Hooptedoodle #112 – Donkey Awards - The Halifax

“I can’t afford to live, but I guess I’d better try,

‘Cause the undertakers got a union, and it costs too much to die”

Jimmy Witherspoon, Tougher than Tough

This morning’s blood-pressure workout was with the Halifax. I made the ridiculous mistake of ringing them up to sort out a problem. The girl I spoke to was polite and correct, but completely paralysed by rules and security checks. Eventually, I regret to say, I hung up the phone while she was speaking, but not before I had spent some pounds on the premium-number call.

The problem, you see, is that my father received a letter from Halifax this week to advise him that my mother has set up Online Banking, and will thus be able to see the details of joint accounts he has with her, but to reassure him that she will not be able to see any accounts which are solely his. If he wishes to discuss any aspect of this, there is a number he can call, and they even offer him the option of a repeat letter in Braille, or in large print (pardon?).

Unfortunately, my father is unable to act on this letter since he died in 2008, a fact which is well known to Halifax since they were involved in all the probate processes, and transferred all joint accounts into my mother’s name at that time. My mother was a little upset by the letter – mostly on a point of principle, I think – but, since she is a bit frail and very deaf, and since I have registered Power of Attorney for her financial dealings with the Lloyds Group (which includes Bank of Scotland and Halifax), she asked me to deal with it.

Not so fast. Apparently Lloyds Group no longer have any record of my Power of Attorney – at least not one that the young lady I spoke to could find. Still, she did her very best to help me. She took me through some long-winded security procedure related to my own accounts at Halifax, which proved that I am who I said I was (which is a relief), but she was still unable to gain authority to change any of my mum’s accounts without speaking to my mum (who, as mentioned, is deaf and was also not present).

You see, said the girl, we will have marked the records of any customer who has passed away, and you should not have received this letter. Yes, I said, I understood that, though whether they have failed to code the record correctly, or have subsequently lost the code, or whether the analyst who designed this particular letter failed to make reference to the code is a matter of very faint academic interest, and is not our problem. The fact that they somehow have lost the details of my Power of Attorney is also  puzzling, but mostly just irritating, since they cannot help me as a result. Perhaps, despite all these problems, the girl could make a note of the account number, check that the customer is, in fact, officially dead, and ask someone not to send out any more letters which are potentially upsetting, apart from being further proof – if proof be needed – of a level of incompetence which is already regarded as proverbial by customers and the public at large.

Is this account still active, asks the girl? Well, no – it is certainly empty, and if it still exists it will have been transferred to my mother in 2008. Ah, says the girl, empty is not the same as closed. Again, I say, we are straying into areas which are the internal problem of the Halifax, and I am neither answerable for, nor interested in, the state of their admin systems – and at this point I hung up.

I accept, of course, that I am probably the donkey

Outcome? Well, I reckon my father may well receive further letters in future, which we shall just shred respectfully. Why do we bother?

Why are we still stuck with having these buffoons sit on our money when they provide us with no service or added value of any sort, other than giving us hassle and irritation on a regular basis? We are stuck, my friends, because there is nowhere else we could take the money which is any better. Though Lloyds Group are (literally) unrewarding people to deal with, they are better than some of the alternatives. Eventually, you just have to laugh and shrug it off – I am laughing and shrugging as I type (which is not easy).

If Halifax cannot manage to understand that one of their customers has died, and if they are constrained by their internal rules such that they cannot arrange to fix this, then I could report it to the Data Protection commissioners but – to be honest – really can’t be bothered. That would only be heaping up yet more irritation. If they were fined – and Lloyds Group are not short of the odd fine at present – which lot of interested parties would have to meet the cost? The customers, perhaps?…

Let it lie – move on. As yet, this is nothing – the service levels and the mistakes we suffer at the hands of automated institutions will continue to degrade at an accelerating rate in the coming years – you may (to use an opportune phrase) bank on it. I have been there. I have seen the beginning of the nightmare.

Hooptedoodle #111 – Dr Huntley

This post stems from some conversations I had with my wife and a couple of friends recently, on the subject of teachers we have known. At heart, the notional heading was “the best and the worst teachers you ever had”, which is always good for a few laughs, but it got me thinking.

This post is not intended to be any of the following, though some will undoubtedly take it to be so:

(1) It is not a topical link-in with recent horror stories about the deteriorating level of achievement of English schoolchildren compared with their peers in other countries, though it is true that some of the conversations were prompted by the relevant news coverage.

