Council Tax

It is once more that time of the year when the charges for council services and water go up. I have a note of what we have paid in this same house over nearly 30 years. 

Charges (£)	1993-1994	2021-2022	increase
Council Tax	562	1727	x 3.07
Water and Sewerage	225	758	x 3.36

According to the Bank of England’s inflation calculator, these bills would have multiplied just 2.08 times had they increased in line with consumer price inflation: i.e. the figures for council tax and water would have been £1,170 and £469. In other words, we are now paying half as much again as we did in 1993.

It feels like we are paying half as much again for half as much. There used to be better bus services, the dustbins were emptied more often, roads and footpaths were better maintained, there were more libraries and they were open for longer, there was an enormous choice of adult education classes in arts, crafts, sports, languages and practical subjects at a wide range of locations, there were literary and arts festivals, and concerts with visiting orchestras.

As regards water and sewerage, why should that be so much more expensive (I know, it will cost less with a water meter when the kids have finally left)? Is it because of leaks, or because of privatisation and profits?  

I don’t want to get into the murky, smoke and mirrors world of local government finances (especially the funding of schools and the police) other than to summarise Which? magazine in that the money raised from council tax goes towards funding local services such as maintaining roads, collecting bins, providing bus services, cleaning streets and social care. 

That last category accounts for one heck of a rapidly growing proportion, now approaching 60%, nearly £26 billion per year. The Local Government Association adds: “As a result, councils may have no choice but to spend much less on other important services like fixing roads or maintaining parks and libraries.”

Occupational Therapy Corners

The last post about the stair rail attracted more comments than usual. They ranged from the resigned to the resolute. The gist seems to be ‘hold on tight as you descend the slippery slope.’

As mentioned once before, Mrs. D. is an Occupational Therapist. Not everyone knows what they are or what they do. When I went to register our son’s birth, the clerk asked for the mother’s occupation and then wrote “Occupation Therapist” on the certificate. “No,” I said, “it’s Occupational Therapist – it has ‘al’ at the end.” If I hadn’t checked again, I would have left that office with a certificate showing the mother as an “Occupation Therapistal”.

Occupational Therapists provide equipment and therapies to help people regain their daily lives after serious illness or injury. Mrs. D. therefore very much approves of stair rails and anything else that make homes safer. She also informs me that our stairs, being straight, will be perfect for fitting a stair lift.  

Another previous post, from 2019, included this picture of our kitchen. You may notice that the cooker hood protrudes at just the right height for clumsy tall persons to hit their heads. It has quite sharp corners. Heads tend to bleed rather a lot. I’ve now done it once too often. It’s much better today, thank you. I’ve just spotted that the cooker hood now has these neat enhancements. I call them “occupational therapy corners”. What next?

Stair Rail

(First posted 9th October 2018)

Soon after moving to our current home nearly thirty years ago, I fitted a handrail to help my ageing father and struggling mother-in-law get up and down stairs. They hauled themselves up, breathless, with stiff backs and aching knees, and then eased themselves down, woodwork and bone groaning as one.

I brought it home on top of the car, which was a bit risky because at 14 feet long (4.25 metres) it stuck out both front and back. It’s a pig’s ear handrail – a reference to the cross-sectional shape, not the quality of fitting.

Neither my father or mother-in-law need it now, but even in my darkest moments, I never imagined that I would. 

Mickey’s Son and Daughter

In January 1971 (fifty years ago!), I went to Westfield College in London for the weekend to a friend’s twenty-first birthday party. Among his records, I noticed Gorilla by the Bonzo Dog Doo-Dah Band, a humorous and quirky group of musicians in which Vivian Stanshall and Neil Innes were the best-known names. It was so entertaining I went out and bought it myself as soon as I got home. Even my dad liked it. One of its most memorable tunes is Mickey’s Son and Daughter.

Records usually get played for time and then put away and forgotten, which is what happened to Gorilla, but years later I heard Mickey’s Son and Daughter again, surprisingly at a ceilidh. The band had started off with Gallopede or some other dance in cut time, but then, as is the practice, they swapped to a second tune which I recognised as Mickey’s Son and Daughter. It fitted unexpectedly well. “The stork has brought a son and daughter to Mister and Missus Mickey Mouse”, I sang along to the future Mrs. D. while simultaneously attempting to impress her with my reeling skills. “It’s by the Bonzo Dog Doo-Dah Band,” I tried to explain.

As mentioned recently, our present-day folk band in which we play guitar and bassoon are currently meeting only through Zoom, and one of the regular agenda items is ‘Tune of the Week’. Anticipating my turn coming up again soon, I started to put Mickey’s Son and Daughter into MuseScore, and searched around for more information.  

I had always assumed it to be written by Neil Innes or Vivian Stanshall like most of the other tracks on Gorilla, but, no, it wasn’t. It was written in 1935 by songwriters Eddie Lisbona and Tommie Connor, and first recorded by Henry Hall and the BBC Dance Orchestra. Other orchestras, including the Scottish Symphony Orchestra, included it in their Christmas concert programmes that year, drawing complaints in the press that it was not the sort of music leading classical orchestras ought to be playing. Nevertheless, it proved very popular.

Of the composers, Eddie Lisbona wrote dozens of songs for top performers, such as Gently (French Jolie) for Elvis Presley and Petula Clark (1961). Tommie Connor is best known for I Saw Mommy Kissing Santa Claus (1952) and the English lyrics to Lili Marlene (1944). 

The Henry Hall and Bonzo Dog versions are very different. I used ideas from both in putting together this MuseScore version. Here it is arranged for guitar and bassoon with default piano chords. It plays just once without the repeat. 

And to encroach on the territory of Immortal Jukebox, here are the Bonzo Dog and Henry Hall versions, and another recorded for the Woolworth's Crown label by The Rhythm Rascals. 

