Tele-bloody-coms - just give us your wallet

The chap from BT was most beguiling.  The package was irresistible, and we'd been specially chosen as loyal customers.  Free broadband, free phone calls, help with the mortgage and use of a private Lear jet whenever we wanted.  All we had to do was switch my broadband from Talk-talk to BT. 'Tell them you want a Big Mac code', said the nice Geordie. 'Get them to send it to your mobile. I''ll ring you back at 4:30.'


I wonder whether anybody from Oftel has ever donned disguise and tried to get a Big Mac code out of Talk-talk. They would be horrified. Talk-talk's response to a polite request for the code is a threat to cut you off instantly from your mobile and your broadband (illegal), followed by a sweetener - "oh - your loyalty compels us to offer you free calls for life and the free use of a Jumbo jet."


It is absolutely impossible, even for a reasonably intelligent punter who just wants to keep costs of landline and mobile phone calls and internet use down to a level which his pension can accommodate  comfortably, to choose between fish and cheese, because like is never compared to like.


Even last month's itemised bill from Talk-talk was unintelligible. I've no doubt the sums charged were correct, but the headings under which they were grouped were utterly meaningless to someone who doesn't speak fonejarg.


I had the Talk-talk bill yesterday for the mobile calls I made trying to make contact with them to request a Big Mac code.  It was over £8, waiting for a reply, and this is the dirty side of telecoms - the invisible charges.


Oftel is failing in its job.  Telecoms is now utterly obfuscatory to ordinary mortals.


I still haven't made a decision.  Since Talk-talk took over Tiscali the broadband service has tightened up, and  TT warn you when to expect a day or so of mild disruption, but they bully you with implied threats if you say you are thinking of migrating. BT owns the infrastructure and doesn't like intruders, and is marginally more persuasive, but it tries too hard when it's going for the kill, and doesn't like taking no for an answer, so it makes nuisance calls to people who've been on the telephone preference scheme for yonks.


And we, the people who fund the big players, are treated with contempt if we protest at their doorstep salesmanship.


That Thatcher woman, doyenne of the car-boot market-place, has a hell of a lot to answer for.

Rochdale Liberals & Oldham East & Saddleworth

I'm sorry for Phil Woolas, who has lost his seat in Oldham East & Saddleworth, but there's a background that never gets into the press.


Red and blue have always respected each other's political differences in Rochdale and in this new ungainly parliamentary constituency, to the extent that they had gentlemen's (and gentlewomen's) agreements not to queer each other's pitch at local or national elections when they went out on the knocker.  Neither party wanted to be involved in unseemly brawls in the street or on the doorstep.  Members of both main parties conducted themselves with dignity and with mutual respect.


That made them ripe for exploitation by the yellow brigade, whose strategists are recruited from St Trinian's and the Bash Street Kids, judging by their behaviour at the hustings (fundamentally juvenile).  It was the yellow brigade who dreamed up the bright idea of doing their last leaflet drop just before midnight on pre-election day, turning on all the security lights in sleeping households and causing every dog to bark, or shadowing other parties' door- knockers in the hope of engineering a punch-up.


The difficulty the two main parties have in this constituency is that there isn't just one yellow peril to contend with, but two - one hungry for power by adopting Conservative policies, the other by adopting Labour policies, and they squabble amongst themselves like children in the school playground. Power at any price - that is the unspoken slogan of the Liberal Party, and that is why they can't risk having a serious manifesto of their own: just opportunistic fluff to allow them to move either way when a  chance arises.


Ugh.

Human Rights Legislation & Alice in Wonderland

Isn't it fitting that it's in pantomime season that an illegal immigrant with a string of motoring offences gets protected by European human rights legislation despite having killed a 12-year-old child with the vehicle he was driving illegally?


This legislation is binding on our judicial system, but it is proving to be bad law because it is not balanced by a Human Obligations principle, which could take into account the circumstances  in which somebody sought protection for their human rights.  Bad law creates injustice and compounds the injury suffered by victims of crime.  Human rights are not absolutes - they are relatives,  which go hand in hand, as all rights do, with duties and obligations.


People who engage in criminal activity surrender their right to be treated equally with their victims or with the rest of society, and until legislators builds this principle of Human Obligations into Human Rights law we will continue to live in an Alice in Wonderland world of topsy-turvy.

Le Grand Air-Miles A$$hole

I've never tried it, but people say that you can get your revenge on the pillock who races up and down the street at 70mph at midnight in his souped-up Citroen 205 by blogging his activities and putting his car reg in as a tag so that other people can find it via Google and heap contumely upon him (and then find themselves up before the European Court of Inverted Human Rights, probably.)


I wish I could do the same for the occupant of seat 13C on Swiss flight LX394 out of Zurich at 12:10pm today, 27 November 2010.


