down by the river....

C. and I went out for a lovely walk up on the moors around Winster in the Peak District on Sunday. It had been pouring with rain when I first woke up, but we decided we would go anyway and, as luck would have it, the weather cleared up nicely around lunchtime. We had originally planned a pub lunch in one of those proper Free Houses that seem to abound in the Peaks, but we were running a little later than planned and decided to just grab something in one of the towns we passed through en-route to the starting point of the walk.

Ripley is a dump, so obviously we weren't going to stop there, and we didn't want to take a chance on there being anything much available in the village of Winster itself, so we stopped in Matlock Bath. This is a small town nestled next to the river in the Derwent valley, with the main street tracking alongside the river as it passes through. It's pleasant enough country, and quite pretty to look at, I suppose, but as we drove into the town itself, I was a little taken aback by what I saw there.

Bearing in mind that we are right, slap-bang in the middle of the country, I was a touch surprised to find that Matlock Bath appears to be rather bizarrely modelled on the classic British seaside town. It's like a mini-Blackpool and the high street is absolutely jam-packed with fish and chip shops (there are at least ten of them over a 400m long strip), amusement arcades, sweet shops selling ice cream, candy floss and rock....hell, they even have some illuminations and make a real thing during 'the season' of having a 'Venetian' parade of boats (which seems all the more remarkable given that the river Derwent at this point is -at most- about 10m wide and is shallow enough that you can see the bottom throughout).

I couldn't help but wonder how this had happened to this little town in Derbyshire, so I looked it up. For much of the late Seventeenth and early Eighteenth centuries, it was customary for members of the aristocracy to spend their summers on a Grand Tour of Europe's great cities. As the political situation in Europe worsened and it became unsafe to travel, it became fashionable to visit attractions within England. Warm springs had been discovered in Matlock Bath in 1698, and they gradually became more and more popular as a destination until they were finally given the ultimate seal of approval by a visit from Queen Victoria in 1831. Lord Byron was apparently so taken with them that he compared the town favourably with Switzerland, leading to the nickname "Little Switzerland". Well, the chocolate may be more Cadbury's than Lindt, but I bet you can't get a really good bit of battered cod with proper malt vinegar in Geneva either....

I think it's fair to say that the clientèle has changed a little since then: not to put too fine a point on it, when we passed through yesterday, the streets were crammed with the kind of people who looked like they might like to holiday in Blackpool with a knotted handkerchief or a 'Kiss Me Quick' hat on their heads. Even as they took in the rarified Derbyshire air in their flammable man-made fabrics, more often than not these people were simultaneously sucking the life out of a cigarette and then exhaling a cloud of smoke all over the infant they held in their arms. I know that sounds snobby, and I'm sure many of them were very nice (the guys in the chippie we went into were incredibly helpful and friendly, for starters) but I'm just saying what I saw yesterday. The famous hot springs that started it all, incidentally have long since been turned into an aquarium and the town has taken its maritime pretensions to the logical extreme by having a lighthouse built.... only in this instance it doesn't so much save mariners from crashing into the rocks as supply southern fried chicken to passers by.

Honestly, it was thoroughly bizarre.

Winster, on the other hand, was a lovely village. Not only is it fantastically situated with a view across the peaks and onto some open moorland, but it was also blessed with cluster of really lovely old stone cottages and - the jewel in the crown - a proper pub. "The Bowling Green" is a free house that serves proper beer sourced from within a 25 mile radius of the pub and serves home-cooked food sourced from local shops. Sadly, I was only stopping for a quick pint before heading home, but it was a lovely pub and I will definitely be returning to have a meal by the fire and sheltered behind those three foot thick brick walls.

I'll maybe look to miss the morris dancing though.

back at the house a bottle is found....

Right. Well this little problem has been nagging away at me now for more than a month, so I'm going to admit defeat and throw it open to the floor. Maybe you can help me.

