Cafe Culture

While a lot of the action in soap operas like Eastenders and Coronation Street centres on the pub, in sit-coms characters are more inclined to gravitate towards coffee bars, with Cafe Nervosa and Central Perk playing important roles in shows like Frasier and Friends. In fact whole episodes of Frasier seem to be set in the coffee shop and one show follows the Crane brothers as they search for a new regular haunt after being driven out of Nervosa when a guitarist (played by Elvis Costello) is hired to play folk music. Coffee shops in sit-coms are nothing new, however. Back in the 1950’s, Hancock’s Half Hour regularly featured them. In one show Tony meets his childhood sweetheart in a Chiswick coffee bar, in another he lists the plethora of coffee shops in Cheam High Street, and in a third he actually runs his own coffee bar.

Frasier & Niles - Cafe Nervosa. Picture: CBS

Although the first coffee houses opened in England in the 17^th century (the renowned insurers, Lloyd’s of London began life in Lloyd’s Coffee House in 1688), it was in the 1950’s that the coffee bar scene exploded in London. Coinciding with the invention of the teenager and skiffle and rock ‘n’ roll music, coffee bars sprang up all over Soho and the West End, spreading through suburbia where they provided an invaluable meeting place for teenagers to drink frothy coffee and listen to their favourite music, live or through a juke box.

By the time I became a teenager the coffee bar had almost disappeared from Britain’s High Streets, being largely confined to Soho, where the Moka Bar had become London’s most well known in 1953. During my teenage years I cannot remember setting foot in a coffee bar. And even as recently as twenty years ago my home town was something of a desert so far as coffee shops were concerned, with Morelli’s being just about the only one I can recall. Today Romford can boast (if that’s the right word) three Costa Coffees, two Starbucks, a Coffee Republic, a Patisserie Valerie and sundry other independent coffee shops.

In Britain we are drinking less tea than we used to – in 2015, tea consumption was 22% lower than it had been five years previously – as visiting coffee shops becomes more and more popular and more and more of them are opened. The relaxation of licensing laws in 2005 might not have created the ‘cafe culture’ that the then Labour government envisaged, but nowadays most British High Streets feature at least one coffee shop with pavement tables and customers sipping their mochas and cappuccinos – albeit that some of them are sitting outside only because they cannot smoke indoors. It may also be a feature of immigration from European countries that have more of a cafe tradition than a pub culture that means that these days many coffee shops include among their customers groups of mid-twenties men who one would normally expect to be in the nearest Wetherspoons. It does, however seem a pity that while coffee shops in the West End stay open late into the evening,  those in suburbia tend to close their doors at six or seven o’clock. There must be a market for them to stay open later for those people who want to meet friends but want neither a formal meal in a restaurant nor an evening in the pub.

Having once favoured Costa or Starbucks, these days Val and I tend to gravitate towards Caffe Nero with Coffee Republic or Patisserie Valerie (or Pat Val, as we call it) our regular back-ups. And while there is a lot of snobbery about coffee and even more capacity for ‘customisation’ a la Niles Crane’s order in an episode of Frasier ; "Double Cappuccino - half-caf, non-fat milk, with just enough foam to be aesthetically pleasing but not so much that it leaves a moustache," my regular order tends to be an Americano, which leaves little room for personalisation other than how much milk to add. Val, on the other hand, while not being fussy, tends to tailor her favourite cappuccino by having it made with skimmed milk and with a single shot. Mind you, I’m not sure whether requesting a single shot and skinny milk would have made any difference the day we were in Mallorca and walked from Palma to C’an Pastilla where we stopped for a coffee. C’an Pastilla looked pretty similar to how I remembered it from my last visit, the best part of thirty years earlier, and if the resort seemed trapped in a time-warp, so did Val’s cappuccino. It arrived topped with whipped cream from a can, and chocolate, looking like a throw-back to the 1980’s. It bore more than a passing resemblance to a 99 ice cream. This is, however, not typical of our experiences ordering coffee abroad; there is something glamorous and seductive about sitting outside a cafe in some Spanish or Italian piazza, sipping coffee and watching the world go by that it is somehow not possible to replicate on the British High Street, no matter how hard we try.

C'an Pastilla seemed stuck in the 1980's...