I hate flying, but I love flying Swiss because the the flight attendants are always so gentle and soothing, and I feel as though this is what Heaven must be like, and they give me confidence because I know that they don't want to get there prematurely any more than I do or the pilot does. Why, once we had a lady driver, and the male co-pilot was careful not to tell us until after the (perfect) landing.


Passengers pile in. Settle themselves.  The usual sort of fatalistic fingers-crossed calm descends as the driver revs up and things start roaring and rattling.


Then rises imperiously from his seat Mr Frequent Traveller Air Miles A££hole and addresses very pleasant young Swiss flight attendant who is closing the baggage lockers. "Bloody hell, I'm on a Fokker. You there, girl, go and ask the Captain how old it is.  30 at least.  Amazed it's still flying. "  (this is during taxiing. Passengers glance anxiously at each other. Some cross themselves, this being Switzerland.)


While flight attendants mime their safety instructions to the Tannoy, A$$hole switches on mobile device, plugs in earphones and becomes deaf to the not only the world, but the word. He does eventually switch off his Important Person Blackberry, but only at the last possible nanosecond, and passengers are now frantically writing their last wills and testaments.


Flight attendants doing last-minute checks before take-off.  A$$hole intercepts one.  "Don't you have today's FT on this flight, dear?"


Passengers and flight attendants are now so cowed by this Important Person (travelling Economy, note) that he also manages to get himself fed and coffee'd twice, once on the up-round and then again on the down-round, while the rest of us were starving.


13D and E having long since fled to vacant seats (about 3 and 5 seconds respectively after encountering him, actually)  we were the only people in range.  Stuffing himself with his second snack he impertinently inquired: 'Been on holiday, then?'


We both turned away and muttered to each other in French (we had been able to brush up our colloquial French at the Piaf concert that Fabienne Jost had given the night before in the Stadttheater Bern.)


Swiss must know who he is - he is frequent-flier Mr Air Miles A$$hole.  Dear Swiss, can't you ban him?  He undoes everything you do to put your passengers at ease.  Can't you put him on something wooden with one dodgy prop and an outside lavvy next time he books with you, tell him he's going first-class, then open the scuppers and drop him in the sea about 100 miles off Reykjavik?


It was only after we'd landed at Manchester that my dear wife pointed out  that we'd been on row 13.  With him.  Mr Total Tosser Know-it-All Air Miles A$$hole.

M'sieur - how interesting it was to cross your path. As we say in English: Vous etes, m'sieur,  vainqueur complet.  And I can't even be bothered to flatter you with the necessary diacritics.

Just 450 words

Bernard Levin did it, TS Eliot did it a lot in Finnegan’s Wake, and no doubt there are other writers who have written an entire column or even book in a  single sentence, but I shouldn’t think it’s easy -  you have to have at your disposal an armoury of weapons such as parentheses (like these,  within which you can waffle on about anything you fancy); or subordinate clauses, which have nothing whatsoever to do with Santa and Christmas but are rather a way of breaking sentences up into related or opposed sense-groups; or very long lists, catalogues, inventories and enumerations of things or words, such as the massive pile-ups of adjectives that Levin used to build pace and tension (and I do miss Bernard’s lively animadversions on anything or everything that got under his skin, though you have to read his books now because he passed on in 2004); and there are others, all helping to constitute what is generally though indefinably called ‘style’, as though style was something that could be pinned down like a butterfly and taken apart to see how it worked, which of course it can’t be because in the process something gets killed, and what gets killed is something so intrinsic to the form and substance that the exercise is pointless, although I have to say that many literary critics (such as F R Leavis or I A Richards) took no notice and carried on regardless, adding little to the literary canon but paving the way for these dreadful postmodernists, most of ’em French (and we all know how French people enjoy a bit of philosophising over a carafe of  rouge and one of those long loaves that can do you such a nasty injury if it pokes you in the eye, though even the baguette is nothing like as hazardous as the croissant, which must be the messiest item of food every invented, scattering as it does more than its own body-weight in crumbs all over your tablecloth, lap, floor, carpet, and dog) and pretty well incomprehensible to people with only one brain; people like Foucault and Derrida, and one or two non-French people like Skinner and Chomsky, all of whom I blame for the fact that all Eng Lit classes teach nowadays is how to find the sub-text so as to work out what Charles Dickens had for his breakfast on Fridays in 1860 or whether Emily Bronte ever had a boy-friend, and if you think postmodernists are a waste of space as far as Eng Lit is concerned just see what they’ve done to music, which is all repetitive plink and plonk nowadays – and so I’m not even going to try.

Scammers, Scumbags, and Scunthorpe (nice place, actually. Possibly.)

I see the free-holiday con-merchants have crept out from under their stone again, and are now operating from an accommodation address in Blackpool, phoning you up at tea-time to offer you unmissable deals and free hollies, which turn out to be 20 minutes Sunday shopping in Scunthorpe if you will just spend fifty million quid on a timeshare apartment in eg Afghanistan to qualify.

