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Flotsam and Jetsam

Incandescent…

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bah…with rage!!

The year has gotten off to a shaky start. We still have no phone or broadband at home (I am yet again sitting in a coffee shop availing myself of their generous free service) and at the risk of boring the gentle reader I simply have to vent!

Regular ‘Imperceptibles’ will be aware by now of my recent battles with British Telecom (BT) to get this fault – which first appeared almost a month ago – resolved. I posted at some length on the subject here and here.

BT had decided before we went to Canada that the fault was internal to our premises and that a visit was thus required. I was not at that point able make an appointment for such a visit on a date after our return because BT would not take bookings that far ahead.

I therefore endeavored to set up the appointment whilst we were in Canada. I failed! The BT website – which had at one stage offered me a helpful link to create such an appointment – no longer did so, the fault having been ‘parked’ in a manner that did not allow it. Lacking any other practical means of communicating with BT – and struggling as ever to make any sense of their ludicrously unhelpful website – I finally emailed them using their online form. On this form I specified that they should communicate with me by email.

I heard nothing!

On our return to the UK I discovered that they had actually tried to reach me – by calling my mobile phone! They had left a voicemail. Now – I had specifically directed them not to do this because Vodafone – my mobile provider – are only slightly less unhelpful than BT. Whereas they were quite happy to inform me – in Canada – that I had been sent a voicemail message, they would only let me listen to it had I set my account up in a particular way before we left the UK! 

Doh!

The upshot of all this was that BT would not attend on the one day that one of us – the Kickass Canada Girl as it happened – was going to be at home – and I had instead to take time off work to be in residence this morning between the hours of 8:00am and 1:00pm.

Hours passed. No engineer appeared. Finally the clock struck one! In a state of considerable annoyance I called BT. Having been told repeatedly by a recorded message just how busy they were (I – of course – had nothing at all to do) I was eventually put through to someone on the subcontinent (how ironic that BT can connect customer service calls to the far side of the globe but they can’t give me a phone line in the Home Counties!).

BT Customer Services were unable to advise as to the missing engineer but promised to contact BT Openreach (the service component of our national carrier) and to call me back. When they did so they told me that Openreach had done some further testing and had decided that the fault was – after all – not within our premises and that an appointment would thus not be required.

Soooo…! BT had decided not to visit me, but didn’t think it worthwhile to let me know. I had sat around for 5 hours – with no broadband – for absolutely no reason!! A day’s leave had been wasted and it was now too late to drive into London to go to the office.

Even worse – since the fault did not require a visit after all it could in fact have been resolved at any point during the previous month!!!

The phone and broadband still do not work and we now face another weekend without before BT’s new deadline to fix of Monday next. I’m not holding my breath!

I am finding it difficult to convey exactly how furious I am at this demonstration of incompetence on such an epic level! BT’s perversity is almost heroic!! I asked the BT Customer Service lady how I might complain about Openreach’s disdainful level of service (or lack thereof!). She told me that I could not communicate with them directly because they are not ‘customer facing’. That’s right. The people who come to one’s residence to deal with installations and faults are not ‘customer facing’!! Just what sort of business are these people running?!

It is a vain hope, I know, that someone involved with British Telecom or Openreach might one day just idly Google the terms ‘Openreach’ and ‘incompetence’ and find a reference to this blog – but the thought that someone might accidentally do so makes me feel just the tiniest bit better.

Thank you for listening!

Communication breakdown

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Photo by DrinksMachine on FlickrAs we continue to jet around the world (the western Canadian components anyway) the subject of communication – in all its myriad forms – floats unbidden into my mind. There are understandably pertinent reasons for this upon which I will pontificate shortly – but first I feel moved to offer an update on the persisting saga of the UK national carrier – British Telecom (BT) – and our domestic telephone connection, which discourse I commenced here.

Subsequent to my rant BT posted on their fault log a proposed fix time for the line of 17:00 hours on the day before we were due to leave the UK for Canada. As nothing at all had happened during the few days prior to that deadline I guessed that they were not going to achieve their target. Sure enough they contacted me during the final afternoon and told me that an engineer would need to pay a visit to our apartment, and that we should thus make an appointment for them so to do. I protested that the fault was clearly in the network rather than at our end but that cut no ice. BT further demanded that I carry out various tests on our domestic equipment before booking the visit, apparently so that they could charge me large sums of money should the fault prove not to be in their domain.

