Small Beds and Large Bears

We don’t have much of a garden, in both senses: the plot behind the house isn’t particularly large; and what there is of it isn’t much of a garden. The previous owner’s dog burnt off much of the lawn with strategic urination, leaving a patchwork of petulant looking grass drooping across bare mud like a dozen feeble combovers. Off a trellis hangs some sort of climbing dead thing, last year’s strong winds having blown the whole lot over and finally doing for it, snapping its last remaining root.

Straggly bushes, brambles and next door’s opportunistic ivy compete for space on a clay border, dotted with pebbles that only serve to such the remaining joy and lightness out of it. And it’s probably best if we don’t mention the shed, or the tree I might have killed.

But it’s still a garden. It might not be the sprawling plot we had in our last rental place, but then it isn’t doomed to the same casual negligence that Mad Bitch Jocelyn cast over her own property, dooming us in turn to impotence as we waited in vain for the promised tools or the promised gardener to tackle all of her fucking bamboo.

Our garden also doesn’t have one of those ultimately problematic anti-weed rugs buried under it, which buy-to-let fuckheads put down and cover with pebbles in the hope that they can then safely ignore nature until the mortgage is paid off. They’d be better off burying their heads under pebbles, of course: these rugs eventually form an ideal matrix for tenuous varieties of grass, which burrow through the weave, tangle themselves up in it, and generally become impossible to remove.

The garden is, in short, within our power to change. It will never be bigger, but it could easily be better.

Over two years ago, I called out Dorset Cereals on their use of palm oil. Moving house and other nonsense intervened, and it was only recently I was able to start chasing them again. Their packaging still had palm oil listed among the ingredients, so in the aftermath of a Panorama programme about palm oil devastation I decided to take advantage of a rather localized twitstorm to start poking the Dorset Cereals Twitter account.

I was rather pleased by the eventual reply:

Just to let you know we don’t use palm oil in any products,see http://bit.ly/dkRFJT

It turns out that they’re still using their old packaging, because so much of it was printed prior to their decision to exclude palm oil. I don’t know how I feel about that particular detail: I’m an advocate myself of waste-not-want-not, but not to the extent of packaging having misleading lists of ingredients. A sticker would have helped.

Still, at least all their cereal is now wanting is a sticker, and not a wholesale greenwash. Now if they can stop Waitrose putting fake “special offer” notices on their products I might actually start buying them again.

After avoiding most of the worst of the snow and the frost I managed to come off my bike on ice this week. Astonishingly, it wasn’t the fault of the local councils through not gritting. I mean: they haven’t gritted, didn’t grit, won’t grit; they’re too busy trumpeting how low council tax is to actually do anything socially responsible; but the road I came off on was a tiny, thin back route in the surrounding Cotswolds.

Almost all of this week’s brief ice covering had melted, and the main roads were largely clear, when a colleague I was cycling home with suggested we go on the quieter routes off the main road. Not thinking much about it, I happily agreed. Indeed, most of it was absolutely fine, until we came to the road out of the back of one village, where in the past we’ve pursued barn owls down a shady, overhung single track.

The road doglegs before the start of the track, and it was only when we came out of the double bend and our bike lights illuminated the path that it was clear something was wrong. Although the sun had been on the hillside all day, it hadn’t reached the road because of overhanging trees. The road is also below the level of the surrounding fields, and the high banks leak meltwater from the fields and concentrate it onto the surface: in other words, the road becomes a drainage ditch when there’s a high water table. It had leaked for some hours, hitting the cold road and freezing into a smooth mirror of ice.

My colleague managed to stop early, while there was still some gravel on the ice to let him come gracefully to a halt. I still occasionally wonder whether or not he was leading me to an icy doom, but not very often. It isn’t healthy to dwell on these things. My bike switfly came out from underneath me and I fell backwards and to the left: that’s the one good thing about coming off on ice as opposed to any other accident; you don’t go forwards over the handlebars. I landed on my knee and palm – a habit I’m trying to get out of as I always feel like I’ve both ruined my cartilage again and snapped my scaphoid again – and skidded for several feet, almost under my colleagues bike at one point, before coming to a halt.

