musings

Manchester, England looks likely to get a congestion charging scheme to penalise motorists using the roads when they are most needed. As a sweetener, some of the revenue raised will be spent on local public transport.

It’s a hotly debated topic, and whilst the basic purpose - to reduce rush hour traffic - is a Good Thing it has many implications which need to be thought through. These incude the effect on Manchester businesses, house prices, the cost of deliveries, disadvantaging the less well off, increased pressure on public transport and so on.

Quite separately, I want to know why increasingly, the solution to social questions appears to be the installation of more cameras to snoop on law abiding citizens. Read the rest of this entry »

“One man’s meat is another man’s poison” the old saying goes. I imagine it means that taste is a personal thing. We are all individuals who make up our own minds on subjective matters such as food preference, art, entertainment, literature and music.

It’s not true, though, is it? Read the rest of this entry »

I went to the local shops yesterday. Has an email recently gone out instructing all retailers to hustle for extra business?

First, to the post office to send a parcel. “Whatever is the cheapest way, please.” Would I like to insure the parcel? No thanks. Would I like proof of delivery? No thanks. Do I have a credit card? Er, yes. Do I go abroad? Hmm. Yes. Would I be interested in the post office’s own credit card which is the only one not to charge for foreign transactions? Nope. I use the Nationwide credit card which also doesn’t charge for foreign transactions, thanks. Bye.
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Purists deride the new-fangled Twenty20 cricket format. Me? Well I don’t know the first thing about the game, so it may well be an ersatz imitation of proper cricket. But I know what I like, and that’s a few hours on a balmy June evening sipping beer and watching a fast-paced game in a family atmosphere.

As you walk up the steps to choose a seat, there is something quite thrilling about the wide green vista which opens before you. It is almost unreal. This is Old Trafford - the Old Trafford! Read the rest of this entry »

Liberty director Shami Chakrabarti was the victim of joke binoculars yesterday, and had to hold her chin up with her fist to stop herself suing the prankster.

This blow came on the same day she wasted time threatening the culture secretary, Andy Burnham with legal action when she should be out there campaigning for the protection of civil liberties.

Someone should tell Ms Chakrabarti to behave a bit more like RMT leader Bob Crow, and to get over herself.

Somebody walked chewing gum in on the sole of their shoe yesterday. Now in most households, a quick scrape of the laminate flooring would deal with the offensive blob. However, we have an old-fashioned floor covering called carpet which is ideal for creating a challenging mess in the middle of your living room. The gum clings tenaciously to every fibre and seems impossible to remove. However, I found that a combination of technology, chemistry, physics and perseverance will triumph over Wrigley’s most obnoxious waste product.

Here’s what I did. Read the rest of this entry »

Whilst waiting at Stockport rail station yesterday I heard each train announced thus:

The next train to arrive to platform one will be …

Arrive to? What happened to “arrive at” or “arrive on”?

Is this a national thing? Maybe it is peculiar to Stockport. After all, there aren’t many stations which have a platform zero. Stockport does. They were obliged to designate the new platform “zero” when they added it next to platform one. If Stockport station is expanded further, we could get a platform minus one.

Years ago, the British telephone organisation (now BT, but formerly the General Post Office or GPO) got into trouble when its bean counters decreed that operators should not end the call with a thank you or goodbye, because that took time, and time is money. There was a public outcry at this hard-nosed attitude to manners, and the decision was reversed.

Now we have BT Answer the free automated call answering service. There is nobody really there of course, but the system talks to us using a recorded woman’s voice. She tells us if we have no messages, or if we do have messages, she introduces each one and afterwards presents us with options to delete, listen again, save or return the call. All very clever, but so commonplace that we don’t give this sort of thing a moment’s thought any longer. And with familiarity comes … impatience. Read the rest of this entry »

Yesterday the British government won - by a majority of only nine - its proposal to extend the time a suspect could be held without charge from 28 days to 42 days.

An overhaul of counter-terrorism laws in 2000 introduced the basic 48-hour detention, extendable to seven days with the permission of the courts. In 2003 that was doubled to 14 days - and the Terrorism Act 2006 took it to 28 days. Can you see a pattern here?
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Dear oh dear oh dear. What has happened to Woody Allen?

He’s turned into Bernard Matthews, that’s what. Except Mr Matthews takes rather unpalatable ingredients and fashions them into a product consumers are willing to swallow. In Mr Allen’s case, he has taken some rather good actors and mechanically reprocessed all the talent out of them.

Not since Dick Van Dyke swept London’s chimneys has a cinema audience been subjected to cockney accents so gratingly unconvincing as Ewan McGregor’s and Colin Farrell’s. They run like a thread through the whole movie which, apart from its value to film students as an exercise in how not to make films, has no redeeming features. Read the rest of this entry »