...and so did the coffee. (This picture from lkpheartsfood.net)

It may be because on the Continent  taking coffee is more of a ritual than we see it in Britain –although that is changing, if slowly – that the experience of drinking it there is exactly that, an experience, rather than just a means of quenching one’s thirst. And the country we probably most associate with coffee drinking as an experience is Italy, although it is only since the end of the Second World war that coffee has gained such a firm tradition. Prior to 1939 coffee was the preserve of the elite, with most Italians drinking hot drinks made from roasted barley or chicory. So what will Italians, for whom coffee is pretty much synonymous with espresso, make of Starbucks, who have announced plans to open their first outlet in Milan in 2017? On the basis that the Starbucks experience is pretty consistent world-wide, it is unlikely that the chain – which coincidentally opened its first store in Seattle forty-five years ago this week and now has nearly 24,000 outlets in sixty-seven countries – is going to make any concessions for the Italian market. That suggests that the Italian coffee aficionado will not be beating a path to Starbucks’ door, but for the younger generation, and particularly those who have travelled and come across their stores in other countries, Starbucks may be less of a culture shock. Personally I’m not a great Starbucks fan; the coffee is consistent but somewhat bland, but they have their place, especially in a family group where not everyone wants an espresso or an Americano, given their wide range of other drinks. Starbucks may not be to everyone’s taste, but just as another American institution, McDonalds, have conquered the world by offering a speedy alternative to the more formal restaurant meal, so Starbucks have their place alongside the more traditional cafe.

The first Starbucks in the UK opened in 1998, on the Kings Road in Chelsea, twenty years after Costa opened their first store and a year after the first Caffe Nero. Between them these three chains transformed a somewhat moribund UK coffee market; considering Britain drinks over 60 billion cups of the stuff every year, it's surprising no one has done the same for tea.

A Midland Odyssey - Part Seven - The Interview

Like thousands of other teenagers up and down the country, my younger daughter is currently preparing for her A levels, just as I was forty years ago. But while Sarah intends going to university after she leaves Sixth Form, in 1976 I was looking for a job. And like many of my peers I had applied for a job with a bank - well, two actually, National Westminster and Midland.  Both offered me interviews; the first one I went to was with Nat West. It did not go well. I got lost on the way from Liverpool Street Station to Goodman's Fields, where the interview took place, and was a nervous wreck throughout. I was not offered a job.

My second interview was with Midland Bank, on a grey, damp Friday morning in the Spring. I donned my new Burton's suit - grey check, two buttons, wide lapels and flared trousers, as was the fashion back then - and set off, making sure that I was in good time and had a map of my destination, Suffolk House in Laurence Pountney Hill, EC4. In an early example of my fear of being late, I was ridiculously early when I got off the train at Liverpool Street, from where Suffolk House is but a fifteen minute walk. Having time to kill, I walked to London Bridge and then back and forth across the river in the drizzle a couple of times before deciding that it was now not too early to get to my interview. Despite the fact that forty years have passed, there are some things that I remember quite vividly from that interview; not so much the meeting itself, but a couple of odd coincidences that sprung up.

Laurence Pountney Hill. Suffolk House is long gone.

Some people say there is no such thing as coincidence, that what we see as coincidence is actually just the Law of Attraction or the Frequency Illusion in action, but there were two incidents at my interview that I think can only have been coincidental, in fact downright spooky. The first came when I sat in a reception area with a number of other equally nervous teenagers, waiting to be called in to be interviewed. An interviewer emerged from somewhere; "Mr Woods?" she asked. "Yes," I answered...and so did someone else. "Oh, so we have two Mr Woods. Mr Michael Woods?" she asked. "Yes," I replied...and so did the same someone else. Puzzled, she consulted her form again. "Michael Grant Woods?" she asked and this time I had to shake my head. Off trotted my namesake for his interview. I often wondered if he got a job with Midland. I accept that my name is not exactly uncommon, and years later I came across others in the bank who shared my name, but the odds on encountering one's namesake at a job interview, in a pool of less than a dozen other people must be very long indeed.