One of the great benefits of the internet age is that scams like this are so easily spotted, because they are publicised on the web by ordinary people who don’t like being made fools of. So get their ‘company’ name and/or phone number when they ring you, make an excuse to keep them hanging on, and Google what information you have, plus the keyword SCAM.  It is surprising how many con-artists fail to take obvious precautions, like blocking their phone number.  Scammers might be cunning, but they are also as thick as any other purse-snatcher
or dark-alley mugger.

This particular scam is well-documented (Google 01253206449 and you’ll see what I mean), and that is fine for us net-wise savvies.  We leave the phone dangling for 48 hours and let them pick up the bill, or we ask a friend in Auckland, NZ, to send them a very large parcel of housebricks  by air freight, without a stamp on.

But I reserve my real anger, fury, rage and calumny against Scammers Anonymous because of Granny Oldbotham and Great-Uncle Wilf, who wouldn’t know a computer from a coprolite (which when abused it closely resembles), and who only had the electric telephone put in at all because the family wanted them to feel safe.  It’s grans and grandads and other elderly people who are most likely to be suckered by these predators, this new generation of cowboy builders in cyberspace with a BT line. And yes, BT, you have a lot to answer for, ethically if not legally, and so do the banks who allow known crooks to have bulging accounts with them,  'banking' and 'ethics' being nouns which have never yet been known to occur together in the same chapter or paragraph, let alone sentence, the love of money being what it is biblically reported to be.)

I thought I was net-wise, but I still got conned out of nearly £200 nearly two years ago by a fake internet trader.  Appalling as it might seem, and despite everything that trading standards departments know about him, he was still operating, or he was until a couple of days ago, at


www.computerwebstore.co.uk


(which mercifully is now offline, it seems)


and he must have made millions of pounds by now out of suckers like me.  But he’s a Liverpool crook, well known to police and trading standards, so rather than tangle with him and find our house burned down in the middle of the night with us in it, we backed off, to my eternal shame.  So he could still be operating under a new name, and you could be ordering that new telly at an absurdly low price off him at this very minute. Bye-bye wallet.


There are reptiles out there, disguised as humans.  Just watch it when they offer you a bite out of their apple.  That's when the problems started.

Direct Action Plan, File Ref aab/112/x/22.7 Annex 12.3

There’s been a lot of grumbling in our little bit of Over Wyre lately, and we’re not used to grumbling, but really!  No sooner have the Yanks who wanted to inject 50bn tonnes of gas at high pressure under our houses pulled out than another lot of anxiety-inducing erberts muscle in.  I mean, you can’t relax for a minute. I haven’t dared put  my slippers on since 1965.

I don’t usually go in for conspiracy theories, despite having the largest collection of X-Files DVDs outside MI5 and the CIA, but I am beginning to get just the teeniest bit neurotic, and I am noticing the sulphurous whiff of a Cunning Plan.

My suspicions were first aroused when Wyre BC gave permission for a derelict building to be erected on what used to be a rather nice bowling green by the side of the historic Bourne Arms.  Then this morning the massive concrete plinth that had just been put up by the side of the mobile phone shop (whey-hey, we’ve got a mobile phone shop in Knotty End!) wasn’t there.  Spirited away in the middle of the night by Persons Unknown.  Derelict building still there, though.  But nice new plinth to commemorate the Battle of Britain conspicuously not there no more, our Ada.

It’s all because we’re Over the River, and not really part of civilisation as it is understood in Big Brash Blackpool or Poulton-le-Fylde-Under-P.  It is all designed to drive us out, so as to declare Knotty End a Site of No Scientific Or Any Other Interest Whatsoever, and then do what councils always do with derelict land – flog it to a manufacturer of land mines or turn it into a giant municipal pig farm or landfill site.

Well, chums, the people who live round here have been here for generations.  They all have ancestors who survived on one Morecambe Bay shrimp a year, and gave the left-overs to the people in the hut next door, and they’re as tough as old boots, and they last even longer.  And one didn’t do one’s stint in planning departments for nothing, neither did one take on Mrs T and her government without learning a thing or two about dirty dancing, so here’s slopping the slurry  -  the Action Plan, absolutely guaranteed to win funding from the NWDA, because it’s called an Action Plan.

First thing, we declare UDI and lay tons of chewing gum along Shard Bridge.  Really really sticky chewing gum. That closes the border. We then write a letter to Lancaster  City Council that starts “Dear Daddy.”  I have read up on local government law in back issues of the Gazette (not you, Sir, the legal one) and that’s considered to be the proper way to address a potential adoptive parent, just take my word for it.

We then get in touch with the people who nicked all the lead off the roof of St Oswald’s last year, and tip them off about the derelict luxury-flat Oedipus complex by the jetty, and go 50/50 on the proceeds, which we offer to Lancaster as a b    , oops, I mean as a generous gift with no strings attached.

Result? Well, absolutely nothing, probably.  But isn’t it nice to rattle your cage a bit, just for the fun of it? If it makes enough noise somebody might hear.

