The View from the Spaghetti Factory

My spam filters tend to grab most of the phishing scam emails doing the rounds (especially those purportedly from Paypal, Ebay or the high street banks) so I never see them. The ones I do see, therefore, have to be unusual and/or clever, meaning that they’re probably the ones that people are more likely to fall for.

So, for those of you who are self-employed, watch out for a fake tax rebate from HMRC. I tend to read unsolicited email with a healthy cynicism, so I consider myself pretty phish-proof, but as I read this…

… I almost, almost found myself on the point of dumbly complying. Part of it was the fact that HMRC change some of their procedures from time to time, so my initial surprise (at an email request to claim a tax rebate) was tempered by the assumption that it must be part of their gradual online development.

I soon realised not only that the reply-to address (@hmrc.gov.co.uk) was wrong, but also that my online dealings with Brenda tend to go through my non-Gmail address. And although I can’t claim to know my tax reference number off by heart, I can recognise it when I see it, and there’s no sign of it in that email. Still, it pays to be vigilant!

I’m not sure how much you can credit genetics for your choice of leisure interest, but my obsession with football doesn’t strike me as being particularly unexpected. My grandad, Bill Burnikell, played professionally before WWII (for Lincoln City, Bradford and Aldershot) and later coached teams in Sweden, Chile and Sudan.

Enough general family history, though; this is one of those “isn’t it a small world?” musings. Up at my parents’ place, we’ve got a whole load of grandad-related artefacts, mostly relating to football and/or Sweden. One of them is an issue of “Match”, a Swedish football magazine, dating from 1961.

This particular issue is largely devoted to Degerfors IF, my grandad’s last club in Sweden, who were flying high (especially for a small-town team from Värmland) in the Allsvenskan, Sweden’s top division. It’s great to see his picture in the squad list centrefold feature, but I was surprised to see a promising young player called Tord Grip… now best known as Sven-Göran Eriksson’s deputy at Lazio, England and Manchester City. A browse through the club’s chronology shows that Sven was also briefly a coach at Degerfors.

I’ve scanned a couple of pages so far; more to come soon…

Swedish “Match” magazine, 1961 on Flickr

I think the people who rent advertising space for London Underground must have a sense of humour…

Or maybe there’s a link between 17th century Dutch art and Ashlee Simpson, and I’m just not seeing it. Yep, that’ll be it.

Didn’t do a huge amount over Easter… I’ve been pretty busy over the last month or two, so it was good to do some concerted idling (as opposed to my usual random bursts of unplanned idling) and enjoy the weather.

Such was my idleness, I can’t even remember what we did on the Monday, but I know we spent a pleasant Sunday lunchtime in the pub garden, followed by a walk to nearby Nonsuch Park, once home to Henry VIII. Finding the service wing of the current (Victorian) mansion open to visitors, we did the local history thang… I don’t know whether it’s a sign of age, but I found the minutiae of Victorian middle-class domestic life uncommonly intriguing!

It turns out that the partly neglected mansion (owned by a consortium of local councils) is up for sale, and conversion to a luxury restaurant or leisure club must be a possibility. In a borough like Sutton, which grew around the railway and the post-WW2 housing boom, even a neglected stately home is a rare treasure… to restrict public access in any way would be a tragedy, especially with its new-found potential as a museum of Victorian life. (More info… Save Nonsuch)

Saturday… saw the Oscar-winning (at last!) Scorsese film, “The Departed”. Verdict… well, it’s pretty good as gangland grudgefests go, but it’s almost like a Scorsese self parody, and probably not Oscar material. Naturally, he should have won the Oscar for “Taxi Driver” or at the very least “Goodfellas”, but of course the Academy doesn’t work like that, does it?

