I'll see you in Hell, Pachelbel

It's shamefully lackadaisical to publish a post consisting of nothing more than a couple of YouTube links, but one of these little films is charming and the other is funny. Millions have seen them; I recommend them to anyone who hasn't.

Some may find the Thai commercial for Pantene a touch trite and mawkish but it is unquestionably a stylish piece of film-making. If you feel ashamed of having enjoyed such a thing, see a different take on the music.

Uncle Stephen reassures us

In a current TV commercial for a car insurance company we hear the warm, avuncular voice of cuddly old Stephen Fry telling us: "...we're not on any price comparison websites, oh crumbs no...".

Is it excessive cynicism or just common sense that makes us wonder what reasons the company could possibly have for this abstention, other than their fear that comparison would not favour them?

Reply paid

Not much junk comes through the letter-box nowadays and it's no great chore to transfer it from the doormat into the paper recycling box. One item, however, I like to take a little more trouble with, and that is the business reply envelope which is often enclosed. This might be to send back your entry form and a cheque for £10 for a chance to win AUD$4,000,000 in Australian Lotto, or there might be two envelopes from Readers Digest, one for your answer saying "NO, I do not want to win £250,000 pounds but I would like a chance to win a rubbishy book about nutrition" and the other for "YES, I could make good use of £250,000 or £50,000 each year for life".

It is the work of a moment to cram these with as much waste material as they will hold: BNP leaflets, flyers from the local pizza joint, or those cardboard tubes you find at the centre of toilet rolls (from which, if the story is to be believed, you can build a glider which will get you out of Colditz Castle).

Then you just post them. This achieves two things: first, it brings a little additional revenue to our beleaguered Post Office—27.5p for each inland envelope, apparently, or 52p for the overseas ones—and second, the people who sent you the circular will be the poorer by that amount.

If a substantial proportion of the millions of addressees carried out this simple procedure, perhaps it would give pause to the senders of this rubbish.

So this is a practice to be commended; please tell all your friends.

New workshop for top judicial brass

Moving on, giggling, from reading about a man in Düsseldorf who tried to fix his air mattress using tyre repair solvent, causing an explosion which blew the wall of his apartment into the stairwell, I came to a news item describing the £56 million shed, formerly Middlesex Guildhall, which has been converted to house the new supreme court. Sounds pretty swish; the law lords, whom we have previously known and loved as "lords of appeal in ordinary" and must now call "justices of the supreme court", will have showers for use by those who cycle to work, state-of-the-art hand dryers in their loos, and some punchy words from the Magna Carta etched into the glass doors (of the courtroom, not the loos).

Well, bully for them. But how many of them are nervous, bearing in mind Parkinson's Law? Not the one about work expanding to fill the time available for its completion, but the one which states that the perfection of planned layout is achieved only by institutions on the point of collapse.

Parkinson based this on his observation of what happened to the Papal Monarchy at the height of its power: the really powerful popes had reigned long before St Peter's, the Basilica and the Vatican were built, and the later popes lost half their authority while the work was still in progress. The great days of the Papacy were over before the perfect setting was even planned.

Then again, the justly admired Palace of the Nations in Geneva, with its carefully planned secretariat and council chambers, committee rooms and cafeteria, was opened in 1937. It had been designed for the League of Nations, which had been seen to have failed by 1933 at the latest, and had practically ceased to exist by the time the Palace was ready to house it.

Or the Palace of Blenheim, built for the victorious Duke of Marlborough as the perfect place of retirement for a national hero. Sadly, it took a long time to build because the Duke was in disgrace, and even, for two years, in exile, and by the time it was finished he was dead.

It could be said that Buckingham Palace, the Palace of Westminster, the Palace of Versailles and Lutyens' New Delhi similarly commemorated the mighty institutions they were designed for rather than housing them. To find out why you will have to get a copy of C. Northcote Parkinson's book of essays. Mine cost 3/6d; yours may cost rather more.

Now hear this, serfs

More than four years ago Sainsbury's started calling their employees colleagues. This struck me as a bit soppy, and when I conducted a poll among the check-out girls I was not surprised to learn that only 14.29% of them (one out of my sample of seven) thought this was a good idea. Today, while I was in the store stocking up on comestibles and booze, I heard over the loudspeakers: "This is a Staff Announcement", so they have obviously gone back to the traditional appellation.

Clearly this decision must have been taken at the top level and one wonders what prompted it. Perhaps the suggestion was made by the newly appointed and ambitious Director of Corporate PR, and was rejected out of hand by the Head of HR (who back in 2005 had the silly idea of changing to colleagues ). After an hour or two of heated debate the matter was resolved only when the Marketing Director, who was in the chair, remembered that the HR man had opposed him over a proposal to allocate additional Head Office parking spaces to directors' wives, and came down in favour of reverting to staff.