Spam, Spam, no thank you, Ma'am

In the last week alone well-meaning 'friends' have seized more than 50MB of my hard disk with viruses that they have unwittingly passed on. These viruses were uninvited.  They weren't the sort that would wipe your C: drive clean or empty your bank account, true, but they behave like viruses because they take up bandwidth, thus clogging up the Internet and slowing it down, and they proliferate exponentially at the speed of light.


The villains are most girlie net-virgins who just reely reely have to pass on to their entire address book the latest bit of round-robin feel-good or feel-guilty drivel that tickled them.


I've tried everything.  I've done polite replies asking them not to include me in the list of recipients for the latest version of frog in a blender or why immigrants are bleeding the country dry.  I've tried suggesting to them that some of this stuff actually breaks the law because it tends to incite racial hatred.  I've tried subtlety - saying 'oh gosh! How amusing! I really must pass your hilarious antisemitic joke and 10MB of jpgs on to some of my Jewish friends.'  Nothing works.


There are two last resorts.  The obvious one is to block them so that I will never receive anything from them again, but this way lies social fragmentation and no Christmas cards, ever.  And nobody would ever speak to anybody else ever again.  The other is to send them a bill.  What we need is a net-clamping agency.  £100 to unlock your e-mail account for abuse of the privilege of free speech, and don't do it again.


Meanwhile, I will once again spend a couple of hours cleaning out all the uninvited hi-res jpgs from the dark corners of the hard disk, where they lurk.  What I can't do is clean out of the heads of the people who send this sad stuff to me their opinion of me - they think I think the same way as them. 


And I rather hope that I don't.

Pope Benedict and the telly

I had been thinking how well the Beeb had been covering Pope Benedict's pastoral and state visit.  They used to do these things so well in the Dimbleby days of hushed and respectful - and infrequent - interjections by people who knew what they were talking about, and the coverage from Westminster Abbey yesterday was Auntie at her best.


A pity, then, that the joyous singing of the Rutter Blessing at the end of the Hyde Park celebrations this evening was completely obliterated by chattering voice-overs.  It must have been the work experience team.  Back to hacks' primary school, please.

Fatuous equivalents

They're at it again, the TV news boneheads, with their fatuous comparisons.  Last night it was the 60cm shaft that is to be drilled to provide an escape route for the trapped miners in Chile.


I would have thought that 60cm was a pretty precise figure, but that's because I'm a word person, and TV types can only think in pictures, so 60cm was explained as 'about the size of  bicycle wheel', in case you were innumerate or completely brain dead and also only capable of thinking in pictures.


Now my memory is that bicycle wheels come in all shapes and sizes (think penny-farthing), even, but not exclusively, 60cm.  So that visual equivalent was about as useful as a chocolate fireguard.


Then blow me, in the same programme the same twits did a montage of a load of London buses to illustrate some impressive measurement or other of the A380 Airbus.  Excuse me, pimple-heads, but buses is buses and planes is planes,  Wales is Wales and Wembley Stadium is Wembley Stadium.  If you really can't get your head round dimensions such as 80ft (the height of an A380) do you honestly think you are safe behind the wheel of a car?

search box added

I hope my reader notices that I've now added a Search facility to the blog, and, egad! - it worked instantly (in XP, anyway. Not in Windows 7, though. Buck up, chaps!)


Last night I remembered mentioning one Mary Jackson ages ago, and because I hadn't tagged her by name it took well over an hour of scrolling through Older Posts to find the one I wanted, with the link.


I do have trouble with all these new-fangled inventions like the electric telephone or moving pictures, because I was always a slow learner, even in infant school (they didn't let me move up to junior school until I was 23, and married).


But, dear reader - don't think the Search bar is for your benefit, 'cos it ain't.  It's for my one remaining brain cell, Horace.  He needs every bit of help he can get.


But back to the reason for adding the search bar - Mary Jackson.  She is an English writer of great wit and acumen who contributes to a learned literary journal, the New English Review -


http://www.newenglishreview.org/

(find her in the author archives button, pour yourself a large glass of something white and possibly Californian, settle back, and prepare to enjoy!)

and I say that Mary Jackson is an English writer because this particular New English Review is actually an American lustrous organ, emanating from Nashville, Tennessee, whence you don't expect emanations of this quality (revenge, Bill Bryson and Paul Theroux, is sweet!).


It seems that I've been unconsciously saving up Mary Jackson pieces for 14 months, and when I finally found the link again I had a wonderful wallow last night.


Mary Jackson weaves words like spells. She is also deliciously rude.  Her particular gift is to turn your life-held preconceptions and prejudices on their heads.  Read her on Samuel Becket or Jeanette Winterson, or on practically anyone or anything else that she turns her attention to, but be ready to get your grey cells all shook up.

Reluctant Organists - 2

(this article appeared in the August 2010 edition of the parish magazine)

I might have mentioned last month the rocks and sharp stones that bestrew the path of the Reluctant Organist, but I didn’t know the half of it then.

