Who needs intelligent when you can have glossy?

Normally it takes a lot to annoy me, but today I saw two news items that managed it. I think it was the combination of the two that really did it.

The first one was this.

Now, I'm sure my life is rather pathetic - I even have a trainspotter jacket and everything. So I'm not asking anyone else to aspire to be just like me or anything. But the question that no-one seems to be asking about this news story is this - are there really people out there with such empty lives that they identify so strongly with a TV show? Especially one that always made me cringe at its artificiality. Or is that just me?

And while I don't particularly have anything against coffee shops, I do have a huge problem with corporate owned places charging me more for a coffee than I'd pay for a pint of Guinness, just to try and kid me that I'm buying into some kind of 'hip' lifestyle. (Or am I behind the times now and the word 'hip' is no longer hip?)

Also on the subject of stupidity, some journalist apparently thinks that no-one bothers to read real books any more; so having my favourite books up on display on my walls is just an affectation on my part.
It seems that someone's got it in for intelligence, at least today. Because in our throwaway society, heaven forbid that anyone would want to keep hold of a good book to come back to later.

My lottery dream would be to open up a large, sprawling second-hand bookshop with a small cafe (not a coffee shop) where people could sit and browse through their books. I *might* serve more than just one variety of coffee, but to be honest I rather fancy the idea of offering customers a wide range of scented teas instead. Just to be different. But most importantly, there'd be lots of books everywhere. For sale, or perhaps even for swap on the book crossing shelf. This is my lottery dream, damn it.

I'd make sure the cafe was staffed by lots of sweet little old ladies who wanted to supplement their pensions and get out of the house for a few hours. (But of course I wouldn't work them too hard or anything.) The kind of old ladies who call you 'love' or 'duck' in a very endearing and non-offensive way, unlike fatuous barmen. I might also insist on having net curtains halfway down the windows and some utterly un-trendy art prints on the walls. Sunflowers, poppies in a cornfield, that kind of thing. Where have all these kind of cafes disappeared to, I wonder? After all, this is England, not New York.

I should have realised that my relationship was doomed when it emerged that my ex-husband always preferred to shun those kind of places in favour of smart, glossy chain outlets ("but you can get a much better coffee here .........") It might also tell you something that his entire book collection turned out to be science-fiction and graphic novels - not that they're all bad, just very limited if that's all you ever read. The things you only discover too late about a person! I also realised later that he would sound a lot like Tony Blair whenever he was lying about something. I think that was the point when I knew I had to make my escape.

I have a theory that intelligent people tend to naturally distrust glossy and instead gravitate towards the smaller, shabbier establishments. Probably because they're not trying to insult your intelligence with spin, or sneaky insinuations that it's not 'cool' to go elsewhere. Whereas less intelligent folk prefer glossy, simply because it is all nice and glossy. Just my own theory, and of course my ex would say that it all depends on how I choose to define intelligence. I've got no good argument to counter that, just the benefit of my own observations. And my own definition of intelligence, of course.

Now, who wants to fund my business idea for a bookshop with a nice old-fashioned tea shop inside? I think it could be a winner!

Zombies

Well, it's good to see that the BBC is covering the really important issues. Like yesterday's story about zombies:

I just want to know if hospital offices around the country will now have to hold zombie planning meetings on the basis of these findings.

Buses and Boy Racers

The other night could have been so simple and straightforward. All I had to do was get to the doctors after work; and then get over to see a friend in a neighbouring town, only about 10 miles away, to pick up some books that another friend of ours needs. How hard could that be?

The doctor doesn't know what to make of my not-quite-arthritis, except that he doesn't seem to think that it is arthritis. I've got to get some tests done so he can decide exactly what is going on. Oh yeah, and apparently I've got a slightly wonky left kneecap. It's never really given me any trouble before, but it did start to get very sore yesterday after he'd finished poking it about. Ah well, you have to see the funny side.

Right, so next step was to get home, freshen up, eat, feed the cat at record speed, and then get out to my friend's. How hard could that be? When I still had a car, not hard at all.

But when I'm dependent on public transport, suddenly it all gets much more complicated. For one thing, there is no direct bus route from my area to the local train station. (Does no-one else in my area ever get a train anywhere???)

And as an extra annoyance, if I decide to take the whole journey by bus, my local area seems to be served by a completely different bus company to the bus lines that run everywhere else. So I can never really get to take advantage of any cheap day-saver tickets or similar deals. I just have to get into town centre as fast as I can manage, and then take my chances that I won't be kept waiting too long to get out of town again. On good days it's easier to walk into town, but when my not-quite-arthritis is playing up I definitely appreciate a good bus service.

This time I found that I'd got into town just in time to miss the airport bus out to my friend's town. That's another annoyance - although only ten miles away, my friend's town is technically in a separate county. And according to public transport wisdom, that seems to make me some kind of a heretic for wanting to travel between the two towns. But there is the good old reliable airport bus, which takes me on a nice long scenic ride through the villages. If I have the patience and the stomach for it. So rather than take the long and uncomfortable walk up to the station, I decided to get a coffee and wait for the next airport bus.