 

If the above videos do not appear for some reason, then the links are: 

• Own MuseScore version - https://youtu.be/WisSDKbcXEY
  
• Henry Hall Version - https://youtu.be/JkrXiB8r2go
  
• Bonzo Dog Version - https://youtu.be/HSlpBCfu-us
  
• Rhythm Rascals Version - http://www.woolworthsmuseum.co.uk/Crown/31A-MickeysSonDaughter.html (web page)

For the record, the full lyrics on the sheet music are:

A million million people are happy, bright and gay,
The bells are ringing the steeple, it’s a public holiday.

All the world is so delighted, and the kids are all excited,
‘Cos the stork has brought a son and daughter to Mister and Missus Mickey Mouse.
All the mayors and corporations, have declared such jubilations,
‘Cos the stork has brought a son and daughter to Mister and Missus Mickey Mouse.

Pluto’s giving a party and before the fun begins,
He’ll present a Gorgonzola to the father of the twins.
Mister Preacher’s eyes are glist’ning, and he’s fixing up a Christ’ning,
‘Cos the stork has brought a son and daughter to Mister and Missus Mickey Mouse.

The news is quickly spreading, the Christening day is near,
The town in happiness is heading to the party of the year.

All the cats and dogs are dancing, and the ‘ole grey mare is prancing,
‘Cos the stork has brought a son and daughter to Mister and Missus Mickey Mouse.
All the cocks are cock-a-doodling, all the lovebirds are canoodling,
‘Cos the stork has brought a son and daughter to Mister and Missus Mickey Mouse.

Pluto’s singing a chorus with the tortoise and the hare,
Clarabelle is in the barn dance with a great big grizzly bear,
All the world is so delighted, come along, you’re all invited,
‘Cos the stork has brought a son and daughter to Mister and Missus Mickey Mouse.

 

The Henry Hall recording has an additional section sung in animal voices. As best as I can make it out (please do let me know if you can get the bits I can’t), it goes:

There’s a crowd around the house of Mister Mickey Mouse
Let’s hear it split the air now let’s see who is there
I’m Percy Pig the postman and I bring the telegram
I’m Charlotte Sheep and I have come to see the little lamb
I’m Donald Duck just waiting till my verse I can recite
I’m Henry Horse and I have brought my band to play all night
I’m Gertie Dog the … [cannot make out this line]
I’m Bertie Bleat the donkey, I am a silly ass

But who is this approaching just when all the fun begins
It’s Willy Wolf the wicked man, he’s come to take the twins
(in evil voice) Hello twins. Nice little twins.
(Mickey) Oh save my son and daughter
We’ll spray the sky with water [?]
(wolf) I’ve got more than I ought to
[sounds of a fight]
[cannot make out this line]
The bad old wolf has gone now
And we had to save the son and daughter of Mister and Missus Mickey Mouse. 

CORRECTIONS / ADDITIONS ARE SUGGESTED IN THE COMMENTS BELOW
 

EQUAL RIGHTS FOR TOES!

About thirty years ago, a John Phillips pointed out in a letter to the New England Journal of Medicine  (1991, vol. 324, no. 7, p.497) that while the fingers all have Latinate names, no such distinction had been given to the toes except for the big toe or hallux. The others were simply numbered.

To remind you, the names of the digits of the hand are:

• Thumb - digitus pollicis
• Index Finger - digitus indicis
• Middle Finger - digitus medius 
• Ring Finger - digitus annularis
• Little Finger - digitus minimus

To rectify this, and to preclude anatomical ambiguity in clinical situations, he proposed the toes be given the following names:

• Big Toe or Hallux - porcellus fori
• Second Toe - porcellus domi
• Third Toe - porcellus carnivorus
• Fourth Toe - porcellus non voratus
• Fifth Toe - porcellus plorans domum
  

 Quod conservis callidus.

Hi there Duggy!

A student sends an awkward email to an eminent professor

Early in the nineteen-nineties, I came across a strikingly enlightening piece of research that suggested that girls who learn things together, remember much more than boys. It was an experiment in which pairs of eight-year-old children explored an interactive videodisk – the kind of thing that tells an illustrated story in which, if you click on a word or group of words, it reads it out, and if you click on an object or character in a scene then something happens, for example clicking a parked car in a street scene sets off the alarm, or clicking a tray of biscuits in a kitchen makes them sing. It was a new and unusual experience at the time. 

Some weeks later the children were asked to write essays about it on their own. The surprising result was that girls who had been paired with other girls remembered twice as much as boys or girls who had been paired in other combinations.* There were other aspects to the experiment too, making a useful contribution to the idea that educational software can encourage learning through collaboration as well as individually.

I stumbled upon this as a new lecturer in a recently upgraded northern ex-polytechnic, hoping to carve a niche for myself by devising innovative courses about emerging technologies. I asked students each to lead a small, short seminar about a published research paper from a list. One student, let us call him Arshad, chose the paper about the pairs of children and the videodisk. 

Email was relatively new in those days. Some university staff still resisted its use, and those who welcomed it were having to come to terms with the accessibility and informality it brings. We took pains to educate students about the possible pitfalls. It seemed inevitable that things would sometimes go wrong, but it was with disbelief that I read the email Arshad had sent to the author of the research paper.

The author was Professor Dougman Fairwood, an eminent and influential Head of Department in a top Russell-group university, author of numerous books, review articles and research papers across a wide range of topics. He had been awarded many high-value research grants, guided no end of doctoral students to successful completion, served on government advisory committees and was internationally respected in his field. You get the idea. Think of those over-achieving grey academics who only creep into the public eye when they advise or criticise governments in times of crisis. Most are pathological workaholics and take themselves very seriously. They get upset if you don’t address them formally, or fail to treat them with the respect and deference they think they deserve. 

This is the email Arshad sent:

From: sexyarshad@screaming.net
To: d.p.fairwood@-----.ac.uk
Subject: Study questions?
Hi there Duggy!
Hows it going,, My name is Arshad A-----, Im a student at --- University, Currently I am reviewing one of your publications titled “------------ ---- ----- ----------”. Its realy cool and I would be very gratefull if you or you coauthor Mrs Farwood would be so kind to answer a few questions reagding the study.
1 - Was there any initial asumptons taken into account about the children taking part in the study? (if any, how valid were the asumptons?).
2 - Taking a retrospective look at the study, how well do you think the study was carried out?, do you think anything was overlooked in terms of implemantaion or methodolgy?
3 - Do you think your study has any implicatons or links to other ideas?
4 - How importantly do you think your study is relevent today and more importantly in the future?
Thanks in advance
Keep it up
Arshad A-----.

