Hooptedoodle #113 – Donkey Awards – Seasonal Stationery

Originally, I was going to single out Marks & Spencer for special mention, but a little further research proves that they are no worse than any other supplier of cards, wrapping paper and other festive tat, so that would probably have been unfair.

The item in the illustration is a gift tag from M&S – specifically intended to allow you to write the name of the recipient and a suitable message on your lovely, gift-wrapped present. The bad news, of course, is that the tag is glossy, and there is no writing medium which I have yet discovered which will work with it. Ballpoint, roller-ball, gel sticks, felt tips and my beloved Sharpie pens refuse to dry properly, and will remain smudgable for ever. Even old-fashioned fountain pen ink will not dry – I have tried – it is like writing on a plastic bag. The ink forms globules which cannot be blotted or blown dry. Even swearing doesn’t help. I can see that, in the midst of all this huge, international, seasonal festival of waste, it might be a nice idea to introduce a little re-use – I’m sure that a damp sponge will enable the recipient to clean up their tag and send it to someone else – the flaw in this is that, once again, the new name will not dry.

Something wrong here. The design seems to have concentrated on appearance and market appeal – this is what our customers will buy. The actual functional bit of the spec seems to have been dropped at some point. Our research indicates that customers are not interested in writing on the bloody thing.

There is more. There seems to be a great fashion for coloured envelopes – we have sent out a lot of cards which have envelopes in a fetching, deep cherry red. Very nice, and they set off the overpriced stamps nicely (don’t get me started on that…), but it requires a very heavy black marker pen to address them in such a way that the poor old mailman will be able to make out where they are going. Something not quite right there, either.

It could be worse. A couple of Christmases ago we had to use some envelopes which combined the worst of both these features – they were glossy, and they were silver. Giving up on finding any kind of pen which would make a readable mark on them, I resorted to sticking on white labels, and addressing those. It’s a trade-off – I accepted the reduction in aesthetic beauty in the interests of getting the greeting cards to the intended friends and relatives. I may have no class, but I do worry about stuff not working.

And then there was the big planning calendar we had on the kitchen wall two years ago. Glossy paper. You couldn’t write on it with any ease, except with marker pens, and they soaked through to the other side of the paper. Bong!

The concept of inappropriate stationery is certainly not new. Almost thirty years ago I was involved for a while in designing and commissioning insurance mailshots in what – in those days – was rather contemptuously described as “Readers’ Digest style”. Laser printers of industrial size were still rare and very expensive, and normally ran in big specialist sites which were booked through third parties. Around this time I remember using the print shops of Grattan’s (in Bradford), and United Biscuits (in Binns Road, Liverpool, next door to the old Meccano factory), but the designers and project managers for the big print runs were a specialist marketing company based in the Cotswolds. John, their project manager, and I had quite a few days together, hanging around the print shops while the jobs ran, and he told me a number of excellent tales of the lucrative and sometimes chaotic world of marketing which he inhabited.

My favourite concerned the Sunday Times Magazine. At the time, the STM was something of an iconic publication for the new, upwardly-mobile classes of Thatcher’s children. Quite a number of the high profile ads in the magazine were handled on behalf of clients by this Cotswold firm. One week, one of their most successful regular STM advertisers requested a last-minute change to their advert. It was a rush job, but it was a special request from the chairman of the company, and he was prepared to pay whatever it cost to get his hot new idea onto people’s doormats the following Sunday.

It seems that he had seen an advert in an in-flight magazine while he had been flying home from the USA, and it was printed in inverse configuration – i.e. white text on a black background. He loved it. He was smitten. He wanted one. He wanted his advert to be changed to this format – and he wanted it immediately. To blazes with the expense – the chairman had spoken.

The design bureau ran it up, and it did, in fact, look stunning. With a lot of overtime and sweat the Sunday Times ad was changed, and they ran with the beautiful new advert.

