Can I interest you in…

The electronic warble that is the sound of our telephone burst into the room like the unwelcome guest that it was. Like all phones it just went off at an entirely inconvenient time and, like a fractious baby, demanded my attention by continuing to wail until I picked it up. Rather than uttering some soothing words I snapped somewhat impatiently into the receiver, “Hallo!”

I can’t help it, I am my father’s son – I learned it from him. If there’s one thing that I like to watch on the television each day it is the news, both local and national. It takes about an hour which isn’t much and occurs around meal time when all good people should be preparing dinner or eating it rather than bothering others on the phone. After that time you may dial as much as you like and preferably during soap operas which are an abomination and deserve to be interrupted.

“Is that Mr Neel?” came the breezy voice with all the sincerity of a politician.

“No, it isn’t.”

“Oh, I have someone of that name at your number.”

“It’s Knell – silent K.”

“Ah, well then Mr Ker-nell…”

“Listen,” I say, with not a little menace becoming evident, “It’s a silent K. I mean, when did you last ker-nock your ker-nees together?

A momentary silence from the other end was followed by a long drawn-out,

“Riiight. Okaaay. Anywaaay, can I interest you in any replacement windows as we’ve got an off…”

“No,” I interjected before he got his second wind, I’ve already got perfectly good ones thank you.”

“And the doors?” he said enquiringly.

“No, I’ve got two really good hardwood doors and they’re staying that way.

“Bargeboards? Cladding?” came the voice rising ever higher in pitch.

“No.”

“Then a conservatory is just the thing,” he said with a new confidence and assertiveness, “Our range of summe…”

“Stop, will you just stop.”

I’d really had enough by now and was prepared to let rip.

“Will you stop phoning here trying to peddle your horrible shoddy products. Yes, I do mean shoddy, what else could they be? Look at it this way, it’s a Bank Holiday and you’re phoning around in the hope of selling home improvements to some poor, gullible sucker. Most people aren’t that daft and so the only thing you’re flogging is a dead horse. If your product was any good people would be queueing up to buy it.”

“Just think for a moment and try to remember a time when a quality company, say, Apple for example, phoned you in the early evening desperate to sell you an iPad. Did you ever get a phone call from Mercedes Benz in Stuttgart enquiring as to whether you’d be in the market for an E Class saloon? Or from Coca Cola offering cut-price carbonated beverages. No? That’s because they are all leaders in their own respective fields and people beat a path to THEIR doors. That’s the gulf you have yet to bridge – it’s called the credibility gap.”

A protracted silence from the other end of the line until a voice came sheepishly down the wire,

“So I guess that’s a no to a new porch then.”

Starfish and the bookshop

Today I was in town and finding myself with a little time on my hands I decided to wander down to the bookshop and browse awhile. I nearly said that I would waste some time in there but it is my belief that time spent in bookshops is never wasted. How can it be so to one with an active and inquiring mind?

To me bookshops and libraries should be hallowed places like cathedrals or even monasteries, full of reverence – and Trappists. That is to say quietness, or silence, should be the order of the day. So how is it then that so many people seem to think that it’s OK to take their brood of noisy and badly behaved kids into the local branch of Ottastones? And why does the shop feel the need to provide a musical accompaniment to my literary browsing? Apart from being intrusive the music at any one time is unlikely to complement the mood of the piece that I’m reading and almost always ruins my concentration.

I was in the Novels section nosing through some prospective books for light reading on my forthcoming holiday and trying to discern which author’s style took my fancy. It was then that I became aware of a child-like hubbub outside the shop but took no particular notice until it started to intrude within the store itself. On looking round I see a 30-something couple shuffling past the bargain bin. The chap was sporting a papoose on his chest into which had been stuffed a baby of the species whose four small limbs splayed outwards like a starfish. A low gurgling emanated from this tiny bundle which was quite reminiscent of a geyser about to blow at any moment. Maybe it was just trying to shift a hairball that it had accumulated from dad’s straggly beard into which its face was pressed.