It was not long before an angry reply was circulated to staff.

Dear Colleagues

The attached is a message received both here and by my co-author, and comes, apparently, from a --- University student. The student does not identify his Department, so I’m sending this complaint to the Heads of Psychology, Education, Computer Science, Engineering, Multimedia and Information Systems, with a copy to the Vice Chancellor.

Your student appears to be writing an assignment on one of our papers, and the questions that we are being asked are just the kinds of questions that a tutor might set. Is it your practice to have your students get the answers to their questions by doing the equivalent of looking at the back of the book? Obviously not, and you might want to take some action to inform the student about your preferred practice.

But the main reason for writing is to complain about the e-mail itself. The interrogational style had ------ and I phoning each other to ask what was going on here. Speaking for myself, I am decidedly cheesed off with this e-mail. Being asked to justify the validity of my own assumptions, or the relevance of my work, is something that I do not expect from a student hoping to pass a term paper. Of course, if you believe that your student is doing exactly the right thing here, then I would be especially grateful to hear from you.

Best regards

Dougman Fairwood.

Professor Dougman P. Fairwood BSc PhD DSc CPsychol FBPsS
Head, Department of -----
University of -----

cc Professor Susan A. Fairwood BEd PhD

I can think of at least five so-called rules of email etiquette Arshad ignored, but even had all been followed correctly, the content was way out of order. Students may well have genuine grounds for writing to staff at other universities, but they should always pass it by their own supervisors first. They certainly should not do it in such a clumsy and tactless way.

I drafted a grovelling apology but never had to send it. It turned out that our Head of Department had already apologised on behalf of the university believing that Arshad had been reading around for his final-year project. No one ever associated his email message with the course I was teaching. That was fortunate because at the very next academic conference I attended, I got into conversation with the friendly chap sitting next to me and asked his name. “I’m Doug Fairwood,” he answered and invited me along for a coffee. We had an interesting chat about interactive videodisks.

I raised the matter of the email with Arshad but he paid little attention, and when his seminar came along it was fairly obvious he had not really read or understood the research paper at all. He still graduated that year with a respectable degree – well, he was a nice enough lad and the university did not like us to fail people. I wonder what he’s doing now.


* One possible reason for the girls’ so much stronger recall is rehearsal, i.e. the more you repeat something the better you will remember it. Girls, being more sociable, seem more likely to have talked about their experiences afterwards between themselves, possibly in play. Strangely, the authors did not consider this in their paper. Professor Fairwood seemed very interested when I suggested it to him. 

North Yorks Walks

It was great to be out on the North York Moors again, although there was a time when I would not have said that. It is where my first proper walks were, with boots, cagoule and rucksack, fifty years ago. My friend Neville used to drive us up on Saturdays in his Ford Anglia and we would spend the day walking. Don’t ask me where: the names Helmsley and Chop Gate sound familiar. Neville had been walking for longer than me and knew all the routes. He persuaded me along and I just followed – literally. 

More often than not he would disappear off into the distance and leave me trailing behind in wretched misery, with swollen ankles, and feet blistered by badly fitting boots. That first pair was fine for a few miles but I could never get the right combination of thin and thick socks to avoid rubbing. Nowadays I wear just one thick pair and stick on a piece of micropore tape at the slightest hint of trouble, which is not very often. As for ankles, from quite an early age I was forever going over and spraining them. I once jumped half way down the stairs and went over with a crunch. The pain was unbelievable. I always went over at least once on Neville’s walks, and still do sometimes, but it doesn’t usually hurt now. Mrs. D. says I’ve got lax ligaments. People cringe when I put the soles of my feet and my knees together at the same time.

On one walk, on Fylingdales Moor near the strange radome “golf balls” (replaced in 1992), I was so far behind I took a wrong fork, and rather than backtrack two hundred yards took a short cut across an area signed “Ministry of Defence. Danger. Unexploded Mines”. I was past caring. Another time, Neville organised a group of us to attempt the Lyke Wake Walk – a 40-mile crossing of the moor from Osmotherly to Ravenscar – but I had to give up less than half-way with one ankle puffed-up like a balloon, and red-raw heels and toes. My heels had blisters upon blisters and my toes looked like they had been stripped with sandpaper. It showed the world for what it is: the beauty and the pain.

The beauty won: the beauty of the Yorkshire countryside. Somehow, I persisted, and my feet, ankles and even I toughened up. We walked in all weathers. I must have been very warm-blooded because, even in the coldest winds and wettest rain, I wore only a cagoule over t-shirt and jeans. I would even go out like that in ice and snow. Now, maybe ten pairs of better-fitting boots later and owner of warmer clothing, I wish I got out more often. So, on holiday last month, it was great to be out on the North York Moors again. One walk was around the enigmatically-named Hole of Horcum.

Panorama of the Hole of Horcum, 2007 (Adam Jennison, Wikimedia Creative Commons)

The Hole of Horcum is a huge natural amphitheatre 400 feet deep and three-quarters of a mile across, just west of Fylingdales Moor. Legend has it as ‘The Devil’s Punchbowl’, formed when a giant threw a handful of earth at his wife. That doesn’t make much sense to me. Apart from the fact that no one would even dream of throwing a handful of earth at his wife, the giant was called Wade, not Horcum. I think Horcum must have been his dog, one of those enormous English Mastiffs, and the hole is where he buried a bone and then dug it up again. In any case, curmudgeonly geo-morphologists have to go and spoil things by telling us the Hole was formed by a process of water-erosion called spring-sapping? 

