Hooptedoodle #405 - I Can't Believe that Curry's Have ****ed Us Up Again

 Yet another Hooptedoodle - I am working on the homework bit of a forthcoming Zoom wargame - really enjoying it - but there's nothing to see yet, so this evening my post is just a short, fairly routine rant.

I'm not particularly looking for helpful suggestions - I just want to share the hate a bit.

My youngest son has been accepted for the university course he wanted, which of course is very good news, but the way these things are organised means that we have a fantastic amount to do in a very short time. I'm sure many of you will be well aware of all this business. We've been arranging for accommodation, new clothes, new bank account - all that - and one thing which is required is a new laptop. OK, fine.

He ordered one yesterday online from Curry's. Sometimes I can't believe that we forget so quickly, and buy stuff from Curry's despite all the grief they have given us over the years; however, here we are again, and it is definitely not my place to advise my son on where he should buy his PC. Anyway, Curry's are likely to stay in business long enough to support the guarantee, the price was reasonably competitive, and they were sending it out by courier the following day.

What can possibly go wrong?

Well, around 4pm today the courier delivered what turned out to be a PS4 - not the £1200 laptop that was ordered. The general stress levels around here are pretty high anyway, so there has been an amount of shouting and swearing - all very regrettable.

Well, it is annoying, but I'm sure it can be sorted out easily enough. In a civilised world, it is obvious that Curry's will hold up their corporate hand, and send another van, to deliver the correct item and take away the wrong one. Customer service - decency - you know the kind of thing.

Ah. Not so fast. They will send a van - tomorrow, in fact - to collect the PS4. There is no way we are getting to keep that. Then they will process the return through their magic systems, and - assuming everything is OK - he should get a refund in maybe 3 to 4 weeks. At that point, assuming the laptop is still in stock, we can start considering a replacement order. Not before. I realise that they always overstate the elapsed time, to avoid anybody getting their hopes up, but it looks pretty certain that he will have no laptop when he goes away to Glasgow on 11th September. Very little chance, I would say. Nothing can be done about it, they have their procedures, which are built upon a couple of core values: all staff are stupid and incompetent, and all customers are dishonest. Yes, I can understand that. Where did the customer service bit go? Why do we have to be rewarded for buying an expensive piece of kit from them by being subjected to a lot of graceless inconvenience?

 Of course, I have no idea, but I wouldn't expect to understand clever stuff like this.

If it were my choice, I would get my refund, and when it arrived I would have already bought a laptop from someone else - someone who isn't a disaster. However, for reasons which are more complicated then you might expect, it looks as though we are going to be forced to live through every moment of this nightmare. I am sure a replacement will arrive eventually, and I'm equally sure that my wife will have a 2-way drive to Glasgow to deliver the stupid thing. How wonderful.

So there you have it, ladies and others: I hope that Curry's get themselves organised quickly, but it's very obvious that they could not care less. Me? I care very much; I hope they go bust in the nastiest, messiest way possible - but not for a year or two... 

Remember the name.

Hooptedoodle #404 - More Adverts from DumbFeed

 I was amused to find another example of OTT locally-targeted advertising - this time in the Edinburgh News website.

Some algorithm somewhere obviously worked out where I live, and that my age suggests I am just bursting to go on a cut-price luxury cruise, and it concocted - for my personal excitement - this tempting glimpse of how I may sail away from North Berwick in style. Just keep a steady supply of booze coming to my cabin, please, Steward. Oh - and cheese Quavers.

Grand! In fact this is just ox-droppings.

In the real world, as everyone who has ever been here knows, North Berwick harbour looks like this [and for a short video, click here], and you will note a total lack of cruise liners - nice, but no cruises, apart from the little motor boat around the Bass Rock.

Sorry about the music on the video, by the way - I guess it was very cheap, though.

Hooptedoodle #403 - Radio Tarifa

 This morning I have a lot to do, so I was having a look through my CDs to find some invigorating music to get me going. Ah! - Radio Tarifa - just the job... 