(2) It is not a cheap swipe at the teaching profession, for which I have a great respect. A surprising number of my relatives – including most of my cousins – are or were teachers, and my mother was also a teacher, though she worked mostly with special-needs kids. I remember very clearly Miss Smallman, who taught all three of my older sons in their first year at primary school. She was in her early twenties when I knew her, and I’m sure they didn’t pay her very much or listen to her at the staff meetings, but each year she produced another cohort of kids who could read, had the beginnings of numeracy and were excited about school and about learning things. That is fantastic – by comparison, most of the convoluted, obscure, clever-clever, unnecessary achievements of my own working career shrivel into dust.

(3) It is not a blind rant about the education industry, though such a rant is never far below the surface, if prompted.

My own experience – of my own teachers, of my children’s teachers and of teachers I have known personally – is just what you would expect. A few exceptionally good ones, a whole raft of solidly competent ones, and a small number of nightmares. A good teacher is a gift from God – I could never have done such a job. At various times I have done some coaching – in mathematics and guitar playing (all right, all right), and I know from that experience the difference between coaching and teaching. A coach can be a great help to someone who already has some knowledge and some enthusiasm; a teacher has to be able to generate enthusiasm in a complete novice. I would have been a terrible teacher – if my students didn’t do their homework, my instinct would be to kill them, and if they didn’t like what I told them I would take it personally and agonize about it.

No good.

You will undoubtedly be able to think of really good and bad teachers from your own experience – the good ones may well have been inspirational – often their influence will extend far beyond the subject they taught. Think about the bad ones – how much damage have they done? How many subjects do you hate, entirely because you once had a teacher you didn’t relate to?

In my occasional role as a music coach, I have met a good few people who told me that they once had piano lessons, but they hated the teacher and so they gave it up. Interestingly, very few said that they gave it up because they were lazy or devoid of ability, so I guess the poor old teacher is a useful cop-out but – whatever – I decided long ago that I didn’t wish to be the person that put someone off music, or destroyed their interest in it for life. I would find that very difficult, even if I knew it was a cop-out.

OK then – this is a job which requires certain qualities, and which demands respect for its intention, if not always for the execution.

Some odd thoughts:

(1) When I left school, most of my friends who went on to teachers’ training college were those who failed to get into university. When I left university, a proportion of those who took their new degrees into education definitely did so because they couldn’t decide what else to do (and the holidays were attractive), or because education seemed a safer, more sheltered option than the competitive worlds of industry or commerce. I make no generalization about the candidates having a lack of something, or being second-rate, or even about whether this is still true, but I find it interesting.

(2) I am not sure, but I think one of the respected professions which are identified as acceptable for the purpose of signing the back of passport photos (and similar) is still that of teaching. Teachers, by tradition, are pillars of the community – people to be trusted – and that is how it should be. Yet, when the eldest of my grown-up sons was studying for his “O-Grade” school certificate exams, the unthinkable happened – the teachers went on strike. All his revision, all the final cramming for the weeks leading up to the exams had to be done by us, without any guidance or support from the Trusted Profession.

I have sort of got over that now, but that is the defining moment when teachers, as a species, stopped being pillars of the community in my eyes and became just another lot of contract-checking, penny-pinching union activists. Teachers should have been above that sort of social blackmail, in the way that we expect doctors to be above it.

(3) A good teacher, as I said, is a jewel – from my own schooldays I recall Mr Percival (History), Mr Yule (Maths), Mr Colvin (Latin) and a Mr Burnett, who was an English teacher, a supportive, empathetic character who broadened my tastes in reading, and who is noted elsewhere as the individual who – some years earlier – had encouraged an unruly and rebellious boy named John Winston Lennon to persevere with his art, his creative writing and his music. I think I was lucky enough to have very few truly bad teachers at school – there was an apoplectic Religious Instruction teacher who was rather too fond of corporal punishment, but he left quite quickly. There was also poor old Mr Nixon, who was a decorated hero of WW1 and who had deferred his retirement well beyond the limits of commonsense. No longer able to maintain control, he used to sit with a bewildered smile while the riot developed around him – not his fault, but that was not a good year for Maths.

There was also a whole pile of teachers who did the job – unmemorable but adequate.

(4) The brother of my ex-wife was a primary school teacher. He was a devoted, hard working fellow, but I don’t think he got much help from the kids in his class – I suspect they crucified him every day. I remember that he was terrified when he learned that new, more rigorous appraisal systems were going to be introduced for teachers – he felt victimized. When I pointed out that there is no job in the world in which you can avoid being judged on performance and results, and that appraisals were a fact of life for the most humble clerk in the world outside teaching, he just stared at me.