The wife/partner/significant other, being dressed in an eclectic mix of shapeless charity shop cast-offs, beamed inanely whilst peering owlishly through large glasses of a style last seen in the 1980’s. Her out-stretched hand was being disengaged by a Tasmanian Devil cunningly disguised as a human boy-child and who answered to the name of Billy. Well, actually, he didn’t seem to answer at all when mummy called out for him to come back in a reedy voice laced with vague hope rather than authority.

“Billy, come here Billy.”

“WAAAAAAAHHH,” came a yell as a large book crashed to the floor.

“Don’t do that, Billy,” said Daddy in a calm and unruffled voice.

“WAAAAAAAHHH,” came the sound from somewhere near the Crime section.

“Billy, I said no,” said Daddy wistfully to no one in particular.

I expected that at any moment the father figure would threaten young Billy. A threat to sit him down and reason with him most likely.

It was then that the starfish got the milky hairball off its chest and onto Daddy’s. A parental kerfuffle ensued with low cursing and a frantic search for tissues and wet wipes. Starfish, now empty, needed refilling and lost no time in letting them know and all the while there’s,

“WAAAAAAAHHH,” from the direction of Health and Beauty.

A small bottle of milk was produced for the starfish. I’m surprised as I was expecting a breast. So was the starfish who instantly complained.

Enough. I’ll come back another day or maybe I’ll just order from Amazon.

iPad? Not dressed like that!

The picture on the left, as I’m sure that anyone who has been on this planet since January will know, is the new iPad from Apple. Like most of their products it is ground-breaking, sleek and stylish. Designed by Englishman Jonathan Ive it is the culmination of several years work in bringing this new computing format to the market. It could be argued that in an aesthetic sense it is the culmination of all that’s beautiful, slim and nice to the touch – a bit like Claudia Schiffer, and it never says, “Nein, nein, nicht heute abend meine Liebe”. Also like Claudia, it requires no further refinement but if it should need to be clothed then it should be with something light and diaphanous so as not to spoil its slim elegance.

Imagine, then, my horror at the sight of the garment shown on the right. This, straight from the fashion houses of Paris of all places, is the supposedly chic covering for the iPad. Rather than the aforesaid diaphanous gown with its translucent and tantalising draw this is something that I’d expect to be found on a hot-water bottle. It’s pink and lumpy with all the sexy allure of a Winceyette nightie. Now I’ll confess to having the occasional fantasy about coming home to a naked or scantily clad German model but this – this would be stepping through the door and finding that Nora Batty had moved in!

1 in 3 people die

A plop combined with a slight metallic rattle of the letterbox heralded the arrival of something being posted through the door. I pull apart a couple of slats of the blind in an upstairs window to see who has been. It’s not likely to be the postman as it is too early and anyway he always rings twice. Only kidding. Well, not about the early bit anyway. Through the gap I see a young woman with a large shoulder bag of the type a paper-boy uses stepping off the end of my drive and on towards my neighbour’s house. The bag seemed to be suspiciously full of plastic bags which then gave me a clue as to what had just been posted. Finding my way down the stairs I see it there lying on the mat –  a charity bag.

Whose is it this time? I mean, we’ve had bags from just about every charity I can think of and it is becoming a menace. I’m fighting a rear-guard action here trying to persuade the wife that she is not legally obliged to fill each and every one of these bags with her clothes. When she’s buying so many skirts, jumpers and so on I remind her that they aren’t disposable, you know, they can be worn more than once or twice before putting them into one of these bags.

I’m a man and therefore don’t have many clothes – it’s not in my genes. On an enjoyment level, buying them seems to be about as much fun as paying a bill and so I buy just as many as I need and make them last. This also means that when my clothes are ready to be discarded the charity really wouldn’t want them. Really. If I wasn’t already a naturist I’d say that these charities are doing their level best to make me one. Still the bags keep coming.

