worker bee to full time retired sloth and one of the key things that kept coming up was how would we fill all of those extra hours? I imagine that anyone on the brink of retirement wonders what they will do with this newly freed up time and whether they will get bored, having too little to do? Yet conversations I had previously had with friends who had already retired were frequently along the lines of them now  having too little time, in fact they all wondered how they had previously found time for work.

Now the division of labour in various households will differ, but a recent study by Thomas Leopold at the University of Amsterdam and Jan Skopek at the European University Institute found that in homes where men worked, they did about two hours of housework per day but this only increased to 3.9 hours after retirement. Women's contributions to housework fell only 0.8 hours (from 6.8 to 6 hours) following the man's retirement. What I'd like to know is who are these retired men only doing 3.9 hours housework a day and where can I get a piece of that action?

Considering that pre-retirement I was trying to cram a whole load of household chores into the weekend it occurred to me then that these could in future be spread throughout the week, but it never crossed my mind how much they would spread. It now seems that I have become an embodiment of Parkinson's Law, the adage that "work expands so as to fill the time available for its completion" because there always seems to be something to do. Far from finding myself bored and with little to do, quite the opposite is the case. Actually I do find I get bored from time to time but it is rarely through having nothing to do, and with a wife who works from home, any admission that I am bored and have nothing to do would surely be greeted by her saying, "Well I've got some jobs you can do."

So then, 3.9 hours of housework per day? I don't know how the household tasks are divided up in your neck of the woods, but in ours, pre-retirement I did the cooking, the cleaning (kitchen, bathrooms, vacuuming but not dusting), gardening, shopping, chauffeuring and general odd jobs; Val's responsibilities lay with dusting and the laundry. As you might expect with one party working full-time and the other retired, the division of labour shifted a bit and I now have added laundry and dusting to my repertoire. So 3.9 hours per day seems a little on the low side except for two things. One is that there are some days when I seem to be on the go all day; the laundry in our house tends to get done twice a week and when it is done it takes probably eight hours end to end. Now granted on the days I do the laundry I'm not working for eight hours, the washing machine and the tumble drier are, but that's eight hours of the day that mean I can't stray very far. But then there are other days when I don't have to put so much effort in; probably over the week 3.9 hours may just, on average be about right. So how do people spend six hours a day doing housework? If you do the laundry every day, clean every day and so on I suppose one might stretch it to six hours (especially if you include cooking and shopping).

But how many hours a day count as "work" anyway? Is shopping work (and here I'm only thinking of essential shopping, like groceries and the like)? Is cooking really work? A lot of cooking could be thought of as a hobby; any cooking can be a creative experience and might not really be a chore. A key difference between housework when one has retired, and one which I think makes the Leopold/ Skopek study a bit misleading, is that when one is in full-time employment, then housework is clearly defined as an activity that you cram into the hours when you are not pursuing your paid employment. Once you have retired housework expands, or rather the time available to accomplish household chores increases; and of course given more time there is the opportunity to undertake tasks with greater care and with more rigour than when it all had to be done over a weekend.

Now that winter is over and the weather is improving, albeit with its normal unpredictability and occasional totally unseasonal outbursts, I need to change the pattern of the housework into fewer days and free up some spare time to do some more frivolous and entertaining things since the effects of Parkinson's Law seems to have taken over. Instead, I need to adopt Horstman's corollary to Parkinson's law, which is to say, "Work contracts to fit in the time we give it." I'm going to see if I can reduce that 3.9 hours a day, or at least not do 3.9 hours every day.

An Impatient Man

Patience, they say, is a virtue. I don't know if that makes me virtuous or not since over the years I have been described as both exceedingly patient and also as very impatient. One manager of mine told me that I was impatient with people who didn't meet my standards, a case of not suffering fools gladly possibly, but actually my impatience was usually more often borne of frustration, and sometimes with myself, that I couldn't get my point across or couldn't get someone to understand how to do something. In actual fact, I think that I am usually very patient when explaining things except when the person to whom I am explaining them should understand but doesn't.

It is a widely held belief that we get more impatient as we get older and in some ways that is true; in others the benefit of experience can make us less impatient. The so called impetuosity of youth is merely an expression of impatience and in my case I think that I was more impatient thirty years ago[1] and looking around, I see more impatience among people younger than I than those who are older. What is possibly more common among people of my age (ahem) and older is a certain intolerance, not always the same thing as impatience, but sometimes it's difficult to distinguish one from the other.

