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.