Let me see, what does it say on this one. ‘1 in 3 people die’. That seems rather optimistic – Oh, hang on, it also says ‘from heart and circulatory disease’. Well, that’s cleared that up. There’s a label here too, ‘URGENT APPEAL. Please donate any unwanted BRIC-A-BRAC’. Are they sure? Do they know what they are about to receive? They do sound desperate. I have a little chrome plated tea spoon with a tag roughly soldered to the top proudly announcing that ‘I’ve been to Skegness’, they can have that. And then there’s the figurine of some indeterminate breed of dog made of a chalky substance with green beads for the eyes and very poorly glazed. The thin line of glue where I fixed the leg hardly shows at all. Also this is probably the best opportunity in a while to get rid of the stuffed and mounted piranha that I bought in a mad moment in Venezuela, afraid that I’d come away from South America without a souvenir. I’m sure someone will love it and give it a good home.

I can remember a time in the not-so-distant past when charity would doff its cap with a “Gawd bless you sir” if you so much as dropped a couple of pennies in the rattling tin. These days if they don’t get it deducted from your wages as some kind of tax on your conscience they want a hefty direct debit each month. Or the shirt off your back – quite literally. Well, they can have it – the shirt that is and I’ll blame my nakedness on the Red Cross.

…than first thought

Three little words. Now the lovey-dovey amongst you may well be thinking ILY when I say that but that’s not it at all. On an almost daily basis our newspapers are littered with the term ‘than first thought’ and those three words are usually, and immediately, preceded by words such as ‘worse’ or ‘more’. Sometimes the descriptions are not quite so negative but all in all they go to show that the experts in just about every sphere of human activity, in whom we place so much faith, get it plain wrong.

The ABC News has this to say:

US oil leak far worse than first thought – An oil leak in the Gulf Of Mexico threatening the coast of Louisiana, Texas and the Mississippi estuary is five times worse than previously thought.

So, wrong by a factor of five. Until they realise that it’s even worse than that.

This from The Independent:

Sea levels may rise three times more than first thought – Sea levels may rise three times faster than the official predictions of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) and the global average sea level may increase by as much as 1.9 metres (6ft 3in) by 2100, scientists said yesterday.

Wrong by a factor of three and that’s probably three times as bad as previous estimates. And that from the scientists who are supposed to be saving the world.

From LiveScience.com:

Tsunami Earthquake Three Times Larger Than First Thought. – A new analysis of the December earthquake that caused disastrous tsunami waves to strike Asia and Africa finds it was three times more powerful than earlier measurements suggested.

So, their measuring devices are not to be relied upon. Or are they? Who knows?

Try typing the words ‘than first thought’ into a search engine. You’ll soon find that just about every discipline from health, archaeology, engineering, science, meteorology, economics, biology etc. has obviously applied a stab-in-the-dark approach to their research. Why can’t they get it right? Do they even try?

I mean, these ‘experts’ are supposedly highly educated professionals that we, the tax payer, have coughed up to assist through university only to find that when they eventually get a job they’re wrong to a factor of five in their calculations. I’m all for education, qualifications and science but sometimes pure gut instinct is a lot more accurate and reliable.

Cats are vermin too

As I sit here looking out of my front window a cat saunters slowly across my lawn. It’s not the first time it has done this. In fact it is a very frequent visitor to my property to the extent that it has worn a diagonal track from the pavement at one extreme to the driveway by my front door at the other. To the casual observer it may appear that, during a particularly wet spell, someone had ridden a bike there and left a deep yet narrow gouge in the otherwise fairly decent grass. But no, this is damage inflicted by a cat with an Obsessive Compulsive Disorder which has drawn it to dissect my garden at every opportunity. Usually, as far as I can tell, it is just taking a short-cut on the way to bothering someone else but there are occasions when it stops and lingers. It does this because it likes to crap in the pea shingle that I have spread under my front window or in the large pots that decorate the front of the house with nice plants. Apart from making me rather angry  and somewhat murderous towards the cat it has done two things. It’s turned my front garden into a cat toilet and, because it may have a half-hearted attempt at burying the mess, it scatters shingle on my lawn. Which chips and blunts the blades of my mower.