Impatience in any age group, but particularly among younger people, is being driven these days by the increasing pace of life and the expectations that people have. Take a simple and trivial example, the internet, or more especially the mobile internet. When the internet was dial up and 2Mbps was the norm, we waited with varying degrees of patience for our pages to load but as speeds have increased there is a tendency to become impatient with our 3G or 4G phones loading pages "slowly" even when we now have speeds of around 15Mbps on 4G.

 Less trivially, it is impatience on the roads that seems to have increased, or at least I seem to have become more and more aware of it. I regard myself as a competent driver, if somewhat risk averse as exhibited by the fact that my usual abhorrence of being unpunctual goes out of the window when I'm on the road, where better late in this life than early in the next is my motto, and so some of the sights I see make me wince. I guess that every motorist has, at some time, hooted at the driver who hasn't noticed that the traffic lights have changed, but impatience seems to have crept in with many people to the extent that if you haven't moved a whole nanosecond after the lights have gone green then they are sounding their horn. When it has happened to me I have had to fight the impulse to put my hazards on, get out of the car and enquire of the other driver if there is anything I can help them with? Only the likelihood of physical violence and the thought that I am actually inconveniencing myself and other non-hooting drivers just as much as the horn happy driver behind me stops me from doing so.

Actually in all the years that I have been driving I think that I have sounded my horn no more than once a year on average, but when I do it seems that I have to aim it at pedestrians more than any other type of road user. Unlike the USA, jaywalking is not an offense in the UK, but I am increasingly wondering if it should be considering that standard of road crossing that I see more often these days.  Just round the corner from where I live is a college, served by a bus stop within ten yards of which is a Pelican crossing and every day, rather than walk those ten yards from the bus stop to the crossing, hordes of people take their lives in their hands and cross behind the bus. Perhaps they think they are saving time, but typically with the amount of traffic on the road they have to wait longer for a gap than they would take to walk to the crossing. And when they do cross they saunter casually across with scant regard for the cars and other vehicles, either engrossed in the music playing through their headphones or by their phones, or as I saw recently, pausing in the middle of the road to light a cigarette. One day there will be an accident and doubtless it will be blamed on the motorist despite the suicidal manner in which these people cross the road. So it is with these people that I get impatient, more for the staggering arrogance that they display in expecting me and other drivers to look out for them rather than taking their own safety seriously.

Another group of people with whom my patience is limited are the shoppers who appear to be constantly taken by surprise when it comes to paying for their purchases. Now I tend to be the type of person who has their money or card ready to pay even when there are five people in the queue in front of me, but at the head of this queue is normally someone who suddenly realises, when the assistant tells them the price, that they ought now to start digging out their purse or their wallet.

My patience also expires when dealing with those people who don't call you back. You know how it is, you phone someone, be it the school or the bank, or a shop and the person you speak to can't help but promises to call back. In these days when being out of contact is nigh on impossible you would think that one would never suffer the frustration of yesteryear when we couldn't stray too far from our landlines for fear of missing that call back, but now with everyone having mobiles there should be no excuse for not getting a call back, and yet so often I have waited for a call, not got one and phoned again. Same goes for people who don't reply to emails, people who claim that my email must have gone to their spam folder, or who swear blind that they have replied even though they patently have not: just how difficult is it to reply to an email?

There is one thing that I have learned over the years though, and that is being impatient is generally unproductive. The people with whom I am impatient don't change because they know I'm impatient with them and my being teed off with them does nothing except put me in a bad mood and raise my blood pressure. The fact that I know this on a rational level does not stop me from being impatient, rather I think that the causes of my impatience have changed; sadly I think that I will remain An Impatient Man.

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[1] "My God," said Val, "just how impatient were you then?"

Not A Matter Of Life Or Death

The late Bill Shankly famously said that football wasn't a matter of life or death, but that it was more important than that: it isn't. At this time of year in particular, as the football season reaches its climax, it stirs the emotions in a way in which probably no other sport does and for supporters of clubs in danger of relegation, the thought of dropping a division, or even out of the Football League like Tranmere Rovers and Cheltenham Town, must feel like a tragedy. But tragedy is an overused word in a football context. Back in 1985 I thought it would be tragedy if the club I supported at the time, Leyton Orient, dropped out of the old Third Division and into Division Four. On the final day of the season, 11th May, O's entertained Bournemouth and nothing less than three points against mid-table Bournemouth would be enough to keep them up. The game ended 0-0, O's were relegated and as we drowned our sorrows in the supporters club bar after the match we became aware of events that had unfolded at Valley Parade, Bradford.

