A Brighton Boy Blogs

People are always bemoaning the state of the country. They always have been, for as long as I can remember. “It’s not like it used to be, is it?” they say. They’re right of course, and perhaps it’s also right that a country shouldn’t be static, but should be progressively marching forward into a new and better future. But is the UK of 2010 “not quite the same as it used to be” in all the wrong ways?

Most of the population seems to live in fear, far more fear about everything than ever before. There’s the fear of terrorism. Then there’s the fear of being unable to pay one’s way (or indeed the massive credit debt bill)  and the associated repossession etc. We fear all the diseases we can get too, which seem to number more than ever, including the global pandemic killer swine flu. All those fears are old ones: the terrorism & Al Qaeda thing conveniently replaced the cold war & Soviet Union; we always need more money; and disease has been with us since the dawn of time. The trouble is, now we fear each other as well. We’re brought up to think that the rapist, murderer, paedophile or Satanist animal-sacrificer could be living next door. Or that we’ll meet them walking down the street. We used to have “eccentrics” – harmless individuals who had character and behaviour beyond the norm – but now they’re all weirdos and not to be trusted. The result is that nobody can walk down the street without being in danger. Children can’t be let out to play. Women can’t walk the dog at night. Reception teachers can’t give an upset child a cuddle or even stick a plaster on them, despite the child seeing the teacher as a parental figure. And heaven help you if you should smile at a stranger, much less wish them “good day” or give up your seat for them on a bus – you pervert, you.

So how did we get ourselves into this mess? How can we get ourselves out of it? Is it a purely British problem or is it global? Well, having travelled in other countries and been greeted warmly and offered great trust everywhere  despite being a stranger, and worse – a foreign stranger – I can safely say it’s not a global malaise. So what caused it here? I’ve no idea – although it’s definitely institutionally encouraged and perpetuated within government, both local and national. It’s something to do with “political correctness” and bureaucracy and the never-ending desire of politicians to avoid doing the right thing and instead opting to look like over-enthusiastic puppies wanting to please their masters. Or worse, chameleons pretending to be puppies.

I also think it’s something to do with the appalling state of education. Here I’m not speaking of league tables, or exam results, but of whatever became of our tradition for a robust general education. Perhaps it’s the fault of the National Curriculum, or perhaps that was just a milestone along the way. In the Britain of 2010 teachers would much rather have a pupil diagnosed with ADHD or some such other non-existent syndrome than take responsibility as an educator for their lack of understanding in maths or English. And don’t tell me this doesn’t happen, because I’ve seen it for myself. They’d also rather tell school children that all alcohol consumption is bad for you and that if you drink alcohol you’re an alcoholic, rather than leaving it to intelligent, caring parents to impart ideas of self-control and moderation. Again, this has actually occurred. In our schools, our children are taught to fear everything in our society… and just beyond fear lies the vast, desolate wasteland of hatred.

Hatred is rife in our society. We hear the word every day. Actually it’s not so difficult to hate something, we seem to do it all the time, to television programmes and foods and politicians. Hate is the new dislike. In fact we “hate” so much that we no longer have a word to describe true hatred, which may be why it goes unnoticed when it happens. You might be forgiven, observing the lack of running street battles with National Front vs Anti Nazi League and riot Police in attendance, that racism has disappeared in the UK too. But it’s alive and well – the targets have changed, as have the perpetrators. Yes, some white people are still racist against black people, and some black people are racist against white people. Some people of every colour and religion dislike someone because they’re different, and it was always so. Jewish people have become very closely integrated into British society, and we have establishment figures and celebrities who are Hindu and Muslim – but it doesn’t stop the racism.

The respectable-appearing UKIP wants to “Ban the Burka” and the BNP is just the National Front in suits. There are still lots of people in the UK who would happily see someone else carted off to wherever they came from, as long as someone else did the dirty work for them. But now we have the bloody Eastern Europeans coming over here and stealing our jobs too. Oh dear, I’m sorry, I appear to have come over all “Duffy” – for the purposes of demonstration only, of course, for I am a descendent of a relatively recent previous wave of Eastern European immigrants, for whom the UK was a sanctuary from likely death from the forces of hatred. So it’s always bothered me when hearing a Jewish person, for example, being racist against a black person. Of all the people on this planet, what right has someone of a race that has been so persecuted through the centuries to be racist? Alas I heard only yesterday a first-generation British man of South Asian descent talking about the Eastern Europeans who should be sent home, and how out of touch Gordon Brown is for thinking that a million European imports doesn’t balance a million British ex-pats in Euroland.

