Category Archives: “And another thing …”

Despite the name, this is not a place for more rants. It is for posts that don’t fit into any of my other sections.

A CARING HERO

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The lead news item on my radio (BBC Radio 4) this morning was the fact that there has been a significant rise in the number of Down’s Syndrome pregnancies in the UK. Some experts were attributing the rise to the fact that many women are starting families later, when the risk increases.

Coincidentally – at least I assume so, because it must have been planned some time ago – the news was followed by an edition of “The Choice” – a series where Michael Buerk interviews people who have faced difficult choices in the lives. The subject today was Alex Bell, who has adopted large numbers of young people with severe disabilities, many of them Down’s Syndrome sufferers.

I describe Alex Bell as a hero (years ago I would have said heroine, actress, etc, but that would be showing my age) because she faced horrendous difficulties with all these children, and showed remarkable fortitude and cheerfulness in coping with it all. Moreover she started down her chosen road from a very early age, in her teens in fact.

Normally I admire Buerk’s persistent but gentle interviewing style but this time I found it irritating. For much of the time his questions seemed to indicate that he thought Alex was misguided or, at the very least, an obsessive. To her credit she answered all the questions, even those that verged on the patronising, with the same good humour she must have shown a million times with her severely disabled charges.

Don’t take my word for it: listen to the programme at http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/b00nf1bv/The_Choice_27_10_2009/

MORE REAL ALE!

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Well, more on the subject, anyway.

Further to my last posting, I read a story in yesterday’s Independent, entitled “We’ll drink to that: pubs hail the return of real ale.” I had written that real ale sales were reported as holding up better than “cheap lagers”. The latter will apparently suffer further in the long-predicted event of a Tory victory, because of today’s announcement of plans to appply minumum pricing.

The Indy’s real ale story was simply that 2.3 million more pints were sunk in the first half of this year than the same period; the last time that full-year consumption rose was in 1982, so if the rise is maintained that’s going to be good news for the traditional brewers, the number of which is growing.

That volume increase, by the way, is 1%:in the current climate that’s a healthy rise.

One oddity: the last line of the report states that Britain’s beer market is worth £18.3 bn; of that real ale represents very much the minority, at £2bn. However, elsewhere in the piece a large graphic shows the the number of pints of real ale sunk last year as 237 million. Unless I’m missing something, that values the wonderful stuff at £8.44 / pint. If I were a brewer, I’d say it’s worth that much, but round here I pay an average of £3 a pint. I’m surprised that nobody at the Indy noticed the discrepancy.

BEER SALES "SLUMP"?

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Beer sales in the UK are experiencing a “slump”, according to a piece I saw in the media. The drop was 8% year-on-year. Is this really a slump? Considering how much other business sectors have been affected in this recession, I’d say that only an 8% fall means that beer is still a pretty important part of the British way of life.

The story claimed that the “slump” was partly due to an excise duty increase earlier this year, which put an extra 1p on a pint of beer. Shock, horror! When most pubs round here charge an average of £3 a pint, an extra penny is 0.3%. Who would seriously say that they gave up or reduced beer drinking based on a 0.3% increase? Does the brewers’ trade association or the media think we are stupid? There are many other factors; the extra penny can’t be that important.

Since reading that story I heard from a friend, whose work involves scouring the various business pages, a fact that this media story didn’t include, i.e. that the “slump” has mostly been in cheap lagers rather than ales. I seem to recall that we were told, not long ago, that it’s lager that is responsible for the majority of binge-drinking, with its concomitant effect on casual violence. Isn’t one of our leading brands of lager widely referred to as “the wife-beater”? Maybe this “slump” could be good news from a health and a public order viewpoint. Not good news, I realise, if you own or run a pub and your business’s viability depends on the volume of lager sold. You don’t have to go far to see pubs that have closed down due to changes in drinking habits and the smoking ban.

I should, finally, declare an interest. I like beer as much as the next man or woman. Although I have spent enough time in Scandinavia and Germany to appreciate lagers of various kinds, to my taste real ale is the real thing. So if this latest piece of news could be described as good (or at least less bad) news for brewers of traditional ales, and bad news for binge-drinking, with its effects on health and on the depressing incidence of domestic and other violence every Friday and Saturday night, then I’ll drink to that. Or, to quote Benjamin Franklin: “Beer is proof that God loves us and wants us to be happy”. Happy, please, not in prison or hospital.

BBC’s "PM" news magazine under fire

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Listening to “Points of View” on BBC Radio 4 today, I was interested to hear that the BBC had received complaints that its “PM” programme is “dumbing down”. Admittedly the complainants, being good Radio 4 listeners, (a club of which I count myself a member) didn’t stoop to the over-used dumbing-down cliché. They were more specific. The programme, they said, seemed to be straying from its mission statement; sorry, from its purpose. The programme was “becoming light entertainment”.