I was a big fan of these guys - still am, I guess, though they no longer exist. I am always a little nervous of World Music as a heading - so much of it can be meaningless if you weren't brought up in the culture and the musical traditions of the country you are listening to, though it's often very refreshing, and sometimes eerily familiar.

Radio Tarifa were something of an enigma - founded by two Spanish students of medieval music and North African music, they teamed up with a Flamenco singer, and became very successful in 1993. The band is named after a fictitious radio station they dreamed up, in Southern Spain, and the music, they reckoned, is the sort of stuff you would pick up late at night on such a station. The emphasis is Mediterranean, rather than Spanish, so there's all sorts in there - Flamenco, Jewish, Algerian and Moroccan music, and what I would regard almost as "Turkish Wedding" music, a rich mixture - always energetic, always brilliantly performed. They specialised in exotic and ancient instruments, and, though much of the material was traditional, they wrote a lot themselves, "in the style of" this multi-cultural genre they had created. I have seen a couple of live shows on video, and was confused to see that the band, on tour, was enormous - though nominally a 3-piece, they had many guest players. A real riot.

Their aim was to explore the music of the Mediterranean area as it was before the current nations were so well defined - when the Moors were still in Spain - maybe 15th Century is some kind of watershed; though this sounds a bit academic, the music is often festive and exciting. Heartily recommended by me, for what that is worth. The band took an extended break in 2006, which became permanent, alas, when the main singer died in 2012.

The track in the video clip is from, I think, their 3rd album, Cruzando el Rio, which dates from 2001. Of course, you may find it irritating, but it's great music for washing the recycling, I can tell you!

Hooptedoodle #402 - International Trade after Brexit; Your Call Is in a Queue

 A couple of weeks ago, I arranged for a package to be sent from Germany. Since there are concerns about the increased likelihood of loss of or damage to goods entering the UK during our "settling in" period, I arranged for the shipment to be fully insured, and for all paperwork, and the package itself, to show the full value clearly.

Sure enough, on Friday I received a letter from Parcel Force's Edinburgh depot, explaining that they were holding a parcel from overseas for me, and that I would have to pay Import VAT of £55 and a handling charge of £12 before they could deliver.

Righto - that's what I was expecting. I went online, on Friday (6th Aug), paid the charge and was offered a calendar to choose a delivery date, there being an additional £12 charge for Saturday deliveries. I swerved the Saturday offering, and arranged for delivery for Monday 9th - that's today, in fact. So I can sit and wait for my parcel to arrive.

Well, maybe. If I check with the Parcel Force Worldwide tracking page for my parcel (above), it tells me that my package is held, pending payment of import charges - this has been the status since 3rd August. If I phone to ask whether it is on its way to me, I get a completely automated service - one of the countless options tells me that my parcel is held pending payment of charges; another option tells me that the charges have already been paid.

I searched in vain for a number which might get me though to a human being. At one point I was offered the chance to speak to a customer service desk, and was presented with a long preamble about how my call might be recorded for training purposes, and that Parcel Force's staff are key workers, and they have the right to expect to be treated with dignity and respect. Eventually a phone started to ring, and then I got irritating music, interspersed with repeating messages about the many shipping services they offer, and how my call was in a queue.

You know what? I'm really not as daft as I may seem. I think it would be possible to spend a very long time in this queue, because I don't think the customer service numbers get answered, especially in the current (predictable) shambles which our departure from Europe has spawned. They leave it to the robots. There may or may not be any key workers present in the customer service area - it makes little difference.

Will my parcel arrive today? Has some decent person at the Edinburgh Parcel Force depot stuck it on the wagon, since the charges have been paid, and since they have promised me delivery today? If they have, why haven't they updated the tracking system?

This is only slightly inconvenient - if the parcel arrives then that's fine - if it doesn't arrive, then I have to change some plans for the rest of the week. Not a big deal - presumably it will arrive eventually. If I had paid the extra 12 quid for the Saturday delivery I'd be really rather cross, though, eh?

