Small Beds and Large Bears

Two months ago, I said:

Witney’s branch of Cargo closed recently. Fair enough, I thought, but it did so only to reopen in a far bigger store space (where New Look used to be). I give it six months….

Now? FALCO: Witney Cargo. We walked past its whitewashed windows earlier today. Apparently it’s going to turn into a Lakeland, whatever that means. It’s meant to be better, but then it could hardly be as bad as Cargo was.

Someone somewhere is clearly suggesting to commercial organizations, including but by no means limited to Waitrose, that what they need to boost sales is to advertise fake special offers. The idea is that you put an oversized price sticker on the price-label slot along the shelf, to suggest that the price of that particular item is worth a second look: by essentially abusing the standard language of cut-price goods, drawing people in with the visual promise of a price reduction, then in the small print making it clear that there’s no such thing.

They come in several flavours. There’s the ones that say effectively “this was the price of this thing yesterday, and guess what? we haven’t increased it overnight in the shitty way we usually do!” These bleed into the labels which say “didn’t you fucking know that this product was hand-woven by fair-trade alpacas on Keira Knightley’s Celebrity Alpaca Farm? Well, now you do, buy it at the price it’s always costed, you idiot.” Alongside both of these are the fake offers saying “this is the same price as you’d get in our competitor’s stores! It’s a bit like price-fixing only not strictly illegal!” and a recent addition to the pantheon has been “we’ve not got round to updating our prices to take into account the VAT increase, as it takes a lot of time to do so and we’re also probably a bit stoned and don’t give a shit, so we’re pretending it’s because we don’t hate you, although we do, you cocktouchers.”

I only mention this because I’m not convinced that they’re having the effect that the stores hope they might. I realized today why I haven’t been buying the rather tasty Dorset Cereals recently (apart from the fact that they were still using palm oil last time I checked) is that each range available in Waitrose has a fake special offer beside it, just telling you the standard price and how lovely it is. Every time I pass by the shelves, often on my way to actually buying it, I experience that brief cycle of excitement and disappointment, decide I don’t want to be treated that way, and continue past, dismayed that another customer–company relationship is being amateurishly fucked with.

… Are we done with capitalism yet? Because I’ve taken a long, hard look and I’m not convinced it’s ever been working as it ought to have.

I said a couple of weeks ago that I was worried about fixing a shed. I had qualms which centred around how someone as ignorant of DIY and other practical matters as I could possibly supervise events to a sufficient level of safety and productivity that it would be suitable to ask any of my close friends.

This weekend I decided to prune a tree. Quite soon after we had moved into the new house I looked into how and when you should prune a tree: the general advice was to cut in late autumn or winter, the dormant period, with a few exceptions. At the time I had no idea what sort of tree we had inherited from the previous owners, and after collecting advice on pruning I then went onto Flickr, where numerous hobbyist groups exist to examine posted photographs of unknown plants and offer their advice on what sort it might be.

Opinion was mixed, but along with advice gleaned from elsewhere I soon realized that the tree was a flowering cherry. From looking at the leaves, I and others worked out that it was also probably suffering from blossom wilt. Its small-scale structure was therefore, I decided, in as much need of pruning as its larger-scale sprawl. A good prune and a good fertilize. Excellent, I thought, and managed to wait till January before eagerly beginning my life of vegetable husbandry.

Only after lopping a decent amount off our tree did I return to the pruning advice to find that one of the exceptions was: cherry trees, including flowering varieties. If you prune them in winter then they bleed almost as much as if you prune them in summer, but without the summer sun to help them withstand the stressful event. I don’t think I’ve trimmed so much off yet that I might have killed it, but: how would I know what would and wouldn’t kill a tree? I can’t even prune it at the right time. For Christ’s sake don’t let me near a shed.

Long-suffering bedwatchers will be dismayed to hear that I spoke too soon and am back on a course of antibiotics for my stomach. My old friend H Pylori, or possibly some relative thereof, might well have returned according to my doctor. Obviously there’ll be some basic human sympathy in that dismay, but I imagine a general feeling of ennui at the sheer

With any luck this will be a short, sharp shock: high, brief doses of antibiotics and no repeat prescriptions. I certainly don’t intend to be semi-dependent on the awful omeprazole again, and if this doesn’t work I’ll be happy to just take symptom management in future: for which read, Rennies. Certainly there’s no other indications of anything seriously, seriously wrong, so a couple of blood tests and some advice on my diet would make me a happier man than further medication.

