Hooptedoodle #292 - Name, Rank and Cereal Number

The Final Instalment

A while ago, while I was looking out for some sort of acceptable breakfast food which would offer a more healthy alternative to my favourite toast and jam, I tried a few brands and varieties of "instant" porridge. I took a liking to some of the products of Dorset Cereals, especially their Gingerbread mixture, which is pretty good for a zero-effort production straight out of the shower.

Recipe:

* Slit the packet open
* Empty into a deep porridge bowl
* Add one cup-full of semi-skimmed milk (little green plastic cup in the cupboard, filled 1cm from the rim)
* Microwave on full power for 3 minutes
* Allow to stand for 1 minute, stir well
* Leave to cool for a few minutes (while making coffee)
* Bingo - gingerbread flavour porridge

Now all right, all right - I know this isn't proper porridge. Proper porridge is made with rolled oats and water and a little salt, and has to be eaten on a mountain top in a blizzard, while you are wearing a kilt and sandals - maybe a hair shirt would be OK. Any milk or sweetener (especially golden syrup) is a dreadful offence, and not acceptable at all. Even thinking about it is shameful.

Well, to coin a phrase, shove it. The microwave packet stuff is pretty good, especially on a cold morning, it's quick to make, and it is definitely better for you than toast and jam (real butter, Bonne Maman strawberry preserve, 3 slices, mmm, stop it...).

Back to the original tale. The Contesse found it was hard to purchase locally, but found a source online. Nice big packs too - one big box contained 5 smaller boxes, each of which contained 10 of these little sachets. That's 50 days' porridge, chaps - almost certainly sufficient for a lot longer than 50 days, since the odd portion of toast and jam would probably sneak in from time to time, not to mention occasional pains au chocolat etc.

If you are looking for humour in this story, then the only funny bit is coming up, so be careful not to miss it. The Contesse, who is good at these things, spotted that our big box of Gingerbread Porridge (hereinafter GP, for brevity) had a use-by date only 8 days later than the date of receipt - this implied some very intensive porridge consumption for a while, so she emailed and protested about the short date. The suppliers were as good as gold - they apologised at length and unreservedly, and promised to ship us a replacement box immediately, which they did.

Only snag was that it was from the same batch as our original box, and thus had the same use-by date. Thus we now had 100 sachets of GP, all of which in theory had to be eaten within a very short time. I'm not sure what would have happened if we'd complained again, but we didn't.

At this point commonsense bubbled to the top of the bowl. A sealed sachet of instant porridge contains almost nothing which is going to deteriorate. Dried oats, some flavouring and sweetener - maybe some actual dried gingerbread from Grannie Dorset's kitchen? In theory, you should be able to eat this stuff long after the official expiry date - what could happen to it? What is it going to turn into, in the absence of moisture and light? Bear in mind that the warring Highlanders, in their day, could subsist indefinitely with just a small bag of oatmeal and a little spring water. I don't know what they plugged the microwave into, but that is impressive.

So that's all fine. I slowed right down on the manic porridge-eating schedule, and in fact it's taken me a couple of years to get through it all.

Today I am left with the last packet - so I hung it on the fridge to register my respect for the occasion. I shall now eat it. It's OK. I am not exactly excited by the stuff, but it has some advantages (as discussed) and I can savour the fact that I got it for half price.

Half-price porridge is a good deal, even if it's not proper porridge.

Hooptedoodle #290 - A Trifle Confused

Very disappointed this morning. One of the disadvantages of waking up at 6am to BBC Radio 4 news is that sometimes I am still drowsy, and my perception of what has been said can be a trifle confused.

However, it seems that Mr Trump is not going to come to Britain to open the new US Embassy in London after all. I'm not entirely clear why he refuses to come, but it seems to be something to do with the fact that he doesn't like the building, and it's all Mr Obama's fault, apparently. That all sounds quite reasonable, I guess, but I was secretly planning to go down to the Metrollopus and join the welcoming throng, so, yes, I am deeply disappointed, and what am I going to do with this little flag?

This is also potentially unfortunate from a diplomacy point of view, since we in the UK might be reliant on some handouts from the US if the Brexit negotiations proceed on their current tack, so I hope there is no element of falling-out in his decision. It's all a bit worrying, really. I'll just keep the flag safe in my drawer - yes, next to the scarves and my woolly hat - since I'm sure he'll be back to see us soon.