When we were in Austria a few weeks ago, we paid a visit to the Ottakringer brewery shop. It so happened that we were in the neighbourhood where Vienna's most famous beer was made, so we decided to have a quick look see. Amongst the many different varieties of beer, they had a few bits of merchandise. Amongst all of the t-shirts, fleeces, tea trays, umbrellas and the like, I spotted a key ring. I did need a new one, and it seemed pretty cheap - so I bought it.



But here's the thing, it appears to have three functions. The first two I can work out for myself without any great difficulty.

-> thing to attach keys to to make them harder to lose

-> handy bottle opener

Great. Those two things were the main reason I bought it.

But what's the other bit for? That bit on the top, just above the hooked bit, where a little groove has been cut into the metal. It is clearly there by design, but I'm blowed if I can work out what it has been designed to do.

Peter and I studied it closely over a Wurst and a beer at a street stand later on that same afternoon. Perhaps it was for opening cans?

We tried it.

Nope. Useless.

Perhaps for removing the foil from bottles of wine?

Nah. Too blunt and not exactly fit for purpose.

Opening letters?

Why the hell would you attach that to a key ring? Couldn't you just use a key?

I wouldn't say that this was occupying a whole lot of brain space, but it has been gnawing away at me for weeks.

What the bloody hell could it be for?

Any suggestions?

death sanitised through credit....

A little over twenty-five years ago, I opened up my first bank account. Naturally, I opened that account with the same bank that my parents used, and I became a "Griffin Saver" with the Midland Bank. As a sweetener for the deal, the bank gave me a rather natty little bag and a small dictionary. I'm not sure that this account ever handled anything more than the odd bit of birthday money, but I think that the bank more than recouped their investment as I have never quite got around to moving my bank account since. Oh sure, I'm not a Griffin Saver any more. When I was 13 years old I was automatically shifted into a "Live Cash" account, and then a few years later, when I was a student, they moved me on again into something called an "Orchard" account. I moved my account holding branch a couple of times, first from Milton Keynes to the branch on the University of Warwick campus, and then from there to the branch on High Street in York. That second move was a bit of a hassle, so I've never bothered to move it since. At some point the Midland Bank became HSBC, but apart from issuing me with a different cheque book, it's all been much of a muchness.... except of course that account now handles a bit more money.

I've got other bank accounts now, of course. I've got a savings account, a cash ISA, some assorted building society accounts and investments, a joint account with my wife... that kind of stuff.... but essentially the account that used to hold my pocket money is now the same account that receives my salary every month, and it's the account I use on a day-to-day basis. HSBC have always kind of abstractly annoyed me (why advertise yourself as the world's local bank if you then charge me for taking money out of an HSBC branch in any other country but Britain? How exactly is your international presence helping me?) The interest rates are derisory and the service pretty poor and I keep meaning to move... I really do...but I never quite get around to it. It's clearly less hassle to stay put than to move.

Until, that is, the bank lost my mortgage payment.

With the help and sage guidance of LB, we shifted our mortgage in January into one of those offset things. This meant that I now needed to set up a standing order payment from my current account so that it now went into a savings account offset against the mortgage. Fair enough. I set that up so that the first payment would go out on 8th February. I did this over the internet, as usual, and once it was set up, I didn't give it a second thought.

A couple of weeks after the first payment was supposed to have been made, C. started chasing me to set up the mortgage payment as it hadn't arrived in the account. I checked my current account, and was a little dismayed to see that the payment had certainly been deducted from my account on time...... but clearly hadn't arrived. And so began the dismal process of trying to find out where my money had gone.

The HSBC call centre is in India. Now, I have absolutely no problem at all with call centres that are based in India or indeed anywhere else outside of the UK (and in fact, I find the adverts for banks in this country - I'm looking at you NatWest - that make snide, racist remarks about foreign call centres to be insulting. There are crap call centres in the UK too, you know). What I do have a problem with is call centres that are utterly unable or unwilling to help the poor customers who ring through needing some help or guidance. For about a month, all I could get out of the HSBC call centre was the news that they could confirm, in fact, that the money had left my account. This much I knew. What they could not or would not confirm for me was where exactly this money had gone. I received no fewer than two letters confirming the departure of this money from my account on the 8th February. The letters were identical in every respect, except for the small detail that they each listed a different destination account. Now, in my books, as soon as a bank confirms that the same payment has gone to two different places, THEY LOSE. Not according to the bank. Both destination accounts belonged to me (one was the mortgage account that I had originally set up to receive the money and the other was the offset savings account attached to the mortgage account), neither account had received the money. HSBC didn't seem to care, all they cared about was that the money had left my account. They didn't care where it had gone, and they cared even less about what I thought about that.