Anyway, I started on the thumping quantities of amoxicillin, metronizadole and omeprazole this lunchtime and have just taken my second dose. Currently I feel dreadful—slight headache and wooziness, flushed face, odd taste in my mouth—but that might just be an encroaching hangover from last night’s excellent whisky tasting session. My last experience of Lady Liquor for two weeks, sadly: the doctor cautioned that drinking while on metronizadole would make me “feel like [I was] dying”, terminology which actually endeared her to me immensely.

At least the absence of drinking, and the diminishment of enjoying food (or indeed profiting calorifically from it, as my stomach shuts down for the duration) will help me adopt a lifestyle of post-festive detoxification. But, faced with tiny animals that drill into your gut, acid reflux, irritable bowel, a switched-off stomach and hot flashes… on the whole, I’d rather go to a spa.

Hi,

Sorry I haven’t been in touch. Let’s recapitulate on events so far. My wife K. took out home-contents insurance with UIA Insurance a couple of years ago, in the names “K. —” and “J. —”. When it came to cancel the insurance, you refused to let my wife do so, saying there was a contract with both her and “J. —”, and that everyone on the insurance had to get in touch separately to cancel it. Shortly afterwards you took more money out of our account, because the direct debit was set up to automatically renew every year. I emailed UIA’s generic feedback email address, disparaging your pointless security theatre and voracious debiting; you ignored my email, replying instead by paper letter, explaining what we had already made clear to you we knew, and refunding the debit.

Thanks for the refund, but no thanks whatsoever for (a) not responding to my email correspondence in kind, leading me to reasonably assume for some time that everyone there must have died of swine flu or (b) crafting a response which manages to miss the essential faults in UIA’s security procedures and ignores some of the points I raised in my email. I would have replied to your letter sooner—although no particular reply was required—but as we were in the middle of moving house we had to ration the amount of time spent explaining things to simpletons.

First of all, let me explain the distinction between “security” and “security theatre” to you. Security theatre is essentially a set of complex and inconvenient procedures, established by people who have read the letter of, for example, compliance regulations, but don’t really understand the spirit of them, so that from a distance the measures look like real security. Typically they won’t actually address issues of security—some will even introduce extra “attack vectors” in the process, weakening the overall security of the system—but they will permit organizations to confirm with e.g. regulators that procedures have been put in place. They’re back-covering exercises, basically, put together to make the consumer’s life difficult so that companies can avoid any risk and make it more likely that people will just give up and give them money.

With that distinction in mind, let me pose a few questions:

1. Is it UIA’s policy to not reply to emails with emails, if only to confirm that the email had been received and the communication was being escalated to print? Did it not occur to anyone there that it might demonstrate a basic level of human respect to just send a quick, non-automated email to me, rather than to give me the impression I was being utterly ignored for days? And given how anodyne your printed reply to me was, could it not have been sent over email anyway? Wouldn’t using email have meant that you’d have been less likely to ignore points I made, and was that actually the point of a printed letter?
2. To our knowledge UIA has never had any direct communication with the person you know as “J. —”. I mentioned this in my email (or did I; but see later for that) but you conveniently ignored it in your printed reply; to reiterate, this means it’s not at all clear to me how you’ve established any kind of legal contract with them. How do you know they exist? How did they give their consent to enter into the contract? Nobody ever explained—on the phone, in your letter, and certainly not over email, which you seem incapable of using—what the contract consisted of, or how it was made with someone who never communicated with uIA directly. Can you confirm that no such document exists which establishes a contract with a real person? Does UIA regularly enter into legally binding contracts with people who might not exist?
3. You received an email from someone at “j—@gmail.com”. On the basis of this email alone you cancelled a contract with a person who might not exist called “J. —”. As you claim UIA takes security seriously, how did you (a) establish that “j—@gmail.com” existed and was a real person, and (b) confirm to the satisfaction of all parties involved that “j—@gmail.com” was the same person as “J. —”? Was there in fact anything going through your brain at all, other than “oh, shit, we’ve got one here that won’t actually take our crap?”
4. Given the above, what procedures does UIA have in place to prevent the following:
   1. “K. —” setting up a fake email address that looks like it might belong to “J. —”, and cancelling a contract using it?
   2. Anyone setting up a fake email address that looks like it might belong to “J. —”, and cancelling a contract using it?
   3. “K. —” asking any male acquaintance to contact UIA by telephone and pretending to be “J. —”, to cancel the contract?
   4. “K. —” waiting until she had a bit of a cold, then doing a deep voice and pretending to be “J. —”, to cancel the contract?