The thing is, you can find damage-limitation jobs for the less gifted in industry. You can keep Ten Thumbs Smith away from the circular saw on the building site; you can make sure that certain people do not get to answer the phone to customers. I’m not sure, but it may be possible to avoid having idiots run banks, but, unless you sack them, all teachers get a class of children to look after. The consequences of letting a disastrously poor teacher loose on a class can be chilling, so the need for appraisal was, and remains, more pressing in education than in many other jobs.

(5) There is a risk, for anyone spending their working days as the largest, cleverest person in a room  full of seven-year-olds, that they eventually come to see this as their natural role, and their treatment of adults and people outside the classroom may be affected by this. One would hope this is not common, but my experience suggests that it might be.

(6) A surprising number of teachers have only other teachers as friends – this is particularly strange. Why would this be?

Which brings me to Dr Huntley. In my first year at Edinburgh University, he was my lecturer for Pure Mathematics, and his teaching style was unique. The setting is one of the big, ancient halls in the Old Quad – a lot of dark, ancient carved timber, a general atmosphere of Presbyterian gloom which is not lightened by the thought of probable traces of DNA from Walter Scott and countless other worthies, three very large, dusty blackboards and Flash Huntley, who appears, with his gown streaming behind him, at exactly 9:00. There are about 300 cold, weary students waiting for him, banked up in the rows of long desks.

Huntley opens his old briefcase, and takes out an old folder containing some very old notes. He cleans the blackboards, and then he takes a sheaf of pages from the folder and begins to copy them on to the left hand board, in small, fussy, chalk writing. He writes very quickly. When the left hand board is full he moves on to the middle one. When the right hand one is full he cleans the left hand one and continues there. The room is silent, apart from gasps for air and occasional groans. Everyone is copying Flash’s ancient words from the boards, as fast as they can, and you’d better not fall behind or he’ll have rubbed out the bit you need. After an hour, Dr Huntley stops writing, puts his notes back in his briefcase, and disappears. He never speaks – I cannot remember him ever speaking. He leaves a hall full of anxious souls trying to finish off the notes before the servitor throws them out – some, of course, have just given up ages ago.

The process was that you then took your notes to the library and read them to see what they said – understanding in real time being something which the format of the lectures did not support. Assuming that reading them took another hour, this is now a two hour investment of time just to have read the material. Three mornings a week this is repeated – hour by hour, week by week, Dr Huntley’s ancient script will, all being well, have been copied down by at least some of the hardier of his pupils and will provide them with the complete Pure Mathematics course for the year. The only glimpse of reason is a one-hour, small group tutorial on a Friday, where the students will get to discuss the notes and do some practice examples.

Astonishing – I can still hardly believe it. If a pile of Roneo’d copies had been handed out, Huntley need not have appeared at all – in fact he maybe need not have existed at all. We could all have read the copied notes without the hour of scribbling. In a modern age, the students could just have downloaded the entire course from some server library, and then they could have spent the time reading it, working with it and learning something, rather than going through this torture ritual.

Dr Huntley – I haven’t thought about him for years, and he must be long dead now, but the achievement stands – I cannot imagine a better way of breaking the hearts of all those young people – cold and a long way from home, most of them – than getting them to speed-write 1000 lines every morning in a gloomy, smelly old hall with cobwebs and a bad echo. Whose model of education was that, anyway? Who wrote the original bloody course notes? – did an angel pass them to him? Please say we can do better now.

The Chester Trip

Evidence - there's not a lot of contemporary stuff left, but here the repair to the main
breach in the wall is clearly visible

On Sunday, I went down to Chester for a few days looking at the ECW sites. I went with an old friend, whose name – as it happens – is Chester. Merely a happy coincidence, but I shall take care to make it clear to which Chester I am referring, as necessary.

Our preparation for the trip was mostly in reading John Barratt’s fine The Great Siege of Chester, and booking ourselves on to a couple of guided tours.

Monday we walked around the walls – there is a very good set of visitor information boards for the ECW period, featuring excellent artists’ impressions of how the various locations looked in the 17^th Century. As far as we can tell, these painted views are not available in any publication or online – I am still checking, but they probably should be.

In the afternoon we went for a guided walk around the battlefield at Rowton Moor (about 4 miles outside Chester’s walls) with Ed Abrams, who offers a fine blend of enthusiasm and expertise – his Civil War Tours enterprise is heartily recommended.