“Coverage and analysis of the day’s news” is the one-line definition of “PM”; this on the BBC’s website, no less. But these correspondents / complainants were objecting to recent trivialising and unnecessarily jokey initiatives: for example sexing up the programme’s weather bulletins by adding sound-effects; and, crucially, asking listeners for ideas on how to make those same weather bulletins more memorable. In general, the charge was that the BBC was becoming more interested in what “PM’s” listeners and bloggers had to say about stories than the views of their own journalists. Didn’t the BBC have enough expert journalists to cover the stories?

I was pleased to hear this: I had noticed these trends myself and found them irritating at best, so it was good to know I was not alone. But insult was added to injury when “Points of View” wheeled out the producer of “PM” to answer the charges. Her defence, IMHO, did not really take the complaints seriously; in fact I detected a whiff of complacency. She insisted that by canvassing and broadcasting listeners’ opinions, they were expanding the range of expertise they could call on. My view on that is that yes, some of the listeners may well be expert on some topics, but by no means all of them. Who should moderate the inputs to decide which are grounded in sufficient competence to be broadcast? A BBC journalist specialising in the topic, perhaps? Then let’s hear the journalist’s views instead.

As for the memorability of weather bulletins: leaving aside the question of whether the weather (sorry!) needs to be given such prominence in a news programme (when the BBC already has plenty of dedicated weather bulletins elsewhere) the producer’s defence of the puerile stunts that had been tried, was centred on the fact that this topic had promoted lots of e-mails. My own view anyway is that the necessarily brief weather bulletins in this kind of programme are so general as to be useless in a country that’s famous for local variations. They can’t even tell us what the weather is doing now, never mind what will happen in the future: it’s bizarre to hear a presenter say, “today, it will be dry everywhere” while outside my window the rain is pouring down.

The final complaint levelled was that incidental music was creeping into what was previously an all-speech programme in a virtually all-speech channel. The offender was the introductory music to the stock exchange report “Up-shares down-shares”. A listener who was unemployed thought that the introduction of music and in fact the overall style of the piece was inappropriately jokey when talking of such serious matters as the state of the economy, especially when most of such news is uniformly bad these days. This criticism was quickly brushed off by the producer on the grounds, as far as I could tell, that they had had an e-mail (maybe more than one but I didn’t hear it) from a listener who loved the music. Why should that apparently random listener’s views matter more than those of the listener who’d lost his job and was offended by the trivialisation?

Written in sorrow more than anger, by a devotee of Radio 4.

BREAKING NEWS: RAIL TRAVELLERS PREFER TRAINS TO BUSES!

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Earlier this year, train operating companies (TOCs) in the UK were asked by Network Rail, who own the track and signalling systems, to sign an undertaking that they will use “rail replacement services” only as a last resort. That’s because their research has shown that rail passengers (sorry, customers; we are all customers now), having paid for a rail ticket, prefer to travel on a train and not on a rail replacement service. Did they need to commission research to come to that conclusion?

For those of you who have never had the doubtful pleasure of using them, “rail replacement service” is another way of saying “bus”. This euphemism is widely used by train operating companies in the UK.

The issue is not new. A report said that Network Rail “recognises the need for a 7-day railway”. That was in August 2007. What progress have we made since then? See http://www.firstclasspartnerships.com/opinion.php?id=6

My impression is that many other European rail systems handle this problem far better, by doing more of the necessary maintenance work overnight. That’s referred to in the link above.

Going back to the original report, a question that occurs to me is: how do you define “last resort”? If a TOC wants to use a bus – sorry, rail replacement service – they could, of course, find a reason, or excuse, and call it a “last resort.” The BBC report said that Virgin Trains, for example, can sometimes run replacement trains over the parallel Chiltern Railways track between London and Birmingham when their normal route is blocked by engineering work, but they don’t like to do it because (a) their drivers are not familiar with the route, and (b) the cost is higher than using buses. Would either of those reasons qualify as a “last resort”?

I avoid travelling by train on Sundays and will continue to do so until we really do have a “7-day railway”.

BRITISH RAIL FARES: SKY-HIGH OR COSTING THE EARTH?