The second coincidence occurred when it came to my turn to be interviewed. I sat down opposite the interviewer and realised that I had met him before. Back in the 1970's, when all the banks seemed to recruit on an industrial scale at the end of each school year, Midland Bank would visit schools in an effort to encourage school leavers to apply for jobs with them, and when the Bank's caravan had visited my school, Forest Lodge in Collier Row, one of the members of staff who came with it was now sitting on the other side of the desk from me. I cannot recall anything about the interview itself, although it must have gone much better than the one at Nat West - or perhaps Midland were not so picky - because I was offered a job. Of course it might have been that the job should have been offered to the other Michael Woods, or perhaps it could have been that the interviewer was simply impressed by the fact that my memory was good enough to have remembered him from his visit to my school. In any event, by the time I came to sit my A levels, I knew that come August I had a job to go to.

Like Suffolk House, my old school - Forest Lodge - is also no more.

Nowadays the idea of a job for life is becoming less and less common; one in three workers stay in a job for no longer than two years apparently, but in 1976 there were certain industries, and banking was one of them, where long service was the norm. And whereas my parents were both factory workers - they were employed by Thorns (later Ferguson), my Dad as a French polisher and Mum on a production line assembling television circuit boards - my getting a job in a bank carried with it a certain cachet, more so than nowadays I suspect. The fact that my parents worked in a factory (although my Mum had been a secretary with a firm of solicitors before I came along), that we lived in a council flat and I went to a comprehensive school made me consider our family to be firmly working class. Today, notions of class distinction are much more blurred - if they exist at all - and they aren't something to which I pay attention anymore; at best they are irrelevant, at worst divisive, demeaning even.

In 1976 the rate of inflation stood at 16.50%, down slightly from the whopping 24.20% which it reached the year previously, and even before I had started work I received a letter confirming that my starting salary would see a double digit percentage rise following negotiations between the National Union of Bank Employees and the bank. And even before I had set foot in a branch, I was transferred! My initial letter confirming my employment as a Grade One clerk (subject to the usual six month probationary period) advised me that I would start at Midland Bank 126 High Road, Ilford but hard on the heels of that letter came another transferring me to the strength of the bank's staff at 412 Cranbrook Road, Gants Hill (just over a mile away).

Midland Bank, Gants Hill is now a pizza restaurant.

So in August 1976, after a week's Induction Course at Midland Bank's Training Branch in Holborn (see A Midland Odyssey Part Four), I took the 247A bus from Collier Row -where I lived at the time - to Gants Hill to embark on what might loosely be called a career with Midland Bank. Funny to think, had my interview with Nat West turned out differently, or had there not been two Michael Woods at Suffolk House that Friday, or had I not known my interviewer, I might now be looking reflecting on a very different past.

"Allow 28 Days For Delivery"

Internet shopping is big business: in 2014 over £104bn was spent online in the UK and last year more than three-quarters of all Britons reported buying goods online. While some of those will have been 'click-and-collect' purchases, a large proportion will have been for goods that had to be delivered to the purchaser's home, which accounts for the fact that when I look out of my dining room window there is a good chance that I am going to see a delivery van of some kind. And it seems that it is a rare day when the doorbell isn't rung by a delivery driver bringing a parcel to our home.

The frequency with which we receive a parcel delivered to our door is in sharp contrast to how often we had a home delivery even just a few years ago. As with so many other things, the internet has been responsible for the huge growth in shopping from home. Seeing those delivery vans going up and down our street made me think about how things were before we could order goods online, and before communication improved with the coming of text messaging and email and tracking services that allow us to see exactly when our goods are being delivered.

Neither of my parents had bank accounts until sometime during the 1980's when their employers stopped paying them in cash. Before then paying for large items like furniture or domestic appliances was done with cash or on hire purchase, and if the latter then the instalments had to be paid in cash. The only things that were ever ordered for home delivery were those that were too big to bring home on the bus (neither Mum nor Dad drove, although Dad had a moped which was of little use in transporting anything bulky). If you were lucky enough to be given a date when something would be delivered all you knew was that it should turn up that day, meaning that you had to spend the whole day indoors waiting for it. In the event that the day dragged on and the item had not turned up, you could always telephone to see where you item was, except that until about 1974 my parents didn't even have a phone, so the only way to make a call was to trot off to the nearest phone box. Doing so of course ran the risk that the moment you turned the corner, the blessed lorry with the delivery would turn up.