I was told by a friend in Germany that his business was looking at buying some equipment recently, and they chose American kit because doing any trade with the UK at the moment is a bureaucratic nightmare. I do hope his impression is not typical.

I shall get myself a mug of tea and read for a bit, keeping an eye on the lane. I am quite a fan of Parcel Force - they have always done a good enough job for me, notwithstanding my occasional rants, and I believe that they will not pretend they have been here, or that I wasn't in. The fact that their online tracking record is wrong is quite a shaker, really...

***** Very Late Edit *****

Parcel finally delivered safely on 12th August - no damage. Delay would appear to be caused by procedures for recording payment of import charges being swamped. If the coin-counters would only tell them, the shipping people would deliver. 

I sent in a pro-forma enquiry on 10th - entry requires the Parcel No (which I supplied). I now have a reply, which says they cannot help me, since I didn't supply the Tracking No (which I wasn't asked for, and which is different). Someone, apparently, will be in touch in 3 working days - now that's strangely familiar.

I'm really happy to have received my parcel, but very disappointed with Parcel Force's bizarre concept of "Customer Experience" - maybe things will improve. A Customer Experience without the option of speaking to a human employee smacks of not treating the customers with dignity and respect, but I guess that's the way we are heading.

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The Old Metal Detector - a Personal Recollection

 It is certainly not my place to offer any kind of official tribute to Clive Smithers - I have neither the authority nor the knowledge - but I have not seen any media mention within our hobby since he passed away on 15th July, apart from private emails, and I felt I ought to write something.

He and I were good friends for some years. I made his acquaintance, as did a number of others who shared his hobby interests, through correspondence associated with eBay purchases, and I met up with him at wargame shows at Stockton and Falkirk. Since he lived only a couple of hours drive away, I was privileged to visit him a few times at Langley Moor, which was always a remarkable experience, including explorations of the soldier and magazine collections in his attic [which, famously, had to have the floor strengthened with steel girders to support the weight of stored metal, and out of which, less famously, I almost fell on one occasion!] and a good Old School lunch in the Miners' Institute. 

 He stayed here with us on, I think, five occasions, for wargaming weekends. He was always a very courteous and enthusiastic guest, and he was very kind to my youngest son, which I shall not forget. He first came here in 2008, and his last visit was in December 2012, a date I remember very well, since he arrived the day after our village fire station burned down. The fire station is immediately next door to the railway terminus, so I had an interesting journey to pick him up from the train!

As the years passed, he had increasing problems with his health, and eventually travel became more difficult. He suffered with diabetes, and had a series of alarming issues connected with this. On one occasion he came here wearing a surgical boot, a treatment for a bone condition known as Charcot's Foot, from which he recovered after months of wearing this torture device. He bore the encumbrance with praiseworthy good humour, and, typically, expressed his determination to paint up a unit of ECW infantry named after his condition. I don't know if he ever did, but it was a nice idea.

Like a lot of wargamers and collectors, I have quite a few ex-Clive figures around, and I guess there were some veterans of mine in his attic. He was a phenomenon. His knowledge of the history of the hobby and the manufacture of toy soldiers was encyclopedic. If I ever had a mystery figure of whose provenance I was uncertain, Clive would know what it was. His greatest lasting contributions to the hobby were his wonderful blogs, notably the Hinton Hunter, the Lone S-Ranger and Vintage Wargaming, which I certainly hope can survive in some way as the standard references they have become. 

I know a little of his background. A native of Durham, he studied History at Oxford, and did postgraduate courses in business and Theology. When I first knew him he had his own business, a consultancy which specialised in project management and website design, most of his clients being local government and charities. He called his firm Esra Solutions, one of Clive's many private jokes. At some early point in his working life, he fell out with some business associate or other, who accused him of "not knowing his arse from his elbow". When he set up his new enterprise, Clive named it Esra ("arse" backwards) as a gentle act of revenge. I have in my possession one of his corporate handouts, a pair of cufflinks engraved "esra" and "woble". The joke lives on.

