Well, it wasn't a rout, but we didn't exactly cover ourselves in glory either, finishing safely above the half-way mark in the list of entrant teams. We easily thrashed the local MP's table, whose surprise late dash to first place last year provoked some mutterings, doubtless unfounded, from the more suspicious among us. If there's an event that beats the village fête produce and jam-making competitions for vicious competitiveness (I'm groping for an adjective that comes somewhere near the scope of the French acharné), it's the Mayor's annual charity quiz. Back of beer mat calculations suggest takings of well over £5000 for local MS and Cancer charities, and for a local residential home for people with learning disability. The management of the hall made it available free of charge, but gross profits from the bar must have been pretty respectable - a good £30 from our table alone, I'd say, and ours was but one of 56, not all of which were quite as well-behaved as our magisterial one.
The residential home I mention above has been in the news lately for all the wrong reasons: two residents had had significant sums stolen from them by a senior member of the care staff, hence theft in the most appalling breach of trust. It didn't help in publicity terms that the culprit was the son of the director of the place. The court is reported to have heard stories of the defendant's depression (yes, a difficult illness) and low self-esteem (which in his case, seems to me to hit the nail deservedly on the head). Good job I wasn't chairing that court. Anyway, the home organised and ran the quiz (with a certain waspish authoritarianism, I thought), and provided a hefty ploughman's supper for participants, gathering the leftovers afterwards to feed to the chickens somewhere. Waste not, want not.
They'll be feeding their chickens; we'll be hoping to feed a wider range of birds today, since it's Big Garden Bird Watch time again. Readers of the old blog will remember how much joy we get from watching the visitors to our garden and bird tables. Educational too: blackbirds and thrushes; wrens and their cousins the dunnocks are all ground feeders, as are the wood pigeons, collar doves and the crow family. Robins and finches sometimes feed on the ground, but also come to the hanging feeders, as exclusively do the three or four varieties of tits that we see here, and the beautiful nuthatch, which always feeds upside down. Herons will empty your pond of fish at the drop of a long and pointed bill, and squirrels will eat anything, anywhere. So I'd better get some warm clothes on and get out and stock up the feeders!
Sunday, 31 January 2010
Friday, 29 January 2010
29 January
Approaching five months after my last appraisal as court chairman, I at last got my first sitting today as an approved chairtaker. Since I'm still feeling full of aches and pains after a recent cold, it was a welcome surprise that we had finished our list by lunch time. Nothing exciting - some sentencing, some adjournments and rather a lot of sitting in the retiring room waiting for things to happen elsewhere.
The builders finally turned up at 3:00 pm, and are fiddling away in the shower room as I write. I really hope they get it all sorted today: our ten days free of the dust and smell of building work and builders was rather nice, and the return thereof is not altogether welcome. With luck this will be the last of it.
The builders finally turned up at 3:00 pm, and are fiddling away in the shower room as I write. I really hope they get it all sorted today: our ten days free of the dust and smell of building work and builders was rather nice, and the return thereof is not altogether welcome. With luck this will be the last of it.
Wednesday, 27 January 2010
27 January
It's nice to have a full house once in a while. My fellow 2004 swearers-in and I have tried to meet roughly annually for curry: when we lived near a reliable Bengali restaurant, we'd gather at Smith Towers and walk down the road. Since our move, we've tended to meet at a restaurant in Tonbridge, but I find the noise completely ruins any chance of conversation. Well, last night we gathered here, joined by a 2002 colleague who went through another rite of passage with us, chairmanship training. I have to admit to buying in the pappadums, naans, samosas and onion bhajis. One of the gang brought a delicious chicken curry, another a splendid pudding, and I dug out my Madhur Jaffray recipe books and knocked out a chicken curry, saag aloo, mushroom pullao and of course the time-honoured chick peas. We had a great time, swapping gossip, funny and horror stories from the bench and generally having a good natter over the meal.
It didn't help that the main road is up each night on the bottleneck stretch by the Spa, so people had to make some lengthy diversions. I've heard from one of them today: the others are probably still going round in ever-decreasing circles.
I'm conscious of having eaten far too much, as usual. And guess what I'm having for lunch?
It didn't help that the main road is up each night on the bottleneck stretch by the Spa, so people had to make some lengthy diversions. I've heard from one of them today: the others are probably still going round in ever-decreasing circles.
I'm conscious of having eaten far too much, as usual. And guess what I'm having for lunch?
Sunday, 24 January 2010
24 January - later
Just learned that the reason we hadn't heard from friends in Scotland at Christmas was that Chris had died, of metastatic liver cancer last November, six months after diagnosis. Ten years younger than me, and the third friend I've lost to the same complaint in recent years. Carpe diem.
24 January
Thirty-eight years since I diffidently reported for service at 2-12 Gresham Street EC2 on the first of 10'652 days on the payroll of the Post Office, BT and a number of its subsidiaries and joint ventures. For my first two years, Master of Arts, University of St Andrews and altogether, I fiddled around with office layouts, trying to persuade the trade unions to allow us to cram yet another desk into this office or that.