I waved the banking code at them, telling them that it was the responsibility of the sending bank to account for the money, but it made no difference. I was given some vague assurances that they would put a trace on the transfer, but I was rather afraid that all this would mean would be a third letter telling me that the money had left my current account. In the end, I rang them up to complain. It's another option off those endless telephone systems, and this time I pressed it. It sent my call to the same place, and I dealt with a person. She was clearly working in the same department as everyone else, she was equally unable to help and, crucially, she told me that I couldn't actually complain.

"What do you mean I can't complain? Why not?"
"Because we're investigating the payment at the moment."
"And I can't complain until that's complete?"
"No. You can't complain until that process has finished."
"But I want to complain about everything that's happened up to this point"
"You can't"
".....!"

It turned out that I could actually pop into a branch and complain if I really wanted.

So I did.

I spoke to the manager of my local branch here. It didn't really help: she was actually a little bit terse with me, and although she logged my grievances again, when I asked her if that meant my complaint was now in the system, she said,

"Oh, we don't like to call them complaints."

What? Like a train isn't late until it's more than an hour late, a complaint isn't a complaint until a certain amount of time has passed or a certain amount of money has been lost?

"Ah, but standing order payments aren't like Direct Debit payments. They don't have the same kind of guarantees from the bank once you set them up."
"So even if I set up a payment and enter all of the correct bank account information, if the money gets lost, it's not your fault?"
"That's right. We've got a customer who lost £20,000 like that!"

Is that supposed to be of comfort to me? I'm sure she's wrong too. Surely it's not true that the bank has no responsibility for my money under those circumstances?

Anyway. C. had actually discovered where the money had got to by this point - the bank had managed to transfer it to our joint account. I decided not to tell HSBC, but to see if they found the money on their own.

I got another call a few days later. They were now able to tell me that the money had gone to the joint account. Apparently this was obvious from my account records, although not so obvious that any of their employees had thought to mention it to me at any point.
"You must have entered those account details when you set up the payment"
"Well, I didn't."
"You must have."
"Alright, if I did, then how come you sent me a letter confirming you'd made the payment to my mortgage account? You can only have known about that account if I'd entered the details on a standing order."
"You must have mentioned it on a phone call to us"
"I didn't"
"You must have."
"Do you have call records?"
"Yes."
"I want you to dig up the record of the call where I gave you those bank details."
"We can do that."
"And I also want to know why it's taken you two months to tell me where this money has gone, only for you now to tell me that it's as clear as day on my records that I entered the details of my joint account."
"We're sorry for the inconvenience. We may be able to give you £20 of compensation for that"
"Good. You do that."

...and so on.

HSBC simply will not admit that they got things wrong. I suppose the most important thing here is that I have found the money, but it has taught me several crucial lessons about HSBC: that they do not care about me as a customer; that they did not care where my money had gone, only that they had paid it out of my current account; that they will not admit fault; that they do not equip their call centre staff to help customers who ring them asking for anything more complicated than a balance; that I really need to change banks.

It's taken me 25 years, but I've finally got over the inertia that has seen me keep my main bank account with HSBC. As soon as I get my compensation from them, I'm closing my account and taking all my business somewhere else. C. has already done the same (and let's face it, her business is worth a lot more than mine). Fuck them.

If it helps, I'll return the dictionary too.

Wankers.

The morale of this story? DON'T BANK WITH HSBC.

D'you hear me google? HSBC ARE INCOMPETENT. HSBC HATE CUSTOMERS.

End of rant. It's a long and boring story, I know, but if it's any consolation to those of you who have made it this far.... I feel a little bit better now.

we only want to get drunk....