Friday was the most active day, featuring a sun-drenched walk through the Surrey hills between Dorking and Leatherhead. Spring was at its most glisteningly fertile, and I even captured some moments for you via the medium of photography…

Good Friday walk in the Surrey hills (photoset on Flickr)

Having occasionally been known to post “Have Your Say” comments on news websites, often with tongue planted firmly in cheek, I guffawed heartily at the reader responses to this story from the Surrey Comet…

Marksman called in to kill Kingston’s pigeons

What tickled me in particular was the genuine response from (presumably) an old lady, standing like a flimsy barrier of normality against the oncoming surreal flood. We’re a witty bunch down here in SW London, y’know.

Greene King boss faces a roasting (BBC News)

Of course, Greene King are perfectly entitled to sell whatever beer they like in their own pubs, but in this case they seem to be acting brazenly in the face of local opinion. That’s nothing unusual… despite the idealistic “traditional ale plus modern forward thinking” message on their company website, Greene King represent one of the biggest threats to proper localised brewing in this country.

Their recent growth spurt is well documented by CAMRA who have expressed concern over the Greene King approach to ruthless expansion. Other large brewers, such as Fullers or Wolverhampton & Dudley, have taken over struggling local breweries recently, but have generally maintained their product ranges, striving to keep the quality and branding consistent. On the other hand, Greene King simply absorb the resources of the smaller companies into their own homogenous operation.

I’m really tempted to go down to Lewes tomorrow for the bonfire celebrations. I’ve been before and it’s a lot of fun, but there’s that extra level of intrigue this year. I don’t exactly need much persuasion to drink Harvey’s beer, so I’m perfectly happy to do it as an act of protest :-)

(By the way, there’s more info on the whole affair at the Lewes Arms blog)

From a feature in yesterday’s Guardian…

And from the BBC today…

I feel quite guilty about Beano’s… I used to go there quite regularly, and although I didn’t buy much (I bought more from 101 Records, another sadly missed independent shop nearby) I was certainly “browsing with intent”. The easy availability of Amazon and Ebay have made it so much more convenient for me (and, clearly, so many others) to do my browsing online.

And while I can’t really blame Tesco directly for the demise of Beano’s, they are a major influence on the overall changes in our towns. Look at that Guardian quote again… three independent retailers in central Croydon, two of which are soon to close. In case you don’t know Croydon, there’s a *lot* of shops; I’m guessing a large proportion of them belong to companies such as Kingfisher, DSGi and Virgin Group… huge companies who want a finger in every retail pie. It might not be Tesco, but it’s the gradual “Tesco-isation” of our towns.

Another thing occurs to me… while our society is becoming more and more attuned to short-term disposability, Ebay proves that some of us are still interested in looking for tasty bargains among secondhand stuff. But when that interest is almost totally monopolised by Ebay, aren’t they almost as bad as Tesco? Rather than diversifying our spending habits (let’s drop in the obligatory Long Tail reference here!) is the internet contributing to the lazy, bland Tesco effect?

This afternoon, temperatures are set to be hotter than at any time since yesterday afternoon. Even at 5:00 this morning, the sun strength was greater than at any time in the previous eight hours. This is likely to be the hottest and driest 19 July 2006 on record. We live in remarkable times, boys and girls.

Like all work-shy, not-enough-to-worry-about, Guardian-reading liberals, I’m incredibly concerned by the implications of global warming, not least the distinct possibility that it may have been caused largely by our own misuse of the planet. But can’t we just have some of this for a couple of months every year, without the nasty side-effects of global famine, floods and mass species extinction? If we promise to be well-behaved and put up with several weeks of slate-grey skies and sleet in the winter? Please, Mr Weather Deity, sir?

(Hang on… it hasn’t rained here in south-east England since 1937. If there’s any melted polar ice-caps going spare, we could make use of them.)

What is it about this country and the weather? We have a temperate maritime climate, and although our weather is changeable, it’s always polite and unassuming, never reaching extremes. Yet when it snows, our schools close, our motorways close and our public transport system grinds to a halt. When it’s unusually hot, our office air-conditioners fail, our roads melt and our public transport system grinds to a halt. When the leaves fall in autumn, our public transport system grinds to a halt.

I suspect it’s because we’re all too aware of the mild, non-threatening reputation of our weather. When building roads, railways or offices, it’s all too easy to quote our national winter and summer averages of 5 and 15 degrees and plan accordingly.