It was when I raised with the Treasurer, I thought quite politely, the matter of the customary Fee for services above and beyond the call of duty, that I was transfixed by a gimlet eye and informed in acid tones that the Fee for a Reluctant Organist was exactly the same, to the penny, as the fine for failing to sing in the choir.  In vain did I protest that I had hummed as well as strummed.  It cut no absolutely no ice.

I was particularly peeved because on Whit Sunday I had become the latest innocent victim of a cunning plan hatched by French organ composers to restore national pride after Agincourt.

French composers of organ music, you see, have a mischievous  streak, and they are never happier than when they are teasing the reluctant organist by starting a piece off innocuously enough on Page One in some easy key like F, with a nice tune and only the flute stop out, then introducing more and more sneaky sharps and flats after the first page turn, until suddenly, just as you’ve arrived at a really fast passage in six sharps and 11/16, you are expected to have enough free hands to pull out 19 more stops on the swell and 12 on the great while holding a nine-note chord with your feet, and the new ‘registration’ (as we organists call a particular combination of knobs and buttons) occupies half a page of extremely small print.  In French.

It is not surprising that ladies make good organists, because reading an organ score must be very much like reading a knitting pattern.  If you can translate K2, yfwd., sl.1, K2tog, psso, yfwd., K5, yfwd., sl1, K2tog. psso., yfwd., K1 into dexterous digital activity while simultaneously concentrating on daytime television then reading an organ score, even one by a French composer, must be an absolute doddle.  And it is worth noting that in a random sample of French organists, such as Olivier Messiaen (anag: “vile ear emission”) and Marie-Claire Alain (“a miracle alien air”), fully half are women.

The reason that there is so much French organ music is, of course, that French orchestras, like French farmers and French ferry operators, are always on strike, and churches and cathedrals there have learned the hard way to play safe.  Indeed, the great French composer Camille Saint-Saëns (“calm is an essential”) got so exasperated that he wrote a symphony for Organ and Orchestra that still packs the concert halls because he cunningly fixed things so that nobody notices if the orchestra do not actually turn up.

But on one thing all Reluctant Organists agree – that the last word should come from their patron saint, perhaps the finest of all English-speaking women organists, the New Zealand-born Gillian Weir – 


“I are willing.”

Caveat emptor - 5

It does seem an awfully long time ago, but it's only, and exactly, a year since I last went mutton and cost the Notional Health Service a shedful of kiwi.

http://choirstalls.blogspot.com/2009/07/caveat-emptor-4.html

So - but only to bring the story up to date:


Same thing happened last week.  Mutton in the left toby.


Wiser this time, avoided the local health centre (or Lucrative Puncture Clinic) and phoned the walk-in centre in Blackpool.  That was 9:00am.


By 11:00am full hearing in afflicted doodle had been restored by a very competent nurse.


Thank you so much, Colette.  Please accept this huge bouquet of red cyber-roses and a big 'ug.

Reluctant Organists - 1

 (this article appeared in the July issue of the parish magazine.)

I don’t trust Church Organs.  Unlike the Church Piano, which has long been domesticated, the organ is a feral creature, apt to assert itself in unpredictable and possibly life-threatening ways.  The Church Piano comes equipped with a single keyboard, and makes only three sounds – plonk on the left, plink on the right, and a sort of muffled plunk in the middle (where it gets the most wear.)  The Church Organ comes with a bewildering array of keyboards, five in some instances such as Cathedrals, where the poor organist must need either a couple of assistants or at least a stepladder to use the one at the top.

The piano has two pedals – the left one and the right one, and is easy to remember which pedal does which job. The left one is the clutch, the right one the accelerator, I think, or it might be the other way round (pianos do not need a brake pedal, because they do not move about much or they go out of tune.)

The organ, in contrast, has dozens of pedals, whose function is not quite the same as the function of the pedals on the Church Piano, as every Reluctant Organist knows to his (or her) cost after stepping on one by mistake in a quiet bit of the service.

But it isn’t the pedals on the Church Organ that cause most trouble for the Reluctant Organist, who can always tie his or her ankles to the legs of the organ stool so there is no risk of an accident – and it isn’t even the keyboards in their manifold multiplicity.  It is all those knobs and buttons and things.  I’ve managed to work out that the one that says START turns the organ on, and the one that says STOP turns it off so you can hear what the Vicar is saying, and I’ve found the light switches, because they look like light switches, but as for the rest I confess that I am completely baffled.  The knobs, which you can pull out or push in, are supposed to change the sound that the organ emits, and to help you, they have labels on them, like Flute, or Trumpet, or Oboe, or Salicet, whatever that is (it sounds to me suspiciously like something you buy discreetly at the chemist’s.)  The problem is that if you pull one out either nothing happens or the organ just carries on sounding like an organ.   The trick is to pull them out in different combinations, I am told, and to help the Reluctant Organist at St Oswald’s there are five presets.  Well, I have tried the five presets, and in ascending order they sound like this: 1) very very quiet indeed; 2) very quiet indeed; 3) jolly quiet; 4) pretty quiet; and 5) absolutely deafening.