Worse still were the items you ordered by post. Having filled in the form from the newspaper or magazine, it was off to the Post Office to buy a Postal Order (my parents didn't have a bank account, remember), post it off...and wait. Most of these purchases came with an "allow 28 days for delivery" clause so it was anyone's guess when the purchase would arrive and the chances of actually being in to receive it were slim. As you can imagine, we didn't order very much by post. On one occasion that we did, the item was out of stock and our Postal Order was returned, which meant that not having one of his own, my Dad had to get his brother to pay it into his bank account to get our money back.

Even when you were fairly confident of a delivery date, things could go wrong. By 1990 I had left home and married. My first wife and I ordered a settee which was to be delivered from Wales. On the appointed day, a Friday, I had a phone call to say that due to high winds having closed the Severn Bridge, our settee could not be delivered. A new delivery date was agreed, which was the following Friday. Come Monday morning I was at work and received a call to say that our settee had arrived , but no one was in to take delivery. We ended up having it delivered to my parents' house (fortunately they lived in the same road as us at the time) and had to transport it home in the back of the car - with the tailgate open - later that evening.

It is a while ago - maybe about eighteen years - since I made my first online order and you probably won't be surprised to learn that it was with Amazon, but I can still recall my amazement at being able to place an order at five o'clock in the afternoon and have the good turn up before noon the next day. We now take that sort of thing for granted and with email confirmation that our order has been despatched and with some delivery companies providing tracking numbers that allow the buyer to see exactly what progress their order has made and when it is going to be delivered, the mystery over when things are going to turn up are largely over.

Not entirely, though. At one time we used to order our groceries online from Tesco and in the early days the system worked well. The time came, however when it seemed that the supermarket may have over-extended themselves and having waited more than once until 10pm on a Friday for a delivery promised between 6pm and 8pm, we gave up on online ordering. In fairness, that was a long time ago; they may have improved since we last ordered.

Having gone from the days when ordering goods meant buying a Postal Order, mailing the order and being at the mercy of the seller and the Royal Mail for the actual delivery, we now take ordering goods online and being certain of when they are going to be delivered for granted. And if we can't be in to take delivery, we can always arrange to collect from places like Doddle or from Amazon Locker. Many things we buy don't even need to be physically delivered. Digital downloads of books, music and films mean that we can enjoy our purchase within minutes of ordering the product (download speeds permitting), although despite my attachment to my Kindle, I still quite enjoy reading an actual book and where music is concerned, prefer a CD to a download.

So, where next for online ordering and delivery? Amazon have proposed using drones to make deliveries, but for some products, perhaps there is an even more radical possibility. 3D printers are not yet commonplace - prices are at present prohibitive - but there is no reason why, once these machines become as ordinary as the home computer and inkjet printer, that some physical goods could not be downloaded in the same way as we now download music and films.

That may sound like the stuff of science fiction, but bear in mind that before 1994, when Amazon were founded, just buying things online was non-existent and now it is so normal as to be unremarkable. Who knows? in another twenty years time we may think nothing of downloading something like a toaster and printing it at home.

School Chiefs In Punctuation Ban Row!

It is probably because I drifted into a career in banking through passivity rather than due to any burning desire to work in the industry and remained there for thirty six years more through inertia than anything else that I have always admired and even envied people who have a clear vision of the vocation they want to follow. However, when I was in my last year at school and wondering what I would do for a living, I harboured some thoughts about pursuing a career in journalism. After all, English was probably my best subject and I enjoyed writing, but in truth I was probably too shy, too introverted to consider a profession that generally requires one to have a thick skin, be hardnosed and perhaps even unscrupulous at times. I remember hearing that one could not consider oneself a proper journalist until one had filched a wedding photograph from the home of a grieving widow, something that I could not conceive of myself doing, although as a junior reporter I would probably have been reporting on church fetes, Women's Institute meetings and proceedings at the local magistrate's court, so the requirement to steal mementos from a tearful spouse might be a long time coming, if indeed the need ever arose at all.