Let’s be very clear about this, if people want to come & live here it’s because it’s not a bad place to live. Perhaps that’s why so many Brits are working so damned hard to make it a place where nobody wants to live.

Nick Clegg was right to imply that Britain has never quite got over itself as victor of world wars and sore loser of its empire. We still like to believe that our industrial might is still intact, that our foreign policy word holds sway over the majority of the civilised world and that we are still a world power. We have never quite come to terms with the idea that the smashed shadow of post-Nazi Germany, which we helped to rebuild, became a more successful economy retaining much of its engineering & manufacturing base with a better standard of living & quality of life. Still, we’ve not done badly by and large, and so here we are in 2010 with high-definition LCD TVs and computers in every home, and eight years olds with mobile phones – mostly on credit. And shopkeepers stabbed by schoolboys, unprecedented levels of under-age alcoholism, sex, teenage pregnancy and thirteen year olds with chlamydia. Where everyone is scared of everyone, and where everyone seems to think the world owes them something. Yippee, what a wonderful country we’ve created.

Oh look, since I’ve mentioned those two I may as well mention the David Cameron one as well. Alas when you look at the detail you discover that he’s personally said very little of any meaning about anything, particularly as it relates to healing our society. He and his little Oxford chum George Osborne would rather engage in old-style Conservative political personality point-scoring, which is all fine and dandy except for all the stuff a chap called Ian Duncan-Smith has been up to since entering the back-benches and forming his Centre for Social Justice. So far, from the Cameron-commissioned report entitled “Breakthrough Britain” which came up with a very coherent set of almost 200 recommendations for healing social injustice, Mr Cameron has taken a piecemeal set of only 29 cherry-picked recommendations into Conservative policy. However he has indicated that Mr Duncan-Smith might be his Minister for Social Justice if they get in, so who knows… Ian Duncan-Smith might yet be forced to compromise his principles and forget social justice.

Finally, a little about politicians in the era after the expenses scandal. A lot of people say they mourn the passing of a prior era, when strong leaders like Winston Churchill were around, who would take difficult, unpopular and very often distinctly unsavoury decisions on behalf of the nation. Yet they also say they want politicians to be human and trustworthy and… nice. Then they complain when Gordon Brown is heard muttering something under his breath about someone, and not without some justification if you actually bother to listen to the woman and her attitude. We all have a public face and a private face – even Nick Clegg & St David Cameron – it’s part of being a human being, with all the complex social behaviour that brings. Churchill himself was difficult, temperamental, depressive, and borderline alcoholic, and yet few would dispute his courage and leadership during the years of the Second World War. So come on, people, actually work out what it is you want the politicians to be… you’re confusing the poor dears.

Let’s just hope on May 6th we don’t take a further step towards wrecking our country and our society. Lord knows we’ve been fantastically good at it so far.

This unadvertised special offer from Brighton & Hove City Council occurred on… yes you guessed it, April 1st. So how many others received PCNs (Penalty Charge Notices) erroneously? How much has it all cost to sort out?

Just to explain, for some reason some Brighton parking ticket machines were issuing one-hour tickets when they should have been issuing two-hour tickets. Yes it’s all so easy to sort out, but why should I have to spend my valuable time sorting out yet another Brighton & Hove City Council bureaucratic cock-up? It might help if they employed Parking Wardens with brains… sorry, “Civil Enforcement Officers”.

Oh dear, now I’ll probably be chastised & hated for insulting council workers… but let’s face it, it doesn’t take much brain power to work out that a parking machine saying “£3 for up to 2 hours” and a parking ticket saying £3 paid for 13:12 to 14:12 means that no PCN should have been issued in the first place!

When an airline destroys your suitcase on your outbound flight, you’d like to expect that they’d be not only apologetic but also perhaps actively help you find a replacement for the journey home. Alas in Monarch’s case they failed on every step of the way to customer service satisfaction.