I pointed out that we were about to leave for Canada, not to return until January 7th. BT told me that they could not book further ahead than January 6th. Doh! We left it that I would book something online from BC.

The next morning – as we awaited our cab to take us to the airport – the doorbell rang. It was a BT engineer!

Needless to say I was obliged – cursing under my breath – to send him away…

 

Since our arrival in Canada I have struggled to stay in touch with the outside world and, indeed, to keep up my postings to this blog. We are carrying with us a laptop, two iPads (one belonging to the School), an iPhone and my Galaxy Note. All of these can easily be connected to the InterWebNet and once upon a time we would happily have freeloaded our way around the globe, pirating unsecured wireless networks at every stop. Sadly – for us – the rest of the connected world is no longer quite as cavalier when it comes to network security and we now struggle to find an open connection of which we can take advantage.

We are now staying with our wonderful friends in Saanichton at their smallholding. The good news for them is that they have expanded their business and built a new office further down their acreage. The bad news for us is that their broadband circuit is now in the new location and thus not accessible from the house. I can no longer scribble these posts lying in bed as once I could.

For the rest of the time it is a case of visiting coffee shops and other hostelries and utilising their free wireless services – assuming that one can connect – which is far from always being the case.

The message that I take from all of this is – you will not be surprised to hear – that we now live in a world in which many of us feel stripped naked if we do not have high speed access to the InterWebNet. I can’t quite work out if this is a bad thing or not and that will doubtless be the subject of much further musing in future posts.

In any case it is now time to wish all gentle readers the very happiest of Christmases and to sign off.

Peace! Stay safe. Enjoy!!

Wrong number

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Photo by BrewBooks on FlickrOur domestic telephone circuit is provided by that unlovely agglomeration – British Telecom (BT) – with whom I have had many and various dealings over the years both in professional and personal capacities. As is the way in this neoteric age the medium nowadays serves a dual purpose, carrying – along with any telephone traffic – our broadband data connection. This latter is – counter-intuitively – actually provided by a different corporation altogether – our Internet Service Provider (or ‘ISP’ for TLA aficionados) of choice.

It is undoubtedly a sign of the times that whereas the telephone these days gets very little use the data traffic hums near constantly…

…until a couple of days ago – when it stopped!

Actually – that’s not strictly accurate. It didn’t so much stop – as go astray!

I was working on the InterWebNet late of the evening when I was somewhat taken aback to find the screen suddenly appropriated by an ISP warning message. What was particularly strange about this was that the message was not from our ISP! Now – I’ve worked in IT for a long time, but in this case it didn’t take a technical genius to work out that we had somehow been disconnected from our service provider and connected to someone else’s. Our ISP confirmed this the following morning when I called them from my office – informing me that as far as they could see no traffic had passed on our connection to them in the previous 12 hours.

There followed a morning of fruitless calls to both ISPs and to BT – each of which in turn metaphorically shrugged their shoulders and referred me to one of the other parties – something that I find happens all too often these days when dealing with customer ‘services’. Finally our ISP suggested that I call them from home – whilst at the computer – so that they could attempt a diagnosis in ‘real time’.

To that end once I had fought my way home from the office I seated myself in front of my PC and picked up the telephone. The line was dead! I hadn’t thought to check this the night before. Just to be on the safe side I thought I should check the line by calling the number from my mobile phone.

To my surprise the call was answered by someone else. Someone that I didn’t know!

Well, you will have worked out by now – as did I – that my entire connection had mysteriously been swapped with someone else’s – the classic crossed-line. I called BT… or rather – I tried to call BT. We played an inverted form of Russian Roulette through their automated call-centre system, with me being half a dozen times the recipient of the equivalent of the bullet to the brain (being bumped out after half a dozen steps because – apparently – I am ‘not a BT customer’… (I wish!)). Finally – by punching in a sequence of random digits in response to some arbitrary question or other I got through to a real live person. It didn’t take long for him to acknowledge that lines must indeed somehow have been crossed and to log the fault.