Looking back, I have often wondered if I actually heard that tale or if I imagined it. That was until I read Romps, Tots and Boffins: The Strange Language of News by Robert Hutton. As the sub-title suggests, it's a book that explores the language of journalism, or journalese, that inhabits our daily papers, the words and phrases used in newspapers that rarely appear in our normal, day to day speech. Words like 'baron' as in 'oil baron' or phrases like 'foul mouthed tirade,' which normal people would substitute with "effing and blinding" or swearing, or cursing. Then I came across 'death knock,' which Hutton explains is what happens when someone dies in a newsworthy way and a reporter is despatched to counsel the grieving family...and 'get every picture of the loved one that's in the house.' So I hadn't imagined it after all.

You only have to take a cursory glance at any newspaper to see what Hutton means about the particular idioms that reporters employ. In fact there is probably a good parlour game to be had from scouring a paper with a list of words like 'officialdom' or 'plucky,' 'rabid' or 'reeling' and seeing how many you can score. Journalese exists for many reasons. To tell a story in short, punchy phrases that convey their meaning easily for readers whose time is at a premium. To deliver prose that is lively and easy to read and is familiar is an asset in getting the message across when space and time are limited. Thus 'rant' for an argument with which the writer (or paper) does not agree, or 'rapped' when someone is told off. It's a sort of code, but one for which the reader has the key, even if on starting to read a particular newspaper they may have to learn it. As Hutton points out, journalese is a fairly universal language and while at one time there were different dialects for tabloids and broadsheets, (Keith Waterhouse, of whom more later, identified 'tabloidese' as a distinct sub-genre), the lines are now so much more blurred, with words once the preserve of The Sun or Daily Mirror now also commonplace in The Times or The Telegraph. Although journalese evolves (as Hutton tells us, 'mad cow disease' and 'test tube baby' are the inventions of journalists), some expressions are ages old and perhaps no longer relevant. A sports writer describing a footballer turning 'on a sixpence' before executing a 'slide rule pass' is alluding to a coin not in use for over forty years and a calculating device long since supplanted by the pocket calculator. But the reader will immediately know what is meant, even if they have never seen a sixpence, or a slide rule for that matter.

This week a story appeared in the press suggesting that government ministers are concerned about the excessive use of the exclamation mark by children as young as seven. The ! is apparently over used, particularly in social media, and teachers are being advised to curb its use by their pupils. The reporting of this story has sent journalists into a frenzy of journalese in describing  the announcement from the Department of Education (DoE). Teachers are apparently "up in arms" about this guidance, which is described as a "stern edict." This has resulted in a "backlash" with ministers being accused of "taking writing back to the 19th century" since primary school children are to only get credit for using exclamation marks at the end of sentences beginning with 'what' or 'how' as in "What a lovely day!" or "How exciting!" This, by the way prompted the title of my blog this week, as you may have guessed by now. Banning exclamation marks other than in specifically prescribed instances may be somewhat Draconian; it is certainly at odds with the idea that the correct use of punctuation, grammar and even spelling are less important than a child's ability to express themselves, although I have limited patience with that concept. I would agree that the over use of the exclamation mark diminishes its effect; the use of multiple exclamation marks certainly does, but limiting its use to certain sentences will rob others of their meaning, reducing the dramatic to the mundane. Language evolves, and social media, particularly Twitter where brevity is vital given the constraints of 140 characters, is a particular example of how English (and presumably other languages) is changing whether the DoE like it or not.

The media reacted to the exclamation mark rules with typical journalese.

The DoE's pronouncement on the use of the exclamation mark is not the only example of someone wishing to limit its use. Somewhat surprisingly considering the genre in which he writes, Stan Lee, creator of such characters as Spiderman, Iron Man and Hulk, once tried to ban them from Marvel Comics, having decided that they were "too juvenile." There is a theory that exclamation marks were originally used so often in comic books because of the printing process. The use of poor quality paper meant that full stops were often not visible or might be removed by a printer and so a ! ensured that the reader understood what the  writer intended. The story goes that after a short period in which the exclamation mark was not used, Lee relented and they were reinstated, perhaps because a comic book without exclamation marks is like a Big Mac without the pickles.

Spiderman, complete with exclamation marks.