Given how hard UIA made it for us to cancel our “contract”, and yet how easy they made it for us to accidentally give them more money, the only explanation for all of this which shows your company in a good light is that there exists an overarching and incredibly subtle security policy, hidden from mere mortals and your customer-proles, which ties all of this together, and somehow makes it not a ridiculous pile of security-theatrical tosh sketched in by people who don’t know actual security and contract law from a hole in the ground.

However, in the absence of any evidence for this policy, I think I’m on safe ground if I assume that (a) UIA’s email policies exhibit insultingly bad netiquette in only replying to certain emails—ones from people who actually don’t take any crap—via a printed letter (b) UIA’s grasp of contract law is laughably weak and poorly understood internally beyond set procedures employed by human robots (c) UIA’s so-called security policies only exist to tick boxes and make it harder for the consumer to cancel their insurance, and not merely don’t prevent security breaches but introduce new and inventive ways for people to spoof identity. If you provide any evidence I reserve the right to publish it here in full, so that you might rebut these claims.

Yours sincerely,

Small Beds (or maybe I’m “J. —”, or maybe “j—@gmail.com”, or maybe all three, or none! How can you tell?)

[edited 2010-01-18 to include the company's name]

Our shed needs fixing. I’ve done the easy bit: I’ve bought ten square metres of felt and some things called clout nails which sound terribly exciting. I’ve even got felt glue, or maybe it’s felt sealant. Whatever: it goes between the two metre-wide strips I’ll need to cut, like the filthy filling in a disgusting building-material sandwich.

Now comes the hard part, and frankly it’s exposed a chink in my social armour. This is a two-man job, and I don’t think I know anyone “handy” enough (in all sorts of meanings of the word) who could help to re-roof a shed, or at least know them well enough to ask them to do so for e.g. the price of a hot dinner and some beer. That’s not intended to be an insult to my nearest and dearest, as I certainly would never expect anyone to ask me to do the equivalent for them.

You can divide my social relationships how you might wish, but it’s clear that those closest to me are literate, funny, bright, entertaining, sweet, charming and quite capable of accidentally putting a clout nail through a fingernail or a foot through a shed roof. These are the social decisions I’ve (often unwittingly) made over the years, to enjoy the company of people who can make me laugh and think, but whom I wouldn’t trust with a powertool; I hope they’re close friends precisely because they think the same about me.

Fixing this shed will probably have to wait for spring anyway, despite the bad weather gradually rotting away the timbers. It needs a long, sunny day, as otherwise it’d be a frothing bucket of misery poured over the heads of both me and my mystery companion. Hopefully by then I’ll have made friends with a lusty, rustic type with biceps like slabs of Cotswold stone and a head full of similar. Either that or I’ll have paid one or even two of them to sort it out and push off.

Looking back at 2009 in depth, I realise now that there was a lot more to it than I had first assumed. The middle half of the year was dominated by buying, and then decorating and moving into, a house: three months for the former, three for the latter. But I also wrote two chapters of a (finally) published book, took two trips to France—one for work, one for play—celebrated three weddings, lost a friend, lost the wife of a friend of my wife (the friend himself being at death’s door on Christmas Day) and attended to what in retrospect feels like a lot of trivia.

Two of our best friends, j4 and addedentry, were married in January. I blathered on the radio to hawk the first of the five miniconferences I was to organize before the year was out. I got inexplicable, migrainous cluster headaches for a few weeks, which disappeared with no more explanation early in February. Indeed, February was a month of taking many leaves: I bade the IoP farewell; the Register parted company with reality and, as a result, with me; and I finally said goodbye to the tablets I had been taking for my stomach since late 2007. March was quiet in comparison, with phantom cows and the premiere of Age of Stupid to keep us company.

We were willing hosts of the talented and interesting Looby, as he performed at Oxfringe 2009 in April, and shortly thereafter we began the lengthy and tedious process of buying our first house, made all the longer and more boring by our own innate aversion to any risk. That made May and June quiet indeed: in May I came out in support toll bridges but against cart horses, so in June we were required to flee to a cottage in the wilds of Brittany. This put us far away from the internet and even mobile phone reception, but close to family, who came severally from Cardiff and Valencia to meet us and each other.

At the summer solstice, remember that the environment I live in, cycle through, and take deep breaths of inspired my own favourite blogposts of 2009:

• Gonna blog when I’m awake; sleep when it’s dead
• Wheel’d round in my diurnal course
• Heat is a motion; expansive, restrained, and acting in its strife
• Deer imprudence
• Outside the beer festival the season is brewing its own
• No light, but rather darkness visible

So to these, 2009’s favourite blogposts: inspired by deep breaths, long cycle rides, and a life spent surrounded by the seasons and countryside.

July, August and September began joyfully but then settled into a slog of painting and carpet-fitting, as we completed on the house, decorated it almost throughout, and then moved in with the help of—yet again—j4 and addedentry. I was acutely and remarkably ill for a day and a bit. There was a trip to Ikea that ended in customer-service mediocrity, and a more extended trip to Paris (with work) which ended up an awful lot of fun, despite the food; all the more so, because it excused me from hunting for dado rails and making good where a fake fireplace once sat.

I wrestled rather one-sidedly with politicians and the press in October, decrying David Cameron for ignoring incompetence and recalcitrance in his own party, the failure of his constituency’s council signage and what it means for the reputation of national newspapers when they resort to sub-YouTube content. I singularly failed to say anything about parliamentary expenses, although I did enjoy the Oxford Beer Festival. November, the month of remembrance, was rather glumly ushered in by news of the death of one of my best friends from university; I promised myself in the first hour of 2010 that I had shed my last tears over that, so let’s move on. Which I did at the time, by celebrating advent early (in the opinion of most of my irreligious peers, at any rate.)

I compensated for an early advent by beginning to transcribe our “hilarious” home-made advent calendar considerably late in the month. We went on a climate march, along with record numbers of others; measurements suggested that moving house was the best thing we could have done to improve our carbon footprint; I took a bite out of so-called “skeptics” that are really denialists; the aviation industry tried to stop people flying; yet ultimately our political masters ensured that it all meant bugger-all, thus proving that they meant bugger-all too. The year’s strife ended with the wife of K’s elderly friend R. passing away, and R. himself being rushed to hospital over his family’s Christmas dinner; our own 2009 was seen out from the bosom of our family, and surrounded by good wishes for the year ahead.

That was 2009, then: death, disillusion, disappointment; hard and sometimes thankless slogging; luck, love and life. 2010 will be in parts better and in parts worse; either way, I look forward to walking through it with K, with friends, and with my scant audience of blog readers. Thank you for keeping up with Small Beds for the past three hundred and sixty-five days, and do pop in from time to time during the next lot.

Every year during the twelve days of Christmas I try to read A Christmas Carol. I maintain that it’s no more or less pathetic or maudlin than watching It’s a Wonderful Life every time it’s on, but then whether that excuses it or not, I couldn’t say. This year, K. rediscovered her complimentary copy of the edition illustrated by Roberto Innocenti, which she reviewed for Early Times nearly twenty years ago. Reading it has been like finding your favourite radio serial has been made into a programme on BBC4: again, make of that what you will.

The older I get, the more I wish for low-key fun at Christmas. It’s not that I’m becoming wedded to any particular tradition—save that of taking advantage of the societally sanctioned free time to see people who mean a lot to me; and reading A Christmas Carol—but rather I don’t feel like the best use of Christmas as a festival is to do anything particularly wacky. I rarely travel at this time of year (which is surprising given my parents live in Spain) and only undertook a car journey to Cardiff because K. missed her parents and First Great Western are incapable of running a decent train service.

This year, then, we had Christmas at home (thus also enjoying the house we only moved into in September) listening to the radio and watching a few DVDs. New year’s eve and day will be spent in Cardiff, where I’m currently hiding from the hoover in K’s bedroom. It’ll be the first new year for some time that we’ve seen in with family. That’s another thing that I’m worryingly becoming more attached to: family. With a year of losses and gains behind us, it’s hard not to treasure those close to you, but it’s been a bit of a surprise to me that I’d want to bring my family—and K’s family—any closer, rather than concentrating as I’ve largely done so far on friends instead.

