Flaying it by ear

Did you know that you’ve scientifically got a greater chance of being struck by lightning and soiling yourself in public than you have of passing a communal piano with someone competent at the keys?

I absolutely made that up, but it sounds eminently plausible because public pianos are a scourge on society. There’s one near our local supermarket where I just meandered over to buy some reduced bread and doughnuts – the essentials – and a man was sat at the keyboard repeatedly smashing his actual face against the collection of notes around the middle C.

At least that’s what it sounded like. He may have been drunk and lost all power over his digits, or perhaps he enjoys the admirable self-delusion of being able to play the instrument and no one close who loves him enough to tell him to stop.

It’s not necessarily any better on the vanishingly rare occasion when the person actually can play. It feels like an assault on the person, an invasion of personal space from a great distance. I don’t let anyone get in my head, but somehow these keyboard warriors have free rein to waltz (or boogie woogie) right on in.

And if the person actually was any good surely there would be people willing to pay them to deploy their gift in an appropriate context – a room, with people who have been forewarned and perhaps even possess an appreciation of the oeuvre.

And as a brief aside, how can we as a society be considering the banning of under-16s from social media but not communal public instruments? Whatever are, these wilful plinky plonkers are an anti-social element who need to be stopped. Or at least told to play the things pianissimo.

Step back in time

I know that if you have the ability to go back in time you’re supposed to do something worthy with the immense power, like go into the past and save the world from the perils of unspeakable suffering wrought by the likes Adolf Hitler or Cheryl Cole.

If I went back in time it would be to check messages on WhatsApp before they were deleted. Another wellspring of unspeakable suffering wrought.

Because it’s not enough simply to kill Hitler really – Germany was suffering from the impact of the Treaty of Versailles and Hitler was the opportunist herdsman who drove the country in the right direction. Well, the wrong direction, but you know. In many ways the Weimar Republic was such a roiling period disquiet that any number of other people could have risen up with the wind behind them.

And if you could kill two wars with one stone you’d have a go, wouldn’t you? You’d have return to the point at which Franz Ferdinand decided to visit the victims of his failed assassination attempt, a badly thrown grenade. The driver stalled his car right next to a dejected gunman sitting in a cafe.

But then in many ways Germany and Russia were spoiling for a fight in the run up to the first world war. Where would you nip that in the bud? Do we stop Otto Von Bismarck from unifying the German states in 1871?

It’s exhausting really, you basically need a history degree just to do something nice for people.

UN-believable developments

I was just reading about how the German chancellor is under pressure because of his failure to secure a seat on the UN Security Council.

You’ve got to feel sorry for a governmental leader, no one is every happy with anything you do – get the seat on the UN Security Council and they’ll only want something else.

But I never even knew that they held a vote for the thing, like some sort of geopolitical Eurovision Song Contest. I wonder how they go about deciding who they’re going to vote for – a round of singing, naturally, but Friedrich Merz probably lost a bit of support in the swimsuit round, he’s very stringy looking. But tall, by all accounts.

The fact that Trinidad and Tobago, Kyrgyzstan and Zimbabwe won seats over Germany must feel like a slap in the face. Austria and Portugal they can perhaps cope with, but who’s been posting all that cash to Kyiv? People can be so ungrateful.

There must be some sort of consolation prize that Germany can be awarded with to save a bit of diplomatic face. I don’t know how these things work, but you can imagine this year’s UN Christmas party taking place at a nice outdoor market in Augsburg.

Happy birthday to me

Today was my birthday – I’m not a big one for birthdays, but I’m willing to at least acknowledge them. I’ve been busy thinking I’m a year older than I am for a good month or two so that I would be ready to hit the ground running today. Or at least to hit the ground briskly walking at my age.

I was excited to have chips for dinner on my birthday, my favourite repast. I cycled breathlessly (that wasn’t the excitement, I’m just not very fit) to the chip shop and got there at 21:03, whereupon it transpired that they closed at 21:00.

The nice fellow behind the counter must have noticed my crestfallen and sweaty little face, because he asked me what I wanted. ‘Chips,’ I said, which I thought he might already have been able to guess. He actually apologised for giving me extra chips because he was clearing out the fryer. I was not able to finish the chips, and that does not happen very often. What a great day.

I might be a robot

I should clarify my last post – I had to fill out a brief test (I did fail it the first three or so times but just because I don’t want to make it too easy) and got the official internet thumbs up for not being a robot.

I think though, that much like an MOT, my not robot status is really only valid for the point at which it was issued.

It did get me thinking a lot about whether I might indeed be a robot – an excellent one, I would interject at this point, not least because I’ve been able to fool the tests littered about online specifically designed for catching out robots.
But if I think about it (would a robot be able to do that though?) how would I actually know if I was a robot? Surely the whole point would be that I wouldn’t know. For plausible deniability if nothing else.

I did think that I’ve seen myself bleed due to various mishaps, but then it would be a simple matter of having some deeply concealed code that made sure I never cut too deeply in the wrong place or some such nonsense.

Maybe I’m overthinking the whole thing, which a robot certainly wouldn’t do, and I should accept my not a robot status in the spirit in which it has been generously bestowed upon me.