The Hole of Horcum, 17th August 2020

My own picture is from roughly the same viewpoint as the panorama, taken from the edge of the hole soon after we began circling anti-clockwise. The purple heather was putting on a better show this year. On reaching the far right-hand side we went off at a tangent along a path to a five-way junction at Dundale Rigg (what a name for a folk band!). From there you can divert to Skelton Tower (an 1830s shooting lodge) and marvel at the steam trains on the North Yorkshire Moors Railway far below. However, we continued on to the sleepy village of Levisham and then looped back East and North along the side of a wooded valley, picking our way through nettles to reach the footpath across the floor of the Hole, visible in the above photograph. In seven miles we had walked the whole of Horcum.

Levisham Village

Entering the Hole of Horcum, 17th August 2020

Another day we walked along the cliff top, along the track bed of the old Whitby to Middlesborough Middlesbrough railway, which closed in 1958. Some of the now-dismantled structures along the line, such as the Staithes Viaduct, were remarkable. At Staithes you can still make out the brick abutment on the hillside across the valley from the village car park that was once the site of Staithes railway station. The viaducts survived as potential Second World War targets only for unaffordable maintenance costs and declining passenger numbers to achieve what Hitler did not.

We joined the track at Sandsend, following in the footsteps of the intrepid Mr. Yorkshire Pudding who was there last year, and also ourselves in 1997, with the same two people in the next photograph as above. Whereas Mr. Pudding’s group continued the six miles north to Runswick Bay, we turned inland towards the village of Lythe and returned to Sandsend by a higher path across fields, giving a bird’s eye view of the resort.

The old railway track north from Sandsend, 19th September, 1997, looking towards Whitby Abbey

Looking down on Sandsend from the higher cliff path, 16th August 2020

The final photograph is from the cliff tops south of Whitby near the Abbey, which gives fine views in the opposite direction, north towards Sandsend. You can see Sandsend and the wooded cliffs where we walked.

Looking north to Sandsend from near Whitby Abbey, 21st August 2020

From the Abbey you descend the famous 199 steps back into town.

For more photographs, this guy’s web site is a real treat:  
Sandsend to Runswick Bay
Hole of Horcum (he starts at Levisham). 

Whitby, Staithes and Scarborough

Kite Flying, Raithwaite, Whitby, 1997

I never visited Staithes or Whitby as a child, nor did we go to Scarborough much, probably because Bridlington and Filey (see previous posts) were nearer.

We have since been to all three quite often. In the nineteen-nineties we stayed twice in cottages in the grounds of Raithwaite Hall about two miles north of Whitby: not then the luxury hotel and spa complex it is now. The cottages were new, but the hall itself was the decaying former home of two Whitby shipping families. Pictures of the ships and their histories were displayed in an outhouse. When the last of these shipping magnates, William Headlam, died at the age of 81 in 1990, he cut his estranged wife out of his will and left his £7m fortune to a fifty-six year unmarried nurse who had cared for him for twenty years. Offers of marriage flowed in from all over the world, but she rejected them all.  

We also stayed a mile further north at Sandsend during a memorable week when the temperature soared and we spent most of the time playing in the warm pool that forms where East Row Beck crosses the beach to reach the sea. I towed the children round and round in an inflatable dinghy for hours. We flew kites in the longshore winds, one a stunt kite bought while rushing to catch a train, making me mangle my words in the shop. The Reverend Spooner would have been awestruck.

Another year, we stayed yet a further ten miles north at Staithes. There’s a place to get fit quick. You won’t find much of it on streetview. You have to leave your car at the top of the village and walk down the hill with your bags, or park briefly at the bottom and carry them up steps. You walk up and down to the car, and down and up to the harbour all week. Your leg muscles swell out like mooring buoys. 

Staithes: we rented the house top middle with three skylight windows, to the left of several white ones.

As for Scarborough, I went a couple of times with my parents when little, but have no photographs. My strongest memories are of Peasholm Park on the North Bay, where I learnt to row round and round the island in the boating lake – a skill later to impress my children. Several times a week there was a re-enactment of the Battle of the River Plate with miniature battleships, culminating in the scuttling of the Admiral Graf Spee, celebrating the days when Britain liked to think it could wup the Germans over and over again without really trying. The special effects – the smoke, the explosions, bombers dropping torpedoes as they whizzed across on a zipwire – were phenomenal. Most of the model boats were operated by people hiding inside and walking on the bottom of the lake. There’s a job for some people I might name.  

We saw all three places again last week while staying in Whitby. They were crowded. There were no rowing boats on Peasholm lake, only dragon pedaloes. Where is the skill in that?

Dragon Pedaloes, Peasholm Park

And then there were the walks on the North York Moors …

Review - Penelope Lively: A House Unlocked

Penelope Lively: 
A House Unlocked (4*)

As a child, Penelope Lively often stayed at her grandparents’ country house, Golsoncott, between Dunster and Watchet in Somerset. Years later, when the house was sold, the contents brought back memories of the people who had lived there, and caused her to reflect upon how life had changed. It is twentieth century social history.

Bill Bryson used a similar idea in At Home (reviewed here) in which the layout of his nineteenth century Norfolk house triggered a collection of topics about the history of private life. It is interesting to contrast the two. Bryson is readable and entertaining; Lively is weightier and more demanding. Bryson writes about anything that takes his fancy, especially the eccentric or sensational; Lively is focussed and thorough. Bryson leaves me amused but wondering why I bothered; Lively leaves me with much to think about; Bryson is the livelier writer, Lively the deeper and more sentient.

At Golsoncott, plants in the garden lead to tales of Victorian shrub collectors who roamed Asia in search of new specimens. A picnic rug and a painting generate discussions of the differences between town and country, how they regard each other, and how these things have altered over time. A prayer book sparks off an account of churchgoing and its decline, contrasting Lively’s own ambivalence with her grandmother’s certainty.

In other chapters, Lively writes of wartime evacuees, a Russian friend who had fallen upon hard times, and an orphaned teenage boy who had escaped from Vienna just before the war, all of whom lived for a time at Golsoncott. She tells how they came to be there: “It is fascinating to contemplate with the wisdom of hindsight the trajectories of utterly disparate lives that will one day intersect” (p87).