Keith Waterhouse. Picture: The Guardian

In terms of writing styles, I am of a mind with Robert Hutton, who regards the late Keith Waterhouse's book, On Newspaper Style, now more than 30 years old, as an essential guide for writers. As someone who greatly admired Waterhouse's writing, for newspapers such as the Mirror and the Daily Mail and in his novels (Billy Liar would probably be the book I would chose to take if ever asked to appear on Desert Island Discs), I can honestly say that if I could write a tenth as well as him I would die happy. As far as I am concerned, it would probably be better for children to be schooled in their writing by reference to  Waterhouse, whose campaign against the misuse of the apostrophe should be a lesson to us all, than by a bunch of Whitehall mandarins.

The March of The Mobile

Predicting the future is difficult and there are enough examples that show that even industry experts are prone to getting it completely wrong. In 1943 IBM Chairman Thomas Watson said, "I think there is a world market for maybe five computers," and as recently as 1977  Ken Olsen, founder of Digital Equipment Corp said "There is no reason for any individual to have a computer in his home." Both predictions were spectacularly wrong. And in 2006 David Pogue, writing in The New York Times, said, "Everyone's always asking me when Apple will come out with a cell phone. My answer is, 'Probably never.'" By March 2014, iPhone sales had reached 500 million devices.

The iPhone; Who saw that coming?

The march of the mobile phone has been inexorable. In 1993 Vodafone predicted that just 10% of the UK's population would own a mobile by the year 2000, yet now  there are over 90 million mobile phone subscriptions in a population of 64.6 million people. Mobile phones are so ubiquitous that you probably don't know anyone who doesn't own one; 93% of the adult population have one and 66% own smartphones. Mobile phones, some people said, would never supplant the landline, yet now the landline phone sits forlorn and largely ignored, except by the elderly. I only keep our landline because that is how we get our broadband and on the rare occasions the phone rings it is either my Mother-in-Law or a marketing call, and thanks to the Telephone Preference Service (TPS), the latter have reduced to a trickle (except the other night when I got two, at 1am and 4.30am).

UK mobile and landline usage. Source: Ofcom

As we know, the mobile phone, particularly the smartphone, is more than just a device for making phone calls and sending text messages, nowadays the crucial part of your mobile phone contract will be how big your data allowance is and how much you pay for it. A typical 500MB monthly allowance would let you view 5,000 basic web pages or watch an hour of video, but as streaming high definition videos or watching TV on your mobile becomes ever more popular, "all you can eat" data allowances are essential, to which the mobile phone companies are responding by hiking prices. Three has stopped offering customers an "all you can eat" plan at £17 per month, increasing their tariff to £30 in response to the huge additional demand.

But as well as checking Facebook or Twitter while we are on the move, we are increasingly using mobiles to buy stuff online, to check our bank accounts and pay for things. You can pay for your parking using your mobile, or with Apple Pay, just about anything by adding your bank card to your phone and using it in the same way as a contactless payment card. At the end of this month Android Pay will go live in the UK using similar technology. The future is likely to see our smartphones enabled for us to complete more and more of our daily tasks. The Hive Active Heating app allows British Gas customers to control their central heating at home from their phone. Smartphones can be used to set your TV recorder and Vodafone have an app enabling you to control your home broadband connection remotely. Inevitably more will follow.

SEAT and Nissan are just two car manufacturers who are integrating mobile phone technology into their vehicles, enabling your car to read you text messages from your phone for instance, or control the air conditioning and heating. Meanwhile Volvo have announced that from 2017 they plan to become the world’s first car manufacturer to offer cars without keys. Volvo customers will be offered an app for their mobile phones to replace the physical key with a digital one. Which is all very well, except that I cannot get the app on my phone to work with my Nissan, and people who can have found that the app can be hacked and that they can send messages to cars other than their own, although there is no suggestion that this could work while cars were in motion nor affect steering and impact safety.

Volvo drivers will soon be able to unlock their cars with their phone.

In the future we could be offered the option to do away with our front door key and unlock it with our mobile. Replacing season tickets for rail travel or entry to sports grounds with mobile phone apps may become commonplace (you can already use a smartphone in place of an Oyster Card on the tube in London), employers may replace workplace ID cards with mobile phone apps and while at present we still need to insert our bank card in an ATM to withdraw money, will the day come when we simply point our phone at the screen instead? We can already order a takeaway pizza from our phone, so why not be able to order from a restaurant menu at the same time as we book a table using our phone? Arrive at the restaurant, take a seat and hey presto, your meal arrives immediately that you wave your phone at a reader on the table.