When he last came here, in 2012, he had just started work as director and secretary of Lord Crewe's Charity - his job seemed to be to organise just about everything, from meetings to the website, including interesting extra duties such as managing the town of Seahouses, which is owned by LCC. It was very apparent from the number of phone calls he received while he was here that this was not a job that you walked away from at the weekend, and I believe that his workload, together with his deteriorating health, greatly reduced his spare time subsequently.

I met him again at Stryker's birthday wargame bash in 2016, in Bath, and he was in poor shape physically. However, I visited him at Langley Moor the following year, to swap some figures (of course), and he seemed rather better, though he admitted he no longer travelled very much. That was the last time I saw him. Apart from occasional email contact, we lost touch, and I was surprised how much time had passed when I was informed by Mark that he had died on 15th July. I reckon he must have been 58.

He was a remarkably intelligent and very amusing fellow, very good company, and could be extremely generous. He had a devotion to toy soldiers since childhood, and seemed to have a nostalgic view that a pastime for gentlemen had been rather spoilt by over-commercialisation and by the influx of the unwashed hordes (make your own joke out of that), yet he had a waspish contempt for what he saw as posturing within the hobby, and for self-promoting cliques for which he had little time. He was also, let us not forget, a passionate supporter of Newcastle United.

I am glad that I knew him; I am sad that he died so young, and offer my condolences and best wishes to his friends and family. 

***** Late Edit (6th August) *****

I received a very nice note from Clive's elder brother, thanking me for my efforts to write something suitable. He mentioned that the funeral was on Wednesday (4th August). It seems Clive had an emergency op for cancer in March, and had been receiving chemotherapy subsequently, though the coroner recorded pulmonary embolism as cause of death. Clive was 59, in fact, and is survived by two brothers and a sister.

His family are aware of the significance of his blogs, and will try to ensure they are left as they are.

*********************

Hooptedoodle #401 - Maulwurfabwehr, anyone?

 

I have observed over the last week or so that a mole has been making a mess of one edge of our back lawn - just at the foot of the stone wall which keeps out The Deep Dark Forest. I had hoped that this was just a passing visitor, but the mess is getting worse and there are fresh entry holes, so I guess something will have to be done about it.

We've never had moles in the 20 years we've been here. When I first arrived, my next door neighbour had a fine collection of big, cartoon-style molehills, and so I bought myself an ultrasonic mole-scarer. I have no idea whether the thing worked, but we never had a mole subsequently, so maybe it did. When we were getting some landscaping done here, last Winter, we found the old mole-scarer in a border somewhere. I was tempted to fit new batteries (first for 19.5 years) and see if it still worked, but then I realised...

How can you test if an ultrasonic mole-scarer is working? If you can't hear the stupid thing, then the only proof you might get is if suddenly there is a crowd of moles carrying little suitcases on their way out.

We threw out the old gizmo in January, and forgot about it. Well, we may have to invest in another. Nowadays, of course, you can get solar powered ones, but there's still an act of faith in there somewhere. We bought ultrasonic mouse chasers for the garage at one time - no idea if they worked either, of course. Brilliant scope for a scam.

The whole idea of selling someone something that they can't prove works is very good. Echoes of those chaps who sold the Emperor his invisible suit.

I have no wish to hurt any moles, so discouraging them sounds a better idea, but I have to say that the only time you see moles in these parts is when there is a line of the things hanging on a fence somewhere, so maybe needs must.

I had a look online for painless ways of getting rid of moles, and found adverts for clinics in Orlando which will remove them with lasers, so I gave up on that.

Trip to Stryker's, and Various Other Topics

 On Thursday I had an invitation to a wargame at Baron Stryker's country seat, rather north of here, so I packed up my lucky tree, tried to convince Siri the Navigator that Stryker does not, in fact, live at the pharmacy in my local High Street, and set off early to avoid the entitled children trying to kill each other on the Edinburgh Bypass.