The book becomes more personal as Lively compares her grandparents’ marriage with her own and contemplates how the roles of husbands and wives have changed. She, herself, grew independent of traditional expectations by taking a post as a research assistant at Oxford University. There, she heard talk of a bright new research fellow called Jack Lively whose name “sounded like a character in an eighteenth-century novel.” They were married within a year. As she says, they met “in the clear blue air of higher education, both … freed from the assumptions and expectations of [their] backgrounds.” It would have been nigh impossible for a girl from the southern gentry to meet and marry a young man from the northern working class in a previous age.

There was, however, an earlier independent-minded woman in the family, her aunt, the artist Rachel Reckitt, who had little time for convention. She was the last inhabitant of Golsoncott before its sale in 1995.  Lively’s grandfather was a grandson of the Hull industrialist Isaac Reckitt who made his money from the manufacture of starch: the firm later became known as Reckitt and Colman. Her grandfather, an architect, did not go into the firm, but one his sons became chairman.

The book visits Lively’s recurring themes and concerns throughout: memory, past and present, and personal history. Moments that once were the present are overlaid by re-interpretations. Sometimes, “it seems that the sunlight through the wisteria spattered the veranda tiles in exactly the same way in 1995 as … in 1945” (p83). She finds a rusting iron bedstead in a pigeon loft and sees the room where the fifteen-year-old Viennese boy slept, “thinking in another language, his head full of images far removed from west Somerset, hearing the same peaceable pigeon rumblings … heard still”.

“Now I am the commentator … I have double vision: fifty years ago is both now, and then. It is all still going on, quite clear and normal, the world as I know it, but those other eyes see a frozen moment … ahead lies everything that will happen … life and death, and beneath that the shifting sands of public events.” (p202).

She is right. For example, I could go back to Leeds and walk the route I used to take to work fifty years ago. I would see both what is there now and what used to be there, all still going on, clear and normal, but that would be another blog post. 

I picked up A House Unlocked from the books that came from my late mother-in-law, after reading Treasures of Time (reviewed here), and have now sent off for Moon Tiger.

STOP PRESS - 10th June 2020
Golsoncott is currently on the market. The estate agent's pdf has external and internal pictures. Oh to win the lottery! See https://media.onthemarket.com/properties/1969509/doc_0_0.pdf 

Key to star ratings: 5*** wonderful and hope to read again, 5* wonderful, 4* enjoyed it a lot and would recommend, 3* enjoyable/interesting, 2* didn't enjoy, 1* gave up.

Previous book reviews 

Scammed

Images link to Which? and Guardian articles

I’d never get scammed. Not me: M.Sc. in computing, software writer, programming teacher, systems consultant, researcher, lecturer, forty years computer experience. I even wrote articles for so-called learned journals. Scammed? Me? Never! 

A month ago I bought something from Amazon. I know. I shouldn’t. They’re a scheming, two-faced outfit who don’t pay their fair share of tax and use too much non-recyclable packaging, but it was convenient. And before I knew, I’d signed up to a month’s free trial of Amazon Prime.

You have to credit the devious way they trick you into clicking that button while making you think you’re just selecting free delivery. There seemed to be no other way forward. It’s a masterpiece of interaction design. They hope you’ll forget you’ve signed up and that later you won’t notice the £7.99 disappearing from your bank account every month. 

I wasn’t worried. I knew all I had to do was go to my Amazon Settings –> Accounts and Lists –> Your Prime Membership and unsubscribe. I knew that because it’s the second time I’ve been caught out. It shows how ingenious they are that I should fall for it again, even when trying not to. I am not alone (see another Which? article).

You have to confirm you really do want to unsubscribe; that you don’t want the free next-day delivery, the video and music streaming, the books, the games and other supposed benefits. Well I don’t. I’m not interested. So I unsubscribed. Nevertheless, want it or not, you still get the free trial for the full duration. You can’t opt out. It’s like a stop smoking programme that supplies you with free cigarettes just in case you don’t really want to stop.

You harbour a lingering unease they are still out to get you somehow. For the rest of the month you are checking your Amazon account every few days to make sure it still says “Your free trial will expire on …” and afterwards that “You are no longer a member of Amazon Prime”. It did. All looked absolutely fine.

But then, two days after the trial ended, I received a phone call on the landline, an automated voice reminding me that my Amazon Prime subscription was about to be renewed at a cost of £39.99 to be charged to my bank account and that if I did not want to renew I should press 1 to speak to an account manager.

Did I believe it? Well yes. Given the circumstances you can see why. I was furious. Did I press 1? No, but only because the phone had not been resting properly on its stand so the battery went flat and cut me off. Would I have pressed 1 if not cut off? Probably not, but I can’t be sure. Amazon does have my landline number on the account but no mobile. I thought it might be a text-to-speech message.*

I was agitated for the rest of the day. I logged on to Amazon to check it still said: “You are no longer a member of Amazon Prime”. I checked my bank account. Only on finding the Guardian and Which? articles did I begin to relax. But in the sense that I believed it a genuine call, yes, I’ve been scammed.

Scams depend on timing and circumstance. If you email enough people to say their Wordpress account has been compromised and they should log in immediately using the link you provide, some will fall for it, especially if they do indeed have a Wordpress account and have recently experienced problems (Blogger users, of course, would instantly see straight through such a simple trick). Pressing 1 would have connected me on a premium rate line to some irresistibly persuasive person in Africa wanting me to allow them remote access to my computer, give them my bank card details or log on to a fake website. I could have been thousands of pounds out of pocket. 

Scammed? Me? Er, no way?

 
*If it had been sent as a text, then pressing ‘1’ would have had no effect because there is no direct connection to the sender while reading a text. 

 

Lost Entitlements

They don’t want you driving these once you’re 70

In 2009, the BBC programme Watchdog reported that DVLA* were removing entitlements from driving licences reissued after a change of name or address. Drivers found they had lost the right to drive motorcycles or other categories of vehicle.

It may be conspiracy theory but the rumour is that many people who are qualified to ride motorcycles have not done so for years, and DVLA do not want them to start again because of the dangers. Some who do still ride motorcycles had to re-take their motorcycle driving test because they were unable to prove they had passed it years ago.

