Dadblog

What is it about people using mobile phones on trains that is so endlessly fascinating? This morning, a young woman stepped onto the Thameslink at Herne Hill, opened her mobile phone, and the following ensued:

YOUNG WOMAN: “Barclays Bank…..Yes……Can you put me through to Lost Cards. Lost…..Hello, my credit card has been taken by a cash machine……De Klerk…..D-E-space-K-L-E-R-K…..[postcode]….I just moved, [postcode]…..De Klerk, with a K……Sometimes it’s spelled with a C….No-one knows how to spell it…..Is there anything else you can check?……Can you call me back?……Hang on……Hello? Hello?”

At which point she hung up. Don’t you know a lot about her now? Well, so did the entire Thameslink train. I’ve done her a favour by removing her postcodes (which for some reason I could remember when I got to work). But how striking can one phone conversation be?

1. She was incredibly rude (note, she never said please).

2. Her card wasn’t even stolen, it was in a machine. Couldn’t she have waited until she got off the train?

3. She was called De Klerk, for Christ’s sake. Whether or not she’s related, being able to spell your name so confidently on a crowded train carriage is one thing (most people, say psychologists, would find this incredibly difficult), but spelling a name like that so confidently implies either staggering self-confidence, or a staggering lack of environmental awareness, or both. I’m going on the train tonight to do the same thing, with one small change. “My name? PRESLEY. P-R-E-S-L-E-Y. Initial E. I’ve been living in the same place since 1977, as it happens.”

Brad Delong never, I mean never, writes about British politics, so this morning’s reaction to the foreign office mandarins’ “letter to Blair” is interesting, if not exactly profound:

“This development looks very important indeed to me in the context of UK politics. It reminds me of only a few other occasions, all from the Thatcher era, and in conjunction really marking a turning point. The first was the when the Church of England came out openly criticising the apparent lack of concern for the plight of the poor. The second was when the Oxford Dons refused to give her an honorary degree, and, now I come to think of it, there was a third: when the Queen openly sided with the black African Commonwealth states against Ms Thatchers apparent soft-peddling on South African racism.”

It’s always dangerous putting the word “marillion” on a website - I mean, you don’t know who’s listening, do you? But there’s a fascinating story from the Register this morning about how M***llion got to number seven in the record charts by using tactics remarkably similar to those employed by the record industry itself: pre-selling albums, using the money to promote really heavily on radio, and direct-mailing fans.

“But while grandad is slipping a CD into the player and lighting his pipe, those bands who are old enough to be his, er, contemporaries, continue to take the fight to the industry giants. Key to this are the fans, thinks Marillion front man Steve Hogarth. “If you can enable a dialogue with your fans, you’re in a position to move mountains,” he notes, adding that Marillion aren’t alone in nurturing this new kind of relationship. Indeed, there are plenty of other bands that have been “enabling dialogues” of their own, from old timers The Stranglers to bands with a younger appeal, such as Thrice. Steve’s advice to new bands is pretty straightforward: “Instead of gigging round toilets for ten years trying to get a record deal, gig around toilets for ten years and ask people for their email addresses. If what you’re doing strikes a chord, you’ll be financially better off while remaining pure and free to do what you want.”"

So, let’s raise a glass to Marillion, and say Fugazi! to that big nasty music business.

Anyone who has stood in helpless confusion in a Currys or Dixons store while trying to get someone to help them, or has been sold a dodgy warranty, or has signed up for “free credit” only to find that if they miss the payment by a day they are hit with an enormous bill, or has seen the odious Stanley Kalms on television throwing money at right-wing causes, will have seen the news that Dixons is having to close a third of its stores, and gone, well, duh. A shite store is a shite store is a shite store. And Dixons is shite.

Rather a lovely sonnet from Shakespeare appeared in my in-box this morning:

XXVII.

Weary with toil, I haste me to my bed,
The dear repose for limbs with travel tired;
(more…)

Being British, it seems odd that I’ve never posted on the weather before. But last night, my manor (Herne Hill/Dulwich/Tulse Hill) suffered one of those weird localised floods that seem impossible in London (I mean, where’s the watershed?) but happen anyway. The Thameslink was closed because of flooding in the Kings Cross tunnel (they weren’t ready for rain, because it never rains in April in London, does it?), so I got the bus home, spoke to my wife on the phone, who informed me that people had been wading across Dulwich Road with their trousers rolled up, that my son’s bedroom had water coming through the ceiling, and that a policeman had been spotted in a boat floating down the Dulwich Road.

A policeman in a boat is one of those local news shortcuts that tell a complete story in themselves, like a politician in a classroom or a burned-out car. But in London? Policemen in boats are surely limited to low-lying provincial areas with closed sub-post offices, aren’t they?

So why did Herne Hill flood? I still don’t know. But it did strike me that nobody mentioned an obvious fear: that the culverted River Effra runs nearby, and maybe something bad happened to it. As one who is mildly obsessed with London’s hidden rivers like the Westbourne (runs in a tube above Sloane Square underground platform) and the Fleet (pours into the Thames beneath Blackfriars Bridge), I kind of like the idea of one of these hidden treasures bursting their banks.

Always one to blow my own trumpet….here’s the return of my financial hypochondriac column on Guardian Unlimited Money. A cracking read, of course.

“I stood beside the grave of him who blazed
The comet of a season, and I saw
(more…)

The far right - dangerous, yes, but at times also deeply funny in their strange, other-worldly incompetence, as the Guardian reports today, on Le Pen’s “shared platform” with the BNP’s Nick Griffin:

“They were to illustrate their solidarity in a joint press conference, but half an hour before the event, details of the venue were still a secret and journalists were told by David Jones, BNP press officer, to convene at a mysterious interim location: the car park of the stationery shop Office World near Didsbury.

Alex Jones, from the Merseyside Coalition Against Racism and Fascism……got out his mobile phone to take pictures of some BNP members now gathering.

One of them, a man in mirrored sunglasses who preferred to remain nameless, retaliated by getting out his mobile phone, and for a moment the men stood taking portraits of each other while a junior manager from Office World got on the phone to head office.

A lively exchange of insults ensued, in which demonstrators shouted “we’re part of a multicultural society”, “you’re drug dealers,” and “smash the BNP”, and which David Jones rejoindered with the unexpected line: “The fact that Searchlight [the anti-racism newspaper] is produced in tabloid format shows how patronising you people are to the working classes.”"

And the story also includes a vignette illustrating why, hopefully, far right (and far left) politics have little chance in the thin soil of British political thought:

“An elderly woman from Altrincham wandered through the riot outside the hotel, looking for an advertised antiques fair. Asked for her views on the BNP she said, sensibly: “I’ve got no views at all.”"

Extraordinary quotation from John Nash which I found on his autobiography on the Nobel Prize site:

“So at the present time I seem to be thinking rationally again in the style that is characteristic of scientists. However this is not entirely a matter of joy as if someone returned from physical disability to good physical health. One aspect of this is that rationality of thought imposes a limit on a person’s concept of his relation to the cosmos. For example, a non-Zoroastrian could think of Zarathustra as simply a madman who led millions of naive followers to adopt a cult of ritual fire worship. But without his “madness” Zarathustra would necessarily have been only another of the millions or billions of human individuals who have lived and then been forgotten.”

That’s poetry, isn’t it?