It is maybe difficult to convey what an illustrious event this was for me. Since I have not been anywhere for 16 months which did not involve vaccinations or visiting my mother in her care home, it was a genuine treat. Ian had set up one of his excellent Old School games - proper wargaming! - an Allied force of about 1815 [I was the Duke of Wellington, though I am not a gentleman, and the Archduke, who had travelled further than I, was Blücher] was fighting against Ian's [Napoleon's] impressive looking French.

Ian, whose photos will inevitably do the event more justice than mine, will probably produce the official blog account in due course, so I shall merely set out here the best of my pictures, to give an idea of the action, with my usual propaganda-laden, biased captions. It was a most enjoyable day, with beautiful toys, an entertaining and absorbing game, great food and amusing company; I really had a marvellous time. My thanks to Stryker and the Baroness for their faultless hospitality, and to the Archduke for being an all-round good chap and a splendid ally.

Oh yes - the reason I still need navigation assistance to get to Stryker's, after a number of such trips, is because I can never, for the life of me, remember which exit from the M90 to take. It's always familiar when I get there, but you know how it is.

 

Turn 1 - Allies on the left (British this end, Prussians at the far end) and French opposite. I had all sorts of ideas about shifting some cavalry to my right flank, to cover the French lancers on that side, but the French immediately started bringing up their heavy cavalry reserve in the centre, so the Allies were prompted to react to this.

 

Thus the action began with a cavalry battle in the middle. I have no idea what odds Paddy Power had been offering against this possibility, but here we were again. The morning session was underway in frantic style, and Napoleon had brought along the Dice from Hell - here is an example of what the Allies were up against in this first session.

 

On the Allied left, some Prussian uhlans chased away a very attractive (though short-lived) regiment of Chasseurs à Cheval, but were obliged to follow-up, and suffered from musketry for their efforts. It took them a while to recover their composure.

 

The main cavalry action was not going well at all for the Allies - the Scots Greys have already routed (and took a long time to rally - they completely ignored all the fine words of Wellington, and only rallied when Stapleton Cotton joined them after lunch), some Prussian dragoons are falling back, while the Prussian cuirassiers and the battered Inniskillings are struggling against French cuirassiers and carabiniers respectively. Below you can see that the British right flank was now fixed, everyone in square, obsessed by the threat from a single unit of lancers.

At this point, we took a break for a splendid lunch, and the Allies were pretty much convinced that they would be beaten very quickly during the second session. However, something in the wind had changed. Given the choice, if there is a hill, the British infantry always prefer to march over the top. After lunch, the Cambridgeshires received a charge from the dreaded lancers in line, and drove them off with very heavy loss. That was the first encouraging sign for our side!

Allied cavalry still on the field, though the Prussian cuirassiers are about to disappear. The Blues have now taken on the fight against the French cuirassiers, and the Inniskillings are somehow gaining the upper hand against the carabiniers. This was the start of a very good spell for the Allies. [I have to observe that Blogger is a real pain in the neck this morning - uploading photos has been punctuated with a lot of failures and re-tries, and my usual treatment of caption text doesn't seem to be working now...]. Below you see the massed Prussian infantry working themselves up to fever pitch.

Napoleon sent forward his shiny new Grenadiers à Cheval, to support his stalling cavalry thrust, and they were promptly defeated by the Blues - the Curse of the Fresh Varnish strikes again. With the disappearance of the French lancers, Wellington's squares got themselves into column and started advancing on the Allied right.

On the Allied left, the Prussian uhlans keep an eye on a Swiss square (as one does), and the Prussian infantry are wearing down the Poles at the windmill. Below, you see the Cambridgeshires, with Rifles support, involved in a firefight with French infantry at the farmhouse. The last surviving gunner with the Guard Horse Artillery waves his linstock in defiance. I think it's a linstock.

On the central ridge, it's all happening - the Allied cavalry is now going very well indeed, putting the French line infantry to flight. Napoleon sends up the two battalions of his Guard to put things right...