2-stroke Velocette

You can understand the outrage. My dad felt the same. He passed his motorcycle test in the nineteen-thirties and rode through the war on his 2-stroke Velocette as an Air Raid Patrol Messenger (childhood polio ruled out active service). Yet, around nineteen-seventy, he was dismayed to notice he no longer had the motorcycle entitlement on his licence. Not that he wanted to ride again – he wouldn’t have dared – it was the principle.

This is a page in his old licence. Until 1973, driving licences took the form of little red books issued by County Councils. They had to be renewed every three years or annually before 1959. West Riding residents sent their licences to 14 St. John’s North, Wakefield, where a new three-year (or one-year) sticker was pasted in.

They really knew how to stick things in those days but, as best he could, my dad peeled back through the thick wodge of renewals in his old licence book and discovered that what used to be Category III (later G) “Motor Bicycle (with or without side-car) …” was there in 1939 but not in 1940. I still have his licence with all its stickers and what appears to have happened is that his motorcycle entitlement was not carried forward when he passed his motor car driving test. Oversight or clerical error, he seems to have ridden his Velocette through the war illegally.

What annoyed him even more was that he worked with someone who started to drive before tests were introduced in 1935 and was licensed to drive just about everything you could imagine. Despite never having taken a test of any kind his colleague could drive both cars and motorbikes. My dad had passed to drive both but could now only drive cars. It was no consolation that somehow around 1950 he had bizarrely acquired the right to drive a road roller. 

Now, I feel hard done by too. Did you know they remove some of your entitlements when you get to seventy?

Most people currently in their fifties and sixties can drive 16-seater minibuses and medium-sized vans and trucks (up to 7.5 metric tons or tonnes: categories C1 and D1). They are there on my paper driving licence (many people now have plastic photocards but green paper licences issued before July 1998 remain valid up to your seventieth birthday unless updated due to a change of name or address, but at seventy you have to change to a photocard).

The rule is that you can drive 16-seater minibuses and 7.5 tonne vehicles if you passed your car driving test before 1997 (partly subject to Restriction 1: not for hire or reward). Those who passed after 1997 are restricted to 8-seater minibuses and smaller vans up to 3.5 metric tons. However, at 70, they take away the higher entitlements and restrict everyone to the lower limits. You can keep the higher ones by taking a test and asking a doctor and an optician to certify your fitness to drive, for which no doubt they charge, but that’s too much faff.

Even to continue driving ordinary cars and smaller vehicles, I have to send back my paper licence, self-certify I’m fit and can see, and get a photocard. It will have to be renewed every three years. I will no longer be able to hire 7.5-tonne trucks or drive minibuses. Not that I ever have. It’s the principle.

What I don’t get is this. If it’s all right to self-certify I’m fit to drive a car or a 3.5-tonne Transit, why can’t I self-certify for slightly bigger vehicles? Maybe we should all go out and hire flatbed trucks and big box vans while we still can, just for the fun of it.

I suppose it’s like with some people who own guns: restrictions should apply to everyone else but themselves.

Hire one while you still can - just for the fun of it.

*DVLA – the Driver and Vehicle Licencing Agency which until 1990 was called the DVLC for -Centre.

A Tale of Two Tea Pots

As mentioned before, I once lived in Scotland. I still carry around this now very crumpled Scottish one pound note as a reminder of that time.

I had a close friend there. She was attractive and intelligent, and did not put up with nonsense. We went to the cinema, classical concerts, the ballet and on country walks. She taught me Scottish words and phrases, and introduced me to Lewis Grassic Gibbon’s A Scots Quair. She stayed with me a few days when she moved house, and I stayed with her for my last couple of days in Scotland after getting my own house ready to rent out. Perhaps, in other circumstances, at a different time, it might have been more than a friendship.

I left Scotland at the end of the nineteen-eighties for a job in Nottingham. Soon after, walking along Pelham Street, or was it Goose Gate, I spotted a cheery Chinese tea pot in a shop window. I bought one, packed it up very carefully and posted it to my Scottish friend for her birthday. She was absolutely delighted.

I then fell in love with the future Mrs D. who was also attractive and intelligent but did put up with nonsense. Wondering what to buy for her birthday, I thought of my Scottish friend’s tea pot, so returned to the shop and bought another, exactly the same. She was absolutely delighted. It seemed neither necessary nor appropriate to mention the earlier one and I forgot it. We were married around a year later. My Scottish friend came to the wedding and was pleased to say grace because she was by then a Church of Scotland Minister.

My house in Scotland had been rented out not through choice but because at the time it was impossible to sell. Eventually, market conditions changed and someone bought it. I drove up with Mrs D. to sort things out for the last time. Before coming home we called to see my Scottish friend at her Manse near Stirling. 
 
She offered us tea and biscuits. On the tray was her Chinese tea pot. My wife spotted it immediately. She was not delighted.


There's more about my Scottish friend in this earlier post: Jumped Down Catholics (it's quite long)

Köhler’s Apes

Blogger Tom Stephenson described recently how he retrieved a small, ancient metal blade that had mysteriously appeared on an out-of-reach flat roof by using a long pole and a magnet. I could sense his immense satisfaction in the flash of insight into how to retrieve it and it gave me vicarious joy to read how the blade popped on to the magnet for him to haul it in. Köhler’s apes would be impressed. This is how culture, in its widest sense, is passed on. 

Wolfgang Köhler, if you’ve not heard of him, was one of those psychologists whose ideas made the study of that subject a pure delight before it became all numbers and logic. He described how insight and problem-solving are not confined to humans; how chimpanzees, after puzzling a while to gain insight, would stack boxes or join two sticks to retrieve bananas that were out of reach. They do it for the thrill of it. I could go so far as to say that dogs enjoy doing clever things such as learning the name of a toy, and Phoebe our cat certainly looked pleased with herself when she realised she could open the sliding doors between the back and front rooms (that’s the dining room and the sitting room for those of you who don’t speak Northern) in order to sleep on the settee and be sick on it, but scientific psychologists would call that anthropomorphic nonsense.