Bradford City had won the Third Division and their last home game against Lincoln City should have been an afternoon of celebration; it turned into a disaster, a tragedy of unimaginable proportions that ended with 56 dead and over 250 injured as the main stand, which was due for demolition, caught fire. As we watched the TV news of the blaze the previous 90 minutes of football we had seen, the whole season in fact, became meaningless. Relegation became irrelevant because come the next August we would be back to watch our team. Over fifty people who had set out to support their club that afternoon never went home, many of those who did make it out of Valley Parade that day probably never had the stomach to return; that was tragedy, relegation wasn't.

Photo: The Guardian

Despite my best efforts to keep matters in perspective however, I am just one of countless thousands, millions even, whose mood is affected by the performances and results of the team I support. It used to be said, in the days when the UK was a manufacturing powerhouse, that Saturday's football results had a direct effect on productivity and absenteeism. If the local team won the workers were happy, and happy workers were productive workers. If the local team lost them absenteeism was higher and productivity lower. In my case the fortunes of my team, Romford FC have distinctly affected my mood this last season.[1]

The season began on a high, with a 4-0 win over Burnham Ramblers last August, but this was followed by an not unexpected defeat at the eventual runners up, Harlow Town. The next two away games were galling however as Boro contrived to lose at Waltham Abbey and Maldon & Tiptree despite leading both games as they entered the final five minutes. Dropping points from winning positions was a feature of the season. Boro led 2-0 against Tilbury, but drew 2-2, lost twice to Soham Town Rangers despite leading in one game and drawing until the final minute in the other, and dropped points at Aveley in a thrilling 4-4 draw having been 1-0 and 4-3 ahead. Heavy defeats were another unfortunate feature of the season; 8-0 at Wroxham, 6-2 at Needham Market, 5-0 at home to Brentwood Town and 6-2 at Thurrock. It was difficult to remain positive as relegation became a very really possibility, however three wins from the last three league games garnered sufficient points to avoid the drop into the Essex Senior League, but it was nail biting stuff.

Two goals by Nick Reynolds in a 3-1 win over Ware secured 20th place in Ryman League Division One North.

The narrow defeats are somehow harder to bear than the heavy ones. When you are 5-0 down at the home of the eventual champions (Needham Market), getting two quick goals back is some consolation, even if the hosts get a sixth, but leading with little more than stoppage time to play and still losing makes for a dispiriting weekend. 

Romford's visit to Needham Market, home of possibly the biggest hedge in football.

In fact, weekends between August and November were generally a bit depressing as we saw only one league win, although there were a few unforgettable cup ties. Having beaten St Margaretsbury (one league below Romford) in the FA Cup Preliminary Round, Boro were rewarded with a home tie against Bury Town from the division above, and on a memorable Sunday afternoon, Romford won by the game's only goal to set up a tie with Kingstonian, also from the division above.

Boro on the attack at St Margaretsbury.

The first game ended goal-less, but the replay at Kingstonian was a match that will live long in the memories of all who saw it. Romford led twice in the first 90 minutes and after K's had twice equalised, Boro nearly won it with the last kick of the match. In extra-time Romford again took the lead only for the home side to run out eventual 5-3 winners. Almost equally remarkable was the 4-4 draw at Aveley where Romford were 1-0 up, 3-1 down and 4-3 ahead before having to settle for a share of eight goals and the points.

It's games like those at Kingstonian and Aveley, even when you don't win, that make memories and then there were the final three wins, after a run of just three in the previous sixteen, that kept Boro up and meant that despite finishing 20th out of 24, the season finished on something of a high. For those of us who don't support Chelsea or Manchester City, or in the lower reaches of the game, clubs like Needham Market or Maidstone United, league titles are a dream rather than a real possibility so you take pleasure in other ways. In Romford's league there are teams with playing budgets that run into the thousands of pounds per week, and then there are Boro and a handful of others who pay little or, as in our case, nothing at all. Just competing with the teams who can afford to recruit ex-Football League or noted non-League players is success to a degree. In a similar way supporters of the majority of clubs in most divisions know that their chances of winning something each season are slim; you take your glory when it comes in individual games and hope you don't end up at the bottom of the pile.

The players of Dereham Town and Romford mark the Football Remembers event commemorating the outbreak of The Great War.

Leyton Orient still have a place in my heart and after reaching the League One Play-Off Final last season now find themselves on the brink of relegation to the Football League's lowest division next season, just as they did thirty years ago. That day when they were relegated it wasn't a tragedy, the fire at Bradford was; this time round if O's get relegated it won't be a tragedy either, but Bradford still will be.

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[1] In case you are wondering how I went from supporting Orient to following Romford, see Romford 1 Manchester United 0

If Voting Changed Anything...

The organisation I used to work for gave everyone an annual appraisal, at which every employee would be awarded a rating from one to five. A rating of one or two meant that you were a high performer; a four rating meant that you required improvement and a five signified that you were probably beyond redemption and should consider an alternative line of work. The majority of people were rated three. Management frequently denied the existence of a bell curve but generally ratings were allocated such that 20% of people were ones or twos, 10% were fours or fives leaving 70% in the middle, rated three. And that is how the population of Britain are generally affected by the result of a general election, and especially in the event of a change of government, which likely means that 20% of the population are better off, 10% are worse off but for 70% of us there really is little difference except the colour of the Prime Minister's tie.

The latest polls suggest that it is pretty much even stevens between the Conservatives and Labour but with UKIP outperforming the Liberal Democrats and the Greens it isn't beyond the realms of possibility that UKIP could hold the balance of power in another hung parliament. Except that a couple of by-election victories (notorious for protest votes and being overturned in a general election) and a good showing in the polls count for nothing in the real thing. But, UKIP undoubtedly have the main three parties worried, or if not worried then certainly mindful of the potential they have to exploit the great swathes of the electorate disenchanted with the red and blue hues of UK politics.  Perhaps more worryingly for the Tories, and it has to be said, for Labour, is the possibility of the Scottish Nationalists winning enough seats to hold the balance of power, a more credible possibility than UKIP doing so.  

Except that the SNP won six seats last time out (six more than UKIP, mind you!) so are they really a threat to the cosy two and a half party system we currently have? Anyone's guess really, after all at the last election the "other" parties mustered just 36 seats between them, twenty less than the Lib-Dems and for all the sabre rattling that the wee Jimmy Krankie lookalike has been doing it is possible that the SNP will have as much influence in Westminster next month as Sinn Fein or the independents. We have seen it before in the run up to elections, usually it is the Lib-Dems, talking up their chances but aside from a few mild shocks in unseating a more favoured candidate, ultimately failing to deliver. There are 59 seats in Scotland; Labour hold 41 and the Lib-Dems 11 and yes, the SNP will likely win a chunk of those but it remains to be seen if it will be enough to make a difference.

Wee Jimmy Krankie

"The most dangerous woman in the world" according to Piers Morgan in the Daily Mail

While David Cameron and the Tories have been bigging up the threat that the SNP pose, wheeling out former PM John Major this week, it is perhaps Labour that have more to fear from the nationalists, although contrarily the Tories would probably welcome Labour holding them off north of the border. If nothing else, it makes this campaign more interesting than the norm to see the major parties worried about more than each other, but it remains a somewhat tedious aspect of British politics (and likely, politics the world over) that party leaders and party spokesmen spend more time and effort bad mouthing their opponents than propounding their own policies.

The Tories wheeled out John Major to talk about the threat posed by the SNP

In the interest of balance, here is a picture of a former Labour Prime Minister.

The SNP may be limited to fielding candidates in Scotland but chances are they will return more MPs than UKIP, because despite UKIP's by-election successes at Clacton and in Rochester & Strood, it is really doubtful that they will translate that into more seats on 7th May. By-elections are notorious for producing unusual, protest driven results and I would be surprised if the confidence the party exudes is translated into bums on seats at Westminster. UKIP have such a propensity to shoot themselves in the foot anyway that it is difficult to take them seriously. They remind me of the man who sits next to you on the bus, engages you in polite, sane conversation for five minutes before declaring that he is actually King of The Lizard People and that his tribe will be arriving from Venus imminently. Otherwise apparently sane people are giving the party some credence by supporting them publicly; I think it will all end in tears. For a party so obsessed about geography (in the sense that they want us out of Europe and migrant Europeans out of the UK), it is ironic that they have such a frail grasp of local geography as they have been thrusting leaflets through my door asking me to vote for their candidate in the neighbouring constituency. Mind you, Labour are no better as they have done the same. I actually had the (correct) UKIP candidate at my front door a week or so ago; he seemed to be a perfectly normal, sane human being, but I suppose appearances can be deceptive, he might have told me that he was the Lizard King if I'd let him talk long enough.

While this election has some features that make it slightly different, slightly edgier, even slightly more interesting than some past polls, one element that remains the same is the manifesto. If a politician's broken promises could be cashed we'd all be rich and the cheque they are written on is the manifesto. Clearly no politician ever believed that they would be called to account for their manifesto, actually ever made to fulfil their empty promises considering the drivel they put out. Mind you, did any uncommitted voter ever read a manifesto and say, "You know what, I like the cut of their jib and I really think they will make good on their promises"? Apart from the King of The Lizard People that is. Perhaps manifestos should be made legally binding and subject to performance related pay. Win the election and fail to met your targets and have your pay slashed or get booted out. Perhaps disgruntled voters could take out class action lawsuits against governments that renege on their promises, now that might focus a few minds!

Mark Twain. No, you can't vote for him.

It was Mark Twain who said, "If voting made any difference they wouldn't let us do it," and plenty other people have paraphrased him over the years; Emma Goldman and Ken Livingstone to name but two. For about 70% of us, it is probably true that voting makes no difference but come 7th May it is imperative that we all go out and vote, vote for whoever, be it Conservative, Labour or Monster Raving Loony Party. Because it's like the lottery; if you don't buy a lottery ticket you can't win a prize. If you don't vote you can't really complain about what you get, but if you do...

New Fangled or Old Fashioned?

We came across some old and no longer wanted DVDs and video tapes the other day. The DVDs we can probably sell (stores like CeX will buy them) but the videos will either be dumped or go to a charity shop, who will almost certainly have them on their shelves for some time. After all, who buys video tapes these days? And if you do buy a video tape, what will you play it on? Unless you have a vintage video cassette player you won't find one in the shops. Dixons (part of the Currys-PC World group) stopped selling them in 2004 after just 26 years on sale. The video cassette player is one of those bits of technology that has been and gone in a single lifetime. I accept that they aren't technically defunct, but they might as well be, they  are as relevant today as a mangle is.

Back in the 1980's when video took off a new machine might cost £500; the first machine I bought cost about £300 in 1989. By the time I bought my last machine the price had dropped to around fifty quid. It is true of a lot of consumer electronics that prices have fallen in actual and real terms over the years. Look around your own home and price up your TV, fridge, computer and hi-fi. Chances are that they were a cheaper than the models they replaced, and even if they weren't the spec will be a lot better. When I bought my first PC they weren't even that commonplace in many offices; at about that time I think we shared one PC and two dumb terminals between thirteen people at work. Now your average home has a better network, better hardware and better operating systems than we used at work less than twenty years ago.

An indispensable piece of office machinery circa 1995 was the fax machine. I recall that ten years earlier, when I was working at Midland Bank in Barking a customer of ours was dumbfounded that we did not have a fax machine in the branch. Fax machine? We barely had a photocopier! We had a Scotch copier, to use which one had to copy the original document to a piece of pink, shiny paper and then use that to transfer the image to a piece of normal paper. A single copy took a good couple of minutes. Think about the printer that probably sits next to your PC, a printer that also scans and photocopies and probably cost you a whole lot less than that Scotch copier that retailed for around £80 in the 1980's. Fax machines then did not use standard paper either, they used special rolls of paper and woe betide the person who put the paper in the wrong way round, resulting in a whole sheaf of blank faxes being printed. I know someone who did that (it wasn't me), and the fall out was a number of frantic calls to customers who may potentially have sent us the blank faxes we were receiving.

When the fax machine finally slips into oblivion the chances are the word will go with it but that is not the case with other things that have disappeared. The previously mentioned video recorder lives on in common parlance since we still say we "tape" TV programmes (well, we do in our house) even though what we are actually doing is saving them on a hard disk drive. That expression, together with the video tapes themselves that we have lying about, made me think about other words and phrases that we commonly use that now have little relevance but those of us of a certain generation in particular, are unlikely to ever give up.

Of all the areas of technology that have shown the greatest advances in recent years, the mobile phone is the one with which we are all probably the most familiar. Mobile phones have always had keypads and landline phones have had them for many years, even though phones with dials co-existed with them for a long time. Now I am certain that there are still plenty of phones with dials still in use, but even those of us who no longer have one still say dial, as in "What number did you dial?" when we get a wrong number. The younger generation, who have possibly never seen a rotary dial phone, will be used to their parents saying dial and chances are that the expression will live on way past the demise of the rotary dial phones themselves.

When Britain switched to decimal currency in 1971 there was inevitably a long period of time in which everyone was converting pounds and pence back to pounds, shillings and pennies but despite the passing of the best part of half a century (now that is a frightening thought to someone who was a teenager when we changed the currency), I find that I still sometimes do it. Take newspapers or chocolate bars. Despite the amount of time that has passed I still get the occasional shock when I realise that I have just spent eighteen shillings on a newspaper, or twelve shillings on a Mars bar. The price of a Mars bar is actually used as an index by some economists to illustrate increases in prices. Speaking as someone who can remember vividly when a Mars Bar cost just 2p (it was 1971) and a newspaper cost 3p at the same time, it makes me wonder if, just as my children look at me askance when I say "five bob" or "half a crown" whether their children will similarly look doubtfully at them when they mention pennies in years to come as the value of our bronze coinage diminishes all the time and will inevitably be phased out eventually.

Having said that video tapes and the machines to play them on are as outmoded as the mangle, I now find however that there are some people who believe that they are poised for a comeback, swept in on a wave of nostalgia. They have been compared with the vinyl record, which still has its adherents, except there is a world of difference between the two. Firstly the record deck never went away. It is much easier to go out and buy a good record deck than a video recorder. Secondly there is the aesthetic property to playing a record, the ritual of sliding it from its sleeve, cleaning it, placing it almost reverentially on the turntable and placing the stylus on the platter. Sliding a video tape into the slot in a grey box doesn't compare. And then there is the quality. Vinyl aficionados will argue that the sound quality of a record is superior to CD or MP3 or any other format for that matter, and their arguments have merit. It is difficult to make the same case for the video tape. Subsequent digital formats have knocked the picture quality that tapes were able to deliver into a tin hat. Can you seriously imagine watching a video tape version of one of the current blockbuster, special effect laden movies on a fifty inch television?

 Nostalgia is all very well, but some things are best left where they belong, in the past.

Four Men In Another Boat

Buoyed up by the success of our trip on The Broads the year before (see Four Men In A Boat), we (that is to say, Gerry Baker, Paul Calvert, Keith Markham and I) booked a holiday in 1986 on a narrowboat on The Staffordshire & Worcestershire Canal. After the previous year when we had taken too much food, we decided not to bother this time round and rely on eating out; this proved a bit hit and miss.

We set off for Stourport in Worcestershire where we would pick up our narrowboat and stopped en route at The Badgers Sett in Hagley where I had what was possibly the hottest chilli I have ever eaten. Half way through I had to get liquid reinforcements to put out the fire in my mouth! At Stourport we picked up our narrowboat. Compared with the previous year's cruiser on The Broads this vessel was shall we say, basic and had obviously seen better days. Under one of the bunks we found a piece of ominous graffiti, which unfortunately proved rather prophetic.

Stourport Basin

A number of things were different about this holiday compared with The Broads. Firstly the weather. It rained; it rained a lot. In fact it rained most days. Then there were the locks. The Broads has no locks, the Staffs and Worcester Canal has somewhere in the region of thirty, including The Bratch, a three lock staircase. 

The Bratch. Photo: BBC

Remarkably we managed to negotiate these, and other locks quite successfully, although this was the first time any of us had steered something with a tiller, which as anyone knows is weirdly counter-intuitive at first. No one fell in, no one dropped a lock key into the canal and we singularly failed to flood our boat; we ran aground on a sandbank once but that's one of the reasons you have boathooks! The approach to the lock at Kinver was, however the scene of a near disaster. We were chugging along quite happily at the speed of an arthritic sloth one grey summer's morning and as was our custom, I was at the bow with a lock key, ready to jump off and prepare the lock. Paul was driving. As we approached the lock I turned and shouted, "Slow down!" as we appeared to be nearing a vulnerable looking cabin cruiser at a speed that, although relatively slow, could have caused significant damage in the event of a collision. "I can't," yelled back a rather stricken looking Mr Calvert. There was a collision with the canal towpath and we struck the cabin cruiser a glancing, but fortunately damage free, blow and came to a somewhat ungainly halt. As you probably know, the only way to stop a boat (apart from hitting something) is to throw it into reverse. It transpired that the gearbox had packed up, hence no reverse gear, hence no orthodox method of stopping. We were stuck at Kinver for some days while an engineer was despatched from the boatyard to effect repairs. It could have been worse, at least there were pubs and shops, there are some locks in the middle of nowhere it would have been awful to have been stranded at.

The lock at Kinver. Photo: Roger Kidd

Another difference about the canal was the lack of bollards to moor our boat. Instead we had to rely on mooring stakes, which are usually fairly effective, but what with the amount of rain we had had making the ground soggy and soft together with our inexperience in mooring a narrowboat, it's fair to say that we had some "issues." One afternoon, having returned from a pub lunch, we all had a bit of a snooze. Sometime later I woke up and looked out of the window. That's odd, I thought, I don't remember those bushes being that close when we moored. I'm sure you are way ahead of me, because sure enough when I emerged on deck I found that one rope had come away and we were now at right angles to the towpath! It was not the only time it happened. On another occasion we were actually having lunch when someone came into the pub and enquired if anyone had a barge matching a certain description because it was adrift. We laughed, "That happened to us the other day," confident it was not us as the colours did not match our boat. A vague nagging doubt had us leave the pub early and sure enough it was our boat. The man who had described it was presumably colour blind.

Food was, as I said earlier, a bit hit or miss. The Broads were well stocked with pubs, many of which did a nice variety of food, sufficient to satisfy even the most discerning eater. On the canal the pubs were fewer and further between and almost universally believed that chips were the only way to serve a potato. After a few days I was heartily sick of chips. We went into a pub for lunch and the first question I asked was, "Do you do potatoes any way other than chips?" They did roast potatoes, a chip's cousin perhaps, but sufficiently different; I was most grateful. Paul Calvert's thousand yard stare was turned on us to full effect on the Sunday lunchtime when we discovered that our chosen hostelry did not serve food on the Sabbath. With grumbling tummies and limited options we eked out a meal from a tin of ham and some odds and ends we had on board; a gourmet feast it was not.

Somewhere near Dudley we moored up and took a taxi into town to The Black Country Museum, which was well worth a visit, and Dudley Zoo which wasn't, and where we saw the world's most depressed looking polar bear. At one point we went through Wolverhampton; shortly afterwards we turned back and headed for Stourport, but not without stopping in Kidderminster, which we did not see at its best. By design rather than accident we had arrived in Kiddie on the day that Kidderminster Harriers played Walsall in a pre-season friendly, so there was no doubting that Keith and I would spend the evening at Aggborough, which we did. Walsall won 1-0 if memory serves me correctly (which increasingly these days it does not).

You will have noticed a shortage of photos from our canal trip. Someone did take a camera because there are a few pictures, but as Gerry remarked recently, " it was long before the days of smartphones of course (not even the days of smart people from what I can remember...and I include us in that!)"

Keith, in a rare photo from our trip. Obviously it didn't rain all the time!

I'll leave the last words to Paul, who recalls the conversation with the yard owner when we returned the boat to the yard in Stourport a fortnight after we had left, a lot damper, a fair bit heavier (thanks to the consumption of much beer and many chips) and a lot lighter of wallet.

 "I'll never forget the shock on the boat owners face when we took it back and only had to pay for one gallon of diesel", remembers Paul.
"Did you top it up before bringing back?"he asked.
"No" we replied.
"But you had it for two weeks lads" he said, "where did you get to then?"
We told him a place.
"But that's only ten miles away and you had the boat for two weeks!" he exclaimed in shock at how little we had covered.
"True, but there's an awful lot of pubs on the way there and back" was our response."

Despite the weather, the breakdowns, the fairly basic accommodation (did I mention that water came in when it rained?) and the unremitting diet of chips, it was still a fun holiday. The next year, though we decided to forsake England and boats and the variable weather and booked a holiday to Majorca, but that is another story!

Four Men In A Boat

In 1985, Bob Geldof was busy arranging Live Aid to raise funds for relief of the ongoing Ethiopian famine. Meanwhile at Midland Bank in Barking, Gerry Baker, Paul Calvert, Keith Markham and I were arranging a slightly less significant, but to us, important event, a boating holiday on the Norfolk Broads. Having successfully negotiated the same two weeks holiday for us all (a task not to be underestimated, as anyone who has wrestled with a holiday rota will appreciate), we booked our boat, and on 6th July 1985, loaded our luggage and provisions  into Gerry's car and set off for Beccles.

Left to right: Keith, Me, Gerry and Paul

Remarkably since they were putting a fairly expensive piece of boating equipment into the hands of complete novices, the boatyard seemed comfortable with allowing us to steer their shiny cabin cruiser away from its moorings with minimal training beyond where the controls were and what they did. They did warn about the limited headroom, but a practical reminder is always better than a theoretical one and I soon learned to duck when going into the cabin by walloping my head on the door frame before we had travelled more than a few hundred yards.

The Norfolk Broads, or more correctly, The Broads, since they include parts of Suffolk, cover 117 square miles and have more than 120 miles of navigable waterway. I've no idea how many miles we covered in our fortnight there, but I do know how many pubs we visited because for some reason I decided to keep a record of them and somewhat geekily, I still have that list, which is reproduced below. Given the fact that the top speed of hire craft on The Broads is limited to a pace equivalent to no more than a brisk walk, we managed to travel a remarkable distance in the first couple of days alone, reaching Wroxham by Monday, about 26 miles from our starting point in Beccles. Mind you we might not have travelled so far had the pubs been open all day; in those days the licensing laws meant that pubs closed in the middle of the afternoon, typically at half past two or three o'clock, reopening at about six, except on Sundays when the closed for even longer.

On the Sunday we stopped at The Stracey Arms, a cavernous pub of little character that was extremely popular; compared with many of the more traditional, rustic pubs we visited it had little to commend it. Apparently it is now permanently closed and I doubt it is much missed. It seems that Gunga Din's Old Colonial Inn is no more either, although with such a non-PC name that is scarcely surprising! Other notable pubs included The Lord Mancroft, notable for a reason which Paul will recall but which I am not prepared to go into here on the grounds of delicacy, and The Bell Hotel in Norwich. The Bell served up one of the best pub lunches I have had, consisting of a vast steak and kidney pie and help yourself to potatoes and vegetables, which I took full advantage of to the point where I was unable to eat or drink anything else until much later that evening!

Food and drink played significant roles in our holiday. It was perhaps unnecessary for us to cart quite so much food with us (we stocked up at a supermarket the night before leaving) as we cooked little on board apart from breakfast, although I do recall concocting something with eggs and tinned potatoes (ugh) and Paul kindly offered to make beans on toast on one occasion, although he rather put the rest of us off by enquiring if we actually wanted our beans cooked and our bread toasted. Paul's appetite (and all who know him will know that it is wide ranging and sometimes prodigious) had to be addressed regularly and we always knew when he wanted to eat because he would be overcome with a sort of thousand yard stare.

The middle weekend of our trip found us in Thorpe St Andrew near Norwich, a charming little place that I would happily go back to (in fact Keith and I did, a few years later) on Live Aid weekend; the weather was glorious. While the others took themselves off for a curry, I stayed on the boat as I was not then a fan of Indian food, ate cheese and biscuits and watched Bob Geldof implore the nation not to go to the pub but to send him their (expletive deleted) money instead. I went to the pub.[1]

The Buck at Thorpe St Andrew

Earlier in the week we had reached Potter Heigham, renowned for the low bridge which it is only possible to pass under with the aid of a pilot. A few years later I went on a long weekend on The Broads with my wife and brothers-in-law; it was October, there were high winds and when we attempted to turn round at Potter Heigham we were at one point wedged sideways across the River Thurne. Judicious use of boathooks was needed to get us pointing down river again.  Most of The Broads is easy to negotiate, even for novices like us, especially for me as the only one of our number not to have a driving licence, but Gerry in particular proved adept at manoeuvring our boat into awkward moorings. It was the lack of speed rather than anything else that proved a problem when we came to crossing Breydon Water, a stretch of water about  three miles long and almost a mile wide that we navigated to enter Yarmouth and the northern Broads. At the limited speed we were capable of and against the wind, the crossing seemed interminable and at Yarmouth we encountered some pretty big vessels before gratefully reaching the River Bure.

By the middle of the second week we seemed to have covered a large proportion of The Broads and having reached Oulton Broad on the Wednesday, stayed there until Friday when we moored up in Beccles to return the boat the following day. Here we had a last meal in a restaurant (the name of which I have not recorded) and Keith and I ordered cauliflower cheese, which proved to be a whole cauliflower covered in cheese sauce rather than the more usual florets!

We returned our boat (intact, believe it or not), returned home and decided that this boating lark was actually rather good fun. So much so that we decided to do it again the following year, but this time not on The Broads. It proved to be a much different experience!

To be continued...

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[1] At some point I gave Bob some money too.