The cold that I've been enduring for the last week or two has had one slightly unexpected side-effect: I've stopped drinking. It's not that I don't want to drink, it's just that when I'm busy coughing and spluttering, a nice cup of tea is much more soothing than a pint of beer or a glass of wine.

I’m not a massive drinker by any stretch of the imagination, but I do like to have a drink and NOT drinking has made me realise quite how much it is embedded into my routine. It’s absolutely normal for me to have a glass of beer or wine – perhaps two – almost every night of the week. It’s just something that I do when I have my dinner. I generally won’t have more than one or two beers, and I’m not one of those people who finds it impossible to leave an open bottle of wine overnight, but I do like to drink and having an alcoholic drink with my dinner seems like the most natural thing in the world. I’m not really the binge drinker that I was in my youth either, but come a Friday or Saturday night, I think nothing of going out with friends and catching up with them over a drink. It’s always over a drink though, and I think the drinking I do with my friends is actually an integral part of the catching up. We go out and we drink steadily and talk nonsense until we go home. It’s now pretty rare – the odd night out on the cider excepted -- that I will get completely bladdered, but on nights like that, it’s probably not unusual that I will drink my weeks allowance of alcohol on a single night. This (mild) abuse of alcohol is an important part of my life.

I mention this as there has been some talk here recently about how alcohol consumption has been steadily rising thanks (apparently) to a combination of cheap and readily available booze and the extended licensing laws. Alcohol consumption has been rising steadily for the past 15 years, with figures suggesting a third of men and a fifth of women drink more than the recommended levels each week. Naturally, this is leading to all sorts of problems, ranging from an increase in the number of alcohol-related deaths (which have doubled since 1991), all the way though to drunken kids happy-slapping their way around our no-go area city centres, pissing on the streets and generally making a nuisance of themselves. Now clearly, I’ve not happy slapped anyone in my life and I don’t drink alcopops, but in some ways I don’t think that my attitude to alcohol is really a million miles away from those kids. I don’t call myself a heavy drinker by any means, but can I honestly say, hand on heart, that I give alcohol the respect it deserves? Do I consume in moderation and with caution? Do I think about the effect it has on my body and the effect my intoxication might have on other people? Not all the time. My hangovers seem to be getting worse as I get older, but they’re still an awfully long way from putting me off drinking for a great deal more than the time it takes my stomach and head to settle. It’s one of life’s little pleasures, and I’m not giving it up easily. Drink driving is something that is ingrained into my generation as being something that you just don’t do, but how many times have you woken up on a work day feeling a bit wonky and still driven to work? Serious alcohol abuse is clearly no laughing matter, nor is drink driving, but what is it about the British that allows us to take alcohol so lightly? In most other countries in Europe, people are apparently able to go out and socialise with their friends without feeling the need to have more than a couple of glasses of wine, or perhaps nothing at all. Do that in Britain and you are generally considered to be committing something of a social faux-pas. Here, it’s pretty much drink on drink on drink. We buy drinks in rounds, for heaven’s sake. That’s pretty much a commitment to have as many drinks as there are people in your party, and it also means that drinks will keep coming without you needing to even leave your seat. That’s a pragmatic way of making sure you get as much booze down your throat in as quick and efficient a way as possible.

Is this drinking culture all Tesco’s fault for selling cheap booze? I doubt it. I imagine it was here long before Tescos. Has putting the price of tobacco up made many people stop smoking? Nope. The simple answer is that alcohol is a drug and as a nation we seem to get an awful lot of pleasure from abusing it.

My own personal abuse preferences? Well, I generally like to have a nice pint or two of proper English beer: a Broadside or a Tanglefoot or something like that. On a hot day, I like a nice, cold glass of lager. A proper brewed continental lager by preference (Leffe, for example), but anything will do at a pinch. On a drinking session? Well, all sorts probably, but in the main I’ll settle on lager as it’s cold, relatively consistent in quality and pretty easy to drink. Over a meal? A nice glass of heavy red wine is best, but I am increasingly developing a taste for the zingy Sancerre or Sauvignon-Blanc type whites. I’m not a huge spirits drinker, but I do like a good malt – a peaty Islay malt ideally, but anything with a bit of bite. I’ve also discovered bourbons and I am a hearty advocate of Elijah Craig.

