Credit Crunch

I recently took a guided tour of a vineyard and cellars in Blois, France, that was completely in French. Being a non-French speaker it meant that I understood about 0.2% of what was going on, and most of what I did understand was gained from a man pointing at stacks of bottles of wine and giving informative looks.

Yet I still understand more about Loire Valley vineyardary than I do about the credit crunch. It all just seems to be a sucession of large numbers which, to my mind, is similar in both content and meaning as listening to cricket scores or the shipping forecast.

Apparently though, George Bush has sorted it all out. I’m sure I’m not the only one who has that great sense of foreboding whenever Dubya is called upon to sort something out. It’s rather like being Lois Lane and calling for Superman. Except in this case, Superman’s got the lightning reactions of an octagenerian after 6 mugs of Sherry and a mince pie, and has all the stage presence of a comprehensive school geography teacher with an adenoid problem.

$700 Billion dollars seems like a lot, but I did have a back-up plan if it all went wrong. I get at least 3 offers of credit cards and pre-approved loans a week, and I’d calculated if all the residents of Milton Keynes had pooled together their junk mail offers of cash we could have raised the money within a month. I was preparing a Facebook group to mobilise the masses just in case.

I was also considering emailing Dubya and suggesting he give Carol Vorderman a call. Not for her number-crunching skills, but because I’m sure she’d have helped the US Financial Market consolidate their debts into one easy monthly payment with jut one hassle-free phone call and a quick chat about the weather.

Of course, those of us without a House of Representatives to look after our financial hiccups will find it harder to save our pennies. During the war of course, everyone was told to dig for victory, but nowadays everyone lives on a Barrett estate where if you plant anything but a pink Hydranger in the front garden, the residents committee will blackball you from the Golf Club and paint your kittens green.

You also need new ways to save money on heating bills. You can’t burn coal anymore because it will give polar bears asthma attacks. You can’t roll up newspaper to block drafts around doors and windows because then you can’t recycle it, and if you put paper in a wheely bin these days your local council will print your embarassing holiday photographs on advertising billboards and ban the next three generations of your family from using the public swimming baths.

Don’t go thinking you can save money on petrol either. Even if you can find a route where the local Highways department hasn’t doubled the distance you travel by putting in a slalom of pedestrian islands and one-way systems, there’ll be a sleeping policeman every 100 yards meaning you’ll be braking and accelerating like a yo-yo.

You can cut down on foreign holidays. The only problem then is that you have to holiday in the UK. This is okay, except you’ll have to try and drive there, and when you do arrive there’ll be a force-four gale blowing through your room because your host can’t use newspapers or coal to keep the place warm.

Here’s a better idea. Don’t put your money in the bank, save it up at home – it’s much safer anyway. You can scrunch it up and use it to block up any draughts, and the council will be happy your recycling enough. If you save enough you can build money castles and money dens to keep the kids happy so you don;t have to go on holiday. Plus, when every currency except the Transilvanian Drachma is worthless, you’ll be able to use it to fuel your fire without the polar bears developing the slightest hint of bronchitis.

C- Must try harder

In place of the charming and witty post I’ve been meaning to place here for well over a week now, here’s a picture of two people waiting patiently, presumably for a blog.

And, because my Flickr badge seems to have disappeared without warning I’ve bodged a quick replacement for my lost Flickr badge plugin, you can use the picture to click through to my Flickr stream.

The Language [car park] Barrier

I’ve done a few unusual travelling things in my life. I’ve kayaked in Maine after singing the entire James Brown back-catalogue at full volume in a minibus of comparative co-worker strangers. I’ve cycled through Paris in rush-hour on a bicycle that looked like it was designed in the 1800’s and manufactured from metals discovered when the periodic table still had only a dozen elements.

I’ve slept in some strange places too. I’ve slept on numerous Greyhound buses surrounded by cast members of Louis Theroux’s Weird Weekends. I once slept in a little line of English backpackers in Boston airport as the night-cleaners practiced their synchronised hoovering whilst CNN reporters enthusiastically shouted every news story over the information screens like they were connected to the studio with yoghurt pots and string. And that’s before you get to the varied clientele you meet in shared youth hostel dormitories.

There is a common theme when it comes to language though. To an outsider, my galant attitude to languages causes someone to think I still have this Victorian ideal that one can still travel the world with an English passport and battered suitcase Philleas Fogg stylee with an RP accent. Whilst working away under the bonnet is a linguistic sphere like a well-oiled Babel fish. Behind the scenes my brain is fascinated by language but equally infuriated at an upper school which refused to acknowledge someone might need an arts GCSE and a modern language in later life. And so I have set off for Norway, Iceland, Poland, Hungary and the Czech Republic in previous years knowing fewer words than it might conceivably be possible to teach a small siberian hamster of above-average intelligence.