I'm sure it will be all right.

I'm also a bit confused about something I may have heard (or maybe I read it) about possible enforced changes in Mr T's use of Twitter. I'm already a little mystified by all that. It is marvellous that he uses Tweets to such effect, and so many of them (and he's no spring chicken, you know), though I don't quite understand how this works. Does he leave the room, so that he can Tweet the same people he was just talking to? Does he go to the bathroom or something? Does he have a special (big?) cellphone for important messages? Whatever, it's all very clever, but it seems there are new guidelines coming, whereby Twitter and Facebook and all that lot are going to be required to take a firm stance on what represents inappropriate use of their services, and are going to have to take responsibility for moderating or blocking customer usage - at least, more than they have done previously.

Obviously I haven't thought through all the implications of this, but it has already been suggested that using Tweets to make nuclear threats to the President of North Korea is an example of the sort of thing which advertisers might find alarming, so we may find that the messages which control our future existence may have to find a new medium in future to make themselves known.

There must be some problem with just talking to people, I guess, or using the traditional communications set-up of the White House - I think we have to respect this, as a special case - but it does seem possible that the Presidential Tweets are going to have to stop. Someone suggested that it might be possible for the President to employ a glove puppet as his spokesman - again, I haven't thought of all the implications, but it would tick a few of the right boxes, it would be very cheap, and it would go down very well with the under-5s.

Fascinating stuff. If you would care to suggest a name for the new spokesperson, please feel free to contribute.

Hooptedoodle #289 - It's Amazing

La Duchesse Nails the Punchline

La Duchesse Veuve Culdechat (1934-   )

It being the Season of Goodwill, today we were delighted to welcome my mother-in-law to the humble comforts of the Chateau Foy. It is some time since she made a state visit at this time of year - you can read about the last occurrence here if you wish.

You will gather that we are always on our very best behaviour on such occasions. However, today her visit went very smoothly, and, as a bonus, she undoubtedly produced what so far has been the best line of the holiday period around here.

During the chatter before lunch, she suddenly asked me, "Do you still do - erm - whatever it is you do with toy soldiers...?"

You will recognise that this would be the moment for cheery self-confidence on my part, so I put on a big smile and my best, reassuringly breezy baritone.

"Oh yes - very much so," I said. "In fact, that's been going very well recently - there are a couple of chaps who live not too far from here, and I've been getting together with them for some pretty big games. Splendid fun!"

My smile may have been sagging a little at the end of this, but she was very positive about it all.

"That's good - it's amazing, though, isn't it?"

"Erm - what is?"

"It's amazing," she said, "that there are two people in Scotland that have the same interest as you."

And - of course, as ever - she is completely correct.

Hooptedoodle #287 - The Sun Made It Again

08:13am 6th December 2017, South East Scotland

Having got up early this morning (lots to do), and having been subjected to the radio news long enough to get up to speed on what those ridiculous clowns in Westminster have been doing, and having heard the latest forecasts for the economy and the weather, I am almost surprised that the sun bothered to come up today.

In fact it did such a good job that the Contesse went out on the steps with her camera.

Perhaps there is still a little hope.

Coffee. Toasted bagels. Franz Schmidt's 1st Symphony. It all helps.

Hooptedoodle #286 - A Brief Journey into the Unknown

Saturday was the day for my exciting trip to Perth & Kinross, which is unusually exotic for someone who doesn't get out much. Since I am not too confident about the last bit of the route, I transferred the satnav from my car into the van and loaded up the route. It is a very ancient Garmin Nuvi 250 - the only reason I persist with it is because I invested in a lifetime supply of map updates. Whether it is for my own lifetime or the device's is a matter of moot - I could never raise the courage to find out.

I was aware that there would be a strange bit in the middle of the run, since, though my maps were updated pretty recently, they predate the September opening of the new Forth road bridge, the Queensferry Crossing. I was interested to see what Martina (Ms Satnavrilova, the resident female voice in the device) would make of the lack of information.

Last time Martina had a nervous collapse was some years ago, on a very wet day in Inverness, when she got into an eternal loop in the one-way system, and the display briefly turned psychedelic before I switched her off, out of sympathy as much as irritation.