So I thought I’d look up ‘organ stops’ on the Internet, and apart from two returns which said ‘and thank heaven for that’ all I got was an advertisement for a DIY quadruple-bypass kit.

Anxiously, with a looming service to play for, I phoned a friend.  “Ah!”, he said.  “Presets start you off, but then you have to twiddle a bit.”

So I started twiddling a bit.  And bingo!  He was absolutely right.  I was thrilled.  When I found a combination that worked I wrote it down in a little notebook so that I could reproduce it.  I did it for all seven hymns and both voluntaries, and sat back, satisfied, then took the rest of Saturday off, confident that Sunday would be fine.

Well, evidently somebody changes the combinations daily for security reasons, which is why you were blasted out of your seats by Veni Creator Spiritus, and why Shine Jesus Shine sounded as though it was being played somewhere across the river by a kazoo band with mutes on, so it’s back to the drawing board.

I’ve got two more services to play for in August.  But I’m not sure I’ll have got the hang of the thing even by then, so it could well be back to the piano.  Must remember, though, to work out which pedal does what.  Oh, and book an oil change.

Hosepipe ban? Batten down the hatches...

Usually it rains just after I've washed the car.  All I have to do is creep up on the old Nissan with a foaming bucket and the neighbours groan and whip the garden furniture into the garage double-quick.  Every six months that car gets washed, whether it needs it or not.


But it wasn't me this time, honest.  After weeks of glorious weather, the local water board announced a hosepipe ban last week, since when it's been chucking it down, and I'm getting very suspicious about any outfit with 'United' in its name.


I was going to write one of those pieces that has my reader splitting his sides with mirth, but blow me!  I've been beaten to it.

http://www.blackpoolgazette.co.uk/jacqui-morley/Look-at-it-this-way.6411470.jp

I read it and uttered a hollow laugh.  We've got a garden like that, too.  It's so wet that all we can grow is rice.  From the plum trees at the very top of the garden, which you need a wet suit to reach in August and September when the fruit is ripe, to the house there's a fall of about two metres (more than six feet, grandad), and boy, does water move downhill or doesn't it?  

This was our local Victoria Plum Falls in September two years ago - rather more water coming downhill all at once than our 10cm main drain (4", pops) can cope with.  We wouldn't mind so much if it was the sea that had breached the sea wall, or the river that had burst its banks, but for heaven's sake, this was just rain.


Hosepipe ban?  Pshaw.  The next time it rains I'll ask United to get round here pretty sharpish with a portable reservoir.  Fill it no time, we could.

Scams and Very Honourable Companies Indeed

Gosh! We won £23,500 today!  Brill!  We can get the central heating fixed, repair the leaky roof in the sun-room, and pay someone to sort out the noisy valve in the cistern that wakes everybody in the street up at 5am and because of which we are now permanently constipated.


And it's all thanks to a nice man called Friedrich Müller, who runs his philanthropic enterprise from an accommodation address in Belgium, at the premises of AMA, an advertising company who specialise in the gentle art of giving away shed-loads of money. N't.


But if you too have received this wonderful promise-of-a-guaranteed-prize, don't phone the plumber just yet.  Fill in the claim form by all means, to be sure of your £23,500, but don't be surprised when you receive a discount voucher for £1.50 which you can trade in with a company called Vital Beauty against a £32 bottle of cod-liver oil.  Just write them a letter pointing out their mistake.


Scammers are parasites.  They operate just within the law so that they can carry on conning people - usually elderly and vulnerable people - but we can't call successful scammers devious, cheating, rapacious crooks when they do operate within the law.  Just.  It would be libellous. And to call them evil, scheming scum who want to cheat your grannie out of her life savings would be very wrong indeed- because many of the companies that use game-show techniques to sell goods from little catalogues operate wholly and entirely within the law.  Just.  So I am sure that Vital Beauty is a bona-fide trading company, just the same as Swiss Home Shopping (a sister company) is, and the Office of Fair Trading is of like mind. They drew attention to some trivial little matter about the size of the wording in the bit about the promise-of-a-guaranteed-prize, and Vital Beauty responded immediately (Google Vital Beauty and see that it is indeed a company with a considerable reputation.)


So I am convinced.  I shall return the forms and book that plumber. The cheque should be with me in a few days.


Less honourable companies may deserve to be made to run their businesses from a small room in Strangeways, but if the OFT say that Mr Mueller's empire is entirely above board, who am I, a mere OAP, to doubt it?


Cough up, Herr Mueller.  I am sure your £32 bottle of cod-liver oil is worth every penny. And with your kind promise of £23,500 I can now afford it.