Sadly, the advert – as always – featured a clip-off corner coupon to allow the excited readers to request a quotation and a full catalogue. Since it is almost impossible to fill in a clip-off coupon which is printed in white-on-black, this full page, back cover advert on the Sunday Times became the very first advert of any sort in that magazine for many years to achieve a completely zero response.

No-one had thought of that. John reckoned, with hindsight, that there were so many high-powered specialists involved that they managed to overlook a problem which maybe the office cleaners might have spotted…

They may all be employed nowadays in the Christmas card industry. Let's hope so.

Christmas Prize Competition 2013

As you see, young Bonaparte is not looking very festive, despite his fancy party hat. What do you think the message in the cracker said? Send it to me as a comment to this post (which I won’t publish), or email it to the address in my Blogger profile. The sender of the entry which I find most amusing will win a couple of Napoleonic DVDs – one is Ridley Scott’s noted “The Duellists”, featuring Harvey Keitel and David Carradine, the other is the more recent “Lines of Wellington”*, starring John Malkovich. These are both Region 2 – please note – so if you are outside Europe please check that they will play on your equipment.

Please get entries to me by 3^rd January – I’ll publish results shortly after that date. If you wish to have a shot but are not interested in the prize, please say so and I’ll pick a separate List B winner – for glory only.

The splendid artwork for this year’s competition was very kindly contributed by a good friend of mine, the award winning cartoonist and caricaturist PaK, whose work appears in Private Eye, Reader's Digest, The Oldie and elsewhere. PaK’s website is very entertaining and you can link to it here – he is always delighted to get commissions for caricatures and custom greeting cards.


* Late Edit: the only version of "Lines of Wellington" which is currently available is not (as advertised by Amazon) in English. I got my copies from Germany and from Austria. The language choices are a little confusing - it is a Portuguese production, and it's very nicely done, if you can handle Malkovich as Wellington; the Portuguese speak Portuguese, the French speak French and the English speak English, and the narration is in Portuguese. Subtitles are available in a choice of Dutch or French - if you don't understand Dutch but have some French, switch on the French subtitles and you'll be fine. It's an enjoyable film, and the dialogue is not complex. Authentic uniforms on the 1st Cacadores...

Lead Rot - a Seasonal Revisit

Corroded solder tip, before cleaning up

Yesterday, the gales having calmed down a bit, my son and I got to work to put up the lights on our outside Christmas tree. We have a set procedure for getting this done - it's a fiddly job which involves falling off ladders and other festive traditions.

This year, we got off to a bad start. One of the two strings of lights wasn't working. Now I realise that this is also part of the true Christmas tradition, but we have had no problems of this sort for many years, so our procedure doesn't cover this too well. After messing around swapping individual bulbs - with no benefit - we eventually decided to make a proper job of it, removed all the bulbs and took them indoors, checking each one with a test meter. In fact they were all working, but the solder around the tips of some was showing some deterioration - a pale grey, crystalline deposit which made it tricky to make a decent contact with the test meter.

So I gave them a quick going over with a file - it took less than 15 minutes to clean up 40 bulbs - we screwed them firmly back into their sockets, checked the fuse and the complete circuit with the meter, connected them up, and voila! - Hark, the Herald Angels Sing.

Nick was impressed that our botched repair had worked - though probably less surprised than I was. We got on with the job we had set out to do, and got everything up and working.

So - what is this stuff? The Christmas lights spend Christmas hanging on a tree, obviously, in all sorts of weather conditions, none of which are oppressively warm. The rest of the year they live in a plastic tub in the garage, which can get very cold, though it is protected from direct frost and snow. The crystalline salt, whatever it is, will rub off, but it doesn't conduct very well, and - the main point here - I would not like my toy soldiers to turn into grey dust.

All right, you metallurgists and chemists - should we worry about this sort of thing, or will I be all right if I just don't hang my soldiers on trees or keep them in the garage?

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?