Life, the Universe and Everything

Due to a cockup by National Express (that they've already described as “appalling”) I found myself at Victoria Coach Station at midnight last Saturday with the next coach at 0730. I thought I'd try and have an adventure or at the very least survive 7 degrees C and occasional rain. After speaking to cluster of 9 hotels I asked a policeman for advice about safe places to sleep. He pointed out that “This is Victoria!” before directing me to a shopping arcade up the road. I got asked for change three times on the way and I found it was quite a haunt of mainly young people with wheeled suitcases and i-phones waiting for coaches to various airports. Some were more organized than me After sitting on a step for about 2 hours, I was shivering so much I probably fooled a few local seismographs into reporting an earthquake. So I went for a walk and was bored enough to read a sign at a bus stop that said “Night Buses”. Aha! A night bus, I reasoned would take ages to get anywh...

Well, it may be legal . See an article in my other blog

The story that young women are going to have to pay more for car and life insurance due to a European "equality" ruling is moderately interesting. As is the related issue of annuities used to provide pensions - men will get less than they used to. "Womens-rights" people may be suffering some cognitive dissonance - equality has given women a worse deal! Myself, I tend towards a "fairness" approach - I don't want a particular group or person  to be discriminated against unless there is some real justification. So as a man who is likely to die before my hypothetical twin sister, I'd like a better annuity deal thank you! No, to me, the really interesting thing is what insurance company marketing people will do about it. If women are going to have higher premiums despite being lower risk, a profitable business strategy is to attract lots of them. You can't actually turn men away but it would be silly to advertise at football matches. We mi...

Most of you probably know this one. Your mobile beeps and you've got a text about compensation for an accident you were in. Or that you were mis-sold PPI. But I haven't been in an accident since I went base over apex on the dance floor some years ago at Bromyard (very dramatic, huge crash, but no damage to me). And I could tell at a glance that PPI was a rip-off. How do they get our numbers? A junk text from Optical Express to my work and personal mobiles got me investigating. A Google for "Optical Express" spam got about 125,000 results. A lot of people have received spam from them by text or email. I'm very careful about giving out my contact details so I decided to ask them where they'd got my numbers from. They answered:  We employ the services of third party marketing companies who send out email and SMS communications on our behalf to their own database where contact information has been collated from a form you may have completed online. This wo...

I was in the small Cotswold village of Windrush recently and noticed this poster I like the detail "Please bring a cushion and a log!" presumably for corporeal and thermal comfort. The death of cinema has bee predicted many times. TV was supposed to kill it as was Broadband but here it is, alive and well in a remote Cotswold village.

Took this picture recently, Click to see it full size.

It’s a village on the Cotswolds originally founded over 100 years ago by followers of Tolstoy. The philosophy has changed over the years but it's still a “community” with meetings to make decisions. It's not a posh “gated community”, I know some quite ordinary people who live there. Still, instead of a “village hall” they've got the “Colony Hall” and the library is “The Book Room”.  Sign The Colony Hall Middle England has its garden gnomes and neatly clipped hedges but Whiteway is different Like most village notice boards, this one gives a snapshot of local life Excellent garden shed A stony ploughed field. A lot of Cotswold fields are like this which must make for hard work. The lime will make  the soil alkaline and especially good for growing cabbages Wikipedia entry

Here's a typical, topical and local plea to recycle: Councillor Stan Waddington, the county council's cabinet project champion for waste, said: "Don't throw your Christmas trees away. If you are not planting them back in the garden, chop them up and take them to your local household recycling centre. Let's say it would be a 10 mile round trip to the rather unpleasant recycling centre. I used one of the online calculators to find that  it would cost about 200g of carbon - not to mention actual £££. Let's think of some ways to reduce this: Don't have a Christmas Tree at all - my system - zero carbon - bah humbug! This is simple and effective. Unlikely to catch on though as the Norwegian military-industrial complex :-) are likely to oppose it tooth and nail - they have more spare trees than people. Ok, most trees in the UK are locally sourced but there's still commercial interests pushing you to buy them. Suppose the county council sent round a ...

I camp at festivals several times a year. The sites are large and I'm often quite close to people I don't know. So you hear stuff, in particular, parents shouting at the kids. After a few days, a pattern starts to emerge - Little Billy is always being shouted at. He's obviously a persistently naughty boy, or is he? Sometimes it sounds more like the parents are dumping their frustrations with life on the kid and there's nothing the child can do to stop it. As I don't have children, I find it difficult to judge what's going on - not that it's any of my business, or is it? Should I quietly take the registration number of the car and pass it to the NSPCC ? Sometimes it is my business. I was once camped next to a mother who seemed to berate her daughter loudly from morn till night. It was a bloody nuisance so eventually I waited for mum to pause for breath and let out a loud " Ewwwwwwwww !" Worked a treat! Didn't hear a peep out of her for...

Went for an evening walk over Cleeve Hill. It's got sheep and golfers - and I suspect that's a relationship that has to be worked at. The sheep get an occasional high-speed golf ball in the ribs. So to protect the greens, the golfers have put up "electric" fences with the insulating poles, etc. but no source of volts. One sheep had sussed this out and was on a green getting her revenge by eating the grass. Saw a couple of rabbits. Clapped my hands and verified that their ears worked. You know that old Monty Python line about "What did the Romans ever do for us?". One answer is that they brought rabbits to Britain. Other wildlife included a moth buzzing around at about 25Hz and a murder of crows in the trees near Postlip. Moon came up - see picture. .