On Saturday, probably predictably, as I left the approach road for the old bridge, the display showed that I was travelling through a clear white space (previously farm fields), which became a clear blue space as I reached the water. There was the usual image of the rear of a car in the middle, but the rest of the display was blank. Martina said, "recalculating...  recalculating... recalculating..." over and over, for about 3 or 4 minutes, and then sort of trailed off. The display still showed me heading off into the unknown - although the view outside the windscreen was of traffic, and of the road over the new bridge on a nice sunny morning, the display made me feel rather lonely - almost homesick. I felt a bit like the Voyager spacecraft heading into the depths of space.

Voyager on its way to Kinross

As I approached the other side, Martina suddenly brightened up, though she didn't sound too confident.

"In one mile," she announced, "enter roundabout...", though there was nothing on the screen apart from the little car. Soon after, the road joined the Northern approach for the old bridge, and Martina was back to her businesslike self.

"Enter roundabout, and take first exit...", and normal service was restored. It was amusing to see what had happened, but I have to say it is not comfortable to behold that you are lost at sea. Today I am updating the maps again - that should sort it. Mind you, even the latest Garmin updates still give warning of a temporary 40mph speed limit on the A720, the Edinburgh By-pass, between Sheriffhall and Musselburgh, which was removed at the end of a spell of roadworks in about 2007. I keep a careful eye on Martina for signs of dementia. As it used to say in the audit manual, Trust but Verify.

Hooptedoodle #285 - Drawing the Line Somewhere - another crap post

One of the hazards of living in a rural area.

With all due apology for lack of taste, here's a minor item of local news from here in East Lothian. Apparently, council workmen painting lines along the road near Longniddry managed to paint over a patch of horse manure. Shock horror. My first reaction was that it obviously must have been the responsibility of a different department to shift the stuff, but the council have already explained.

They claim that

(1) it wusnae us - it was a contractor - so that's all right then

(2) it's no so easy to spot this stuff, they paint the lines with a special wagon, you know, and the driver is in a cab, well above the road. Anyone who thought that the painter would be on his knees in the road, working with a big brush and a ruler, go and stand in the corner.

While I was looking for a better picture, I found a much more graphic example, but this is from Kirklees, courtesy of the Huddersfield Examiner [a Mirfield Conservative Councillor described this as "careless" and "beyond belief" - anyone who regards this as evidence of some lack of imagination may also go and stand in the corner].

Since I was now on some sort of roll, I looked online to see if this is a more common problem than I had thought, and came across a show-closing photo of a road line painted over a dead raccoon, from California, at which point I decided to stop. I'll spare you the dead raccoon - I'm sure you can find it through Google if you really want to.

Hooptedoodle #283 - Good Will to All Men

If you haven't seen this before, it is an illustration from one of a series of Christmas-themed adverts produced by Gregg's, the UK bakery chain. Yes, quite so - probably a bit ill-considered. Daft, in fact. Gregg's reckoned it was meant as a bit of fun, apologised and promptly withdrew it - presumably they will try to recruit some grown-ups for the marketing department. That, you might think, would be an end to the matter - least said, the better.

Now I refuse, point plank, to get into any kind of argument about this. Not unpredictably, there is deep outrage in Twitterland, where the sanctimonious and the disapproving are thick upon the ground. Now people are not only outraged about it, but some are outraged because others are outraged about the wrong aspect of it. You can read about all this (if you can be bothered) in an article in the Independent, here.

There are more things wrong with this picture than you might guess at first glance. Obviously, replacing the infant Jesus with a sausage roll, for the adoration of the wise men, is a bit unorthodox, though, of course, the advert doesn't say that it's a straight swap - it's sort of implied. But never mind that, there's also the further business about Jesus being a Jew, so that not only is this horrifying to rather literal-minded Christians, but the association of pork sausages with Jewish people is also deeply offensive. Also, the wise men are almost certainly manufactured in China, which brings some further issues, but we'll swerve that one.

Also featured in the Independent article is a brief snippet about people wishing to boycott Tesco because their Christmas advert included a brief glimpse of a Muslim family. Ah yes. Christian charity in action - how lovely.

