I am listening to the omnibus edition of the Archers on BBC Radio 4 and have just heard Ruth shouting “Phil ... Jill ...” as she met them at the airport following their round the world trip.
Let me say that I am well into my third decade of globe trotting now and I have NEVER heard anyone shouting like that in the arrivals hall at any airport anywhere in the world!!!
DW
You know that I am still in the middle of a bit of a dispute with Calderdale Council. Apart from that, though, I wanted to talk to them about setting up a direct debit with them. They had sent me a letter asking me to call them on 0800 245 8000 to do the deed.
I called that number the other day but they were busy and put me in a queue so I decided to call them back.
Today I called back but the number wouldn't work at all and after about four or five failed attempts I sent them an email saying: tried to call you on 0845 245 8000 but it wouldn't work so what would they suggest ... ?
Here's the classic part: they sent me an automated reply that said,
Thank you for your e-mail. The matter will be dealt with and, if a reply is required, the Billing Section will endeavour to get back to you within 5 working days.
If you wish to discuss the matter in the interim, then please telephone the Billing Section on Direct line telephone number 0845 245 8000.
Can you see the number they have told me to call?
I wonder if someone will twig what they have done and I wonder if I really will receive a sensible reply from them.
DW
Every now and again I pick up and read a copy of The New Scientist magazine: it’s filled with lots of fascinating things that even the average non scientist like me can appreciate. This week there are articles on the possible illusion of time: that’s universe time not GMT. I got the feeling that some of the work I do when analysing companies and industries is ahead of these boffs in terms of including or excluding time as a variable!
There’s a fascinating article on the world’s reserves of coal that I will be looking at in my sister blog ... you know where it is ... and an update on how they are using advances in technology to strap ever smaller and lighter cameras to deer and whales and things.
Anyway, an advert really caught my eye more than anything: now I know some boffin can write and tell me all about it, so please do; but is this a spoof?
Imperial College London: NHLI PhD Studentships 2008
Professor TM and Dr BL “The role of Hedgehog Acyltransferase (Hhat) in human Sonic Hedgehog (Shh) Signalling
Here is what I think Sonic the Hedgehog looks like!!!
Source: http://www.armchairempire.com/images/feature-articles/Weekly-Top-10/pub-crawl/sonic-hedgehog.jpg
No offence intended, you boffs!
DW
If your sense of humour is as finely tuned as mine then you must listen to the Radio 4 offering Down the Line. Down the Line is a spoof radio phone in programme that last night was just hilarious.
They’ve got Disgusted Tunbridge wells calling in, gay blades, dizzy blondes, perverts, military types, that cheeky chappie the London Cabbie ... the lot.
Last night they had a theme running through the programme: a purported professor of physics was in the studio and trying to explain String Theory! Well, String Theory is a serious business for serious physicists and engineers so you can imagine the short shrift it received!
Another theme they thrashed around a bit was how Dr Who was becoming more gay. Moreover, how Daleks must be gay ... you never see a girl Dalek do yoiu, after all?!!!
It was a riot.
DW
Just listening to Desert Island Disks on BBC Radio 4 and I thought it was time I gave vent to a thought I have carried around for decades and that resides in the phrase, beauty is in the eye of the beholder.
Why do some people like some music that I think is not worthy? This week’s castaway was Sir Simon Rattle and whilst none of his choices were rubbish, some of them struck me as very ordinary pieces of music that I would never play twice. One piece was the sort where it seems to me that some of the instruments in the orchestra are a fraction of a second out of kilter with the rest of the orchestra!
Jazz, for example, is a complete mystery to me: the kind that they tend to play on the radio anyway and that old men bop along to. New Orleans Jazz, however, is a different story altogether.
Something that sparked this debate in my mind fairly recently was a programme on Radio 4 that invited people along to talk about a piece of music they couldn’t live without ... or something like that. One week that crumbly hippy Annie Nightingale was on and she chose a piece of music that I feel she cannot possibly like. She is a lot older than me, has never had much musical taste and now she claimed that this music that someone from the 60s or 70s who would wear a pin striped shirt and a waistcoat with jeans would listen to and pretend to like ... in his or her mid sixties.
Just a few thoughts
DW
Well, well, well ... you heard it first here. I told you that I thought that Hain, Osborne and now Cameron (UK politicians) had been incompetent in the way they had reported gifts to their pots of gold and guess who read my blog and came out publicly and agreed with me?
None other than Gordon Brown, Prime Minister: he went on national television news yesterday and admitted Hain’s incompetence.
I’m waiting for a senior Conservative Party person to come out and agree with me over O & M now. They won’t because they are cowards but they should.
THIS is the blog to read, no doubt.
DW
The news today has just astonished me
Here we are with our serially incompetent politicians and the hired hand claiming he was the hub of a Royal life.