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We all seem to agree that improving public transport has benefits for the environment, as well as for quality of life. Well, public transport in the UK is improving, slightly, and not before time. However, the costs are still ridiculously high by international standards, despite what we are told by politicians and the train companies. Earlier this year a damning report by the Passenger Focus group – the first-ever of its kind – compared rail fares in the UK with the rest of Europe. For average commuter journeys (11 – 25 miles) into the respective capital cities, UK fares are (a) the highest in Europe, (b) twice as high as the second highest, France, and (c) four times as high as Italy. Inter-city fares compared equally badly; 87% higher than in Germany; three times those in the Netherlands.
Transport commentator Christian Wolmar says that despite these high fares (and despite having privatised our rail system so as to hand regional monopolies to a small number of operating companies) we are still subsidising rail to a large extent. To what extent, I’d love to know. I’ve heard it said that subsidies are higher than when the rail system was nationally owned in the UK. That can’t be true, can it? If you want to see the BBC’s report on the report, see http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/7897903.stm

When representatives of train operating companies are interviewed about high fares, they always say that if you book early, you can get really good deals. Well, “a chance would be a fine thing”, as the saying goes. Next week I’m heading from Bristol, where I live, to Harrogate in Yorkshire; to visit old friends and also to see my daughter singing in cabaret (had to get that in!) at a hotel in the Dales. Despite checking online several times, well in advance, I have found none of these elusive so-called advance tickets available. Thus I’ll have to pay the “turn up and go” fare. That’s £58 return, based on (a) my senior card, (b) off-peak travel, and (c) avoiding London. If I’d needed to travel before 9 a.m., go via London and been a couple of years younger, it would have been £167. The distance is 224 miles each way … “do the math!” as they say in America.

My fare information source, by the way, was the well-known website branded: “The Train Line: buy cheap tickets ….” Cheap tickets, huh? What would qualify as expensive? I wonder if there is another website that offers “expensive tickets … because you’re worth it.” Those fares would be truly eye-watering.

This was not an isolated case: in the past few months I have made also made longish journeys to Manchester and to Haverfordwest in West Wales. In neither case was an advance ticket available, despite trying to book at least a week in advance; the ads tell us that advance tickets are available until the day before travel.

By the way, my senior railcard costs £26 a year. That’s a good investment, because I save much more than that. However, in France and (see below) Canada, seniors get discounted travel without paying for the privilege. As I saw on a T-shirt: “I’m a senior: give me my damn discount!”

Re Canada: last week I was there for my nephew’s wedding. Coming back, I discovered that I could get to the airport by Toronto Transit Commission’s (TTC) subway – or underground as we’d say on this side of the pond – with a connecting shuttle bus for the last couple of miles. The service was frequent, quick, civilised. The one-way fare (one ticket, valid on subway, tram and bus, as always in Toronto) costs just $1.85 Canadian, (that’s about £1.20) for seniors, $2.85 for you youngsters. The distance is 17 miles, (27 km) which is similar to the Heathrow / London distance. Yes, I know that one can do the whole journey to Heathrow by tube, whereas in Toronto it’s tube plus shuttle-bus; but if you live in or near London, you don’t need me to tell you how the costs compare.

I also saw two safety ideas of especial interest to women passengers. Every subway platform has a Designated Waiting Area with an emergency call system, where anyone who might feel vulnerable is invited to stand. Also their buses have a “Request Stop Program,” whereby women travelling alone on a bus between 9 p.m. and 5 a.m. can ask the driver to stop at any intermediate point between bus-stops.

So, on both value for money and on passenger (sorry, customer) care: Toronto Transit Commission, take a bow!

VINCE CABLE SPEAKS IN BRISTOL

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One of the many advantages of living in Bristol (UK), which has been my pleasure and privilege for the last five years, is the annual Bristol Festival of Ideas. I say the “Bristol” Festival of Ideas but how many other such events are there in the UK? The only big one I’m aware of is in Cambridge, with all due respect to Sedbergh in Yorkshire. There’s also one with the same title in the north-west but that is rather different, focusing on ideas related to social issues. Where my (new) home city leads, others will surely follow, as the late great Isambard Brunel might have said two centuries ago and Bristol’s Merchant Venturers’ Society, still active after eight centuries, would surely also say.

What I do know is that if you type “Festival of Ideas” into Google, the Bristol event always heads the list. Is this because it’s the best event of its kind or because Bristol is more competent at IT, or more specifically how to appeal to search engines?

That’s enough boasting about Bristol, except to say that the last event of the main Festival of Ideas this year was a lecture by Vince Cable. This is probably the most trusted politician in Britain today and a man that even his political opponent Alan Duncan called “the Holy Grail of economic comment these days”.