I tell  you what - I hope you have a very pleasant, peaceful Whatever-You-Prefer-to-Call-This- Festival; perhaps someone will be kind enough to come and wake me up when it's all over. I'll be in the attic. I have no problem with Christmas, it's just the bloody people.

Hooptedoodle #282 - Bump! - Gotcha!

Generic media picture of a minor accident, to grab reader attention

Well, the bad news is that the Contesse has had a minor accident in her car. The much better news is that no-one was hurt, the accident was not her fault (someone ran into the back of her car at a give-way at a T-junction - unless they reversed into you, it is pretty much a given that if you drive into the back of someone it is your fault), the damage is not very serious (a new rear bumper panel will sort it out, though it is a bit of a shame, considering the vehicle is less than a year old), the car is still driveable and everything should be sorted in a week or two. Things, in short, could be much, much worse; motor accidents can wreck lives in an instant, so we have to be very, very grateful, and it is a useful reminder not to take so many blessings for granted.

We have very few mishaps on the road, I am delighted to say, so we have little opportunity to develop any well-grooved procedures for dealing with this sort of situation. However, we have had the same insurer for 15 years or so now, we are quite happy with them (efficient, and very competitive charges) and we have a good idea of what you do if you have a bump.

The last time I had a vehicle off the road after an accident was two cars and six years ago when someone ran into my pick-up when it was parked (definitely not my fault, I was somewhere else at the time, Your Honour). The procedure was simple enough - I contacted my insurer (the same one as now), they booked the truck into a repair shop, who came and took it away, and lent me a courtesy car - a tiny, bright pink Ford Ka, with "Excelsior Coach Repairs" written on both doors in large black letters. It did the job, though the painted advertising does imply a subtitle: "KEEP AWAY FROM THIS ONE - HE HAS ACCIDENTS". The claim was settled, life carried on.

Generic picture of a courtesy car

This time more people were involved. A lot more. And there are a lot of added-value services laid on - if you expect someone else's insurer to pay for all this, it is tempting to just keep saying yes - why not? Everyone else does.

Interesting. The insurance company were efficient and businesslike, as ever, and provided the Contesse with contact numbers and details of the repair shop and the "car-rental company", who would be in touch. They also encouraged her to upgrade to a larger rental vehicle than the basic courtesy car on offer, which seemed surprising in an age when we are all trying to keep costs (and premiums) down. So she agreed to that, and, as promised, people began to ring up. Within a couple of hours everything was in motion.

The Contesse was not comfortable with the contact from the car-rental people, who asked her a whole pile of questions about the circumstances of the accident which seemed to be out of scope for their part in this deal. It turns out that they are not a car-rental firm at all, they are a credit hire company. They offer delivery to your home, and collection (which is attractive, since we live on the Dark Side of the Moon), they will obtain for you an over-spec vehicle, and the Terms and Conditions, legal small print and lists of fees and penalties run for screens and screens of the email attachments. With alarm bells clanging, she did some research online and found a lot of hostile client reviews - what used to be a minimal extra service provided as part of an insurance claim appears to have become a major scam industry. Apart from the wasted cost contributed by the insurers, the credit-hire firm and the rental vehicle providers all lining each others' pockets (yes, there are commission payments travelling upstream as well, so it was in the insurance company's interest to recommend a vehicle upgrade), details of the parties involved are also sold to the market, so that clients are subsequently beset by phonecalls from so-called lawyers, encouraging them to make further claims for whiplash, post traumatic shock, loss of earnings and that mysterious fungal growth in the lawn. It is, basically, a scam. A scam, moreover, which fits right into that much-loved British ideal of an industry which contributes very little, but generates income for an extra level of parasite. The courtesy car add-on associated with a car repair used to involve maybe two people to set it up, and cost very little. Now it involves about half a dozen people, who inflate costs and pay each other commission, and it just milks the system.

No wonder that:

(a) unemployment levels in this ridiculous, bankrupt nation are lower than you would expect, though our output in goods and genuine services continues to shrivel.

(b) insurance premiums are unnecessarily high, and lawyers are never short of a few bob.

(c) the insurance industry (in which I worked for many years) is so widely despised and mistrusted.