It seems extraordinary in these post-Thatcher days that we allowed trade unions to hold the organisation is such thrall. But then, as a boss of mine was known to remark from time to time, the 'Business' existed primarily for the benefit of the people that worked in it. We still used the civil service grading structure, and each grade had its 'space standard' for office planning - as if Clerical Officers (55 sq ft) required only half as much air to breathe as Higher Executive Officers (100 sq ft). Division heads were entitled to a positive sanatorium of 200 sq ft - and they came in a heap of different hierarchical titles: Telephone Manager (Class 1), Assistant Secretary, Staff Engineer, Principal Executive Officer and so on. The fact that Typists qualified only for 40 sq ft no doubt accounts for the extinction of the species.
And the old firm had a language all of its own: trade unions were known - bafflingly to the newcomer - as the 'staff side'. A memo that the boss wanted to discuss with you would arrive in the in-tray bearing the terse endorsement 'Mr Smith. Pse spk. WFJ'. And then there was the imperative-infinitive. 'To see.' 'To note.' 'To file.' Economical, I suppose, but plug-ugly use of language. If the 'staff side' did not agree with a management (sorry: 'official side') proposal, the next step was a 'full and frank' chaired by the boss's boss's boss, followed by 'registered disagreement' and, as like as not 'executive action' (unilateral action by management despite union disagreement).
I won't go on to the TLAs (three-letter abbreviations), but one sentence in three uttered in discussion between staff would be so heavily populated with TLAs as to make it utterly impenetrable to the outsider.
In those first two years, I was paid rather less in total than a month's pension in 2010, though one promotion and the inflation of the Wilson years soon saw my annual salary make it into five figures. But there was no doubting how skint I was in the early years: there was an age scale of pay below the main scale, and I never hit the max of a salary scale. By the time I'd been promoted to the level of my incompetence, pay was entirely grace and favour, with some pretence of negotiation.
Good times, bad times: certainly among the worst years were 1987 to 1989, when I madly agreed to peddle the Total Quality Management message. As with so many good ideas, it had been transmogrified into a monster by consultants (name on application) and invested with cult status and yet another new language, as impenetrable as it was superfluous. Still, by exposing me to some of the higher echelons, that job opened the door to some interesting times abroad. Best, I think were the two years I spent in Switzerland, working on the setting up of a new telephone company. Exhausting, often frustrating and sometimes desperately lonely, it was a job I can look back on with satisfaction. When BT sold its share in the joint venture, it did so at a vast profit.
Well, looking down from the vantage point of Day 3'220 of retirement, I still look back on BT and its predecessors like a loving grandparent, with a kind of benign puzzlement. The paralysing inefficiency of the early days, the obsessive cost cutting of the Thatcher years and beyond, the almost suicidal bandwidth auction and the insane addiction to regular and pendulum-fashion re(dis)organisations were far more trademarks of the firm than any reputation for good service. My recent experience of BT, to whom we have given our telephony and internet business, has been very mixed. My next little test will be in securing my pensioner discount on the broadband subscription - that may be fun.
Here and now, there is birdsong, there are glimpses of the sun, and there are signs of plant life in the garden. Sedums are showing some good shoots, and I have hacked back the penstemons, hoping that this will encourage them to excel yet again this summer and autumn. A few intrepid pansies and polyanthus are showing colour, and the daffodils and crocuses are through the soil, if not yet showing colour. The magnolia, climbing hydrangea and judas tree appear to be budding up nicely. There have been no new goldfish corpses since the last great freeze. So maybe, amid this inchoate euphoria, I need to remind myself that it is still January, and that the worst of the winter could be yet to come.
It seems extraordinary in these post-Thatcher days that we allowed trade unions to hold the organisation is such thrall. But then, as a boss of mine was known to remark from time to time, the 'Business' existed primarily for the benefit of the people that worked in it. We still used the civil service grading structure, and each grade had its 'space standard' for office planning - as if Clerical Officers (55 sq ft) required only half as much air to breathe as Higher Executive Officers (100 sq ft). Division heads were entitled to a positive sanatorium of 200 sq ft - and they came in a heap of different hierarchical titles: Telephone Manager (Class 1), Assistant Secretary, Staff Engineer, Principal Executive Officer and so on. The fact that Typists qualified only for 40 sq ft no doubt accounts for the extinction of the species.
And the old firm had a language all of its own: trade unions were known - bafflingly to the newcomer - as the 'staff side'. A memo that the boss wanted to discuss with you would arrive in the in-tray bearing the terse endorsement 'Mr Smith. Pse spk. WFJ'. And then there was the imperative-infinitive. 'To see.' 'To note.' 'To file.' Economical, I suppose, but plug-ugly use of language. If the 'staff side' did not agree with a management (sorry: 'official side') proposal, the next step was a 'full and frank' chaired by the boss's boss's boss, followed by 'registered disagreement' and, as like as not 'executive action' (unilateral action by management despite union disagreement).
I won't go on to the TLAs (three-letter abbreviations), but one sentence in three uttered in discussion between staff would be so heavily populated with TLAs as to make it utterly impenetrable to the outsider.