All of this is of absolutely no use in explaining why on a busy Tuesday morning I decided to press the ‘German’ language selector on a car park machine in a busy Parisian hotel. But then what could possibly go wrong?

Quite a lot it would seem. The machine read the ticket – the only record that we had ever desposited a car in the car park, and then displayed some nice, friendly Germanic phrase which we took to be ‘please insert your bank card’. I’m not sure whether it was struck with confusion  why a Germanian would have an English bank card, or whether it was wondering why someone would put a bank card into the machine when it had clearly displayed a message about it’s personal theory of time travel.

But it did leave us with a problem.They say a problem shared is a problem halved, but as a French family arrived at the only machine in the car park they proved this is not always the case. In our finest English accents we explained it was broken. Then Sarah remembered she spoke French, and explained what was going on in a much more useful fashion. This was met by some French muttering, some pointing at the screen, and then more muttering featuring which even I could translate: ‘Francais’, ‘Deutch’, and ‘English’ mostly.

Luckily, Pierre from reception was on hand to help us. Pierre was clearly the man for the job, with a name badge proudly displaying the French, German and English flags as his known languages. He perused the machine, and looked worryingly confused. He then turned to us with a look of either profound constipation or that face people make when struggling to find words in a foreign language.

‘Um…’ said Pierre. Decisively.
‘It’s okay, we’re English’, said Sarah. It was clear this was a line Pierre had heard many times before.
‘What does this say?’, asked Pierre, a man with a very formal-looking badge stating his proficiency in German, pointing at a short German phrase on the screen.
‘We don’t know’, apologised Sarah.

The next 30 seconds didn’t need translating, as Pierre showed that universal face everybody makes when they realise they are dealing with imbeciles. To be honest, I don’t blame him. Here in a busy French hotel, he had before him an English couple, freshly sunburnt from their holiday, who were holding up a family of his fellow countrymen by not just breaking a simple machine, but breaking it in a language no one currently involved in the scenario could understand.

‘I will need to send a technician over’, concluded Pierre as he ran away from the mad English people as quickly as possible.

The technician duly arrived, and set about pressing every single button on the machine as forcefully as any man could. I’m sure he knew we’d have tried this ourselves, but he was doing so with an air of authority and determination hitherto lacking in this exchange between man and machine.

Our technician spoke no English at all, and presumably even less German. And so we found ourselves standing in a foreign country with all of our posessions and only means of transport locked in a secure underground car park. Yet the only thought that came into my Guardian-reading mind was ‘what about the dairy?’. We buy our milk from a little dairy called ‘Lucy’s Dairy’. Our milk has pictures of Lucy with one of her herd on the side and we get regular ‘moos letters’ from the cows. Who’d tell them we were stranded in a France, unable to speak German?

Eventually, Pierre gave us a special ticket to get us out of the car park. I did notice, however, that we didn’t get the same sympathetic look he gave the French family who’d been held up just because I’d chosen to press the special ‘display something in German before completely fizzing to a halt’ button.

The ultimate irony was yet to come though. As I we slowly trudged our way down the stairs to the car, embarassed by our failure to use a machine, and the pride in our linguistic skills severly dented we couldn’t help noticing that the barrier in the car park was broken in the open position all along.

Con CERN

So, science in Switzerland. Everyone still here?

For anyone unsure, you can check this very useful website: www.hasthehcdestroyedtheearth.com

Even if by the the time you read this the human race hasn’t been completely wiped out, it at least supplied the media with some nice pictures and scare-mongering. The superlative brigade have been hard at work, calculating the odds that the world would end today despite the fact the machine wasn’t even going to attempt any ‘big bangs’ today.

I felt in safe hands anyway. I’d watched the actual Cern-sponsored little rap.

What’s the French for ‘gunshot’?

“Are you sure we don’t need to look at the map?”, the lovely Sarah asked as we walked down yet another residential street lined with yet another white apartment block. “Where’s the fun in that?” I replied with a confident but ultimately foolhardy manner, “we always see the best parts of cities by avoiding the main tourist routes. Anyway, we’re definitely going in the right direction…”.

On our recent trip to the Loire Valley we found ourselves visiting the lovely city of Tours. It’s official site describes it as a ‘city of captivating charm’, whilst Wikipedia describes it as a metropolitan univerisity city with fabulous achitecture and ‘the garden of France’‘.

“Was that a gunshot?”, Sarah tentatively asked, trying not to sound too startled by the VERY LOUD BANG that did indeed sound just a little like a gunshot. “No, just a moped”, I replied, “Maybe we should look at the map?”.

