Oh Dear. People do get in a strop. Everybody who watches this pile of utter garbage seems to be slagging some / all / many* of the contestants in the light of the Beatles tracks that they have been performing / mangling / destroying* this weekend. If they're so bad then why not go out and do something less boring instead. If any programme asked this question more loudly than X Factor then I'm yet to have been made aware of it.
* delete as applicable
My wife and I were musing the other day - as we often do, and the subject came around to chocolate bars. In particular the Snickers bar. For those of you Brits of a particular age, and I include myself in this category, these things will always be Marathons. I quite often say I'd like a Marathon - primarily out of habit, but also cos it winds the kids up something rotten. What's a Marathon, Dad? Well if you don't know, perhaps you should find out? And so they do, only to forget the next time that I fancy such a naughty snack.
On the subject of the name, Snickers is such an un-British one don't you think? OK, so that's what they were always called in Australia - but then they call Castlemaine XXXX beer. Anyway, enough such national stereotyping, I was looking for one of the ads that ran in the run up to the name change. It has an Aussie, recently arrived in Blighty, desperate for a Snickers, but since we called them Marathons at the time, he couldn't locate what he wanted. Unfortunately, I couldn't find it for you, but I have got this one from around 1980. 'Comes up peanuts, slice after slice.' Just look at the strange angle that the actors are obliged to hold the bar to show the name. Like we're gonna forget?!
Words alone cannot express just how much I despise this show. Anyway, enough about that, I should have realised that it was about to start again sometime soon. I don't think it's entirely coincidental that I have just finished reading John Peel's auto-biography / biography. In common with other luminaries of the 'new music' scene such as Radcliffe & Maconie, I am pretty sure that he would be absolutely horrified at the thought of it.
On one level, I suppose it is the sort of show that is a) an ITV staple and b) probably very good television, but as far as bringing new musical talent to the nation, well it's a complete and utter turn off. Good singers though the winners undoubtedly are, in the main, they and the others who have made it to the final three months of programmes do represent the safest of safe choices. Of course the odd act is different, Diana Vickers springs to mind, but some of them are truly teeth curlingly bad, &^%$ing Jedward and that awful brother and sister combo from a few years back being the worst examples. Oh yes, and Chico.
Anyway, enough of this, I was trying to write about John Peel's book. I found it hard not to cry as a I read it. It's so obvious, especially reading the second half which his wife finished, that he was loved and admired pretty much by all and sundry for the work he did in giving people a chance. Would we have had The Smiths or The Undertones for example without him. Possibly, probably even, but that's not the point. He deliberately, certainly in the early days of Radio 1 went against policy and played new stuff by band and artists who wouldn't have made it to the playlist without him.
It gets worse. If you remember I had a rant back in June about the attitude to people and parking at school. Well, for the last week or so 'they' have been digging up the road in order to make a sewer connection. Consequently, the on-road parking hasn't been available to quite the extent as usual. Does this bring out the Dunkirk spirit in people? Does it buggery. It makes them even worse. There is another area of on-road parking, and this is clear from any road works. So naturally enough people are having to park there. However, there is a small sheltered housing complex which is accessed off this road and on Friday some bright spark in a Volvo (sorry it's a sweeping generalisation I know) had the great idea of parking across one of the visibility splays so that he could wait for his grandchildren. If this wasn't bad enough, when I came back with my children, somebody else had decided that 'when in Rome...' so he had blocked the view on the other splay. Some people are just wankers.
Grrr! this really gets my goat. There are some real idiots around out there who just have no idea what a selfish bunch of cretins they really are. The school that our boys go to is next to a community centre and there is also a rather large car park plus ample parking out on the road. Now whilst the roadside parking is usually utilised (including blocking in the bus stop) there is no way ever that the car park is full and still they park on the narrow loop of road leading to and from the car park and as for the grass in the middle, why the hell not eh? And then there's the roundabout - why not park on there too?
I don't know what these people are trying to prove (apart from the obvious) but it wouldn't harm them to walk a few extra yards, would it? If I were a resident living nearby, I'd be pretty pee'd off I can tell you. I despair of these lazy, arrogant people who still believe that their having a car allows them to disregard common decency towards their fellow people.
