I make a complaint

Obviously I would say that cars are the future in my line of work, but yesterday I had to take public transport to get somewhere I was driving a car back from. A journey that would be less than an hour in the car took me over four hours. Though to be fair that wasn’t normal, it should only have taken two hours, but the bus didn’t turn up and that knocked me back with the next two trains.

Sure, I was able to do some work and I had a book in my bag if it came to it, as well as my emergency flapjack, but anyone who has ever had to wait for 50 minutes at Bletchley railway station will tell you that they wouldn’t want to have to do that again.

I complained to Stagecoach, but obviously they haven’t got back to me – the customer care department is running late. I’m not even joking – I got an auto reply email to my email that said they would try and get back to me within five days, but they couldn’t promise anything because they’re really busy at the moment. Who’s bragging that their complaints department is so overwhelmed that it’ll take more than a working week (that’s by international measures, not the Stagecoach working week) to get back to you?

I was grumpy when I sent the email, but very civil, obviously. Never cede the moral high ground, that’s my motto. To be honest, I know that they won’t have a very good reason to explain why my morning got all messed up, or anything more sincere to offer than a copy and paste reply, but I just wanted to let them know I was annoyed. I’ll probably be more annoyed if it takes them more than five working days to get back to me though.

The super market

I do enjoy going to the supermarket to get the shopping, but I also get really annoyed. Obviously I’ve fallen hook, line and sinker for the gamification of the whole experience – scanning my loyalty card, getting the discounts that aren’t really discounts (they’re really just penalties for not handing over your personal shopping data) and using the stupid little scanner.

Actually that last one is good because I pack my bags how I like them before I even get to the till. There’s nothing worse than that intensely suspicious screen that brings someone over to check your bags by pulling out three things from the very bottom of every single bag you’ve packed. I get the all-clear, because I’m good like that, but then the person puts everything back really badly and the whole shop has been ruined. I try to be nice to whoever the person in the itchy looking polo shirt is, because they’re just doing their job. But then again how many atrocities have been committed in the world by people ‘just doing their job’?

The thing that annoys me about the scanning and the self-checkouts and the everything else is that this service masquerades as convenience, but really it’s an excuse to hire a few less people. And also to track you round the store with that little handset. I know it sounds a little tinfoil hat, but how you shop is probably the most valuable part of the whole process for them to know.

But if I’m being forced to do someone else’s job – especially seeing as that someone no longer has a job – I feel like I should at least be getting paid minimum wage for the 40 minutes I’m trudging round Sainsbury’s looking for things that have been moved since I was last in three days ago. I could put checkout operator on my CV with the experience I’ve got. I think maybe I will come to it, although I’ve had something like 35 jobs, I’m already having to pick and choose.

The politics we deserve

So Wes Streeting resigned his office with great honour and noble sacrifice because he felt he could no longer give the prime minister the sort of confidence he deserved. Let’s ignore the fact for a second that flagship health legislation had been unveiled the day before and a principled politician might want to hang around to see it through.

Streeting talked about the importance of a debate about ideas and not personality – which I would imagine could be a good strategy for someone who was worried about a rival with a personality. Let’s ignore the personal appeal and charisma of potential leaders and focus instead on the detail of their proposals.

And what’s his big idea? He’s all about rejoining Europe, or not necessarily about rejoining Europe but thinks we ought to have a chat about it, as if everyone has been ignoring the topic for the last 10 years. Is it coincidence that the knife edge seat Andy Burnham has found to stand in was a largely Brexit leaning constituency?

Burnham now has to run a by-election campaign being Eurosceptic, but leave himself enough room to talk up a closer relationship with the EU because that will be palatable to his party. That’s our debate about ideas and not personality.

It’s exactly the weaselly student politics sort of behaviour that Jeremy Corbyn and others have criticised recently – and I don’t find myself agreeing with Jeremy Corbyn very often. I was a students’ union president myself for a couple of years in the 2000s, coincidentally the same period that Wes Streeting was involved in NUS. It’s strange to think how many good people were around back then who aren’t involved in politics anymore. Largely because most of them are in jobs where they can do good things and help people.

Like so many areas of life, top line politics doesn’t consist of the best of what the country has to offer, it’s populated by the people who are still there. I’m not saying they’re bad people, or bad politicians, but simply that we don’t have meritorious systems that promote the best. It’s the tricks and sneakiness and many-facedness that gets you along the way.

Maybe we get the politics we deserve, but I dread to think what that says about us as a country.

Legacy moment

I’m quite alright with getting older, although I’m already aware that there are technologies and concepts I’m struggling with, they’re not just intuitive like they’ve always been. The generational gap becomes a gulf or a chasm.

There are some aspects of getting older that I enjoy – I’ve entered into my peak middle aged white male privilege era, so I can tell people off for being noisy (very rarely) or break rules that I think are silly. It doesn’t take me as long to drive through a temporary traffic light that’s stuck on red, for instance.

I consider leaving reviews on Google Maps a hobby, and I enjoy dropping silly comments on Instagram videos. Except one from the weekend has racked up over 50,000 likes. An inconsequential, throwaway remark that is probably the most meaningful thing that I’ll ever do. My legacy is now that comment. It’s not even the most liked comment on the post, but I don’t think that amount of people cumulatively in my life thus far have liked anything I’ve done. Maybe I’m just getting old…

Big concepts

I’ve been trying to explain to the cat that her mum comes back tomorrow, but I wonder whether she has any concept of the days passing. Certainly not the months and years racking up, maybe a notion of seasons.