So we found ourselves standing on the corner of street x and y looking at the map of Tours in the Lonely Planet Guide to the Loire. We’re trying not to look like tourists and failing miserably as a) we’re speaking in English, b) have cameras, and c) are looking at the map of Tours in The Lonely Planet Guide to the Loire which is of no use whatsoever as we’ve walked a very long way off the top of page 31. So far, in fact, that we may well have stumbled into a completely different book altogether. Quite possibly The Lonely Planet Guide to the best places to be mugged and murdered whilst lost in France.

“Well that’s street x over there, and we’re on street y”, says Sarah. “Yes, quite right. Does that information help us…?”.

At this point I’m thinking about developing one of those walks. You know, the ones you see in American rap videos. Where someone tries to make themselves look like they shouldn’t be messed with, by dragging one leg along behind them like they’ve been shot or a going lame.

Thankfully, I’m saved both from myself and from a telling-off from Sarah by a man carrying a large empty folded bag, which I’m hoping doesn’t have the words ‘Gun and stolen swag” written on the other side.

“Lost?” asked the possibly-but-seeming-increasingly-less-likely man who would be later cutting up our dead remains with a stanley knife.

“Um… Yes?” we replied. He looked at our map very briefly, and then asked where we were heading. In all credit to him, he didn’t laugh when we explained we were heading towards a cathedral which was now some considerable distance away in the opposite direction armed only with a map of an area of the city the size of a postage stamp.

“Okay. You go straight on… then… ur [he gestures with his hands frantically]… umm…”.

“Left?” offered Sarah. “Yes. Sorry, my …er English is not so good. I’m going that way. I will show you” he replied.

So there we were, walking around an area of Tours we would still be unable to name or locate on a map, with our newfound best French friend.

“So, you are here on vacation?” he asked.
“Yes” replied Sarah.
“So, do you like Tours?”
“Yes”, we replied in unison. To an outsider we may have seemed to have replied a little too enthusiastically here, but there was still a remote possibility we may have found ourselves in that bag he was carrying later on in easy-to-bury-sized piece later on.

And that was pretty much it. Our guide had exhausted his English, and although Sarah speaks very good French, we’d exhausted our ability to construct polite coversation. We suddenly found ourselves with all the verbal skills of a mute antelope booked to give the key-note speech at a pro-gun pro-hunter conference.

For the next 100 miles we walked in an awkward silence (okay, it was about 800 yards but it felt like an eternity), betraying the English stereotypical fanaticism for small talk. There is definitely a limit for how long you can walk along guided by a stranger without talking. I’d say about 10 metres.

Finally we reached a busy street which we knew was on our map.

“Very good. This is where I stop”, said our impromptu-guide. “Thank you ever so much”, we both replied in a very English tea-with-the-vicar accent that would have suited a 1960’s BBC sitcom perfectly.

Then there were enthusiastic goodbyes. In reality we’d exchanged about three sentences at most, but our situations and failings had given us a fleeting bond of friendship.

Plus, I’m sure he’d have got endless mileage at the local bar telling his friends the story of the crazy lost English who’d tried navigating France with a map showing an area of Tours the size of a Citroen 2CV.

Money: In conclusion, probably safer under the mattress

“Hi, I’d like to exchange this money back please” I proclaimed chirpily. The cashier behind the glass wall that separates us both physically and spiritually from one another listens attentively – I’m sure she’s just seen me muttering to the lovely Sarah something about how pointless it is exchanging such a small amount of currency, but our house is reaching breaking point in terms of how much discarded currency you can leave dotted around the place. Personally I think it’s something to do with my schooling – it appears my friend from school has been ‘outed’ for doing the same thing.

Personally I hold out little hope for any of this. I won’t tell you which bank I’m with, but if you belong to a bank which seems to have an unhealthy obsession with making you use automated cash dispensers, automated cash depositers, cheque depositers, and automated- pretty much anything – then it’s that one. Seriously, it’s got the point now where I either have to pick a small village branch reachable only by donkey and sherpa guide if I want to talk to a human, or else I’ll have to employ an actor to distract the member of staff they post at the door to prevent anyone getting further than 12 feet into the building without being led to a machine.

“One, two, three, four, five… [pause] six. So that’s six pounds, yes?”. To be honest, I was so distracted by the unnatural pause in between ‘five’ and ‘six’ that the stupidity of her asking me to confirm that I’d given her six Jersey pound notes when she had clearly just counted them in front of me slipped under the net.

“Yes. That’s right. Six” I reply, in a manner slightly reminiscent of when I was a small child and went to the Woolwich to open my Henry’s Cat savings account with a few pieces of carefully-counted change. I’d chosen that bank because I liked the little picture on the account info and card – a practice which I still use in my financial decision-making today.

“Great. Here you go.” says the cashier, throwing 3 £2 coins into that little plactic trough they put under the bullet-proof glass screens which are clearly designed to thwart all bank robbers except those with banana-shaped guns. There’s definitely a weakness in the chain there.