Sometimes it's a relatively smooth and comfortable ride, if long, and all the various bumps and potholes in the road don't shake me about too much. But this time I was unlucky enough to get the boy racer bus driver. Every bus company seems to have their share of them.

I've never been able to discover that the boy racer bus driver ever really saves any time with all that fast-and-furious driving, but it seems to make him feel ever so important all the same. This guy even felt the need to accelerate while approaching a red light, in order to shake us all about all the more as he slammed the brakes on at the last minute. For all I know, maybe there was some good reason for him to do that. Perhaps it was crucially important that he did regular spot checks on the brakes. With all the passengers inside. Who can fathom the hidden depths of a boy racer's mind?

Just to add final insult to injury, Boy Racer decided to stop for a break and to take a phone call just five minutes away from the agreed meeting stop I'd arranged with my friend. I listened to about as much as I could stand of his holiday plans before I decided that enough was enough, and I'd rather bloody well walk the rest of the way.

Unsurprisingly, it only took Boy Racer a few minutes to overtake me on the final leg of this trip to my friends. But by this time I was feeling distinctly queasy and glad of the walk and the fresh air to clear my head. Of course my friend panicked slightly to see the bus go flying past her local stop without me, and I had to call her to reassure her that I was still on my way. (Dealing with the nightmare of public transport is one of those semi-regular occasions where my mobile phone often does come in useful. There aren't many other times, but this is one of them.)

In the end I had time to have a very quick meal with my friend, pick up the books, and agree with her that some day I really would have to make a proper visit of it; and then I had to rush off to the station to get the last train home. Because by this time I really wasn't feeling up to the bus ride back.

Only a 20 minute delay for the train, and eventually I was home in time to get at least a few hours sleep before work. After walking home by myself from the station through a supposedly 'rough' area, because of course by then there were no buses around. But at least by then the Ibuprofen had calmed my not-quite-arthritis down so at least I'd have had a fighting chance of kicking someone in the balls if I'd needed to.

And perhaps this story helps to illustrate why the government is not going to succeed in getting people out of their cars and into public transport instead. Even if I really believed they were serious about cutting carbon emissions.

I still don't see how it can be *that* hard to have co-ordinated and well-planned bus services that really serve local peoples' needs; in vehicles that are comfortable and with adequate suspension; and driven by nice, sensible, considerate people.

How about giving passengers more real choice about which services they use and how they get about?

Rather than simply cutting evening and night services because of low demand, how about having smaller and more comfortable buses for those off-peak journeys instead?

And how about hiring bus drivers who actually know how to drive? For all the jokes I still hear about women drivers, I never seem to feel ill or even have problems with delays when my bus is driven by a woman.

No-one in authority is likely to ever experience the reality of trying to get around by public transport. It's only those of us who don't have the choice who have to bear the full brunt of it. Perhaps someone, somewhere will read this blog and start to think about the problem differently. But in the meantime, I'm just longing for the day that I can afford another car.

Not so much a swine as a piglet

There have been one or two confirmed cases of swine flu among my work colleagues, so I was just a little bit worried when I started to get a sore throat and feel a bit sniffly. I even rang my friends who were due to come and stay over the weekend, just to let them decide if there was any danger of me breathing death all over their little two-year-old (after all she is very cute; I might not be the maternal type but I don't actually want to make her ill or anything.)

I'm still only working as a temp, no sick pay entitlement for another three months minimum, so taking a week off work to have swine flu would be a real worry for me right now. But luckily I seem to have shaken whatever-it-was off without needing time off or any phone calls to an advice line. I won't try and claim that my home-made lemon balm brandy really 'cured' anything, but as remedies went it probably beat the crap out of anything else on offer. No side-effects except for a slight hangover.

Finances aside there is another reason why I dread coming down with a heavy cold or flu-type illness, but I might go into that another time.

Pig image courtesy of Designed to a T

Of Witches and Black Cats

One of my latest hobbies to beat office boredom has been following up The Witch Doctor's various references in her blog. And of course, I couldn't resist her Black Cat's challenge of finding the link between that AP News Story and Common Purpose. Took me a while to find the connection, but my day job hasn't been especially busy or exciting lately. It turned up here in the end, the connection being the Media Standards Trust.

I've known ever since I first read Saki that a cuddly talking animal can get away with saying much more than a human could. But the Black Cat seems like a lot of fun all the same. And I do enjoy a good conspiracy theory - even if a lot of them seem to be thought up by people who couldn't organise a piss-up in a brewery. Well, it's still better than anything I've seen on the telly lately.

I'm still not too sure where The Witch Doctor is leading us with all this discussion about Common Purpose, but I'm getting hooked all the same. I used to work in a hospital office, and have often despaired at the way so many private companies seem to view the NHS as some cash cow to be milked at any opportunity: whether it's the firms supplying bottled water to the offices, or the numerous 'consultancies' who take money to promote the latest management fad. (I once spent an afternoon searching out and combing through a contract from one of our office suppliers - not because I had nothing better to do but simply because I knew they were trying to cheat us and I was determined to find proof. I don't think I saved the hospital that much money in the grand scheme of things, but dammit there was a principle at stake!)