We reported the completely smashed International Traveller hard-shell suitcase at Grenoble Airport, where we did the necessary paperwork and were told we’d have to contact Monarch within seven days in order to claim compensation. That meant we’d have to do it while we were in France. The suitcase was unsalvageable so we’d also have to source a replacement whilst in the ski resort of La Plagne, where it’s easy to find ski or snowboarding stuff but incredibly hard (and expensive) to get items such as suitcases.

So, during the week we took time out from what we were meant to be doing on a skiing holiday to talk to Monarch about the claim and find a new suitcase. All we had was mobile phone, so at our great cost we called Monarch and held on listening to some of the most expensive hold-music ever created, before speaking to a lady who took all our details and offered us a measly £45 compensation. As I said, it’s incredibly hard finding something so mundane as a suitcase in a skiing resort with village/small town facilities and a single-minded focus on snow sports. On the third trip around the shops my girlfriend managed to find a large Ripcurl bag for €130, which at the time was near enough £130 – leaving us with a whopping £85 shortfall on a new bag which we were only buying because our suitcase had been smashed by people working on behalf of Monarch Airlines. Oh, and nothing to say sorry for all the time wasted, skiing missed and roaming phone costs endured.

Around 10 days after we returned, the cheque for £45 turned up in the post along with a letter that was full of empty apologetic platitudes which had exactly the same effect as if they’d included a hand-scribbled note saying “sod off and don’t waste our time in future”. Completely meaningless, corporate waffle, devoid of any real conviction, and rendered meaningless by the accompanying derisory compensation. All of which leads me to the unescapable conclusion that Monarch Airlines doesn’t actually care about its customers at all, and in a cut-throat and competitive market place, that is surely a rather stupid attitude to have.

I’m finally turning away from Royal Mail for most of my business carriage. I’ve tried to remain loyal, after all it’s one of those Great British Institutions, isn’t it? But when it’s this painful, you’ve got to wonder… are Royal Mail management really trying to commit commercial suicide? It certainly looks that way from here.

We have been using Royal Mail Smartstamp to prepay and locally print postage labels. It’s an imperfect solution, particularly for tracked services like “signed for” (or recorded delivery as it used to be known) and “special delivery”. Those services have to be completed at a post office where most of the staff either don’t know how to handle them or really can’t be bothered. That’s if you can find a post office that’s open when you need to post something. Many were closed in major cuts during 2008. I went to four of them one Wednesday afternoon & found all closed. All are in roads with parking problems and not at all easy to use. On my fifth attempt on the following day I was told my package was too big for their window & should be taken to a main post office. So not wanting to give up before the sixth attempt I went to the nearest main post office only to be told that my item was 11cm too big to be sent as a signed-for item. And still my customer is waiting.

Part of the problem seems to stem from the split of the Post Office from Royal Mail years ago. It created a complete disconnection between the two halves of the process. Neither really knows what the other half is doing, or cares about the customers caught between the two halves.

So it’s off to a courier company for me, and RIP Royal Mail, once it finally breathes its last and dies.

Sometimes, just occasionally, inspiration comes along and in a flash you have the answer to a whole raft of problems, all at once. It was a bit like that for me one morning as I fought my way up the A23/A27 slip road trying desperately to move from the right hand lane across three lanes of traffic to the left hand filter lane for the A27 Westbound whilst the other drivers coming up the inside aggressively accelerated to prevent me from doing so.

We all know that our roads are too crowded. We all know that there are many, many bad drivers on the road. Most of us know that we’re killing the planet by driving too many cars, and that we should stop. Many of us aspire to improving our health and that of the planet by cycling everywhere, but it’s made harder by belligerent car drivers and dangerous cyclists, as well as the Great British Weather. We also know in our heart of hearts that it would be better for the environment, and probably for our souls, if we all took public transport but we’re also aware that it’s a less than perfect transport solution for a number of reasons. First, there’s the underinvestment, partly caused by a lack of bums on seats; second the fact that it has to share space with all the other more dominant forms of transport including all those idiot bad drivers in their cars… who, incidentally also make our roads more dangerous, cause more accidents, cost the NHS, emergency services and British businesses lots of money, and generally cause misery and stress.

So where’s the inspiration in all this? It’s quite simple actually. Just get the UK Government’s so-called Driving Standards Agency to do its job: raise driving standards. In short, make the driving test a lot more difficult, and the required standard of driving far higher. Then less people will pass, and there’ll be less drivers on the roads. Anyone who has had a road traffic accident in which fault was either theirs or inconclusive should be forced to retake the driving test, as should the elderly, annually. Anyone who took their driving test before, for example, 1985, should also retake their test, and the general population should take a fresh test every 10 years.

The result: less cars on the road, more use of public transport, more income to public transport, more investment in public transport; safer roads, less cost to NHS, less disruption to surgical schedules by emergencies; and the nation would be far more likely to hit its carbon emission targets with fewer cars sitting in traffic jams caused by selfish twats who drive like morons on our overcrowded roads.

So, over to you… what do you think?

I took the advice of my builder & in November bought a selection of ScrewFix Direct ready-assembled kitchen units for my house renovation; then I waited, and waited, and despite three delivery dates being quoted, none was satisfied. When I was told it would be December 20th, I cancelled the order. The staff member who took the call was anything but apologetic and practically blamed me for the lack of a kitchen.
In a recession, give your money to companies that deserve to survive and thrive, not ones that can barely be bothered to offer any kind of service at all. I’m off to Howdens – let’s hope they’re rather better.

Since we decided to leave Esporta Brighton, we’ve had no end of threatening behaviour from the company and its debt collector ARC Europe. This isn’t anything unusual, they’ve done it to lots of people – just try a Google search.

Esporta’s membership contract says that they can terminate a membership with one month’s notice, but that a member cancelling their membership must give three months notice – paid, of course. So when someone like me wants to leave because the facilities are poorly maintained and the club just isn’t up to scratch, they try to enforce this contact term. However, there is a piece of legislation called the Unfair Contract Terms Act 1977 which companies like Esporta should be rather wary of when they ask their lawyers to draft their contacts. Used in conjunction with the Unfair Terms in Consumer Contracts Regulations 1999, one can essentially ask a court of law to review a contract term, and if found to be unfair, the entire clause is struck from the contract. With nothing to replace it, standard UK trading laws take over and there’s nothing the company can do; with no fair cancellation clause in place, they’re not entitled to a penny.

Esporta’s contact terms relating to notice periods have already been ruled unfair by the Office of Fair Trading (see http://www.oft.gov.uk/advice_and_resources/resource_base/consumer-regulations/traders/790/1/), along with quite a lot besides. This ruling would be taken into account by the courts in any case involving Esporta’s membership contracts. This means that nobody should be paying Esporta three months’ fees upon notice of cancellation. Unfortunately a lot of people give way to bullying from the company and its debt collectors. Why is this allowed to happen? Unfortunately a contract is only of any use when tested in a court of law. Since most people shudder at the thought of being taken to court by a big powerful company, most people just give in and pay up. It’s important not to give in, and to fight your corner, because that’s the only way companies like Esporta will be stopped.

Unfortunately this wasn’t all in our case. ARC Europe obtained copies of the contracts my girlfriend and I allegedly signed, and sent them through to us by way of a “now get out of that one” threat. To be honest, I didn’t remember signing a contract, so I was surprised they had a signed one to send me. Upon examination however, it wasn’t my signature. My girlfriend had signed, but I hadn’t. In place of my signature was a very poor forgery in the same handwriting style as that of the Esporta employee who had signed on behalf of the company.

Just to be clear about this, forging a signature on a contract is criminal fraud under UK law. Are Esporta really that desperate? Apparently the answer is yes.

April 2010 Update: lots of letters & phone calls received from ARC Europe (culminating in a threat of solicitors & legal action) & subsequently ScotCall – threatening doorstep collections – and then numerous phone calls from a call centre asking for payment and offering substantial discounts if we give them a card payment over the phone… and all addressed to my partner, not me. This is no doubt because she’s female and relatively young, and therefore seen as the easy target by the bully boys. Indeed she may have got scared & paid up anyway if I hadn’t been around. Finally, a Final Demand letter from ScotCall – saying that the balance remains unpaid despite their correspondence and that they have no choice but to… return the case to Esporta with a recommendation that they take further action. I’ll keep you posted of any further developments. Let me know if you’re also being harassed for money by Esporta & its cronies on the basis of an unfair contract.

The Royal Mail is the arbiter of all addresses. If it’s not on their database, it doesn’t exist. Thankfully my studio is on the database. So are quite a few other businesses in the local area. However it doesn’t stop the Royal Mail’s employees from deciding that they’re all based here, despite a very clear notice on the door saying exactly which businesses are based here, and even despite other notices that have been posted up at various times explicitly refuting the existence of other business names at this address.