It is unlikely that my poll had influenced the decision, but I was glad I had published a report on it because this led to some informative and wide-ranging comments on unrelated topics including the NHS, British Rail, Grandes Horizontales, Broadway brothels and the Dewey Decimal System.

Three weeks later: I have just learnt that they have now gone back to "colleagues". This is the kind of vacillation which has made us the laughing stock of the European retail trade. Just imagine what would have happened if our leaders had been as indecisive as this when we stood alone, defending civilisation against the barbarian hordes!

Attention all zamak mold users

419 scams aren't amusing any more. It is hard to believe that even now they sometimes work, but apparently there are still people who fall for them and are bitterly disappointed when their bank accounts not merely fail to increase by the $15 million languishing in The State Bank of Nigeria, of which they will keep 10%, but instead become unaccountably empty.

These are the foolish people who might equally well have handed over all their money to some organisation with a head office in Reykjavik, not realising that the excellent Vigdís Finnbogadóttir is no longer in charge up there and that her successors are not to be trusted with anything more than a couple of buckets of wet cod.

So it was a nice change to receive the other day an email from Wu Sha Industrial Zone, Changan Town, Dongguan City, Guangdong Province, China, which is unquestionably a genuine offer sent out by a reputable company with whom one could deal while having every confidence that they will do exactly as they promise. It is sad, therefore, that for reasons which will become obvious, I cannot take advantage of this opportunity. It is as follows:

How are you ? This is Lisa From New Orient Mold. Nice to know your esteem company from internet. We can figure out the potential business scope between our both parties.

I will be honored to inform you that we can reduce your product cost so that they should be more competitive in your market. We are a professional ISO9001 Mold Manufactory. Being specialized in the designing and producing all kinds of precision zamak mold /plastic injection molds and parts. We offer OEM and ODM service. Moreover, we use hot-runner molds from YUDO, DME, INCOE and etc.

We also have precision equipment such as CMM, projector, slow wire cutting machine etc. Our tools are mainly exported to Europe, USA and Mid-East areas with high quality in HASCO or DME standard in reasonable lead times. Plastic products also are exported to all over the world with high quality. If there is any project that we can assist you, please don't hesitate to send us for quoting. We will respond to you within 2 to 3 working days. Let us demonstrate our capability and service to you.

Your kind attention to New Orient Mould Company will be highly appreciated. We are looking forward to your favorable news.

Have a nice day
Lisa

These are clearly serious people; they don't mess about with old-fashioned cold-runner molds, or unreliable fast wire-cutting machines. But what makes it unlikely that this is an attempt at fraud are the details which are given; I mean, there would be no need to dream up all that stuff about HASCO and DME standards if you were simply intending to ask customers to send money in advance for non-existent goods; you would just offer 1,000 gross of giant teddy bears at a ridiculously low price. It is true that Lisa's chat-up line sounds a bit forced and there is a slightly unworldly feel about the whole thing, but if you were a professional ISO9001 Mold Manufactory in, say, Blandford Forum, and your sales letters in Cantonese were translated by the student son of the owners of your favourite takeaway, how convincing would they be?

No, the only major error is in the mailing list which identified me as a good prospect; perhaps it was flogged to them by the same unscrupulous Australian EFL teacher who did the translation.

You have a nice day too, Lisa, and all the lads in the Wu Sha Industrial Zone as well. I wish you every success in trying to break into the SE England market, and I am publishing your letter in full in case it catches the eye of someone who is in the right line of business and has urgent need of some high quality molds, or possibly moulds.

Global meltdown

The world panics, but not Le Monde, which has this:

The end of the greengrocer

Dr Tim Leunig, professor in economic history at LSE, tells us that the lucky ones among greengrocers forced out of trade by the supermarkets are those who own their stores and can sell them to the new kids on the block.

And who are the newcomers? According to the good professor, small independent shops are being replaced by "small independent aromatherapists, cosmetic surgeons, weight control clinics, makeup artists, reflexologists and sauna parlours."

So that's all right then, our High Streets are not dying as many had feared. You may have to drive out of town for apples or carrots, but right in the centre you can get nice smells and a new nose, or lose a couple of kilos, or have your lipstick applied and your feet massaged, or just work up a nice sweat.

Here it is again

If you put "Origami Bank" into Google, you will be offered 2,200 versions of the piece below, some of them dating back many months. I couldn’t be bothered to look through them all to see where it originated; it was passed to me by a renegade Englishman currently hiding in Spain.

After all the stress of being tricked about those green Belgian marchers earlier this week I was not inclined to overtire myself today by trying to think of something original to post, and anyway true originality is out of place in Other Men's Flowers, so here is the 2,201st appearance of the joke on the internet. