The Trump Omnishambles

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

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

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

 

Trump. Picture: businessinsider.com

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

There's A Place In The World For A Gambler

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

Football fans can now place bets in grounds during games.

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

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

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

As I Get Older

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

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

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

Easy to remember.

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

Difficult to remember

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

No Static At All

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

DAB Radio

 

New car

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Long Ago and Far Away

A long time ago, albeit not very far away, I was one of literally millions of people  eagerly awaiting what was then the first Star Wars film, the one that has since become the fourth in the Star Wars universe's chronology. Then it was just called Star Wars; it has since been renamed Star Wars Episode IV: A New Hope. I recall sitting in a cinema in London's West End, better to experience the film with the benefit of Dolby sound, listening to that stirring John Williams theme, seeing the now famed crawl as the back story was revealed and then that small space craft flitting across the screen, to be immediately replaced by the hulking mass of the pursuing craft that filled the entire screen to an accompanying rumble from the cinema's loudspeaker system. And now there is a new Star Wars film, one that has been eagerly anticipated by aficionados and which, from what I have heard, is actually rather good in a way that some of the more recent additions to the franchise, Episode One: The Phantom Menace in particular, were not.

3rd August 1977, and crowds flock to The Chinese Theatre in Los Angeles for the opening of Star Wars.

At around the same time as Star Wars was released, in 1977, I started to become interested in science fiction and the first novel in the genre that I read was Larry Niven's Ringworld. More Niven followed, and James Blish (including his novelisations of the Star Trek TV series), Philip K. Dick and H.G. Wells. Interestingly, while Blish, and Alan Dean Foster (who has written novelisations of both Star Trek and Star Wars) have turned their hand to converting film scripts into books, their original output has never been turned into movies, whereas the work of Wells and Dick account for more films than most other science fiction writers. And like any writer whose work is adapted for the screen, the reader's perception of the novel, the story and especially the characters, determines whether as an individual, you appreciate the film or not. Take Jack Reacher for instance; Lee Childs' ex-military policeman turned drifter and investigator of suspicious and dangerous events is supposed to be six foot five inches tall, yet was portrayed on screen by the more averagely built Tom Cruise. A certain amount of suspension of disbelief was required to accept Cruise as Reacher, but on the whole he just about carried it off.

Cruise also starred in the film version of Philip K. Dick's short story, Minority Report, which like most of PKD's shorter output, is a fairly straightforward tale, as was We Can Remember It for You Wholesale which became Total Recall on screen. PKD's longer works, with their themes of altered realities, altered states and postmodernity, have been translated into films which concentrate more on the action elements, with a nod to the philosophical and metaphysical themes of his stories, some with greater success than others. Blade Runner, which Dick eventually gave his full blessing to, is possibly the most successful adaption of a PKD novel (Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?); certainly it is the most well known, although The Adjustment Bureau is to my mind a highly accomplished, and much underrated, adaption. A Scanner Darkly, on the other hand, was in my view a grave disappointment. As much as I enjoyed the book, as much as I wanted to like the film, I didn't warm to the movie, perhaps largely because of the animation technique (rotoscoping). The Man In The High Castle has been made into a TV series by Amazon Prime and there have been plans to make a film of Ubik in the pipeline for years, although the PKD novel I wish someone would film is Flow My Tears, the Policeman Said, a story that I return to periodically and which to me is most representative of PKD's work; it is the novel I would recommend as an introduction to anyone unfamiliar with his writing.

While Philip K. Dick has been largely well treated by the film makers, one cannot say the same for Robert Heinlein. Starship Troopers, the first science fiction novel to appear on the reading lists at three of the five United States military branches, is widely regarded as a classic of the genre yet was turned into a film that bore little resemblance to its source and was described by one critic as "a nonstop splatterfest ... devoid of taste and logic."

Meanwhile, H.G. Wells, a master of science fiction in print, has not been especially well treated by the film makers either. While the 1960 film of The Time Machine was a creditable effort, the same cannot be said of the remake released in 2002. Likewise The War of The Worlds was turned into a landmark work of the science fiction cinema in 1953 (although the special effects now look somewhat dated) but suffered miserably when remade by Steven Spielberg in 2005. Despite favourable reviews from the critics, this adaption succeeded in turning a classic novel into boring, plodding film. Considering how many other stories there are that have been rebooted, it is odd, not to say more than somewhat disappointing, that no one has had the wit to make a film faithful to Wells' original story, that is to say set in Victorian England.

The late, great, PKD

Meanwhile there is Star Wars: The Force Awakens, but with all due respect to those who like this particular branch of sci-fi, I don't think I'll be bothering. I wouldn't categorise it as drivel, although goodness knows there has been a lot of that in cinemas masquerading under the banner of science fiction; think The Phantom Menace, think Superman IV, think Battlefield Earth (which I apologise for mentioning since most of you were probably trying to forget it ever existed), but Star Wars is not really my thing anymore.

On the other hand, there are a whole load of stories that are crying out to be made into films. Apart from the aforementioned hoped for but unlikely War of The Worlds reboot, and Flow My Tears, the Policeman Said, and Ringworld, there's Time Out Of Joint[1] (PKD again), A Canticle for Leibowitz (Walter M. Miller), The Player of Games (Iain Banks), Perdido Street Station (China Miéville) and Altered Carbon (Richard Morgan) to name but a few.

But there again, books being so personal to us, often the stories are better off remaining on the page. Sometimes the best films are the ones that we make in our own heads.

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[1] The Truman Show bears comparison with Time Out of Joint. Until someone films Dick's book, the Jim Carrey movie will do just fine.

Christmas Presents Past

Amazingly, three years have passed since I retired (or was made redundant, but old enough to claim my occupational pension, if you prefer). In some ways it seems like only yesterday that I walked out of the office for the last time; in other ways, it seems like an eternity ago. I met up with some of my former colleagues a few weeks ago and from what I heard,  plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose seems to fit the bill at my erstwhile place of employment. That meeting, plus the anniversary of my leaving work, had me reminiscing on past Christmases at work.

When I worked in branch banking, for Midland Bank, the last working day before Christmas could be manic, although in some branches it was definitely more manic than in others. If the last working day was actually Christmas Eve, we closed at 12.30 rather than 3.30 (or 3 o'clock in the City of London), which meant that at 12.29 the banking hall would be a seething mass of humanity. Private customers would be cashing cheques, shopkeepers would be paying in takings and publicans would be staggering away with enough loose change to get them through the evening.  And on one occasion, we had a gentleman who wanted to open an account: who on earth needs to open a bank account on Christmas Eve? Some poor devil (me, quite often) would have to go into the banking hall to lock the front door, and stay there to let customers out after they finished their transactions. Almost immediately  there would be a procession of people pushing on the locked door or ringing the bell. Upon opening the door (on the security chain of course), I, or whoever had drawn the short straw, would be asked, "Are you closed?" Answering in the affirmative would often draw forth a plaintive request to be let in, which of course had to be declined, to much wailing and gnashing of teeth from the customer.

My experience was that suburban branches tended to be much busier than City branches on Christmas Eve. Romford Market Place branch was particularly frantic on 24th December since we had the accounts of most of the pubs, a whole host of market traders and many of the big shops. People who believed that because we closed early we must have got to spend the afternoon in the pub had to be disabused of that idea because despite closing at 12.30 we would be lucky to get out until two o'clock, and since in those days they closed at 2.30, it often wasn't worth trying to shoe horn yourself into a pub already packed to the gunwales with market traders and assorted others for the half an hour or so of opening time that remained. Except the year we popped into The Rez (Reservation Club) in North Street and weren't asked to leave until 5pm; I have vague recollections of beer and mistletoe.

My experiences of working in the City of London at Christmas were somewhat different. At Queen Victoria Street (QVS), the morning of the last day before Christmas one year when Christmas Eve fell on a weekend and we did not close early, was complete bedlam, with queues of customers who all wanted to cash cheques. It soon dawned on us that we would run out of cash before lunchtime, so one of the messengers and I were deputed to walk down to Cannon Street branch (no longer there, I think it is a pub now), with a Branch Payment for £10,000; we sauntered back as nonchalantly as it is possible to with £5,000 each in our jacket pockets. The Inspectors would have had a fit. Naturally management, mindful of how busy the morning had been, asked everyone to limit their lunch break to the bare hour, which we did, quaffing a few ales in The Dandy Roll in Bread Street (demolished years ago). Of course, when we got back from lunch we found that the only places still open in the City were the banks and the pubs and all of our customers were in the latter, or had gone home. As far as I recall I served one customer in two hours. Christmas Eve at QVS was one of the rare days when the branch manager, a traditional, old fashioned type, would leave his office and pass among his staff, with whom he would share a mince pie, a glass of sherry and some appropriate seasonal platitudes.

I'm not sure if it is still the case, but back in the days when branches had traditional managers, their favoured customers would bring in gifts in the lead up to the festivities. By and large these consisted of alcohol; vast quantities of wine and spirits would be delivered and depending on the manager, these would either be quietly taken away by him, or shared with staff.  Jack Groom, one of my managers at Barking,  fell into the latter category and in fact would often supplement gifts given by customers to ensure that every member of his staff went home on Christmas Eve with something. While working as Foreign Clerk at Barking I had frequent daily dealings with a record exporting company and twice received hampers from Fortnum & Mason as Christmas gifts, the only time I was singled out to receive a gift from a customer other than the store owner in Romford who presented me with a half bottle of Scotch after I discovered that my (large) till difference (an over) was down to a mistake on his paying in slip.

When I moved back to the City in 1986, it was to Eastcheap where I was no longer expected to work on the counter, but Christmas Eve was possibly even more manic in the Foreign Department than it would have been if I had been cashiering. One year, while everyone else appeared underemployed, I found myself desperately trying to process what seemed to be a never ending stream of outward bills, and then had to cancel the Large Town Clearing in record time, with a messenger breathing over my shoulder, anxious to take any returns to the clearing house. And at Eastcheap I took home the oddest Christmas gift I ever received. We were all called into the manager's office individually, where we were each presented with a large bag of dried fruit, courtesy of a customer who imported such things.

Having left branch banking, I found Christmas Eve quite different. Unless it was essential, many jobs wound down, although working in payments was an exception, with limited opportunity to slope off early. Sometimes however, Christmas Eve meant doing very little, and resenting what little I had to do, until it was time to go home, and I do mean home, not the pub, because getting into one on Christmas Eve has in later years not been worth the effort, particularly with all The Amateur Drinkers about (see The Amateur Drinker).

In some occupations, Christmas gifts from customers are unheard of. My wife works for a local authority and has never had one to my knowledge, but by an odd coincidence, my elder daughter, who works for a different local council, has brought home a bottle of wine, courtesy of a client, who just happen to have been a customer of Midland Bank, Barking when I worked there. As they say, it's a small world.

The Christmas Present

Some years it seems that hot on the heels of the first cuckoo of spring is the first mention of Christmas. The earliest I can recall seeing Christmas mentioned was when Debenhams installed a Christmas tree to advertise their Christmas Club...in July. This was closely followed by a local Indian restaurant imploring patrons to book early for Christmas, even before August Bank Holiday Monday. Then in 2012 when the Olympics came to London, the hullabaloo and razzmatazz that attended their preparation, delivery and aftermath put thoughts of Christmas out of the advertisers heads for a while. It was like a throwback to my youth when it seemed that there were no festive references until we had got Guy Fawkes Night out of the way. In the years since then Christmas has started to creep in a bit earlier again. By next year no doubt we will again be seeing festive advertisements before we have taken our summer holidays.

This year, and not for the first time either, Christmas has crept up on me a bit. When the first festive commercial appears on television, when the first display of Christmas cards and other goodies appear in the shops, I tend to shudder, considering it way too early, and put all thoughts of present buying and card writing out of my head. There is ages yet till I need to think of such things, I say to myself, months to do all that stuff. Then suddenly it is a week before Christmas Day itself and I still have to buy presents and post those cards (and last post is Monday, yikes!)

Buying Christmas presents is something that I have to brace myself for; it isn't that I begrudge doing it, nor spending the money, so much as I find it incredibly difficult to decide what to buy for people. I like to buy things for my family and see them open them on Christmas morning and know that they appreciate them, and more importantly, want what it is I've bought them. The flip side is the realisation that you have bought someone something that will be consigned to the cupboard or drawer and never see light of day again once Christmas Day has passed; never a nice thought.

Some people are easier to buy for than others. Generally, children are easy to buy for; there will always be toys or film or television related products that they crave. In fact it can often be difficult to know when to stop, but as they get older the decisions get more difficult. But when children are young there is nothing more enjoyable than watching them unwrap their presents on Christmas morning (provided you can delay that activity until a reasonable hour, say 6 a.m.)

 When buying for friends or relatives who have specific hobbies or collect things, then choosing gifts is easier than for those without such interests. The hardest person I ever had to buy for was my father. The old expression, "what do you buy for the man who has everything?" did not apply, more like, "what do you buy for the man who doesn't want anything?" My father wasn't interested in reading, and once he developed macular generation he couldn't read anything smaller than this font

size.

So books were out of the question. He watched little on TV, making videos or DVDs a waste of time and after he gave up brewing his own beer, his only hobby was gardening. Invariably, therefore his Christmas gifts would comprise socks, a bottle of wine, some chocolate coated Brazil nuts and a tie or a wallet. "Just what I wanted," he would exclaim, although in truth this probably applied only to those items that could be imbibed or eaten. One year I bought him some things for the garden, but the fact was, he had most of the things he needed anyway.

My mother was slightly easier to buy for. Books, DVD's, picture frames, houseplants, a jumper or fleece; these things featured large and for a couple of years we made up hampers of nice foods, the sorts of things that you wouldn't normally buy yourself, but which shops like British Home Stores  specialise in at this time of year. I confess to be being little easier to buy for than my dad was; ask me what I would like for Christmas and it is a rare year when there is anything specific that I really, really want. The odd DVD, or CD; a book perhaps or sometimes a particular item of clothing, but some years I honestly have no especial need or want. At one time, when I was single and living with my parents, we agreed a pact and didn't actually buy each other anything. Bah humbug! you might say, but why waste money, and more especially time and effort, trying to buy something for someone that they don't actually want?

As I sit here writing this I am hoping that inspiration will strike, because one present apart (which she chose for herself), I have bought nothing yet for my wife. Fortunately she is more organised and we therefore have bought presents for our daughters and other relatives, although I have no idea if she has bought me anything, since when I was asked what I would like, my mind went completely blank. As in many other ways, I am turning into my father, the man who wanted nothing. While inspiration is my biggest problem, finding the time to actually buy things for others has proven to be a bit of an obstacle as well this year. You would think that being retired I would have more time, but for some reason (and I have explored this before, see Where does the time go to?) I seem to have no time whatever. I suppose that when I worked I would take a day or two off in December and frantically do all of my present buying. Now that I have all the time in the world, I have all the reasons in the world not to go to Lakeside or Romford, the search for a parking space and hordes of other shoppers being just two.

Genuinely, this oven glove was one of my presents last year.

Were I slightly more organised I could have done my shopping online, except that presupposes that I knew what I wanted to buy. The old fashioned method of trolling round a shopping centre at least offers the advantage of inspiration occasionally striking as you walk past a shop display. And troll round a shopping centre is something I must do. Chances are if you are reading this before Christmas Day, I will be  wandering around shops with a haunted expression, in the company of large numbers of increasingly panic stricken men, on a quest for The Christmas Present.

Big Brother In The Bus Lane

A simple white envelope landed on the doormat on Monday.  Plain, ordinary, with no post mark and no return address, just the words 'Royal Mail, Postage Paid' in the top right corner. What's this? I wondered, intrigued. It was addressed to me personally, so not junk mail in all probability, but one thing I have learned over the years is that unexpected mail is rarely good news. Sometimes not news at all, often unimportant news, but frequently annoying or bad news. I slit the envelope open and pulled out...a Penalty Charge Notice (PCN). Apparently I had driven in a bus lane. I peered at the CCTV photos and recognised with a sigh of resignation, that yes indeed, I had driven in a bus lane, for all of fifty feet or so, approaching a set of traffic lights at which I wanted to be in the inside lane. There had been no bus in the bus lane, in front or behind me, I was not causing an obstruction nor inconvenience by doing so, if anything I was speeding the traffic flow by not clogging up the outside lane, but nonetheless I had driven in the bus lane...for fifty feet.

*Sigh* That's me, entering the bus lane.

According to the AA, fines for motorists using bus lanes have outstripped parking tickets as the main cause of complaints from drivers. One such bus lane, in Lambeth, generates over £1 million in income for the local council every year. Many drivers are fooled by worn road markings and poor signage of bus lanes, while the Lambeth junction is said to be difficult to negotiate without driving in the bus lane. There is a common perception that bus lane cameras, speed cameras and other cameras that regularly record drivers committing some sort of motoring violation have more to do with income generation than improving road safety or traffic flow. With these fines going into local authority coffers at a time when central government grants are being cut and councils find themselves under increasing financial pressure, it is easy to see why.

This Daily Mail graphic shows revenue generated by just ten traffic enforcement cameras in 2013

I toyed with the idea of appealing against the PCN, but decided that there was little or no point, after all I had no real grounds other than requesting that common sense be applied, which is no defence at all. Had I appealed on the grounds that it was only fifty feet, there were no buses and that I was actually improving traffic flow, the reply would simply have been that I was in a bus lane, ergo I was committing an offense.  No doubt my PCN was generated from the image taken from the camera mounted on the lamp post by an automated system, and that my fine having been paid online, the record will be updated by an automated system and me apart, no human will ever be aware of the matter (except you, dear reader). That being the case, there was no possibility of a human operator using any discretion and saying that while technically an offense occurred, there was no harm done. I recall, a number of years ago when motorcycles in London were not allowed to use bus lanes, seeing a motorcyclist stopped by a policeman in Aldgate and asked, "So this is a bus, then is it?" with that particularly sarcastic tone that is undoubtedly taught at Hendon Police College from day one. I am fairly confident that the police officer used his discretion and sent the rider on his way with a flea in his ear but no more; CCTV cameras however have no more discretion than a washing machine does.

In twenty three years of motoring (I was a late starter, only passing my test in 1992) I have picked up five fines. The first was for parking on a double yellow line and was a bit of a calculated risk on my part, although I was by no means the only person parked on that particular stretch of road. I imagine that the traffic warden had writer's cramp by the time he finished his shift. I have to hold my hands up to that one. Number two, however was infuriating to say the least. Driving into a space in a car park as it was just being vacated by another motorist, I was annoyed to return to the car later to find a parking ticket. It was one of those car parks with poorly marked bays as it was largely gravel, with white lines barely a foot long indicating the spaces. My infraction was to have parked over two spaces. My defence was that one of the spaces was largely occupied by a large bush making parking entirely in that bay physically impossible; it didn't wash and I had to pay.

I received a ticket for doing 37mph in a 30mph zone and again, have no defence except that it was one of those maddening stretches of road (the A12 in Suffolk) where the speed limit jumps from 30 to 40 to National Speed Limit (NSL), then back down to 30 via 40 then back up to NSL through 40 mph. I genuinely thought that the limit was 40 when I was clocked; obviously I was mistaken. I went on a Speed Awareness Course as an alternative to the points on my licence; I still had to pay the fine, although they call it a course fee. Then there was parking partially on the pavement, which is fairly common round my way; in fact in some roads, even though there are no formally marked bays, it is the norm. That isn't to say it is allowed and the ubiquitous CCTV camera picked it up.

There are twenty different types of traffic enforcement cameras in the UK; there are somewhere in the region of 5.5 million CCTV cameras of all types (not just for traffic enforcement) of which 6,000 are speed cameras.  Look around and you are never far from a CCTV camera of some kind, so I suppose that PCN's are an almost inevitable consequence of driving.  Eventually you will infringe some traffic regulation or another and get one in the post.

A positively Orwellian London Transport poster from 2002

Oh, some people don't get them. You know the sort, they will boast that they have forty years of unblemished driving behind them. What they actually mean is they have forty years of never being caught behind them. With the number of cameras in the UK, that won't last long.

Mind how you go.