One for the road? Go on then, why not? What harm can it do? I’ll have a double.

and we're spinning with the stars above...

This ain't a scene.....The Crusaders: the original emo army.

I watched "The Kingdom of Heaven" on the telly last night, and although I didn't think it was really all that good, it made me feel slightly nostalgic for a couple of reasons. Although this was, strictly speaking, a little outside the dates of my area of expertise in the later middle ages, I got quite a kick from watching a dramatic retelling of some of the most momentous events in the early medieval period. You know, seeing knights running around and that kind of thing. Of course, like any serious historian, I'm not really a fan of historical reconstructions per-se, and I imagine that Ridley Scott himself would be amongst the first to tell you that this film isn't exactly the most accurate representation of the events around the siege of Jerusalem, but I did enjoy that sense of escapism back into a time where people's values and priorities were so different to the ones that we know today.

Yes, of course the film uses the historical setting to convey an oh-so-subtle and topical message about the futility and stupidity of waging a war over religion, and how Islam and Christianity aren't really so very different after all and why can't we all just get along.... but I liked being allowed to imagine myself for a couple of hours in a world where religion really was important in almost everyone's life, from most exalted king to lowliest peasant - so important, in fact, that they were prepared to leave everything behind and go to war in a desert, thousands of miles from home. Of course, the kings and nobles involved in this were probably also driven by other, more earthly motives, but piety would undoubtedly have been present even there, and don't forget that the First Crusade to the Holy Land - the "People's Crusade" - was made up mainly of peasants, women and children, and not the well-drilled Christian soldiers of popular legend.

I’m not religious at all, and I’m well aware of the balance sheet of atrocities that have been committed in the name of various Gods over the centuries. Even so, I am fascinated and sometimes moved by the sheer scale of this devotion. I am consistently awed by religious monumental architecture – cathedrals, mosques, temples and the like. I don’t believe in their Gods, but I still find the buildings themselves to possess an undeniable aura of calm and reverence. A big, Hollwood blockbuster like "Kingdom of Heaven" may not be the best place to seek an accurate reconstruction of events, but it was enough to prickle the historian lying dormant within me and to get me thinking about the original participants on both sides and to wonder about their motivations for spilling blood over Jerusalem.

The other reason that the film made me feel slightly nostalgic was because of the setting. At one point when our hero Balian is standing atop the battlements at Jerusalem and scanning the horizon, we get a clear view on the horizon of a line of snow-capped mountains. Now, I'm not an expert on the geography of the Holy Land, but it seemed fairly unlikely to me that this was a view you would normally expect to see from Jerusalem.... but it most certainly was a view of the High Atlas mountains in Morocco from just north of the Sahara desert. I know this because it is a view that I myself saw in early 2001 when we were travelling from Marrakesh through to Zagora before the start of our trek in the desert. It is a very barren landscape with a startling contrast provided by the Draa Valley, where the desert is cut by a river with a strip of vibrant green foliage for about 100 yards on either side. This is the site of the town of Ouarzazate, which is home to the film studios where Hollywood film most of their desert scenes: Lawrence of Arabia, The Jewel of the Nile, The Mummy, Gladiator, and ....of course... The Kingdom of Heaven. Now that was a fantastic holiday and Morrocco is a beautiful country with wonderfully friendly people. I'm sure Israel is a beautiful country with much to recommend it too, not least Jerusalem itself, but I'm equally sure that it's not somewhere that I want to be visiting in the near future. This is in part due to the instability in the region, partly due to the difficulty having an Israeli stamp in your passport can give you in visiting some arab countries... but mainly it's because I'm pretty certain that I don't want to be giving the Israeli state the kind of validation that spending my tourist dollars might give them.

Mind you, with that kind of thinking, I should probably be boycotting Britain too.