BT wasted no time. They cut us off from the provider to which we had inadvertently been transferred and left us with no connection at all! Five days on we still await some resolution. As we head to Canada first thing tomorrow morning I guess that there is a very real chance that the matter may not be resolved until the New Year.

The Kickass Canada Girl – who does not like to be parted from the InterWebNet – was not amused!

Envy!

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Envy_Plucking_the_Wings_of_FameRegarding which topic Wikipedia offers this:

Envy (from Latin invidia) is a resentment which “occurs when someone lacks another’s quality, achievement or possession and wishes that the other lacked it.”

On the same subject Bertrand Russell – in ‘The Conquest of Happiness’ – wrote:

Envy undermines happiness – it generates pain from what others possess, instead of pleasure from one’s own possessions, and might even motivate measures to deprive others of perceived advantages.

The key here for me is the manner in which this resentment manifests not just in desiring something that others have, but also in wishing to deprive them of it, or in some other way to punish them for possessing it. Envy is thus clearly a trait truly to be deprecated.

The subject has been on my mind of late for two reasons – both associated with the Tory party here in the UK. The first runs thus:

It is – nowadays – impossible to make public any observation regarding the increasing gap between the richest and the poorest in our society without provoking accusations of a resort to the ‘politics of envy’. This – naturally – pejorative, with the (frequently not so…)sub-text that this destructive emotion be of itself damaging to our economic and social well-being. Such vituperative judgement is – of course – designed to stifle rational debate by appealing to base instincts. The indictment scarcely stands up to scrutiny in any case – but as this is not its true purpose this hardly matters.

I was minded to track down the origins of the phrase but they turn out to be as nebulous as its meaning. Google offers many repetitions of the recent Mitt Romney quote, but its use clearly goes back considerably further. Reagan used the phrase in a number of speeches…

“Since when do we in America endorse the politics of envy and division?” – Ronald Reagan, February 26, 1982.

…and indeed it does have a strong whiff of the 80s about it. I could – however – find no definitive source for the phrase, and if there are earlier instances of its use they were not immediately apparent. Whatever its origins the idiom has been certainly been widely adopted and its usage has increased markedly since that turning point in the 1970s when the long-standing historic trend was reversed and the gap between highest and lowest earners started once again to widen. This is – clearly – no co-incidence.

The second trigger for my reverie was the reportage of this year’s Margaret Thatcher Memorial Lecture, which was delivered in typically bombastic style by the Tory Mayor of London – Boris Johnson. His customarily confrontational address included this startling quote:

“Some measure of inequality is essential for the spirit of envy. Keeping up with the Joneses is, like greed, a valuable spur to economic activity.”

Hang on a minute! Is that the same ‘envy‘ that is the subject of critique when it is directed by the ‘have nots‘ at the ‘have yachts‘? Surely some mistake?

Apparently not! If one is an entrepreneur or a banker (or suchlike) or finds oneself by any other means towards the top of the food chain – then envy is good! Capitalism ‘red in tooth and claw’ encourages alpha-males (and females) to compete for ever greater rewards and this is – we are invited to believe – beneficial for the economy and thus for the country.

When – on the other hand – envy is directed by the 99% at the 1%… then it is to be derogated as mean-spirited, negative and destructive – and thus bad, bad, bad!

So – it’s one rule for the rich… etcetera, etcetera!

Well – who would have thought it?

Whispering time…

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“…dusk is the time when men whisper of matters about which they remain silent in the full light of the sun.”

Simon Raven

Having been up to ‘town’ over the weekend for an entirely agreeable social occasion we found ourselves strolling back to Waterloo along the south bank of the Thames as dusk encroached. The quality of the light was such that I could not resist un-holstering the Fuji x10 and firing off a few shots…

Photo by Andy Dawson ReidPhoto by Andy Dawson ReidPhoto by Andy Dawson ReidPhoto by Andy Dawson ReidPhoto by Andy Dawson ReidPhoto by Andy Dawson Reid

Diggers, Ranters and Levellers

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Levellers'_ManifestRealize that everything connects to everything else.