My knee rapidly swelled up like a balloon, and we both agreed that it was best to stop watching it do so and try to walk off the shock. Twenty yards later the ice finished abruptly, and we never saw any more. After a bit more walking I was able to get back on my bike and gingerly, fearfully almost freewheel it home. Luckily there was no permanent damage, and the accident, and my subsequent treating it with whisky, was even mentioned on Radio 2 after I texted in from the depths of my somewhat subdued evening misery. By the next day I was walking fine, and I’ll probably be back cycling on Monday. Everyone who knows me would agree that I’m the sort of hard knock that would shrug this sort of event off quite quickly. I am man; hear me grunt.

I don’t really want to tell the council. They’re one of those councils that swears they don’t pollard trees till their eyes bleed, then wipe them dry and go off to pollard some trees. A bunch of Tories who practise semi-destructive and ultimately unsustainable husbandry and pretend it’s environmental concern so that their MP—Call Me Dave Cameron, no less—won’t be embarrassed by their feckless antics. with In other words, their solution to the problem of the runoff freezing once a year would be to cut down all the trees and thus undermine the banks. I’d rather hit ice once in a while than be buried under a landslide.

When we first moved from Oxford to Witney, some five years ago, we found the chattiness of neighbours almost stifling; having got used to that, we experienced it all over again when we moved to Eynsham village. It wasn’t that our neighbours weren’t lovely: but they were far more talkative than city dwellers, especially so in the village. Now, moving back to the larger town again, but being used to a village, we’ve found our neighbours almost reticent in comparison.

I was reminded of this when I met the charmingly eccentric Graham Chuckle in Focus some time ago. Graham was our neighbour when we were in Witney last time around, and was a cheery soul who greeted me like a long lost pal. It also reminded me that, despite being in a new house for over six months, I’ve barely mentioned the nearest denizens of the estate here.

On one side there’s a middle-class family, captained by Brian Quietchap and Hearty Sharon, each about five to ten years older than us. They’re nice enough, although he’s hard to talk to because he’s so quiet, while I don’t have a great deal to say to her. Their children are almost as quiet as them, and the only sound we ever really hear from their house is a bathroom-ceiling pull switch being ter-clonked several times anywhere between 5.30 and 7am while one or other of the parents gets ready for work.

On the other side are Hugo and Chavette, with their baby Foghorn. When we bought this house, that one was occupied by a frail and somewhat deaf old lady: the ideal neighbour in many ways. But she overdid the frailty rather; indeed was so frail that her daughter convinced her to move out and rent the property. Cometh the move, cometh the renters: Hugo arrived first, as presumably Chavette was still enceinte, but now they’re both here and you’d certainly tell it from the noise through the wall.

The occasional appearance of an overpolished 4×4 driven by—you guessed it—a small blonde woman (who we think might be Hugo’s mother) makes us think he’s pleached below his natural perch in this life, although his conversation is pretty much exactly that of the typical native of the A40 corridor: lots of loose vowels and the only safe ground being talk about football. Chavette doesn’t really speak many words at all as far as we can tell, and Foghorn communicates using just one long and periodically varying note. Hugo and Chavette watch television in the bedroom, and hoot and bellow at it occasionally, until at least 11pm: between them and Brian we’re not guaranteed a great deal of sleep. Oddly, given his demographic, Hugo has no car in his drive (but then oddly, given mine, I do.)

Finally, immediately opposite is Confused Bananaman. He’s a genial old chap who when we first rang the bell to say hello answered the door clutching a banana and a walking aid, with his flies at half mast. Charming enough, he managed to pass a lot of his confusion onto us when he swore blind that Brian and Sharon’s house was that of his god-daughter; Sharon certainly never mentioned it when I talked about him, and the generations seemed a bit odd: it turned out he was pointing his banana at the next house along.

Neighbours are what you make of them, though, and anyway we’re not quite sure what this lot makes of us. Brian and Sharon have been kind enough to look out for the house when we were away, shuffle bins off the pavement onto the driveway for us, that sort of thing; they’re nice to talk to, when you do talk to them, and I’d like to think we’d be neighbourly to them too if they needed us. Hugo and Chavette we’ve more or less given up on: chatting to them from one driveway to another you start to feel like you’re making encouraging noises over a five-bar gate and not getting a great deal of response. We look forward to their television exploding. And Bananaman is peripheral enough to be no trouble at all, making an appearance only very occasionally, and despite the name we’ve given him almost invariably without a banana.

It could be better, but—partying Chechens, taciturn Chinese faux gangstas, overenthusiastic visiting students and other people our houses have shared boundaries with—it could be a lot worse.

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.