Irresponsible journalism

You’re sitting there about to have your tea, and having survived the public self-humiliation of a load of brain-dead would-bes whipped on by a fantasy S/M madame, you keep the little telly on for the relative sanity of the informative 6 o’clock – news?  News it isn’t. Every night it is the same tired old formula. It is red-top tabloid telly at its worst - sex, crime, scandal, Europe-cut-off-by-fog xenophobia, celebs and bloody football.

In this household football is regarded as being just about as interesting as string, yet a fixed percentage of 6 o’clock programmes’ air-time just has to be devoted to it, whether or not anything has actually happened in this game for little boys with nothing better to do which telly has turned into a multinational industry, so we have to endure gobfuls of padding and gobbledygook from lounge lizards who haven’t shaved for three weeks and who obviously don’t own a tie between them.

And the troubles in Northern Ireland have erupted again, as they will continue to do while tribes think it is perfectly normal to taunt each other in provocative fancy dress parades.  Northern Ireland’s troubles have produced many wonderful, brave women, but it is still a mediaeval, male-dominated society where fathers give their little boys guns and tell them to go out to play and women are supposed to know their play-ass (and where even vowels get tortured to death.)

And that is about the only positive thing I can think of to justify the colossal social cost of football – that it ritualises tribalism, puts bromide in its tea, and acts as a safety valve.

..ooOOoo..

And don’t stop me in full rant, because another thing that is sickening is the air-time that these wretched programmes devote to sentimental stories about ‘our boys’ killed in Afghanistan and Iraq.

It is a brutal fact, but if your son or daughter joins the army there is a distinct possibility that they could be killed.  The risk of being killed is part of the job. If your offspring were not willing to take that risk they could have found themselves a nice,  safe job in a supermarket or a library or doorstep selling the stupor-inducing joys of Sky TV.  But they didn’t. They volunteered to do a job that they thought could make the world a better place.  The really sad thing about war is that so many altruistic genes never have a chance to reproduce because of an accidental bullet or an enveloping  wave of mustard gas. And what are we left with?

Losing a child is awful.  I do know.  What bereft parents need at times of great shock and grief is comfort from loving friends and family – an enfolding arm of genuine human compassion, not some minor telly celeb reading a script written by a semi-literate who has never heard of the subjunctive and wouldn’t recognise it if it bit them on their media studies PhD.

What bereaved parents and families do not need is the vicarious tears that these abject reporters – no, not reporters, ‘presenters’ of scripted current-affairs human-interest magazine shows – invite us to shed.  They are crocodile tears, and they do us all a disservice.  They invite us to be participants in the sort of sloppy sentimentalism that surrounded the death – in an all-too-ordinary tragic car accident – of somebody who was probably originally a normal, happy, even if rather privileged young woman until she got pushed into an unhappy marriage.  We allow our press to build Disney figures out of people so that we can rejoice when they don’t live up to cartoon perfection, and it is this same social cancer which throws up people – and, God help us, voters – who think that a psychopath like Raoul Moats is a folk hero.

It must have been blindingly obvious to the editors of these programmes from Day 1 that soldiers were going to be killed in the Middle East, just as they were killed in Northern Ireland, and just as they were killed in Ypres or on the Somme or the beaches of Dunquerque, and that by committing themselves to covering the first deaths in detail they had hung a millstone round their necks.  When does the air-time run out?  500 deaths? 1,000?  In the Battle of the Somme 20,000 British soldiers died in one day.  Difficult to fit the reely reely exciting football news in that day, hey?

..ooOOOoo..

Uncontrolled social networking and low standards of journalism encourage us to live in fantasy worlds. Older people may have the wisdom to resist it, but for a new generation of children this cartoon, Facebook world is more real than boring old school and boring old parents.  It isn’t only the pervert in the shabby raincoat at the school gates that parents should be worried about.  It is also the sort of brainwashing that children are being subjected to by forces that parents have no control over.  We live in a society in which ignorance and stupidity are regarded as virtues: a society in which newspaper editors can run campaigns against paedophiles and not care very much if their bumpkin readers bash up paediatricians by mistake. Well, it sells newspapers to people who never learned to think.

The next time you are tempted to lay a £2 bunch of flowers at the roadside where a life was extinguished ask yourself what you think you are doing.  It is a gesture as cheap as it is contemptible.  It says ‘O look how hearing about this death has affected me’.   It says: ‘O watch me beating my breast in woe.’  

The vicious me-ist ideology of a grocer’s daughter from Grantham led you to believe that you were the centre of the universe. But ask yourself how this little death of someone you'd never even met, let alone known, has really affected you.  Did it make you cry?  Oh poor you. 

It would be such a great comfort to the bereaved, knowing that.

A Bonfire of the Inanities - please!

Imagine the scene.  You arrive early to make sure of a parking space.  You go into the foyer, mingle, show your tickets, and buy a programme (for Sweeney Todd, actually.)  Then you enter the auditorium.  It is dimly lit.  It is full of theatrical smoke representing fog.  The curtains are open ready for the prologue, so the first set is ready, though on stage time is standing still, just waiting.  You are shown to your seats by somebody who appears to be in costume and in role, and you are momentarily confused - am I late?  Has the show started?

The idea of getting rid of the first big barrier between players and audience - the proscenium arch (itself a relatively modern invention) - goes back at least to the 1960s, when rival telly adopted the proscenium arch (which it still hasn't learned to let go of).  Apron stages, theatre-in-the-round became popular because they were theatrical devices to draw audiences into the drama, instead of  just spectating  it.  And the curtain - that big symbolic barrier - went at the same time.

Theatre is all about engaging an audience's attention, and preparing them for that suspension of disbelief which is at the centre of that magical world.

And directors are very good at their job.  They know that audiences have learned all the old tricks, so they find new ones, which is why the best of them rise to the eminence of theatres like The Swan in Stratford-on-Avon.  Michael Bogdanov's production of Howard Brenton's new translation of Faust in 1995 threw out the fixed, eye-level stage as the common factor in all theatre until then.  He used the space above the floor as well, so actors worked from platforms suspended from ropes. and even from trapezes, so that the idea of 'set'  itself was no longer a certainty to hold onto.

The production of Sweeney I went to wasn't at the Swan, however.  It was in our village hall.  But what it had in common with the Faust was the genius of a director who knows exactly what she or he is doing, has a very precise vision of what is going to take place on the night, and,  crucially,  knows how to achieve it.

If this sounds like a eulogy,  it is very far from it,  for the vision of directors has now been brought to nothing.  They can get rid of the proscenium, they can get rid of the curtain, but there's one thing they can't get rid of - silly, intrusive bureaucracy, and the 'ealth an' safety message that has to be read out to audiences before every show in case somebody in the theatre is totally illiterate or has just been smuggled into the country from Bolokistan and doesn't understand green or EXIT.

I had the job of introducing an evening of song by two choirs last week, and momentary madness took hold of me, and somehow the 'ealth an' safety announcement got sung (to an Anglican chant).  It seemed to go down rather well with an audience which by now has got rather piddled off having its intelligence insulted every time it goes into a Big Room.

And - I haven't been arrested yet!    So I am now working on a four-part version of the same announcement for unaccompanied choir, and a friend is setting it for female vocalist and small jazz combo.  Versions for comb-and-paper and full symphony orchestra will be available soon.  The 'ealth an' safety announcement is so important, to a bureaucrat,  that it really ought to be the star of the show.

But then,  as the Romans used to say: "ars longa - vita brevis" - fat arse, short life.

And quite right too.

PS  If you ever meet a bureaucrat, please give him or her a copy of Bleak House.  It has some rather long words in it which they will love, even though they won't know what they mean.

Music for the Papal Visit, 19 September 2010 - Archdiocese of Birmingham

The Archdiocese of Birmingham has now announced the music for the Mass that will be celebrated when Pope Benedict arrives at Coventry Airport on 19 September this year (actually it's been announced twice - the first time it was the grisly sentimental God-pop that topped the list.  The second announcement was more sensible.)


What is so noticeable about the line-up isn't there's so much pap, but so much that is worthy to be performed during the Mass.


Here's the list.  Dodgy stuff is italicised


Gathering in Prayer and as Pope Benedict vests for Mass

Hymn – Church of God, elect and glorious – Seddon

Motet – Cantate Domino – Monteverdi

Hymn – Christ be our light – Bernadette Farrell

Entrance Procession

Praise to the Holiest – John Henry Newman – R R Terry arr. Andrew Wright

Veneration of altar

Sacerdos et Pontifex – plainsong

Penitential Rite

  

Kyrie – Orbis Factor – plainsong

Glory to God – Mass of Blessed John Henry Newman – James MacMillan

Liturgy of the Word

Responsorial Psalm – Paul Wellicome/Gelineau

Gospel Acclamation – Salisbury Alleluia – Christopher Walker

The Creed – Credo III – plainsong

Liturgy of the Eucharist

Offertory Procession – Hymn – Firmly I believe – John Henry Newman

Motet – Beati quorum via – Stanford

The Eucharistic Prayer

Sanctus &  Mystery of Faith- Mass of Blessed John Henry Newman – James MacMillan

Communion Rite

Agnus Dei – Mass of Blessed John Henry Newman – James MacMillan

Communion procession

Hymn – Blest are the pure in heart – Keble

Motet – O quam gloriosum – William Byrd

Hymn – Be still for the presence of the Lord – David Evans

Motet – Ave verum – Edward Elgar

Chant – Surrexit Christus – Jaques Berthier/Taizé

Distribution of earplugs (Damian Thompson's naughty interpolation, not mine!)

Hymn – Make me a channel of your peace – Sebastian Temple

Conclusion

Hymn – For all the saints – W Howe/Vaughan Williams

Te Deum in C – Franz Joseph Haydn.