Whoops, it has expired. I have to do the test again.

Who can you call?

There are a series of criteria that must be met when deciding whether or not you’re going to call the Ghostbusters.

Is there something strange in the neighbourhood? Is there something weird that don’t look good? Are you seeing things running through your head (actually not sure whether that’s literal or metaphorical)? Is there an invisible man sleeping in your bed (again, not sure how you’d necessarily know. The second verse is significantly weaker than the first now that I look closely)?

If the answer is yes to any of the above, then we can safely assume you should call the Ghosbusters, though presumably they also have their own fairly mature triage system they can follow over the phone just to make sure you’re not wasting their time.

Which is all to say that even the Ghostbusters have a series of measures in place by which you can decide whether they are in fact the answer to your problems. Got a stream of water emerging from the bathroom? Call a plumber. Is your car on fire? Dial 999 (depending on what country you’re in, obviously).

What series of questions do you think need to be asked when Tony Blair is the answer to any of them? The mind boggles that Sir Anthony thinks the man who brought us Gulf War II has any plot worthy of a sequel, but then we do know that Hollywood will commission anything that comes with a faint whiff of nostalgia about it.

Tony Blair ceased to be relevant when he stepped down from office two decades ago, though some cheeky soul might suggest that he was irrelevant long before that, hence the departure. In case you missed it, Tone thinks the solutions to the UK’s issues involve cosying back up to Donald Trump, ditching our net zero ambitions and drilling for oil. Possibly in the North Sea, but maybe everywhere, just in case.

The thing about our ex-PM is that he’s achieved his lifelong dream of becoming a rich old Tory in retirement, the only poor people he glimpses are out of the window on his way to the airport, where he’ll fly to a money saturated petro-autocracy and have the gaul to advise them on… things. Democracy, perhaps, and how to engage with the people.

I’m going to throw in my own suggestions on how to improve the country, if I may, and the first one involves adding to our 2050 net zero targets – because that’s exactly how much I want to hear from retired prime ministers.

Let there be Luce

It’s never easy when you’re entrusted with a legend, is it. There are all sorts of business theories about how innovation eventually leads to stagnation because the very spirit of innovation that led to success gives way to a desire to not risk whatever it is that has heretofore been a significant money maker.

So if you were, say, to work at Ferrari (to pluck an example out of the air) you might find the sort of plucky determination that made the company’s name 80 years ago a little hard to come by in this era of hedge funds and sentiment and share prices.

Ironically the share price has been among the things that have given way at the storied Italian manufacturer in the last couple of days. Ironic when something blandly put together to tick all the boxes ends up doing none of them.

Carmakers often have the luxury of planning five or six years out and having foresight over a finished range of products that we’ve not even seen yet.

Having never produced an electric vehicle before and being a little late to the party Ferrari really needed to do something interesting – what it’s ended up doing is taking a leaf out of Jaguar’s ‘annoy everyone’ playbook and just hope that the global publicity will be enough.

I keep thinking that I don’t actually mind the new Ferrari Luce, but then I see a side shot and it looks like a badly iced slice of cake. It’s got a pound shop radio controlled car vibe about it, or maybe it’s what you’d get if you asked AI to come up with a render for a Ferrari-branded autonomous taxi for a California tech campus.

There are two scenarios here – either it doesn’t sell and Ferrari looks stupid, or it sells loads and we all look stupid. Though to be fair we all look pretty stupid for caring this much about a trinkety throwaway plaything for people with too much money in the first place.

If you can’t stand the heat…

I can cope fairly well with it being warm in the day, but when it’s hot at night, that’s a different cuttlefish entirely.

The temperature just hasn’t gone down enough by the time you go to bed, the air is still warm and the upstairs of your house still superheated with air you could do without right now.

I’m sure there’s plenty I could write, but I’m fairly tired and I need to concentrate on staring at some unfixed point on the wall before I drift off eventually to a slumber that will be ever so rudely interrupted by the cat at some ungodly hour of the morning

Heavy weather

We Brits love to talk about the weather. In conversation, in the news. I have three different weather apps so that I can be fully briefed on the various options (what I actually do is keep looking around until I find the best weather and decide that this is what’s going to happen today).

This week the UK finds itself in the grip of a heatwave – which is to say that it’s warm in London. If it doesn’t happen in London it doesn’t really happen at all. It’s understandable, it’s where all the important people and journalists are.

The basic rule is that weather can be used as a greeting, and it should never be contradicted. ‘Lovely day, eh?’ ‘Yes.’ Any other response would be seen as dangerous and provocative.

The rule about weather reporting in the news is that it is unhinged and totally contradictory. There will have been stories for months about the unseasonable cold or the lack of rain, but heat and precipitation are a disaster. Usually one that no one was prepared for. The change in weather also follows strict patterns, with an atmosphere built up by headlines such as ‘experts warn of rain travel chaos’, or ‘heatwave could kill thousands experts warn’. There’s a whole industry of warning experts, like the prophets and soothsayers of old.

I for one shall be enjoying the weather, right up until it does something I don’t like.

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.