Having checked out the Common Purpose website, which looked to me like a wonderful example of style over substance, I suspect that the only real 'conspiracy' going on here is the waste of NHS money to send insecure managers on their leadership courses. Maybe some of them come away from a course thinking they really *can* do their job after all, whether that's really true or not. But at what expense, and why are such courses even felt to be necessary in the first place?

It also wouldn't surprise me in the slightest if they cover a little bit of Neuro-Linguistic Programming in these courses. It's not hard to spot the managers and senior types who are into that kind of thing; you learn to recognise the slightly cringe-worthy way they occasionally try to Take an Interest in the rest of us. They probably go away from these talks congratulating themselves on how well they've mastered the common touch. But really, if this is how some new world order is supposed to get established, then I'm not exactly quaking in my boots.

But why all the secrecy from Common Purpose about their training sessions and material? Surely a little more openness would go a long way to dispelling some of the odd rumours and conspiracy theories that are out there on the web. Or does even this hostile attention help to maintain the illusion that they must be teaching something powerful? Without it, would more people be able to see that this is all just another case of The Emperor's New Clothes?

I'll be interested to see how the Witch Doctor develops this story, and I will also be watching to see how the AP story turns out. At the moment I see the situation as being ludicrous rather than sinister, but I also hope it stays that way.

(Photo above of my own little cute and cuddly mass murderer. He hasn't yet mastered English but he can usually make his views known to me!)

Back from the land of the living dead

This blog seems to be in danger of becoming yet another one of my many unfinished projects that all seemed like such a good idea at the time.

Part of the problem has been that after a scarily long spell of unemployment, I think I needed to be at a safer distance from all the sheer stupidity that my day to day life descended to before I could bring myself to write about it.

It took good few weeks before I could even bring myself to sign on at the local unemployment office. When you’re working as a temp and registered with several agencies, it’s often easier to hope that ‘something will turn up’ than to explain to the people who work in Jobcentres that in fact you really do know how to look for work.

But in the end I realised that my ‘savings’, such as they were, weren’t going to keep me going for that long. So I had no choice but to have the following conversation, more or less, with Jobcentre staff every two weeks:

JC: “And have you brought your job search record with you?”

Me (scrabbling around in oversized handbag): “Well I’ve been keeping this notebook up to date ……….. you know, who I spoke to and when ………………..”

JC: “We can give you some more of our printed forms, people often seem to find them very helpful.”

Me: “No offence, but it’s far easier for me to keep my own record.” (If anyone’s ever seen those “what I’ve been doing to look for work” forms produced by the Jobcentre, you’ll understand exactly that I mean – if anyone seriously needs that much spoon-feeding through the job-hunting process, I can only imagine they must also need a social worker to make sure they remember to take baths and wipe their own arse properly!)

JC: “So can you show that you’ve taken your three steps to find work?”

Me: “Well if you look at my notes, you’ll see that every Monday I’ve contacted each of the four agencies that I’m registered with; I’ve had a couple of phone conversations with another recruitment firm and got an interview lined up for next week, and I’ve also sent my CV out to a couple of places that were advertising online. Does that count sufficiently?”

JC: “And have you been looking in the paper for vacancies?”

Me: “Well no, I have tried that but I found that I was only seeing vacancies that were already out on the websites anyway – and I’ve already told you that I check the websites regularly before the weekly paper comes out.”

JC: “I see,” (slightly disapproving frown. Apparently showing initiative is not a part of their approved procedure for getting back into work.) “And have you seen any suitable vacancies advertised here?”

Me: “If I do see anything, it usually turns out to be something I already know about through the agencies, or the local websites.”

JC (doing a quick search on their system): “We have this vacancy for an experienced administrator, based on Burton Road.”

Me: “Oh, you mean the one advertised by Bloggs PLC? Yeah I’m already being put forward for that one by agency X.”

JC: “Well I’ll just print the details off for you in any case, so let us know how you get on.”

In the end I’d finally be allowed to sign my name on the dotted line; and the poor underpaid Jobcentre employee would presumably be allowed to tick some box or other to show that they’d done something to “help” me back into work. And then I imagine their line manager could show all the right “performance management” criteria to their own superiors. And we could all go home more or less happy.

Fortunately I am now back in work again, if only on a long-term temporary contract. It even happened in time for me to still keep my house. And I am still keeping half an eye on the online vacancies, in the hope that I don’t have to deal with Jobcentre stupidity again any time soon.

Another time, I might vent about the further problems I had with the recuitment ‘specialists’ and the little games that they like to play with people. But only when I can have a good drink and a long walk to calm down again afterwards.

Cars

Well, my car's through its MOT again for another year, predictably at more expense than I would have liked. Ah well, I supppose working brakes are a good thing.

I just have to keep reminding myself that I need the car in order to find work, so that I can afford to keep the car in working order ......... and I will have a life again some day .........