In the evening, we had arranged to have dinner at The Brewery Tap, in Bridge Street, which was the home of Francis Gamul during the siege, and is where Charles I spent the nights before and after Rowton Moor. I was very pleased with this little bit of historical tie-in (and the food was great). I guess our meal was rather more cheerful than Charles Stuart’s must have been the night after the battle. In passing, I was also delighted to learn that Gamul’s daughter was christened Lettuce, a name which appears to have drifted out of fashion lately.

Original, with new bits - the Water Tower, near the old port

A tax called murage was collected to pay for maintenance of the walls. The
officials in charge of this were called Murringers - here's a list of some of them 

Captain Morgan's cannon - OK, it's a monument - certainly, an iron gun
carriage would take a bit of shifting

Gone but not forgotten

Chester (the person) at the Phoenix Tower. Legend has it that King
Charles watched the battle of Rowton Moor from the top. He
must have had remarkable eyesight - you can't see Rowton from here.

Looking down Foregate Street from the Eastgate - much of this part of the city
was destroyed in the siege, and most of what you can see in this picture is Victorian

Eastgate Clock

Near the South-East corner of the old city - this area saw some of the most fierce bombardment

The rear portion of this pub was the house of Francis Gamul, who was Charles' host
at the time of Rowton Moor

The scene of the first stages of Rowton Moor - there are three modern villages
built on the old battlefield

Ed Abrams, the expert guide (left), discusses the role of dragoons at Rowton with Chester

There are very few contemporary buildings still visible at Rowton - this one, by
local tradition, may have been a dressing station for the Royalist wounded.
The farmer has refused permission to survey the field.

This is almost the only official recognition of the fact that an important
battle was fought here. The monument is close to what is thought to be a mass
burial in an old lime pit.

Tuesday morning we joined Ed’s colleague Viv (who was in costume) for a tour of the Civil War sites within the city, so we were back on the walls again. Informative and very entertaining – again, recommended.

Behind many of the shops in The Rows, in the old city of Chester, are these vaulted
medieval cellars, which were used as storehouses and also as bomb shelters during the bombardment

The Bear and Billet - this pub was originally the house of the keeper of the old
bridge over the Dee, and the copious windows were originally access to a warehouse,
to store goods coming over from Wales

Different time, different approach. As roads improved and commercial transport
became larger, gates changed from  being a means of keeping enemies out to a way
of letting friends in. The Wolf Gate on the right is one of the original gates, the
much larger New Gate next to it is clearly intended to give a prestigious welcome to
the city.

On the Wednesday, we set out on the trail of King Charles. We had intended to move on to the battlefield at Montgomery, south of Welshpool, but the weather warnings for the following day were a bit alarming, and we decided, since Montgomery is not far from the same latitude as Birmingham, that we should not stray so far south. In the event, we went to have a quick look at Denbigh Castle, which is where Charles stayed after his visit to Chester. We stayed overnight at Maeshafn, near Mold, and the next day we had a rather stressful drive home through howling gales and very serious rain. No real problems for us, but we saw a number of large trucks which had blown over, or blown off the road.

This is fine - what has become a standard approach - but I have some misgivings.
Jolly signboards give bilingual information so that Miss Williams' class from the
primary school can identify with life in a medieval castle, and it's great that kids
have such a resource available, but you won't find very much about the actual
history of the place. I checked in Denbigh town library, and there wasn't much there,
either. Is there a tacit assumption that primary schools are the only people who visit such sites?

Hooptedoodle #110 – Premature Independence?

Don't keep logs in one of these

We recently had a bad experience with our logs-and-kindling box – we had a lovely old wooden blanket box, and suddenly we noticed it was looking decidedly wormy. I took it outside on a dry day and, with loving care, I squirted some anti-worm fluid into a flight hole, and was promply hit by a jet from another hole some 7 or 8 inches distant. This is never a good sign. Our blanket box had turned into something resembling the inside of a Crunchie bar, and we decided it should leave home at once, before this condition spread to other, more structural pieces of timber.

To replace it, we managed to obtain a fine big, open basket to take the logs – it’s even canvas lined, which is a big plus. We still need a lidded box or basket of some sort to take the kindling and the various lighters and cleaning materials which the stove requires, and the challenge has been to find something big enough to do the job.

This week the Contesse found an excellent one online – just the thing – a handsome basket with a hinged lid and carrying handles, just big enough to take one of our usual plastic kindling tubs. It was not cheap, but the seller (based in the West Midlands of England) offers “free shipping to Mainland UK” on orders of this size. Never slow to save the odd baubie, we were won over. 