Peter Hain, that former anti apartheid activist turned senior politician, has proven for the umpteenth time in a year how serially incompetent he is proving to be. He fell foul of the need to record the receipt of financial assistance from someone last year and blow me, he’s done it again. Now, I don’t support any witch hunt against the man for what he’s done because I am prepared to believe that what he did was just as a result of his incompetence and nothing more. So let the opposition clowns look after their own serial incompetent, George Osborne; and leave Hain alone.
Hain’s position is safe with Gordon Brown we are told but what about the rest of us? How many more of these self selecting do gooders can we suffer?
Then I had to guffaw when I saw that the hired hand, Mr Burrell, was a primary “witness” at the inquest into the death of Diana Frances Spencer. As former butler to the woman he shamelessly wrote a book on her and made himself a millionaire. He reports that the Queen used to confide in him and now he claims he was the hub of Diana’s life and that she would pour her heart out to him on little pieces of paper in the evening for him to find as he raked out the fireplace in the morning.
It’s all a chuffing great lark out in the big wide world isn’t it? One question that I am sure I know the answer to but daren’t ask the extent of is who is paying for that monstrous inquest? It will turn out to have been the single biggest waste of public money since goodness knows when. We all know the answer and we have known the answer for ten and a half years now. Diana died as a result of a car smashing into a large concrete pillar in a tunnel in Paris. There were suspicions that some odious people with cameras were chasing her car for their own ends and that they helped to hurry her demise. But these conspiracy theories that have been doing the rounds since August 1997 are just laughable. At least Burrell had the decency to say that these conspiracies should stay where they belong: unwritten and unsaid.
DW
I was trying to talk to young Master W on Friday evening but as he wasn’t answering his mobile, my strategy then was to call his girlfriend, the lovely Veronica. She answered and we chatted for a minute or so and then I used a phrase right out of the ark when I asked about her “gentleman caller”. I got that from Coronation Street or some such many years ago. I think it’s a quaint and archaic phrase but I have never been sure which inner messages it contains.
Of course, gentleman caller possibly suggests a lie or some intrigue; but I like it and I used it innocently in that context.
Haven’t used it before for a long time and Veronica never batted an eye lid when I used it and since she is only 19 years old, I doubt that she’s heard it before!!
DW
My aunty Emma used to use the word walt in the context of turning an ankle: she would say that one had walted one’s ankle.
I have used that word ever since which basically makes me only the second person I know who uses this word.
Since I am working my way through the Oxford English Dictionary, I thought I’d take a look at whether walt exists in this very context. Lucky for me, it does!
Walt in this context was first recorded c1400 as meaning
intr To be thrown down, fall over, be upset or overturned; to totter; to lean to one side.
Where Intr means it’s an intransitive verb
DW
Did I ever tell you that the longest word in the English language is
Floccinaucinihilipilification
There you are then, that’s it and it means The action or habit of estimating as worthless. According to the Oxford English Dictionary this word was first written down in 1741.
DW
My neighbour came round yesterday for a chat and he showed me an article in the Halifax Evening Courier that reveals that in addition to my car being stolen over the Christmas period, around 20 other cars were also stolen in my area of town.
The pattern was that older cars like mine were taken for joy riding ...
I have received a settlement from my insurance company that won’t offset the cost of replacing my car. To get back to where I really was, I would need to have received a lot more than that. That’s our insurance companies of course. I have now lost my no claims bonus as well as my car.
I won’t be replacing my car either since I like older BMWs and will not feed these thieves and their pathetic lifestyles. I will walk and get the bus now. I will hire a car when I need one. Until I am ready, that is, then I will set up a security system on my car that will include the equivalent of the medieval man trap.
I also worry about the other people who are suffering now as a result of these stupid and selfish people. Have they also really lost their cars because they can’t afford to replace them. Has any of these unfortunate people suffered mental anguish?
I imagine these joy riders are sniggering at the police and victims like me now. They won’t get caught will they, unless they crash their cars and are hurt and/or trapped. Another reason they won’t get caught is because it is illegal for anyone to set up their own CCTV system outside their house if the images would include the public highway... which is where my car was certainly parked.
DW
A few weeks ago I told you about the astonishing decision to take me to Court as a result of their own inadequacies. I paid my taxes in time but their systems are so woeful that they mislaid my cheque for three weeks. In the meantime, they justified their action to summons me because they couldn’t get my cheque to the bank in time so my account was in arrears.
That letter came out in the name of the chief finance officer so I replied and asked whether what he had written was Calderdale Council policy ... i opened his reply on my return home last night to find that ... he completely ignored my questions.
He is to hear from me further and so might the local newspaper if he’s not careful.
DW
I keep forgetting to ask so can anyone tell me why the duty free shops in the airports in the Middle East sell milk powder and concentrated orange drink powder ... by the tonne by the look of it.
Who buys and why do they need to take it to wherever they take it?
Just curious.