Moments of insight seem to stick in our memories. The photograph above shows our rotary clothes line, a well-made and robust one (now over thirty years old) brought from a previous house in Scotland where they call them whirlies. Blow the ‘h’ and roll the ‘r’ to say it properly. When we moved to our current house there was a rusty old clothes post concreted into the middle of the lawn. We wanted rid of the ugly thing to make a hole for the whirly. Help, insight. Were we a match for Tom Stephenson and Köhler’s apes? (NB not “the Coca Cola apes” as a student once wrote in an exam.)

Half an hour with a hacksaw cut off the clothes post at ground level leaving a suitable hole. It was too wide, but more patient hacksaw work cut down a length of old road-railing pipe to make a sleeve which fitted perfectly into the hole to accommodate the whirly. Very satisfying! 

But there was a further problem. Things used to fall down the hole when the whirly wasn’t in. On one occasion a nauseating smell was found to be coming from the decomposing body of a bird that had fallen to the bottom. We got the poor thing out with a stick, disinfected the hole with Jeyes Fluid and used a threadbare tennis ball to cover the open top.

Then Phoebe the cat started to play with the ball. She liked nothing better (more anthropomorphic nonsense) than knocking it off the hole and chasing it around the garden. If we didn’t put it back things still fell in.

I don’t know what made me look down one day when about to drop in the pipe to put up the whirly, but something caught my eye at the bottom of the hole. It seemed to be moving. I crouched down to peer in. I had to get a torch. There was a large frog at the bottom.

Problem: how do you rescue a frog from fifteen inches (37 centimetres) down at the bottom of a narrow pipe without harming it?

Phoebe the cat, from the comfort of her nest of garden sacks in the garage, suggests hooking it out with your claws and ignoring the screams. The idea that frogs feel pain is felineomorphic nonsense. She also thinks Köhler’s apes must have been stupid. Why stack up all those boxes when you can just spring up on your hind legs, and who would want a banana anyway? As for Tom Stephenson, well, why didn’t he leap across from his balcony and bring back the blade in his mouth? It was one of her friends who left it there in the first place after using it to poke frogs with.

Are there any other suggested solutions to the problem?

From Ferrybridge to Finland

Demolition of Ferrybridge Tower 6 (click to play video)

Those huge cloud factories, the eight enormous cooling towers of Ferrybridge C Power Station, have stood beside the A1 in Yorkshire for over fifty years (the power station itself has existed one form or another for over ninety), but not for much longer. One tower was demolished on July 28th, four more will go in October and all will be gone by 2021.  The site has become a multifuel power generating plant burning waste and biomass, and using all the steam it generates.

Perhaps it’s for the best. In its heyday, Ferrybridge was one of the worst contributors to Scandinavian acid rain, which in 1993 memorably led the Norwegian environment minister Thorbjoern Berntsen to call his British counterpart, John Selwyn Gummer, the biggest “dritsekk” he had met in his life. Even so, I will miss its majestic scale.

I’ve contemplated the towers from miles away: from the top of the Wolds at South Cave near Beverley, from the top of the Pennines at High Flats near Huddersfield and from vantage points in the low lying Humberhead Levels. They have presided over my journeys to and from Leeds by train, bus and car after I left school, and welcomed me back to my part of Yorkshire when I’ve lived away. I have seen them from the air when flying from Scotland where I once lived to give a talk at a London conference, and from a flight to Helsinki. That’s my best memory.

It was in December, 1991, when I was with a Nottingham software company. I set off for the airport at Birmingham in the dark, in fog so thick I had to drive at walking pace with the window open just to be able to make out the white line in the middle of the road. The motorway wasn’t much better but I got there just in time, still in a gloomy blanket of fog.

I had a window seat but it was some time before things on the ground started to become visible. I could see what seemed to be moorland and dry stone walls, probably Derbyshire and South Yorkshire. Then suddenly we were out of it and over three enormous power stations in a straight line, and an island in a river with a familiar hook-shaped bend: unmistakeably Ferrybridge, Eggborough, Drax and the town of Goole laid out like a street plan. And there: a certain crossroads I knew so well. I was looking down on my dad’s house. He would be in his kitchen getting breakfast, absolutely oblivious to me peering down from an aeroplane two or three miles above.

Then, in next to no time we were over the Humber and flying past Hull with Hornsea Mere and the Yorkshire coast curving North to Flamborough just like on the map, and out over the North Sea to Copenhagen, and I realised I’d missed my complimentary whisky.

Oh my, Helsinki is cold in December. They have to run their car engines at least ten minutes with the heat full up the windscreen and lots of vigorous scraping before they can set off. I walked to the clients from the dingy hotel in the snow trying consciously not to breath in too much of the cold. Everyone had thick woolly mitts, hats and scarves in the brightest colours.

Back at the hotel there was evening entertainment from a lookalike John Shuttleworth keyboard and drums combo which I tried to ignore as I ate my tea. A forty-something woman asked me to dance. She said it was bad manners in Finland to refuse a woman who asks a man to dance. I said I was working and she said so was she. I made my excuses and left. I went to my room and locked the door. In the early hours I was awoken by a fight outside in the corridor. Dritsekks! Paska potkuts!

If you have to go to Helsinki, don’t go in December.

Update 13th October, 2019

Four more towers demolished today:

https://www.itv.com/news/2019-10-13/power-station-towers-demolished-in-milestone-for-energy-industry/

https://twitter.com/AmyMurphyPA/status/1183342570769997826

Apparently the three remaining towers are to be retained for the time being in case they are needed for a new gas fired generator.

Moo

Yesterday, windows open in the warm weather, I heard what I took to be the long plaintive moo of a cow on a nearby farm, but it was only the sound of machinery, perhaps a builder’s circular saw cutting wood. There were farms in the village when we moved here twenty-five years ago but they are long-gone for housing, and I haven’t seen animals in the nearby fields for some time now.

Mrs Quackworth (reposted by Smorgasbord Blog Magazine)

Sally Cronin’s fourth and final selection from my archives for her Smorgasbord Blog Magazine is a post from a year ago about a next-door neighbour we nicknamed Mrs. Quackworth. I don’t know how she ever put up with our muck-chucking fights across her garden.