So I told her just one more sleep until her mum comes back, but then I don’t actually know what she considers a sleep, she has so many of them a day. Is her main one of the day even at the same time as mine? I can’t be sure, mainly because I’m asleep, so I’ve no real idea what’s going on. She’s coming back in five sleeps then.

Or is it one more night sleep before she gets back? Perhaps she is able to comprehend the notion of night and day separating each other, even if today’s night belongs to tomorrow’s day. I’m not even sure if she actually starts her day at the same time point I do.

Given that the cat is diurnal – mainly active at dawn and dusk – maybe her day starts as the sun goes down. Or when it comes up. Bit bonkers that we split all our nights up come to think of it. Why even is part of the night today but the rest of the night is tomorrow. Unless it was this morning.

No wonder the cat is confused. Actually, she’s sleeping.

Cat's out of the bag (house)

We’ve been trying to train the cat to use the flap that’s in the back door of the place we moved into back in September last year. In fairness to her, it was fairly well sealed up for the first few months of our residency, so we are asking a lot of her to suddenly change her relationship with an object she was getting on perfectly fine with by sitting next to it and yelling whenever she wanted to go through it.

I didn’t think she’d be bright enough to manage a cat flap at all, she’s a bit of a thicko in many ways. But to her credit she has mastered the art of entering the building. Leaving it is a whole different kettle of ball games, we have to use the door for that. But coming in? Sorted.

Apart from this last week. I should point out here that the cat flap is meant to be activated by a collar, but we don’t have it, so we’ve taped over the little catch at the bottom. It could in theory be a free for all in the house with neighbourhood cats coming round to help themselves to the sofa, but it’s been fine so far. Until the tape got a little loose just one time and the door wouldn’t open and now the cat refuses to enter through the flap.

It feels excessively mean to just leave her out there until she figures it all out again, but now I type that the house is refreshingly calm considering it’s past her dinner time. Fine, I’ll let her in.

Time after time

It’s weird when time doesn’t quite flow properly, isn’t it? My morning coffee felt like a Monday, but work felt like a Thursday and the evening has felt like a Friday, but then I’ll go to bed feeling like it’s a Tuesday.

It’s like there’s been a power cut and my internal clock is just flashing 00:00 over and over. Which is very much how the last 15 years or so have gone by, so at least it’s on point.

I often wonder whether people in the Seventies knew what the Seventies were going to feel like, or was it just the people who wrote books about it all and that who got to decide? Because sure not everyone was walking around in gangling brown flared trousers and listening to ABBA.

What will this decade be known as after the fact? Whatever it is I’m fairly certain I’m missing out on it…

Down(ing Street) and out

Running the country is such a piffling business, I can see how politicians could get bored with trying to make people’s lives better and indulge in a spot of bun fighting. There’s really nothing more thrilling in politics than watching a leadership mandate implode. Sag, really, like someone’s opened the oven door too early.

Will he, won’t he – the prime minister seems to have made it clear that he’s not packing up the furniture in the Number 10 flat until someone has the decency to stick the knife in his front, which I think is eminently respectable. If people are going to gang up on you they really ought to feel it. 
Except – and this is a canny calculation on the PM’s part – no one with any clout will actually be brave enough to do the deed, so the prime minister can squat in Downing Street as long as he likes, basically. I mean he actually can now that Labour has changed the rules on no fault evictions. Someone will have to give him six months’ notice, but I don’t know who actually owns the building. Would it be the king?

There have been a series of ‘dramatic’ resignations today of the most junior and inconsequential ministers who will have emailed their letters over (CCing in various media outlets of course) and then panicked afterwards that nothing will actually happen. It’s been a real who’s who of who’s that – not because no one wants the top job, but rather because some of them want it too badly, and it’s not really good for the old image to have been the one who betrayed the boss.

It’s not a conundrum, in the classical sense – you know, like whether the chicken or the egg comes first. In this case the chicken won’t make a move until a series of minor eggs have been smashed in a speculative fashion. Like vultures, the big names only circle once the whiff of decay has started to emanate. You have to feel for all of these MPs who worry for their jobs come the next in election in – checks notes – over three years. Perhaps this uncertainty and stress could be channelled into some sort of sympathy for the general public? Crazy thought. Just as I type, the minister for victims has stepped down. Who’s going to speak out for them now?

Life irritating art

I saw a video on Instagram earlier of US television’s Dan Levy appearing on Claudia Winkleperson’s eponymous chat show, where her and her celebrity guests tried to explain the 1990s phenomenon that was Mr Blobby – a truly harrowing cultural blip, this pink foam character with a bulbous round head and yellow spots was a fixture on Saturday night telly juggernaut Noel’s House Party and wrought carnage with every appearance.

It’s hard to explain the Blobby saturation – there was a number one Christmas single, beaucoup de mercy and at one point a dreadful money grabbing theme park that mercifully tanked almost immediately. Mr Blobby had a life and career of his own – the original plan had been to pop a different celebrity guest in the suit every week, but Blobby quickly gained sentience and ruined that idea.

Of course he appeared on Claudia’s show and scared the crap out of Levy, who hid behind the guest sofa chanting under his breath whatever motto his therapist has given him for moments that surface his deepest traumas.

It reminded me of my own Blobby experience – I did GCSE art at school, and there was a double lesson on a Wednesday afternoon. Mr Clarke would let us have control of the CD player in turn, which in the late 1990s meant all Greenday all the time, until it was my go and I played Mr Blobby’s single on loop for the entire hour and twenty minute lesson.

It was something unpredictable, and in the end was right – I really did have the time of my life. I never did get to use the CD player again, but it was worth it.