Summer sports. Aren't they crap eh? Well there's three in particular that I really really hate. In no particular order there's golf, tennis and motor racing. Golf, it was once said is a good walk spoiled. There's not much more to be said. As for tennis, well bloody Wimbledon always used to spoil a good Test Match when the BBC carried both. It was so bloody annoying when at some point in the afternoon you'd hear Richie Benaud say those immortal words, 'and now it's time to leave Trent Bridge and head on over to SW19'. Of course I never heard the last few syllables, having turned the TV off in disgust and gone out to do something (far) less boring instead. It was the turgid, relentless need to win by two points which always got me - you know, you'd be watching, hoping for the cricket to start again when the penny would drop and Dan Maskell would remind me that it was so far from over.
Also, my brother was a bit of a turncoat on the old tennis front as he actually liked it. The whole charade just epitomises many of the problems with Britain. It's so class ridden - the best British player currently is a Scot who actually had to go abroad to find a decent trainer who would instill in him the right mental attitude to give him any chance of being any good. Compare him with the last British number 1, Tim Henman. Nice bloke Tim, no doubt (I resisted the chance for a 'nice but dim' jibe there you'll notice), but as far as being a sporting winner? Not a snowball's in hell mate. Then before that we had Greg Rusedski - he was the next best thing to a Brit being Canadian, and boy did the gutter press let him know about it, but ultimately he wasn't quite good enough. If he'd been American, it would have been a different story. Tennis? No thanks.
And then we move onto motor racing, in particular F1. The most pointless exercise in the world ever. It's currently on in the living room, my son is watching it, and to hear the noise coming out of the room, you'd think there was a football match going on in there. Instead it's grown men rushing around in large metal tins on wheels trying to overtake each other. Good grief, you cold stand on a bridge over a motorway at any time of the day or night to witness the same. Thank God it's a World Cup Year so a normal sport will be available for the likes of me right up until 11 July - it'll only be a month to wait afterwards until the footy season starts again.
We've been decadent today. Number 3 son, who is a fussy eater, made some mini pizzas (with bagels cut in half) at his cookery club at school yesterday. So on the way home today we decided to ask him if he wanted to make them at home. Can you guess what his answer was? Well of course you can. However, if you allow one of the little cherubs to make such a choice then you have to do the same for the others. Number 2 son decided that he'd like a curry - so that's what he had. But, and this is my point on inter-connectivity, we bought the jar of curry sauce from supermarket B instead of our usual supermarket. Looking at the blurb it said it was a medium curry. Now I like my curry on the spicier side but in the interests of compromise we usually have a Korma - aka a mild curry. However I am moving our buying / eating habits towards having a medium curry from supermarket A. So when I picked this medium curry from supermarket B I wasn't expecting something quite so spicy. Number 2 son ploughed through his, and currently number 1 son is doing the same. So we can safely say that not all curries are created equal.
In the same way, when you buy an item of clothing that is marked as one size in one store, then go and buy something nominally in the same size in another, why is that they sometimes aren't the same size? Many's the time that I have heard my wife, sister etc comparing sizes between chain store A and chain store B saying that you need to be wary as chain store B's sizes are effectively chain store A's minus one and so on and so forth - and to think that I used to think that was so much nonsense. Oh, yes and why do all of the manufacturers of mobile phones and lap tops and any other consumer electrical goods insist on all of their charging plugs having different shapes and sizes? The only thing it seems that stays the same is the USB plug, but even that can have a myriad different shapes / sizes on the end that actually plugs into the electrical thingy.
The big debate in our house at the moment is whether we should do everything that we possibly can using on-line means or not. It's been highlighted by the issue that we're having with car insurance. You may remember that we've recently changed cars. All reasonable ok on the physical exchange of vehicles front - though the guy who bought our car through eBay actually wanted to haggle when he got to us. Anyway, eventually we got the price we'd previously agreed and a chunk of the pennies went winging their way to the guy who'd sold us our new car (well it's new to us!)