Watching video content, streaming music, reading books and magazines on your smartphone are all so commonplace, old hat even, that it is hard to imagine what you cannot theoretically do with your phone. And as more and more of our lives are lived through our phones, replacing bank cards, remote controls and even car keys, we are becoming ever more reliant on them, which is where it is probably prudent to inject a note of caution...for two reasons. The first is the battery life. Apparently the average between charge and depletion is one or two days, but we all know that with even moderate use your phone can dip to zero inside a single day, which is why battery packs are becoming not only more popular but nigh on must haves. Imagine the frustration of the Volvo owner of the not too distant future who gets to his car and finds his phone battery dead and incapable of unlocking his car? Or the similar angst of the shopper whose phone dies at the checkout, leaving them unable to pay for their purchases? There are plenty of tips out there about extending the life of your battery; personally I find turning off mobile data other than when I actually need it to be the best, but even so I still find the battery running down alarmingly at times. Secondly there is the idea of "putting all your eggs in one basket." Lose your credit card and you probably still have some cash, your rail ticket, your car keys. If their replacements are all embedded in your phone and it is lost, stolen, breaks or simply runs out of juice and you are up the proverbial creek, paddleless. Aside from which we can never forget the potential vulnerabilities of Near Field Communication (NFC) that many of these payment methods and systems of communication rely upon that could be exploited by cyber criminals.

The battery pack, fast becoming an essential piece of kit.

Don't get the impression that I am some sort of Luddite; I am as happy to embrace new technology, including smartphones, as the next man. The growing interest in the use of  the material graphene in mobile phone batteries, a material that would potentially reduce the amount of time needed to charge a battery, extend life to over a week and radically change the way smartphones look, might mean that the days of worrying how much charge you have left could be a thing of the past within the next few years. But even so it will be a long time before I ditch my car keys and credit cards, although by the very nature of such predictions, I could well be wrong.

Surplus To Requirements

The Football Association's Strategic Plan, covering 2011-15, states that one of the FA's goals is to  "protect and build The FA Cup’s reputation as the greatest domestic cup competition in the world," yet the game's governing body are currently debating whether to implement changes to the competition that do quite the opposite. The FA are negotiating with a tiny proportion of the FA Cup's entrants to make alterations that would radically change the nature of the competition and damage its character and iconic nature. It may be clichéd, but just as the giantkilling is such a huge attraction of the FA Cup, so is earning a replay against all odds. Replacing multiple replays with penalties if necessary in the second game made sense, even for traditionalists, removing replays altogether is a step too far. I cannot see how turning the FA Cup into a midweek competition, when Champions League and Europa League dates already congest those days during the latter half of the season for Premier League sides, helps.

Multiple replays (it took six games to separate Oxford City and Alvechurch in 1971) are a thing of the past. Picture: Oxford Mail.

This season 736 teams entered the FA Cup, the views of 716 of those are being put to one side while the FA debate with the twenty Premier League sides how they can make the FA Cup less of a burden for them. While the current format is likely to remain in place until the TV deal with the BBC expires in 2019, thereafter there is a very real prospect that the competition may see replays abolished and ties played in midweek rather than at weekends. The reasoning behind the change is to alleviate the fixture congestion that is perceived as a barrier to English teams succeeding in European competitions and detrimental to the success of the national team. That seems a somewhat disingenuous point of view. You cannot put England's lack of success at World Cup and Euro Finals tournaments down to West Bromwich Albion having to go to Peterborough United in an FA Cup Fourth Round Replay this season and quite how Manchester United's failure to qualify for the knock out stages of the Champions League can be laid at the door of a competition that they didn't enter until after their elimination from the bloated successor to the European Cup is beyond me.

The FA's Strategic Plan states that they will "protect and build the FA Cup's reputation."