So there I am, regularly left with large piles of other company’s post.

Should I just bin it? I think there’s a law against that, and besides I’d hate to think that another company might be getting loads of my mail & treating it as trash.

Should I play postman? I did for a while, but the novelty of my new unpaid position soon wore thin.

Should I complain? Yes, I’ve done that too. It took weeks for someone to contact me, and then weeks more for someone from Royal Mail to finally come and pick up the pile of by now unforgiveably late mail. And worst of all, the very next day there was yet another piece of misdelivered post.

Now I even have a red “sorry you were out” card on which the postman has written the name of a company never before heard of at (nor depicted on the door of) these premises. I tried calling the 0845 number on the card but their automated telephone system not only failed to acknowledge that these circumstances could ever possibly exist, it also failed to connect me to another human being so that I might report the error. So now whatever it was will sit at the sorting office for a few weeks until it’s returned to sender. It’s such a waste of everyone’s time, energies and resources, and ultimately all down to one man’s utter inability to read and compare simple names and phrases.

Still, perhaps it’s partly the council’s fault. They name and sign everything so confusingly. I’ve had my studio premises for five years now. Almost every day, someone comes in asking “Is this the trading estate?”. “No”, I reply, “this is the business centre, the trading estate is on the next road up”. In fact it’s probably true to say that if I had a tenner for every time it had happened, I wouldn’t need to actually do much work at all; £100 a time and I’d be in clover.

Clover? Hell, I’d even turn vigilante privateer postman.

Years ago – in 1981 – when I was a mere fourteen years of age, I started doing the London to Brighton Bike Ride. Living in Brighton, we’d get up very early, catch one of the special trains to Clapham Junction, and proudly start the ride. Depending on the mood of our little group of friends, we’d either complete the thing in a few hours, or take our time, make loads of stops for Women’s Institute doughnuts and so on, and get into Brighton sometime in the afternoon. We’d be able to ride home to freshen up, then go out for a quick meal in the evening. It’s an annual event that holds a fond place in my memory over many consecutive years.

At some point in the late 80’s I stopped doing the ride. I had seen it get more over-crowded and dangerous, with so many people doing the ride unofficially that fast downhill sections like Slugwash Lane had become scenes of many inevitable accidents – one year I remember seeing the road awash with blood – and narrow uphill sections were turning the event into the London to Brighton Bike Shuffle.

I did the ride with my wife & friends a couple of years during the late 90s & early 2000s, but things weren’t much better. So it was goodbye L2B from me.

Yesterday I experienced once again the utter farce of what the London to Brighton Bike Ride does to Brighton. Road closures would be OK. Diversions fine. But when tens of thousands of extra cars (many of them 4×4 domestic trucks) are coming into Brighton for the sole reason that they’re picking up one or more cyclists, something is badly wrong. Traffic down a 15-mile stretch of the A23 came to a virtual standstill. Doesn’t the British Heart Foundation care about it? Surely the pollution alone should tell them that something has to change – it certainly can’t be good for the heart, and I wonder what the British Lung Foundation would say on the matter. And making it the day of countless other summer events, village fetes, and indeed Father’s Day – that’s just asking for trouble.

I daresay nothing will change next year. It’s a stupid, overhyped event which has become unmanageable. Sure it had noble roots and a great cause behind it, but nowadays it’s just a menace. At the very least it needs a new route, a major rethink, better public transport coordination, and a ban on pickups by car. The London to Brighton Bike Ride has gone bad.

Just a quick public information notice: Belkin makes the most unreliable, poorly designed, unmitigated rubbish in the world. It’s true. I have owned several items by Belkin, none of which has ever worked properly, and have always given them the benefit of the doubt. But the Belkin Vision N1 router is the last Belkin device I shall ever own. It crashes all the time and I can’t keep a wireless connection for more than 20 minutes or so before it overheats and freezes. They can have it back through their office windows for all I care. I should sue for the amount of lost time and stress Belkin has caused me. None of their products work properly, or at least work for long. The USB hubs regularly need to be unplugged from the mains and reconnected just so they recognise the devices plugged into them. If it says Belkin, just don’t go there. Please. Perhaps then Belkin will actually take notice and produce something decent for once. Companies like this just don’t deserve to exist.