Now, I thought I knew whose vile little animal it was – my next-door neighbour’s. All this started at the time they moved in but, during early conversations with them when the subject was raised and skirted around, they denied it. He said it was probably a fox. I’ve never seen a fox with black fur and white feet – socks I believe they are referred to. My wife now tells me that it isn’t the neighbour’s cat and that it comes from another house further down. I suppose there’s a way to find out and that is to look for the house that has undisturbed soil and shingle and no cat shit. I mean, they don’t do it on their own patch do they?

If you do find out who owns it they will just smirk and say that there’s nothing to be done about it – you can’t control cats. These same people are, no doubt, the same ones that will be first to get holier-than-thou if your dog should make a mess. I was a dog owner and I always cleared up after it. I just needed to make sure that I basically caught it on exit, as it were, or the phones would be ringing. Why is it that a dog owner can be subject to fines of thousands of pounds if their animal fouls the ground and yet this doesn’t apply to cat owners whose feline foulness causes so much damage?

And then there are the horses, look what they leave on the road. Several kilos of stinking manure at a time but do we hear of fines for horse riders? No. Ah, yes, it’s good for the roses you say. Tell that to a motorcyclist who has just come round the bend and slammed straight into it. I suppose you think that the biker just gets up, dusts himself off, chuckles to himself and carries on his merry way. Carted off in an ambulance more like.

Pigeons. I know someone who lives next to a chap who has a pigeon loft. Every day he lets these aerial rats, these vermin of the skies, out of the loft whereupon they fly off over the neighbours’ houses and gardens squirting out their foul guano over washing, cars etc. Any sanctions? No ASBOs? As long as they’re not dogs it doesn’t seem to matter.

Pigeons should be shot on sight, cooked and eaten, horses exported to France where they like a nice bit of cheval and the cats should be sent to China to be stir-fried with a few noodles.

The disfigurement of our towns

Does anyone else feel that our towns and villages are being disfigured and vandalised? In this case I’m not referring to the damage, destruction and graffiti meted out by youths with too much energy and too little direction in their lives. The broken street furniture, spray painted tags on walls and in other seemingly impossible places. No, I mean the blots on our urban landscape officially sanctioned and enacted by our local councils in the form of street signs. Dozens of them strategically placed in front of most of our nicest buildings and views.

Only today I was on an excursion to a village not far from where I live. I hadn’t stopped there for years and as it was a nice sunny day and I had time on my hands I thought I’d park there and wander around with my camera and snap a few quaint views. The village is old with many narrow streets of houses, cottages and shops dating back hundreds of years and is largely, I imagine, a conservation area. I didn’t see a sign to say that it was but I’m sure there is one there somewhere. There’s a sign for everything else. You’d soon find out if it was the moment you tried to paint the front of your house a different colour or install double-glazing. A small, pumped-up, grey little functionary from the parish council would be round in no time to tell you that it’s “not in keeping with the area”. So why is it that an extra layer of glass or a plastic frame in your cottage is a no-no but a dirty great metal sign pointing to a car park, a one-way system or a toilet is ideally suited to being planted in front of a half-timbered Elizabethan gem? Just how many of these signs do we need? When was the last time someone actually removed any of them once they no longer pointed the way to something that was still there? The point is that there was hardly a view in any direction that was devoid of signs. For Sale signs, signs to the car park, stop signs, Give Way signs, signs to the A road, signs to the motorway. This village is littered with the junk of modern living which needs to be removed in such a place.

In the picture there’s an example of an old cottage, Grade 2 listed, in a conservation area in a different town and the local authority have seen fit to plonk two signs right outside one of the nicest houses in the street. What have they done to preserve the character of this street and this house? Nothing. Instead they have provided a convenient sign pointing the way to that grey little planning officer who won’t let the owners of the cottage paint their windows any other colour.

It’s not just signs either. There is now the 21st century scourge of wheelie bins obstructing our pavements – several per house in colours almost exactly designed to clash with your Georgian terrace. They have all the visual impact and warm, homely feeling of an invasion of the Daleks.

Maybe it’s me. I’m just an ordinary amateur photographer – some would say very ordinary and very amateur – but it is what I do and in my own way I am looking at these things with a photographer’s eye. Why can’t the councils and city planners look at it that way too. Send them out with cameras to take some nice photos of their town and maybe they’d get it.