“That’s the easy bit. The Euro’s will be a bit more difficult” she says, ominously.

I’d only brought back ten Euros. The task of withdrawing cash from my account in Euros had been so long-winded and traumatic I’d made sure I’d got my money’s worth by spending as much of it as possible. I remembered the cashier had explained at length how he’d got his David Dickinson tan on holiday, and how he’d only come back to work that day and had forgotten all of his passwords to allow him to do his important banking stuff on the computer. And I remember thinking how it was 2pm in the afternoon, and what exactly had this chap been doing all morning.

There was a pause as the cashier tapped frantically on the computer. In my head was an image of monkeys tapping away at computers as my mind tried to calculate how many monkeys you’d need before the opening lines of Far from the Madding Crowd emerged.

The cashier reached for her spectacles case, which was odd as she was already wearing her glasses. She unfolded a much-used scrap of paper with a single word written on it, and carefully and purposefully tapped it into the computer before folding it up again and putting it back in the case.

I was wondering if that was the official bank advice on pin-number security as she said, “So, that’s ten Euros”.

“Yes, a ten Euro note”, I replied biting my lip, crossing my toes and clenching both my left and right buttocks to prevent myself from laughing out load.I stared at the floor to avoid catching Sarah’s eye.

By now a long queue had formed behind me at the little rope thing that institutions place to mark out lines that shouldn’t be crossed with such efficiency that military checkpoints across the world can only look on in awe at their success. I thought momentarily about apologising to those waiting, but they had a look on their face that suggested they were expecting such inefficiency from many earlier experiences.

There was some more tapping, then she got up and left the cubicle. Yes, left the cubicle. I was now standing at AN EMPTY cashier with a queue of people behind me. She returned after what felt like an eternity clutching a hand full of print-outs.

She signed one, and paper-clipped my ten euro note to it. She then carefully folded it exactly in half and placed it to one side like she was disarming a bomb. “Can you sign here please?”. Normally I would carefully read an A4 piece of paper covered in officially Times New Roman text from a bank before signing it, but I hastily scribbled my signature as best as I could using a cheap biro attached to a small ledge with only 1 inch of chain and handed it back.

She then carefully counted out my money. “So, that’s five, then six, seven, fifty, seventy, five… [another long pause] …seven”.

Seven pounds and seventy-seven pence. Eight whole minutes of my life for £7.77. Four people held up in a queue in the bank for £7.77. By the time you factor in all of this, plus the cashier’s wages, the lighting, the electricity and broadband for the computer, the cost of the paperclip and the small rainforest felled for the paperwork, this was surely not worth £7.77.

£7.77

“Is there anything else I can do for you today?”, the cashier asked with a youthful enthusiasm that betrayed her maturity. I seriously doubted it would be and advisable or worthwhile endeavor.

Eastbound and Down

East bound and down, loaded up and truckin’,
we’re gonna do what they say can’t be done.
We’ve got a long way to go and a short time to get there.
I’m east bound, just watch ol’ “Bandit” run.

Today marked the passing of Jerry Reed. Although perhaps little-known in this country, he was a giant of the US Country scene (bear with me, usual service will resume shortly).

Many hours of my youth were spent watching Reed and Burt Reynolds in the Smokey and The Bandit franchise, and although I’m somewhat shy to admit it I know more words to Reeds songs than many would admit to.

I often write about how they don’t make musicians like they used to, and Jerry Reed was no exception – when recording his comeback album Elvis arrived in Nashville to cover Reed’s Guitar Man and, struggling to recreate the right sound from Nashville’s finest session players, called Reed back from a fishing trip to play the guitar in a way only he could.

BBC Obituary.

Horsing Around

We all like singing horses, don’t we?

A guaranteed way to use up 5 spare minutes – create your own horse-quartet!

http://svt.se/hogafflahage/hogafflaHage_site/Kor/hestekor.swf

The Olympics: Some sports I wish had been / were still included – Part 3

Ballooning: Demonstrated 1900

I’d love to see this still going today. Imagine the commentary. Imagine the amount of air-time needed to show the event. And then think about the poor chap who’d have to pixelate all of the advertising logos and phrases on each and every balloon.

This was introduced at the 1900 Paris Olympics, which also saw the only involvment of Golf. What a fast-paced affair that year must have been…

The Olympics: Some sports I wish had been / were still included – Part 2

Water Motorsports – 1908

This event had two outings. It was first demonstrated at the 1900 Olympics in Paris – a city famed for its port (!), this was an official event in the 1908 London Olympics. I’ll leave you with the Wikipedia version of events:

All three events used the same distance, five laps around an 8 nautical mile course for a total of 40 nautical miles (70 km). In each of the events, multiple boats started but only one finished, due primarily to the gale that was blowing during the course of the competition.

I couldn’t make this up.