Got a replacement credit card recently. Using the contents of the single postal package and two very easily obtainable pieces of information about me, I managed to activate it, view my PIN and change my statement delivery to paperless. Fortunately, I am me. Had that post gone astray, it would have been too easy for someone to have run up a large bill!

I was thinking today about the Thursday Market in town and how it has changed over the years. It used to be by the gasworks and a blind man could find that for the same reason as he could find the brewery - though neither establishment thought to offer a factory outlet and make a profit from their commitment to diversity. Of course, the market used to be much larger and largely taken up with men selling complete dinner-services on the "I'm not asking you to pay £10, I'm not asking £5, ladies and gentlemen, who will offer me £2 10s?" system. There was a "Temperance" café - where "temperance" actually meant "abstinence" - see we had "spin" even before decimal coinage! The posters on the wall explained how animals only drank water - which I knew to be lie because our dog enjoyed Guinness when he could get it. But then, I digress…. 

Nearly crashed today staring at a "Cotswold Dog Spa" van. Yes, they do offer Canine Hydrotherapy which I've sneered at before . They even offer "canine sports massage". What is wrong with the modern dog? If it needs a bath, sure it's a tussle but it can be achieved with simple equipment at home! And if it's ill, you take it to a vet who diagnoses Worms and prescribes dried rhubarb pills. It'll be an Albatross Flying School or Hippopotamus Dieting next! 

Your Question: Why are you contacting me for marketing purposes when I've opted out of marketing? All our customers have the option to opt out of marketing. You can view and amend your preference at My Account and check the 'My details' section. Alternatively, you can telephone on 0845 270 6543 (Lines are open Monday to Friday 8:00am - 7:00pm, Saturday 9:00am - 1:00pm). If you opt out of marketing, we will be unable to send you details of offers and services that could save you money. But we will still contact you in relation to the service we provide you. Duh!

I see we have one of these locally. History repeating itself as each wave of migrants tempts us with their cuisine - and that word itself I suspect is not native :-) Anyway, there was a menu in the widow. A list of incomprehensible items with prices. I reflected on how more customer-friendly the equivalent menus were in 1970s Chinese and Indian takeaways. Sure, they had foreign words but each item also had a number for embarrassment-free ordering. And there were English descriptions too such as "rices with vegetable" which served to inform and amuse. But history hasn't repeated itself exactly. The owners of Indian takeaways in 1970s Britain were often the only people of that ethnicity in town. Pioneers. Very few of them were nurses, engineers, doctors, etc. With the Poles it's been different. The pioneers arrived a decade ago. The Polish takeaways, grocers, etc. came later and are not there for to provide the occasional exotic treat for the English natives. They...

It's supposed to be a good thing. We're told that women want men to do this and it really frustrates them when we won't. There's propaganda that it's what "real men" do and how happy it makes women. Good news ladies, it can happen but we need your help! On those rare occasions when the man in your life does express his feelings - especially if it's about inadequacy, fear, grief etc - put your arms around him and whisper in his ear "That's so sexy darling, let's go upstairs….."

Saw a sign on the back of a bus "Drive this bus for £7.25 an hour" with a phone number. Just for a minute or two, I pondered this. Would I pay £7.25 to drive a bus round for an hour? Would it be fun? Brm Brm! Then my brain tapped me on the shoulder and explained the scheme was that I would get paid £7.25 if I drove the bus around for an hour. Strangely, that didn't seem to be such a fun idea.

BBC Radio 4 recently did a documentary on Hulme , part of Manchester. If you're quick, you can Listen Again   It's a fascinating story of Tamil refugees, deck-access flats, squatting, demolition, a no-go area for the police and a rich alternative culture. My connection? A few years ago, I got a day's work delivering some training to an organisation based there. In preparation, I used Multimap to plan a route. Having got a small-scale map of my approach, I zoomed in for more detail. Something went horribly wrong - the layout of the streets on the large-scale map was almost completely different. When I finally arrived, it was clear that a large part of the area had only just been rebuilt. Multimap must have used some mapping from before and after. Here's links to some less geeky stuff: Wikipedia on Hulme Photos of the old Hulme

It's a café in Cheltenham town centre between Tesco and the taxi office. It's old fashioned - a throwback to the 1960s. Not quite authentic - the ketchup is not in a tomato-shaped container and the wartime posters are reproductions. They don't talk about cholesterol, they just DO it. Popped in there at lunchtime today and realised I hadn't had a proper breakfast so I ordered one. They didn't bat an eyelid. The kitchen is in the basement so the girl leaned out of the back window and shouted the order down. All the puddings are served with the option of custard or ice-cream. They do coffee but don't get clever and try ordering cappuccino. It's probably the last of it's kind - I'm sure there are others in less sophisticated towns like Gloucester but we are Cheltenham Spa .

Was at a small presentation recently and this woman started by handing out some papers while she chattered away. Most people started reading but I put the papers to one side and listened. Someone noticed and I explained that I couldn't read and listen properly at the same time. This provoked some unfortunate comments about men and multi-tasking. Anyway, introduction over, here's my tips for doing and surviving presentations: If the presenter gives out documents and doesn't stop talking, put the papers to one side and listen. You can read stuff later but you can't usually "listen again" Presenters: Give out documents at the end if you want to be listened to. Tell them you're going to do that and that there's no need to take notes. Presenters, consider not using technical equipment at all. I was at a day-long meeting recently and everyone (except me) had their stuff on Powerpoint . Nothing actually went wrong but there was loads of fumbling. In contrast,...