Leonardo da Vinci

Proof yet again – if proof were needed – that all things within our consciousness are bound together by a common strand and that even when one is unaware of the fact connections are being made which only become apparent after the event…

To whit…

I wrote a couple of posts some few weeks or so ago on the subject of the chancellor – George Osbourne’s – speech to the Tory party conference – under the banner “The World Turned Upside Down“. I chose this particular appellation largely on the back of the quotation – by Pope Alexander VI to Lucrezia Borgia – that I had used as the strap line for the second of those posts.

The phrase itself is well known but – as is sadly all too often the case – I had not at that point adequately considered its origins. I later felt moved to look it up – as I should have done in the first place.

“The World Turned Upside Down” has its origins as a ballad (of uncertain authorship) which dates from the 1640s. It was penned as a polemic against the puritan parliament’s edict that Christmas should be henceforth be regarded as a solemn religious festival – thus banning the kind of pagan celebrations with which we are now familiar.

The ballad should not be confused with the considerably more modern ditty which bears the same title but which was written in 1975 by Leon Rosselson and later recorded by Billy Bragg. This song is in turn frequently confused with the “Diggers’ Song” (also known as “Levellers and Diggers“) which is another 17th-century ballad, inspired by the Digger movement and composed by Gerrard Winstanley.

Leon Rosselson took the title for his song from the synonymous book by the Marxist historian, Christopher Hill, the subtitle of which is “Radical Ideas During the English Revolution”.

The period of chaos that marked the English Civil Wars – the ‘English Revolution’ – that confrontation between the monarchy (with its belief in the divine right of kings) and parliament (determined to establish democracy – however primitive in form) re-invigorated a radical tradition that had previously been rigorously suppressed whenever heads had been raised above the parapet. A variety of movements – the Diggers, the Levellers, the Ranters, the Quakers (very different in nature to the movement we know today) and the Fifth Monarchists – flourished for a brief but significant period.

“All well and good” – I hear you say – “but what has this to do with connections?”

Well – the period immediately following the civil wars – the protectorate of Oliver Cromwell and the subsequent restoration of the monarchy – is also know as the Golden Age of Piracy. These historical strands are – without doubt – interconnected, there being solid grounds for believing that the rise of piracy was at least partially rooted in English radicalism…

…and it just so happens that I have recently been reading extensively and widely on the subject of piracy – for an embryonic project to which I will no doubt return within these posts before too long.

Altogether now – “Arrrrr!”…

A silly affectation

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488px-Lincoln-Warren-1865-03-06As to the whiskers, having never worn any, do you not think people would call it a piece of silly affectation if I were to begin it now?

Abraham Lincoln (before he grew such!)

We are now well into Movember – that intriguing charitable appropriation of the penultimate month by those who encourage the effusion of facial fungus in support of mens’ heath issues. This is – of course – an extremely good cause and one which I wholeheartedly support. I understand that the campaign is already well established in Canada and support in the UK and elsewhere grows year on year. At the School boys and staff alike have taken up the challenge – in many cases with inevitably hilarious results.

Good for them!

I am not myself one of those so engaged, but it should be admitted at this point that I am – nonetheless – currently cultivating something of a beard –  an undertaking that I have never before so much as attempted. The main reason for not being a party to the charitable effort is that I stopped shaving – as I frequently do – over the recent half term, only deciding as School returned not to re-start. Those properly adopting the challenge are supposed to be clean-shaven on the first of November – which ruled me out since I couldn’t face starting again from scratch.

The other reason for my ambivalence is that I still find myself very much in two minds as to whether or not I really do want to sport such facial growth.

First steps in anything new – as always in this technological age – are to consult the InterWebNet. There I get something of a shock. There is a fair amount of ‘beard’ literature thereabouts, but much of it has about it the sort of evangelical zeal that I find vaguely discomforting. Enthusiasm for the wearing of a beard I can – I suppose – understand. Efforts to stigmatise those who choose not so to do as being somehow less than manly could be conceived as humourous until those attempts become just that little bit too vehement – at which point I start to sense the pungent odour of rodent!

I am not particularly hirsute and three weeks into the experiment progress on my putative brush seems to have slowed to a crawl. Before you smile knowingly and mutter “there you go, then” to yourself, it has to be said that I actually think the growth quite suits me. It makes me look almost distinguished. Further, the Kickass Canada Girl – having previous form in the field of beard appreciation – has given the nod of approval.