Of England's Champions League entrants last season, only two required FA Cup replays and one of those sides, Liverpool, had already failed to qualify for the Champions League knock-out stage by the time they needed an extra game to get past Bolton Wanderers. Meanwhile in Spain and Italy the domestic cup competitions are played over two legs in every round. Barcelona won the Champions League despite playing 60 games in all competitions (Lionel Messi played in 56 of them) while Chelsea played 54 games in all competitions  (none of which were FA Cup replays) and not one player started more than 38 of those games.  Barcelona won La Liga, the Champions League and their domestic cup competition, the Copa del Rey in which they played nine games, one more than is necessary for a Premier League team to play to win the FA Cup. It is difficult to ascribe Chelsea's failure to win the Champions League to the two FA Cup ties they played last season (neither of which were replays).

If we are looking for reasons for England's failure then perhaps the surfeit of overseas players in the Premier League might be a better place to start. If we consider English teams failing in Europe then perhaps a more important factor might be the strength of their opponents, but never forget that English teams have won the European Cup/Champions League on twelve occasions, second only to Spanish sides, and eight English teams have taken part in the last eleven finals. Not, I would argue, a poor record and certainly one which would unlikely to be improved by abolishing FA Cup replays. Premier League teams routinely field teams in the FA Cup made up of second string and youth team players anyway (a policy that rather undermines their assertion that the FA Cup is detrimental to English teams progress in Europe), but it remains an iconic competition that is definitely now more highly regarded by clubs below the Championship than it is by the top forty four clubs in English football.

Romford play St Margaretsbury in last season's FA Cup, a competition that remains hugely important to non-League teams. 

Returning to the FA's Strategic Plan, the organisation set great store in their being able to deliver their goals by "Listening to football fans." Not, presumably on the occasion of the FA Cup tie between Exeter City and Liverpool, switched to a Friday night for television and resulting in Liverpool supporters finding that the last train home departed Exeter before kick-off. The complaints of the travelling Liverpool fans was brushed aside by broadcasters on the basis that it was  " no different to their visits to Swansea on a Monday night in the Premier League and a Wednesday trip to Southampton in the League Cup, both of which they have done in the last 12 months." So that's all right then, having been thoroughly inconvenienced twice, by the third time they ought to be used to it. Liverpool rewarded their travelling fans by fielding a woefully under strength side that required a replay to despatch their lower league opponents. Not that this would have made any difference to their Europa League aspirations as they fielded an equally weakened team in the replay.

There is no doubt that Premier League clubs are losing interest in the FA Cup, as Manchester City showed last weekend at Chelsea. Using the excuse of a midweek trip to Kiev in the Champions League,  they fielded a team containing six teenagers and five debutants. Winning the FA Cup used to be an end in itself, now it is not much more than a route into the rightly much maligned Europa League and while Arsenal picked up £3.3 million for winning the FA Cup last season, this was a pittance compared with the €36.38 million (£28.38 million) they accrued for reaching the last sixteen of the Champions League. Financially Premier League clubs do not need the FA Cup. Tinkering with the prize pot for the FA Cup would make no difference to the big clubs and would probably result in reduced prize money for the earlier rounds where clubs below the Football League really need the money.

The top clubs in Europe have been discussing changes to the format of the Champions League and Europa League, and while they deny it, rumour has it that they want to strengthen the stranglehold the tops clubs have by denying a place to even the champions of countries like Scotland and in effect creating a European League. A permanent place in the Champions League for clubs like Arsenal, Chelsea and the Manchester clubs might make even the Premier League a secondary consideration. A Champions League place for the FA Cup winners might be sufficient incentive for clubs to start taking the competition seriously, but if guaranteed or wild card places in the Champions League for the top clubs unable to qualify on merit become a reality (as has been mooted by Barcelona president Josep Maria Bartomeu) then the interest Manchester City, Chelsea, Liverpool et al show in the FA Cup is likely to wane still further.

With the prospect of FA Cup replays being abolished and the competition possibly being shunted into midweek, with Premier League clubs taking less interest in the competition and the views of supporters being ignored, can the day be far off when the oldest knock out competition in football is deemed surplus to requirements?

A Midland Odyssey - Part Six - The Midas Touch

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

Nixdorf terminal

The "green screen" 

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

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

Midas Team cartoon, courtesy of Mus Huseyin

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

I'm middle, right in this one.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Chinese Way

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

Tommy Lawton during his Arsenal days. Picture: Arsenal FC

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

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

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

Alex Teixeira. Picture: Evening Standard

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

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

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

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

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

This is where money is needed...

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

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

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