...and ponders which of his axioms, appropriately delivered, might encourage the infantry, who can be seen heading back his way in disorder. Below are two general views of the table, coming into Turn 8 (the end of the day). The mighty Silesian Landwehr have chased away the Poles, while in the foreground the Hertfordshires (?) have decided that trying to form line to meet the oncoming French infantry is too risky, so they plough into them, still in column. I wanted to see what happened when two columns met head-on, so was delighted when the British boys managed to disorder the opposition on this occasion.

At the end of the game, the French were once again scoring a few successes, but the Allies had won on Victory Points by a decent margin. Napoleon could not get his Guard infantry onto the ridge in time to stop the rot, and the Allies were surprised and delighted to have won, considering the disastrous morning session. Stryker admitted afterwards that at lunch he had considered giving us some extra troops, to keep the game going in the afternoon. I've seen games turn around like this before, but I don't recall one turning in my favour for a very long time!

Here you go - you saw it here - British and French columns meeting head-on. Lovely toys, too.

 

Separate Topic #1 - WSS Rules

I'm very pleased to say that my enforced break from painting has allowed me to finish the playtesting I had planned, and I now have a working "First Edition" of my Prinz Eugen rules. I'm confident they will change some more, but at least I'll be editing something which exists rather than a cloud of scribbled notes! My thanks to Chris G, Stryker, Goya and the others who have helped me get this project shaped up. Another tick in the box, and a great deal of waste paper off to be recycled!

Separate Topic #2 - Troll-Stalking for Beginners

I mention this lightly, with no particular agenda. It would be inappropriate for someone with a blog as ill-disciplined and rambling as this one to have too thin a skin. I don't set out to upset anyone, but it is bound to happen. I don't worry about it - if someone disapproves of what I write, I assume they will move on and not waste their time on it. If they express their distaste then fair enough - words are cheap - in fact, some people's words are without any value at all.

Recently, an old friend of mine drew my attention to the fact that I was taking a bit of a panning on the pages of a hobby chat-forum, not from the point of disagreeing with what I had written, but from a stylistic point of view - in particular, phrases such as "incomprehensible" and "a mess" were in evidence when I had a look.

Well, I'm not really going to get too upset about this. I quite enjoyed most of the invective aimed in my general direction. I am aware that such fora have traditions of being unpleasant for its own sake, but one hero in particular - his ID may or may not be Frobisher, as it happens - went a bit far. His contribution, which was what had triggered the tip-off in the first place, was much too personal and unkind for my taste.

Why do people do this? I don't know, but I guess that one day it will kill off our access to social media as we know it, Jim, so I don't see it as trivial. To quote the uncredited soldier from the Waterloo movie, how can we kill one another? We've never even seen each other (etc). Where is the appeal in being hateful to a complete stranger, with no real motive? Is it just to amuse our friends, or do we actually feel better afterwards?

I have no idea. I thought for a while about why I should be a little upset about something so unimportant, and I decided that it is the "we've never even seen each other" bit. The anonymity. There's a definite threat in receiving hostility from a stranger who could be - well, anyone, really. So I contacted my old friend who had tipped me off in the first place. He, you see, is a member of the forum in question, and thus he has access to a few more details about the Cruel Frobisher. Armed with some simple facts, easily available to any member of the forum, I spent about 20 minutes, online, and poking about mainstream social media, without doing anything illegal, and I now know all about Frobisher. I know his name, I know where he lives, I know what he works at; I have, if I am interested, access to pictures of his friends and family. He is not very threatening at all, in fact he is rather a sad little creep. I have removed him from my consciousness.

Given this amount of extra information, I have reduced forum-member Frobisher from the status of Mysterious Warrior to something rather more entry-level. I have no idea what I could actually use my new knowledge for - almost certainly nothing at all - but it is astonishing how the implied threat disappears when people appear on public platforms as themselves, with their own identities. Maybe a change has to come, in which case MSFoy will have to come clean and admit that he is, after all, the Prince of Wales. Topic closed - if anyone on a forum somewhere takes exception to my views then I'm sure they're right. I could not care less.