Anyway - the ending. After a fairly short period of consideration, the Contesse called the insurer, and also emailed them, and cancelled the courtesy car. They can stick it up their corporate bottom, though of course she did not tell them this. They were pretty sniffy about it, and not prepared to discuss their business relationship with the "car-rental firm". We have email confirmations, and names of the people she spoke to on the phone, at both the insurance company and the credit hire mob. If some poor chaps turn up with a big, posh rental car for us on Wednesday then we know nothing about it, and they may take it away. They can hardly charge for a service they haven't provided. We shall cope with the vehicles we already have - my wife can use my car for a few days, I'll use my van, and we'll write off any small inconvenience against the money we have saved everyone, and the illusion of a tiny victory against a dodgy system.

Watch out for insurance claim add-ons. I cannot believe this is a uniquely British problem, though we seem to have a remarkable talent for creating money-making scams of this type.

Hooptedoodle #279 - Jock and the Lottery

I received word recently that my old friend Jock had died - in fact I hadn't had any contact with him for nearly 20 years, but that just means that the version of Jock I have lost is forever a younger, healthier version.

Jock was a very amusing man - a natural extrovert, without the grating excesses which are common to such people. I admired him a lot. He had a hideous-sounding job - he worked as a general trouble-shooter with the social work department of the local authority in Edinburgh. His patch was the roughest, nastiest council tenement block in the city - a place whose name was well-known for the amount of crime and drug addiction. Jock spent his working day - and many of his nights - helping some of the most wretched people in the city, making sure they got their benefit money, met their parole officers, ate some actual food - he worked tremendously hard, he loved his job, and he did work which really made a difference. And, of course, he didn't get paid very much himself. He admired me, I think, because I had some knowledge of science and mathematics - things that fascinated him, though his level of understanding was roughly what you might get from the Daily Express or the backs of cereal packets. He used to watch a lot of science programmes on TV, though he admitted he mostly didn't make much of the detail.

One evening, long ago, over a beer in the Canny Man's in Morningside, Jock and I were discussing the National Lottery, in which he was a big investor - he was constantly on the lookout for some magical "mathematical" system which would land him a jackpot. I was a big disappointment to him; I had no systems, I didn't even have any belief. I told him that I didn't gamble, especially on no-hope projects like the Lottery. I related to him the tale of some of the actuarial students at my work, who had calculated that a man aged 30, a British citizen in average health, who buys a Lottery ticket on a Monday has more chance of being dead by the Saturday than he has of winning a big prize.

Jock was very impressed by this - and he asked me a few more questions about it, and he even (I think) wrote a few notes in his Filofax (remember them?).

I didn't see him for a while afterwards. Eventually I bumped into his wife in the local supermarket. We exchanged greetings, and I asked after her husband. She told me he was well, but very busy, and then she asked me what had I said to him about the Lottery? I had no idea what she was talking about, but then remembered, and said that I'd simply mentioned how small the chances of winning were. She told me that Jock had been very thoughtful about this, though he had admitted that he didn't really understand it, but since then he had started buying his weekly ticket late on a Friday - just to be on the safe side.

I still treasure that - a worthy memorial for my old friend, I think.

Hooptedoodle #277 - Lunch with Sir Henry

This is really about the tricky little matter of accents - or ahxents, or excents, or....

A long, long time ago, when the world still had a little hope left, I was busily engaged at work on a hefty project which was installing new system development methods and tools. As it happens, the firm which employed me was successful and highly respected, and the project - which was a joint effort between Our Lot and an American specialist software house - became a bit of a flagship in the industry for a while. As a consequence, around about 1991 I found myself presenting a series of lectures at conferences - something of a road show, explaining what we were doing, and why everyone else should spend all their money on doing the same things. I was the tame customer expert, a rare and highly prized life form, and the software company shipped me off, with my lecture slides, to London, Paris, Stockholm, Atlanta, Lisbon and - erm - Glasgow.

In the middle of this period, I was invited to have lunch with my company's chairman, Sir Henry. This was not in recognition of my fine work, you understand, nor did it indicate that Sir Henry might just possibly give a rat's about what we were doing. He had recently been criticised in the business press for being almost invisible - in fact, I think the word "almost" was absent from the criticism. Accordingly, a very expensive PR consultancy was now doing a job on him, and one of the Great Steps Forward was that he should host occasional lunches, attended by randomly selected groups of plebs from his firm, so that he could keep up to date on their skills and their efforts to make him even wealthier, and they could come to see what a warm, caring, avuncular old bugger he really was.