---

Incidentally, the Pollstar is travelling around the Middle East as we speak, and having passed through Turkey and Syria is just making his way into Jordan and, being an Indiana Jones geek (like all right thinking people), is getting very excited about seeing Petra.....

it was acceptable at the time.....

I had my annual phonecall yesterday evening from my old University. They wanted money, of course. In spite of being one of the richest educational institutions in the UK, they're not above trying to make me feel all nostalgic about my student days to tap me up for some money.

Having gone to a boarding school, it wasn't the first time I'd been away from home for any length of time, and so university was never really all that big a deal for me. As a result, I'm perhaps not as sentimental about my time there as I might be, and I'm not the kind of person who plans his life around the next reunion. Perhaps the university knows this. Their trick to get my attention is to get a current student on my old course to ring me up. They still want my money, of course, but they get to wrap it all up in a nice conversation about old times.

Although I have absolutely zero intention of giving any money, I always feel for the student in this situation. They are presumably doing this primarily because they need a job to help pay their way through University. They haven't volunteered to talk to old graduates out of the kindness of their hearts, they are doing it because they are paid to do it. I get no thrill at all from being rude to people at the best of times, and I'm certainly not about to get on my high horse about the begging policies of a stinking rich University to some poor kid trying to raise a bit of beer money. Instead, the student will enquire politely about my time at the University, and I'll politely respond.

The best part of my undergraduate course was the term that I got to spend studying the Renaissance out in Venice, and the student who called me last night was particularly interested in finding out about that: where I lived, whether I had to speak much Italian, how hard the coursework was... that kind of thing. We also talked about tutors (she has the same one that I used to have), how the union had changed (they're knocking it down to build a new one over the summer, apparently) and the merits of living in Leamington over living in Coventry. Small talk really, and in its own way it was perfectly pleasant. I made it clear right from the start that I wasn't going to be committing to a donation on the phone, and she didn't push it too hard. We got on fine.

The thing is though, every time I found myself being drawn out of my reluctance to talk in any depth about my time at University, I remembered that I was talking to a kid. I don't mean that in a derogatory sense, it's just that she was in the second term of her first year. This means that she is probably little more than 18 years old and was likely born around 1989. I graduated from that University some 13 years ago, and in 1989 I was sitting my first GCSE. In other words, I'm nearly twice her age and I'm more or less old enough to be her father. She was politely interested in what I was saying, but to her, I must have seemed absolutely antique.

Bless her for trying, but my God it made me feel old.

love for sale....

One of the unexpected benefits of the oncoming Valentine's Day onslaught is that the quality of my spam folder has soared.

It's brilliant, and I simply have to take my hat off to the spammers for the sheer sparkling wit and creativity of their prose. Here's a random sample - just from the last couple of days. Check it out:

"Unleash that watering hose in your pants. Be the King of the bedroom with your new sceptre." (Sceptre? I like that.... Watering hose? Less so.)

"Your enlarged package will satisfy her to no end" (to no end? eh? where's the fun in that? I can do that already...)

"It's going to be a bumpy night, tell her to buckle down for the ride of her life. Your tool can only get BIGGER" (wow- that's motivational)

"Don't let women laugh at your tiny tool. Enough is enough." (tiny tool? is that supposed to be motivational?)

"No longer want to be shy about your item?" (do these people know me?)

"It's time to bring your good willy hunting" (I see what they did there...)

"Become Mr. Big. Pop this twice a day to increase your lenght and girth considerably. if your lady tells you that size is of no importance, she is lying to you. studies clearly show that the intimate life of couples whose man has a smaller one is a lot less active than their counterparts who have big sizes. So think about it again." (Hmmm. think about it!)

"Your instrument will bring great joy to ladies" (Ah, fortune cookie copywriting!)

"Big male instrument is your wealth" (and again!)

I could go on, but I'll leave you with my absolute favourite:

"A couple of inches never hurt anyone"

This is advertising like it ought to be. Ladies! Thinking of a gift for your other half on February 14th.....? Look no further! Just dive into your spam folder and follow those links, those naughty little doorways to happiness and fulfillment.....

I have to tell you: I'm almost tempted.

That stuff is wasted in the spam folder.