The thing is – though – that I’m not sure that I either particularly like the feel of wearing the thing, nor – indeed – that I actually like the notion of being bearded. Though I am susceptible to the romantic caprice of the grizzled mariner I’m not sure if that is in reality how I see myself. I simply don’t know whether I like the idea or not.

Well – perhaps I’ll give it a week or so…

So…

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SoI do not believe that I have ever been – or could ever be – a party to a serious relationship with anyone who was not an admirer of the most excellent Mr Peter Gabriel. Those with whom I have shared such accord will undoubtedly testify to my continuing enthusiasm for the man and his works over an extended period.

The Kickass Canada Girl and I – naturally – established early on that we were mutual admirers, the chief difference between us being that whereas I have genuinely lost count of the number of times that I have seen Mr G perform live in the flesh, she had not – to the point at which we met – had that opportunity at all. In common with many other UK artists the Canadian leg of Mr G’s previous world tours had rarely extended further west than Montreal or Toronto. My worry was that – given that none of us is exactly young any more (Mr G being some four years older than I) – opportunities so to do might prove somewhat scarce.

So it was – back in the summer of 2007 – that the Girl and I found ourselves huddled close together under the pouring rain in the grounds of a stately home in Norfolk. We had trekked all the way up there to catch one of a small number of dates that Gabriel was playing as a warm-up to that year’s WOMAD festival, which itself was unfortunately coincidental with our being out of the country on holiday. Mr. G played a fine set of (mostly) older numbers which we enjoyed hugely – if somewhat damply – but I found myself regretting slightly that the Girl was not getting to see the full ‘show’.

We had the chance to see Mr G again in early 2010. This time he was touring in the wake of the release of his album of covers of other performers’ songs – ‘Scratch my Back’ – with a full orchestra instead of his usual band. Once again a splendid evening was had by all – but it still wasn’t quite the live PG performance by which I had been so captivated on previous occasions.

Finally – this year – came the news that, at the age of 63, Gabriel was touring once more – this time in celebration of the twenty fifth anniversary of the release of his biggest selling album – ‘So’. Gabriel was to be joined on the road by the members of the band that toured the album back in 1986/87 – David Rhodes, David Sancious, the excellent Manu Katché and of course the ever-present Mr Bass, Tony Levin! The show was to climax with ‘So’ performed in its entirety.

The tour reached London this week – sojourning for two nights at the in-feasibly remote ‘O2’ – and the Girl finally got to see what I had observed many times previously. She was suitably blown away!

Who knows how many more tours Mr G has in him? Given his incredible contribution to the arts (as well as to many humanitarian causes) through more than five decades I for one would not blame him for wanting to take life easy from now on. His voice – it must be said – sounds almost better than I have ever heard it, so it may be that he has no thoughts of retiring just yet. We can but hope!

Needless to say – should you ever get the chance to catch him live I most strongly urge you so to do.

 

Two ton

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Photo by Leo Reynolds on FlickrTime – perhaps – for a slightly muted celebration. ‘Two cheers’, one might say… this being – as it happens – the two hundredth post on this blog.

The one hundredth such was posted a mere day or so less than a year ago which means that I am averaging – even by my rudimentary mathematical calculations – very nearly two posts a week. I am quietly rather proud of this record and certainly would not have expected to have been able to maintain it when I started out some twenty months ago.

It is my hope that some of what I have written will come in useful for those contemplating the move from the UK to Canada – though of course progress on my own project in this regard has (through circumstances beyond our control) been pitiful of late.  Hopefully some of my postings on Long Distance Relationships have provided some encouragement to those of you obliged to live in like manner.

Much of what I write originates simply from the things that move me, the things that interest me and even from the things that irritate me. Sometimes my prolixity has been excessive – and for that I beg your indulgence. Mayhap my meanderings on occasion might have appeared aimless – mere frivolities. Well – life seems to me to be made in roughly equal measure of the meaningful and of the meaningless – and it is my whim to celebrate them both the same.

To that end I raise an (ever-present) glass (in need of a top-up, since you ask!) and tak’ a wee dram to make a toast:

Here’s to all those that I love
Here’s to all those that love me.
And here’s to all those that love those that I love,
And all those that love those that love me.

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