Can I blame this on the events of the year, on its hopes and fears, births and deaths; or is it an inevitable consequence of getting old? Am I slowly becoming the sort of person who says they “don’t want any fuss?” Have I skipped a generation—sidestepping what K. feared might happen, that I turn into my dad—and am now turning into my granddad? The fact that we don’t see consumption as necessary for celebration, and the slightly eccentric conservatism that results—Petroc Trelawny in place of a plasma TV—means we’ll never be completely like the generations before us, but that probably just means we’re merely reinterpreting them as farce.

Christmastime and Christmastide wait for no man, and there’s been plenty to prevent me from following up on my doom-laden thoughts about COP15 and what might happen if it failed: which it did. Before 2009 draws entirely to a close it’s probably worth a few brief words on the subject.

It’s important to acknowledge from the start that COP15 and the process dubbed “Hopenhagen” failed utterly: no binding legal agreement was put in place; there wasn’t even, beneath the rhetoric, any diplomatic agreement; and what targets were mentioned were so laughably inadequate that they might as well not have bothered. It now looks likely that China scuppered the last-minute talks, for what reason I don’t know, unless they’ve found a way of sequestering carbon that we don’t know about: in which case, they won’t lose out by sharing it much as we already share the atmosphere that’s causing the problems.

I had in fact just about reconciled myself to Naomi Klein’s suggestion that no deal was better than a bad deal, although I still felt that COP15 could have finessed a good deal even in its closing stages. It’s also clear that time is running out, and there’s only so many times we can press the reset button on the political process, so do those wheels grind slow (and not particularly small, it seems.) So I was less upset by COP15’s failure than by the abject failure of our politicians

I’m sure Melty-face Cameron would have done the same, of course, but why did Gordon Brown pretend COP15 was some sort of triumph? It’s all very well to suggest that, as a politician, they needed some sort of victorious outcome from the process, but real leadership could easily have come up with something substantial for the electorate that also highlighted the fact that China had ruined that particular international process: sanctions, a national carbon rationing scheme, a cross-party transition to green politics, and a timetable for setting up many binational agreements that might take the place of some of the COP15 framework. Essentially, we might have a modest plan that could be seen to happily freeze out China, and nullify the effects of its slavish pursuit of outmoded economic models. It’s not as though kowtowing to China has increased our influence with them, after all: yet another special relationship, like the one with the US, that bears more similarity to the special relationship one might have with a sinister and slightly gropey uncle than anything else.

Instead, we have a complete failure of political will, and tacit appeasement of the UK’s climate denialism with weak, watery policy. So why aren’t people taking to the streets? Why aren’t they doing what respected politicians suggest and blockading coal power stations? Why isn’t there civil disobedience on a large scale? Beyond the largely acknowledged fact that the population as a whole is apathetic, ignorant and blithely in denial, confronting climate change with a shrug and a swift change of topic, I don’t know. Why am I not taking to the streets? I’m not sure about that one either, apart from my natural physical cowardice.

COP15 has failed; the political process towards fighting climate change has failed. We can’t rely on it any more. What other options do we have? some might say: very few). Political disobedience, certainly, but in a country with the UK’s innate intellectual, cultural and political conservatism disobedience on its own is bound to fail. But there’s an alternative, as the ever-eloquent Franny Armstrong suggests at the end of her rather bitterly realistic assessment of COP15 here:

What if we, the people, do as Gordon Brown should have done? Let’s say: we continue regardless, acknowledging that COP15 failed but assuming that the original targets did and do make good economic and environmental sense, and start to implement smaller-scale measures anyway?

Let’s normalize carbon rationing, local production, make-do-and-mend and public transport: who’d have believed we’d ever have been able to normalize climate-change discourse only a few years ago? Let’s treat people who still continue to fly around the world like the poor-killing social pariahs they ought to be; let’s boycott China and oil-intensive plastic goods; let’s be encouraging and noncompetitive towards other people’s genuine attempts to “go green” but expose greenwash for what it is; let’s share skills and knowledge; let’s write letters and rebut climate denialism; let’s find the little things that make a big difference, and just do them.

It might sometimes feel like we’re musicians, or even deckchair arrangers, on the Titanic, but if you don’t have hope you don’t have anything, and I don’t see people who are understandably incredibly upset over COP15 committing suicide en masse yet. Overconsumption is ultimately pretty boring anyway: let’s try something else.

[Seinfeld and Kramer] ‘Merry Christmas!’ said Seinfeld. ‘And a happy new n***er!’ added Kramer. ‘… What?’

Posted by Wordmobi