In those first two years, I was paid rather less in total than a month's pension in 2010, though one promotion and the inflation of the Wilson years soon saw my annual salary make it into five figures. But there was no doubting how skint I was in the early years: there was an age scale of pay below the main scale, and I never hit the max of a salary scale. By the time I'd been promoted to the level of my incompetence, pay was entirely grace and favour, with some pretence of negotiation.
Good times, bad times: certainly among the worst years were 1987 to 1989, when I madly agreed to peddle the Total Quality Management message. As with so many good ideas, it had been transmogrified into a monster by consultants (name on application) and invested with cult status and yet another new language, as impenetrable as it was superfluous. Still, by exposing me to some of the higher echelons, that job opened the door to some interesting times abroad. Best, I think were the two years I spent in Switzerland, working on the setting up of a new telephone company. Exhausting, often frustrating and sometimes desperately lonely, it was a job I can look back on with satisfaction. When BT sold its share in the joint venture, it did so at a vast profit.
Well, looking down from the vantage point of Day 3'220 of retirement, I still look back on BT and its predecessors like a loving grandparent, with a kind of benign puzzlement. The paralysing inefficiency of the early days, the obsessive cost cutting of the Thatcher years and beyond, the almost suicidal bandwidth auction and the insane addiction to regular and pendulum-fashion re(dis)organisations were far more trademarks of the firm than any reputation for good service. My recent experience of BT, to whom we have given our telephony and internet business, has been very mixed. My next little test will be in securing my pensioner discount on the broadband subscription - that may be fun.
Here and now, there is birdsong, there are glimpses of the sun, and there are signs of plant life in the garden. Sedums are showing some good shoots, and I have hacked back the penstemons, hoping that this will encourage them to excel yet again this summer and autumn. A few intrepid pansies and polyanthus are showing colour, and the daffodils and crocuses are through the soil, if not yet showing colour. The magnolia, climbing hydrangea and judas tree appear to be budding up nicely. There have been no new goldfish corpses since the last great freeze. So maybe, amid this inchoate euphoria, I need to remind myself that it is still January, and that the worst of the winter could be yet to come.
Thursday, 21 January 2010
21 January
More snow yesterday - great big wet lumps of it for a couple of hours. I tire of this. Add the on-off relationship between my PC and the new router, and you'll see that even the prospect of a day in the Yewf court offers a degree of solace. I should be able to get back to my country lanes today, since yesterday's snow didn't lie on the tarmac. A greater risk is actually flooding: my route to court takes me across the flood plain of the Medway, and at this time of year it's not unknown for one or other of the roads to be under water.
Goodness me! A Republican senator in Massachusetts! What's this about? General mid-term malaise or something more specific? I could understand well-heeled and well-insured republican voters being reluctant to shell out for better health care arrangements for those left below when they pulled the ladder up, but why would democrat voters desert over that issue? I suppose there's disenchantment over the failure to deliver on campaign promises, but who's taken in by hustings rhetoric these days? Forty-some years ago, my political philosophy tutorial group was set the essay title 'Why do we value a democracy?', and after debate, concluded that we didn't, preferring an idealised benign despotism. My views haven't changed a whole lot in the meantime.
Goodness me! A Republican senator in Massachusetts! What's this about? General mid-term malaise or something more specific? I could understand well-heeled and well-insured republican voters being reluctant to shell out for better health care arrangements for those left below when they pulled the ladder up, but why would democrat voters desert over that issue? I suppose there's disenchantment over the failure to deliver on campaign promises, but who's taken in by hustings rhetoric these days? Forty-some years ago, my political philosophy tutorial group was set the essay title 'Why do we value a democracy?', and after debate, concluded that we didn't, preferring an idealised benign despotism. My views haven't changed a whole lot in the meantime.
Tuesday, 19 January 2010
Tuesday 19 January
I had hoped that dumping Virgin Media's broadband offering wouldn't necessarily mean losing my web space, which dated from pre-broadband dial-up days. Well, I was wrong, so here I am at the address I set up a while back against precisely this eventuality. In other respects, the changeover has gone smoothly, with only a few hours off the air. BT's natty black plastic arrived as promised, but I didn't hook it up until the workmen had gone, and I'd had a chance to dust down the chest of drawers it now stands on. Setting up the router and configuring the computers was a simple job, and I haven't encountered any hitches yet. But I still haven't managed to set up the broadband phone that comes with the deal. A job for later today, maybe.
The shower room is functioning, but I'm dissatisfied with some details, so we'll have to have the chaps back, unfortunately.
Another job is to learn how to make Blogspot do what I want. The old web site let me keep separate sections - recipes, pictures, links, book reviews etc, and I know other users have mastered it, so there's some hope for me, however scant.
The shower room is functioning, but I'm dissatisfied with some details, so we'll have to have the chaps back, unfortunately.
Another job is to learn how to make Blogspot do what I want. The old web site let me keep separate sections - recipes, pictures, links, book reviews etc, and I know other users have mastered it, so there's some hope for me, however scant.
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