In the unlikely event that you had forgotten, ‘Cable’s the star of Newsnight’s credit-crunch discussions, the go-to guy for a sagacious economics quote for broadsheet front-page leads … ‘ (Guardian). He’s also ‘everything a politician should be and everything most politicians are not’ (Mail on Sunday) and ‘a heavyweight in anybody’s cabinet’ (The Times)

And in the middle of the recession, we had him in Bristol! I don’t know why the venue was only 80% full, but those who stayed at home missed a lot. Economics is supposed to be “the dismal science” but dismal Vince Cable is not. Even while describing events that were, and remain, apocalyptic to the trained economist that he is, his intelligence and wit shine through, as did his insistence that “I’m not here as a party politician,” a claim he backed up by a reluctance to score blame-giving points and a tendency to give credit where it was due. Who knew politicians could do that??

But what I liked best of all was his tendency to put all the figures he mentioned in perspective; in context. Comparisons create a picture of the significance of the data in a way which can’t be done by just throwing out an impressively large number on its own, as most politicians like to do. The examples of this exemplary trait were too numerous to mention and the habit shines through Dr Cable’s new book “The Storm”. This analysis of the world financial crisis has been so comprehensively (and favourably) reviewed that I don’t have to repeat the process. Suffice it to say that my gang were unanimously of the view they had been at a memorable event.

Jonathan Ross, health campaigner?

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At the weekend I saw a new side of the ubiquitous Jonathan Ross. Witty? Rude? Intelligent? Overpaid? These are frequently remarked-on aspects of Mr Ross, although some say that nowadays he shows a little more humility after his recent problems. The qualities I saw, or rather heard on 25 April, you could call humanity, empathy, genuine interest in and knowledge of larger issues than the showbiz stuff that we can all ingest and enjoy on his radio and TV shows.

What prompted this, at 11.50 on a Saturday morning on his BBC Radio 2 show, (yes, I was so impressed I even made a note of the time) was a phone call from a woman with a record request. Jonathan asked the caller what her job was; she replied that she worked in a rehabilitation hospital. He asked what kinds of patients were treated there and it turned out that many of them were stroke survivors.

Rather than wrapping the conversation up with a few banalities, as many radio presenters would have, Ross followed up with intelligent and interested questions about stroke: the work; the patients; the effects of this devastating condition; the importance of speedy diagnosis and treatment. He was clearly well aware of the recent Department of Health advertising campaign and, with his customary verbal creativity, managed to work that campaign’s “FAST” slogan into his closing comments. Full marks Jonathan Ross, for whom I have a new-found respect.

SINGING IMPROVES CHILD BEHAVIOUR

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I’ve been reading a report on Arts and Health (http://www.dh.gov.uk/en/Publicationsandstatistics/Publications/PublicationsPolicyAndGuidance/DH_073590 ) about the health benefits of a variety of artistic activities: both for therapy and disease prevention. One of the sections talked about the benefits of singing. Stuff you already know anecdotally, if you ever sing, whether in the shower (alone or with a partner), in a choir, or even on a stage. Singing, especially with other people, makes you feel good; and this report demonstrated it can also do you good. Physical as well as psychological benefits.

Yesterday, another endorsement of this most enjoyable pastime, from a totally different source and angle. The “Thought For The Day” in BBC Radio 4’s “Today” programme, started by enthusing about Venezuela’s system of youth orchestras – the best-known is the Simon Bolivar – improving the lives of hundreds of thousands of Venezuelan kids by teaching them to play classical music.

There are similar initiatives in the UK. Many of them are about singing rather than instrumental music; that avoids the cost of instruments. (Of course we are not such a rich country as Venezuela, are we?). The payback seems to have been fantastic. Check out the link; (http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/console/b00jr4qm and go to 1 hr 49 mins)

I liked the comment of a Yorkshire primary school head teacher who reported greatly improved behaviour since class singing was prioritised. Her explanation:

“You can pay a fortune for sports equipment and coaches; one of the by-products is that the children learn to be competitive. Hire a part-time singing teacher and they learn to be cooperative.”

Toxic assets, a definition

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Imagine that you are about to host a barbecue and you have lots of pork fillets to cook. However you suspect that one of them might be off. What do you do?

Throw it away? Or cook it and eat it yourself, to ensure none of your guests gets sick?

No, you throw them all in a sausage machine and make loads of sausages, so as to dilute the risk. But guess what? All your guests get sick!

How about that for a great metaphor for toxic assets? I heard it last Friday on a wonderful BBC Radio 4 programme called “More Or Less”, (repeated Sunday nights) which looks at the numbers behind the news stories. In particular it tries to add some perspective and – dare I say it? – accuracy to the statistics we hear thrown around liberally but often misleadingly. The programme’s presenter Tim Harford has asked listeners to send in more metaphors to describe any aspect of the current financial situation. So, all you creative folks out there, get e-mailing, via the programme’s website, http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b00jnlmn.

BTW, the pork fillet metaphor was in turn quoted as being from the Today programme and was coined by the Editor of “Money Week”. Apologies to all concerned if I have misquoted it.