The very thing...

Not so fast. When we attempted to checkout with our lovely basket, the transaction included a sum of £15 for shipping because – that’s right, you guessed – our postcode is in Scotland. On reading the small print on the website, we find that Mainland UK to this firm means “England and Wales”. We’ve sent them a polite email, querying their policy. We live 40 miles north of the English border, and there is an awful lot of Mainland UK beyond us – I could, of course, arrange to have it shipped for free to a friend in Berwick upon Tweed, and collect it from there, but the Contesse is not sure she wishes to deal with this supplier any further. It’s less to do with our being indignant about being discriminated against (which would be a classic Scottish paradox – we like to be different but not to be left out!) than it has to do with an objection to being stiffed – especially by a bunch of ignorant bastards (as it were).

We are all hoping fervently that talk of Scottish independence will quietly go the way of the Loch Ness Monster and the Darien Scheme, but maybe Royal Mail’s postcode software already knows something we don’t.

Where Have You Been All the Day, My Charming Billy?

Yesterday was Flatpack Day here – I took delivery of a tall, 80cm wide Billy bookcase unit from our trusty Swedish friends at IKEA, and it is now in position in my office, and the job of shifting and re-storing everything I can think of is well under way.

I have even secured it to the wall in the approved H&S manner, so small children may climb up it with impunity (unless I catch them).

I have now moved my soldier box-files from Cupboard No.2 (beyond the door at the end of the office in the photo below) on to the lower shelves of the new unit, as you see, and shifted the wargames terrain boxes from Upstairs Hall Cupboard B into Cupboard No.2 (I hope you're taking notes here), which is much handier, and means that I will no longer be at risk of waking up the entire household when putting away my terrain at 2 am.

That's Billy, in the corner; the white door is Cupboard #2

What is going to happen in Upstairs Hall Cupboard B, then, I hear you ask? It will go back to storing bedding and towels, which is what it was intended for, but that’s probably out of scope for this blog. Maybe.

It’s a fascinating field of study, this constant re-engineering of space to conceal the fact that our armies have become – well, too big, I suppose. Did Warhammer ever do a title on this?

I enjoyed the flatpack job so much I have been thinking of ordering another unit I don’t need, just to build it. The nice thing about IKEA stuff is that it goes together perfectly – everything lines up. No dremel, needle files or pin-vices needed, and no piping around the turnbacks to paint.

In the final picture, you will see the neat fit offered by this size of shelving to A4 box files; grey ones at the bottom are Peninsular War artillery and staff, blue are Peninsular War Spanish and pink (sorry, light red) are ECW. The remainder of the Peninsular troops are still in The Cupboard in the dining room, this being the infamous glazed display bookcase which no-one can see into, since it is fitted with black curtains to keep out the sun…

ECW Movement Rates and a Renaissance Joke

My early games with my ECW miniatures rules based on Commands and Colors have shown a common theme – a tendency for the cavalry to race around the place, wiping each other out, while the foot are pretty static in the centre – slow to get into action and ponderous once they get there.

This may well be an authentic representation of what 17^th Century warfare was like, but I have been giving some thought to making the foot a little more mobile – nothing outrageous, but a little more – how do you say? – oomph when deploying. For my next couple of games I propose to allow foot to fire only if they stand still, to move 1 hex and still have the capability to initiate a melee combat, or to move 2 hexes with no option to carry out any combat. This double move is not allowed to bring them nearer than 2 hexes (musket range) of any enemy, and must not compromise any terrain rules, so they may not make a 2-hex move if they are within 2 hexes of the enemy, and must stop when they get to 2 hexes from the enemy. I am doing some consistency checking to see how this sits with the terrain rules and the Command Cards.

This change may, of course, distort the entire game, but in principle it seems reasonable, so I propose to give it a trial.

Subject 2 – on my September trip to Bavaria and Austria, I saw the remarkable Glockenturmautomat in the Kunsthistorisches Museum, in Vienna. This astonishing clockwork device was made in Augsburg in 1580. We did not get to see it working when we were there (it’s much too precious for that), but I have subsequently found a little film about it on YouTube (of course). It is an odd piece of whimsy – a tower with bell-ringers working away while some merrymakers are boozing on the balcony. The film shows that, in close up, the weathering of the drinkers makes them look a bit sinister, but it is a terrific piece of workmanship.

If you like a touch of Rabelais in your humour, watch to the end…

[Because Blogger's video linking tool isn't working properly, please click here]