DW
No, I haven’t got the car back or anything remotely resembling any progress whatsoever but I thought I’d share with you and advantage of being without a vehicle: this afternoon I walked into town to do my jobs and then I walked back.
All told I walked for around 90 minutes, including the 30 minutes of pottering I would have done at the inkjet cartridge shop, the library and B&Q.
Let me confess that I went out to walk to the shops yesterday to buy some milk and got to within around 100 metres of the shop I was aiming for when I realised that I didn’t have with me the means to pay for anything. Of course, in the old days, I would have known the shopkeeper and s/he would have trusted me to return later with the cash and I would have gone home with my milk. Instead, as I had cut it so fine, I was unable to go home and then go back to the shop before it closed ... so I had enough milk for the evening and my early morning cuppa but then had to walk to the corner shop just five minutes away before I could eat my All Bran and Muesli with a banana! (I’ve run out of Bran Flakes).
That’s almost a top tip isn’t it?
DW
I know you’ll think I’m off my chump for saying things like this but I do wonder at where all of these changes to our language and business etiquette are leading.
The insurance company just called me to book a telephone interview with me and I was asked a few security and other questions. Fine, but note what else they said
She: For security purposes, can you confirm you date of birth, please?
Me: xx/xx/xxxx
She: Brilliant!
She: I will need to know who the last person was who drove the vehicle: was that yourself?
My questions are:
Why was my answer to the question about my date of birth brilliant?
Why was asked if it was myself who was the last person to drive my car ... was it YOU is what I would have asked.
DW
I’m not normally political in this blog but those French do gooders who are now in jail in Chad after attempting to kidnap loads of children from Chad deserve all they get.
I find looking at a man with a pony tail a bit of a trial so when I saw one of those do gooders with a sculpted beard and a pony tail I thought, just what do they think they are doing roaming the world looking like that and thinking that they have the right to take others’ children because they think they are better than the children’s parents and family?
The story seems to be that the children were being “rescued” from potential misery and death in Darfur in the Sudan. We were also led to believe that the children were orphans. It turns out that very few of the children are orphans and their parents say they were duped into letting their children go.
Can you imagine what you would feel like if someone took it into their silly little pony tailed head (on women pony tails can look very attractive!) that they knew best and took your child or children for a life with them in another country to which you will probably never have access ... ? Ask the McCanns and other deprived parents what that feels like.
Now there are even more do gooders who are bleating that these people should serve their sentences in France and that some of the sentences were too harsh. Send them to France and they could well be released early. President Sarkozy has already interfered in two such cases since he became President and no doubt these people are waiting for him to hop off to Chad too.
Let them rot in Chad, I say and let them think carefully before they do something as stupid again.
DW
So, after having slashed two tyres and then waiting for me to buy a new battery, the bleeders have stolen my car. I got back home last night from my first visit to Turf Moor in years and left the car in its usual spot outside the house. When I got up this morning I saw a space where the car should have been.
The Plods are on the case and I’m waiting for action from the insurance company now.
What do I think of these people? Can’t say in polite society.
DW
This is not original but it might be a timely reminder for many but possibly too late for others.
If you want to open a bottle of wine, make sure you have a corkscrew available.
The lovely bottle of wine Dima brought to the Xmas dinner table will be opened today, Boxing Day. Andrew had brought some wine and Guinness so he saved the day as no corkscrew was needed for either of them!
DW
Have you ever read something that you think have an understanding of only to find yourself thinking that this is just rubbish? Welcome to an article by Robert Scapens of Manchester University.
The article is entitled Understanding management accounting practices: a personal journey and it was published by the British Accounting Review in 2006.Scapens went on to be awarded a life time achievement award by the British Accounting Association.
Scapens has been around for a long time and in an article around 20 years or so ago I put in a bit about him and his ideas but got no response.
The bottom line is that the work that Scapens does falls under the heading of management accounting but I have yet to find any understanding of the subject in anything he has written. He blows the gaff on himself in his own article when he admits that he arrived at Manchester University many years ago as an accountant with no knowledge or understanding of business and management accounting. I think nothing has changed.
That article was utter drivel and as it was presented as some kind of key note address I am thankful that I wasn’t in the audience.
Sorry to be so personal but I wasted an hour or so reading the wretched article!
DW
Here are a few images of what I saw in Manchester yesterday.
 | Want to make some money at a German style Christmas Market? Grill a shed load of sausages then |
 | Here is that Santa Claus on the Town Hall ... 150,000 light bulbs I think there are! |
 | The London Eye? Nope, the Manky Eye! Forgive the pun ... unless you are a Manchester United supporter, of course! |
 | Here’s a photo of the statue of Oliver Heywood: philanthropist and that, born in Manchester |
There are two other key ways to make money at such markets:
Sell beer and mulled wine (this attracts the most customers)
Sell cakes (eg stollen) (this is the third most lucrative venture)
DW