We also seem to suffer from an inability to make individual choices based on comfort. Now that’s partly down to meaningless social pressures (why anyone would allow their employer to dictate that they wear a collar and tie at all, never mind in summer, baffles me completely) but there’s also an inbuilt conservatism and lack of self-determination. I’ve boarded trains on hot summer days, to find a carriage full of sweaty people, none of whom has taken the initiative to open the windows. And the converse… cocooned by our ever-growing car culture and over-heated houses, people seem quite offended to find that a t-shirt and trackie bottoms just aren’t suitable for ambling down the High Street in January.

If the BBC interrupted Newsnight with toothpaste adverts, I’d be annoyed. Similarly, if the Houses of Parliament were renamed the Vodafone GovMax! Centre, I’d have a right old rant. Well, you would, wouldn’t you?

So when, having bought some Royal Mail stamps today, I was made to wait for my change while the Post Office assistant tried her utmost to sell me a BLOODY CREDIT CARD, I was not amused. I know Post Office Counters plc is now distinct from the Royal Mail, but still… I’d rather like to deal directly with the people who are delivering my mail, rather than through an advert-funded intermediary! I’d buy all of my stamps from the newsagents if I could, thus avoiding the endless Post Office queues, but that’s not an option when something has to be weighed.

This isn’t the first time something like this has happened; I’ve turned down offers of credit cards and car insurance on four or five occasions. I don’t know whether the assistants have any choice in this (i.e. whether they’re doing it for commission) so I’ve been polite every time, but I’m now itching to give someone a piece of my mind. Let’s see how effective their complaints system is, shall we?

This won’t mean much to people who weren’t at the University of East Anglia, but never mind. We’ve all got bits of nostalgia floating around in our brains.

When I arrived at UEA back in October 1987, there were five options for living on campus. Norfolk Terrace and Suffolk Terrace were the award-winning Ziggurat-shaped constructions dominating the area around the UEA broad. Orwell Close and Wolfson Close were much smaller and more exclusive, probably best suited to mature students. Finally, there was Waveney Terrace, a snaking four-storey building constructed mostly from unpainted breezeblocks.

I lived in Waveney Terrace for two years, and while I was sad to hear of its imminent demolition, I can’t really say I’m surprised. Students expect more luxury from their halls nowadays, so the en suite rooms of Nelson Court and Colman House (which would dominate the foreground of the picture below if you saw that view today) are going to be a much more pleasant prospect. Even at the time, the news that you’d been given a room in Waveney would produce looks of shocked sympathy on the faces of your friends. Little breezeblock boxes, arranged in long corridors of around twelve rooms, with the shared kitchen and bathroom at one end. Even when they painted the walls in time for my second stint, they got it horribly wrong… industrial grade semi-gloss paint in a fetching shade of “gents toilet off-white”.

But you know what? I loved the place.

During my first year, I was allotted a room in Waveney before I’d really seen the campus properly, but when I came back after my year abroad, I actually *requested* a room there. I’d done my homework. I knew that, beneath the bold modernistic architectural veneer, the Suffolk/Norfolk terrace rooms were a good few inches smaller and the furniture was bolted to the floor. Pah! To think those laughing-faced fools dared to call Waveney a prison… I rearranged my functional Waveney furniture with the gleeful abandon of a FREE MAN! Maybe it’s all to do with the “creativity born of restriction” thing I’m always banging on about (in relation to music, anyway) but the forbidding appearance of the Waveney rooms seemed to inspire people to make more effort with their rooms.

But of course the main thing was that we didn’t know any different. Even the properly plastered walls of the other residences didn’t represent a particularly huge leap in the luxury stakes, especially not by modern standards, but that didn’t matter. It was all about personalising your little space, listening to your favourite albums and making new friends over a two-litre plastic bottle of cheap lager. I suspect that sort of student life has now vanished for good, along with the notion of higher education for its own sake, but that’s market economics, I guess…