It has been interesting to see which items Sally would select, it being hard to know for sure which posts others particularly like. Had I been asked to select four myself they might have been completely different. Thanks, Sally, for the many hours you must have spent looking back through our archives - not just mine but all the others too.

The Smorgasbord repost invitation is here

The reposted post is here

Mrs Quackworth 

 

With the Operatic Society around 1920

Until I was ten or eleven I had to share a bedroom with my younger brother. We were sent to bed at the same time, which meant he got to stay up later than I had at his age and I had to go sooner than I thought I should.

It was not even dark in summer. We could hear Timmy from next door-but-one bumping along the pavement on his trolley, made from a long board and some old pram wheels. We were in bed but he was still playing out at ten o’clock at night. That was really unfair. He was two years younger than me.

Downstairs we could hear the next-door neighbour talking with our parents. She sounded like a duck, as did her name ...
 
Read original post (~1200 words)

Research Before The Internet (reposted by Smorgasbord Blog Magazine)

Sally Cronin’s third selection from my archives for her Smorgasbord Blog Magazine is my review of Antonia Byatt's novel Possession along with an account of how it brings back to life what it used to feel like carrying out university research before the days of abundant electronic resources and the internet. 

The Smorgasbord repost invitation is here

The reposted post is here

Research Before The Internet (as evoked by A. S. Byatt - Possession: a Romance)

The plot concerns two modern day scholars researching the lives of two fictional Victorian poets, and it’s a lot more exciting than that makes it sound - a cracking mystery story in fact.

For anyone whose university days predated the turn of the century, when we had to go to libraries to look things up in books and journals, or even use primary sources, perhaps researching a thesis, dissertation or final-year project, Possession brings it all back. You feel as if you are researching the Victorian poets yourself.

Read original post (~800 words)

Every Car We’ve Owned

Ever wondered what happened to your old cars? Here’s how to find out.

This is looking like a month of car-related posts following our recent change of car.

When you buy a car in the U.K., you now receive an official document called the V5C registration certificate, historically known as the “log book”. It shows you are the “registered keeper” – not necessarily the same as the owner, as in the case of a company vehicle, for example.

Our new V5C came through the post with a reminder that it was our responsibility to ensure the vehicle had been taxed – “tax it or lose it”, it said. In other words, to ensure that Vehicle Excise Duty had been paid, also known as the road tax, the tax disc, or, as I sometimes call it, the Road Fund Licence, a remnant of my days in accountancy many years ago. We don’t even have physical tax discs for the windscreen any more.

The reminder pointed to a web site where you can check your vehicle’s road tax and MOT test (roadworthiness) status: https://www.gov.uk/check-vehicle-tax. It confirmed we’re all legal, even though I knew that already.  The page also has a link to an insurance checker: https://ownvehicle.askmid.com/, which reassuringly confirmed that our old cover had been cancelled and the new cover was in force.

Interestingly, these web sites let you check any car at all. Want to know about your friends’ or neighbours’ cars? Just enter their registration numbers and look (although the insurance site does warn that it is a data protection offence to look up the insurance status of a car you are not permitted to drive).

It set me thinking about all the cars we had owned, like my 1966 Morris Mini in the blog banner above, bought in 1972. Unsurprisingly, neither that nor its short-lived predecessor appear in the database. It was too long ago. 
 

But the next one I had does: a flame-red 1972 Morris Mini Van I bought when it was three years old. It shows it was first registered in 1972, that its tax ran out three years after I sold it at the end of October, 1984, and that there is no current MOT test certificate in force: as expected because I know that the person who bought it from me ran it for three years and then scrapped it.

It is also possible, in the case of any vehicle on the road after 2005, to check the MOT test history from the link at the bottom right of the screen above, which is https://www.gov.uk/check-mot-history. This records the date of each MOT test, the vehicle mileage at the time, whether it passed or failed, and if it failed, the reasons why. The database also holds the location of each MOT test but you need to have the latest V5C number to access that, so you can only see it for vehicles you currently keep. Even if there are no tax details, there may still be an MOT history.

Well, as the kind of nerd who delights in these things, I wanted to check up on every car I or anyone in my family had ever owned. There was at least partial information for every vehicle I could remember except my first two mentioned above. It reveals some fascinating details.

For example, the eleven year old Golf Estate we sold recently to webuyanycar.com. The database shows it passed its MOT test two weeks after we sold it. During this time it gained a further 377 miles on the clock. How can this be while it remained untaxed and uninsured? I am certain of the numbers because I noted the mileage when we sold it, and the MOT history shows the mileage when it passed its MOT.

Or my 1985 Talbot Samba, previously blogged about here, the first new car I ever had, and by far the worst. Within months it began to suffer all kinds of corrosion and mechanical problems which Peugeot-Talbot, basically, refused to acknowledge. It was in a terrible state when traded in after five years and 59,000 miles. I am, frankly, astonished to discover it ran for a further five years. Pity the poor owner. Unfortunately, it was too early for a record of the MOT details.

Our later cars lasted much longer. A Ford Fiesta we took over from my dad in early 2002 after he gave up driving, eighteen months old with only 1,500 miles on the clock, ran for a further nine years and 70,000 miles after we traded it at the end of 2006. Its MOT record suggest no major problems other than brake pipe corrosion, until near the end in 2015 when, at fifteen years old, structural corrosion seems to have done for it. 

We also had three VW Polos which lasted very well. One of them we had from three years old in 1993 until 2001. It then ran for another six years until, over sixteen years old with a mileage of 117,145, it failed its MOT test in January, 2007. From the list of faults (see screen image above), it looks like a sensible decision to give up on it.

But the longest lasting is an oceanic green VW Golf Estate, a lovely car bought new in February 2002, part-exchanged in 2008 at six and a half years and 55,000 miles, which, according to the latest records, is still on the road with 120,000 miles on the clock.

We’re now on to our seventh Volkswagen. It could well be my last. We must like them, although everyone has their preferences.