Previous to this, I had arranged my insurance on-line - having rung the provider direct for a quote and then picked their much cheaper quote through confuddled.com or whatever it's called. All through the day when we picked the car up, my dad had been telling us (well me) that a visit to a bricks and mortar insurance broker would enable us to get a Certificate of Insurance in the flesh (so to speak) there and then. Of course I didn't (wouldn't) listen and as an up shot I've got a car, which is fully insured, sat on the drive but not drivable on the public highway because I can't tax it without a valid insurance document, because I'm still waiting for my on-line insurer to send it out to me...
What's more, this is a particularly difficult week for this to happen as I'm in the middle of a two week placement in a school 20 miles from home and my wife is having to ferry our children to school on the bus. All well and good until you realise that there's one bus an hour during the day time, which then reverts to being one every two hours just after the kids come out of school! Eh? What's all that about? And tomorrow, one of the kids has swimming and the distance between the baths and school (the other one still has to get to school) will most likely see him being late. But then the nice lady on the phone yesterday said that the necessary document would be going out in the post...
Now you may not have noticed, I mean my posting is quite irregular. However, there was nothing from me yesterday, not a solitary peep, sorry tweet. The reason, well it's quite a simple one really. You see, we were cut off. Cut off at the telephone socket by our glorious national telecomms giant, BT aka British Telecommunications. But Mr Jellybaby sir, the reason that they cut you off is surely self-evident n'est pas? You didn't pay your bill. Well no, not really because I did pay my bill.
As a matter of fact I paid it the day after it was raised. Oh yes. I have paperless billing, so as soon as I received an email from them telling me that my bill was ready I hopped on over to my online banking website and paid the bill - much like I did in the previous quarter. In fact exactly like I did the previous quarter. So that's it thinks I. Oh no it isn't thinks BT, silently, malevolently almost, as around 3 weeks later I received a red bill telling me that I hadn't paid. I ring up and explain that I have paid, shurely shome mishtake? No they say, you haven't paid. I ring my bank and they do a trace on the payment - their investigations result in a letter telling me that yes, BT does have your payment (it also says, but if if they won't admit it, it's up to you to sort it out, like here's a proforma letter that you could send them, or get your solicitor involved... blah blah blah).
So, after that letter, I ring BT again and lo and behold, someone - don't know who - tells me, yes Mr Jellybaby, we've found your payment. Everything's fine thank you for using BT. Excepct it wasn't fine and they hadn't found the payment, I guess that the CSR must have been 'new' or hadn't heard me correctly or was just telling me what I wanted to hear, because on Tuesday of this week (it's Thursday morning now) I found that my service was 'restricted'. People could call me, but I couldn't call anybody, BT excepted. So I called them, and had a bit of a rant - and to be fair, they are good they didn't rise to it. All those soothing noises, I'm sorry Mr Jellybaby, blah blah blah. I will say that the chap I spoke to wasn't overly keen to supply me with the number for Ofcom - he first told me that I could find it on my bill - 'erm sorry, I have paperless billing.
No matter, he also gave me a fax number for the BT billing section - that way I could fax them the information to show them that I had paid and then, and only then they would start an investigation to see where my money had gone within their system. I think that they must be like Sting you know. His accountant was able to swindle him out of a big stack of cash - he's obviously got too much. Trouble is, my bill was only £143.39, a mere drop in the ocean, not even what they make in a second in profit so we are lead to believe.
I sent them a fax from the newsagents. £2.50! For three pages! Gah! By this time our service was completely cut off, no calls in or out, EVEN TO BT. I could use the internet, only to pay my bill mind. Eventually, I did find a geographical number so that I could call them on the mobile. Thank you for your fax, she said. A maximum of 24 hours for your service to be reinstated she said (later revised to 48 hours). Once the phone was back on, mid afternoon yesterday, I called them again to chivvy them along with the broadband reconnection, but nothing. At least that young lady had the experience, good instinct or whatever to take all the information pertinent to my case and enter it on their system.
So now it's Thursday and we're back on - can't you tell? BT are making enquiries into where the money has gone. It's not really any of my business to be honest, because I paid the bill, way back on the 18 March. I know it, they know it and they need to be more careful with their money. Good grief, that's what we tell the kids...