It was, of course, a complete charade, not to say an irritating waste of time and money, but he had to be seen to be trying, at least (and he was, I promise you, very trying), and this was really just a small drop in a vast ocean of waste, anyway.

I had hoped that I would be somewhere down at the shallow end of the table for lunch, where I could nod earnestly and make vague, sycophantic "rhubarb" noises as the brighter little sparklers jostled to catch the Knight's eye. Alas (lucky white heather), I was seated at Sir Henry's right hand, and as the soup arrived he was already asking me what I did, and what I was involved in at present.

Taking care to swallow my (deliberately very small) mouthful of crusty roll before I replied, I spoke slowly and clearly, with what I hoped was a well-judged balance between calm enthusiasm and boring technicality, and with absolutely no inappropriate nervous jokes or hints of self-deprecation. It all seemed to be going quite well until I caught sight of Sir Henry's facial expression, which really put me rather badly off my stride.

Sir Henry was peering at me, blinking, as a man might try to peer into a severe gale from the deckhouse of a fishing boat. His back was hunched, his mouth hung open in a grimace of very obvious pain. This remarkable pantomime was evidently something he had perfected in the past, and the very clear message was:

"I can hear that you are speaking, and I recognise some of the words you use, but I fear you have an accent which is unfamiliar to me, and this is something of a problem; it is necessary for me to make a show of putting up with this for a minute or two, but you appear to come from a background which is outside my comfort zone, so keep it brief, will you?"

You see, I am a little challenged in the accent department. I was born and schooled in Liverpool, though my father's own accent belonged more to rural Lancashire, his ancestors being farming people from the Warrington area. At the age of 18 I went to University in Edinburgh (which is in Scotland, by the way) and I have lived in Central and Southern Scotland ever since. Thus my normal speaking voice has evolved over the years - it was probably a bit of a hotch-potch to start with, and then the need to make myself understood (to get fed, for example) required me to modify my vowel sounds and the figures of speech I used over an extended period, so that I am now instantly recognisable, wherever I go, as Someone from Somewhere Else. The Universal Foreigner.

My former schoolmates and my (very few) remaining family members in Liverpool will, without hesitation, identify that I now have a Scottish accent, a suggestion which would astonish my friends and relatives in Scotland, who think I probably sound as if I come from the North of England, though they might not be quite sure where. If I hear recordings of myself speaking, I would say I maybe sound a little like Michael Palin, or maybe Melvyn Bragg - that sort of thing, anyway - fairly vanilla, educated North of England, right enough. Nothing particularly memorable, nor likely to conjure up images of (say) George Formby, or Yosser Hughes. Nothing (I hope) that suggests I might be incapable of joined-up thinking, or might have a tendency to steal the wheels off your car.

Maybe

Maybe

No

No

However, it seems Sir Henry remembered our brief chat, and subsequently his secretary sent a message to the head of my Division of the company, asking him was he quite happy that someone with my accent should be acting as a spokesman for our fine organisation. My Director, bless him, said that yes, he was quite happy, though he also made sure that I got the message about Sir Henry's discomfort, so we'll give him only a qualified blessing.

So what on earth was all that? Sir Henry had no idea what I was talking about, partly because it was below his horizon but also because he was too frigging dumb. However, he unerringly managed to pick up on the fact that I might not be one of the Chaps. I filed the incident away - I was a little indignant, I guess, but I was quite a tough fellow in those days. I did not propose to be mortally wounded by a posh old tosser like Sir Henry, and I forgot about it all very quickly.

Now, having remembered him, I checked to see what Sir Henry is up to. Perhaps, I pondered, he is no more? - certainly he has, once again, become invisible. A friend and former work colleague confirmed that he is still alive, but, alas, is not keeping very well. The old fellow is now in his mid-eighties, suffered a major stroke some years ago, is confined to a wheelchair, and has great difficulty with speech.

I find that very sad. I was hardly a close friend, obviously, but it is always tragic to witness the downfall of the mighty. One can only hope that he is still wealthy enough to ensure that all the people who care for him and look after his needs do not have regional or Eastern European accents - at his stage of life he most surely does not need the strain of having to pull that face again.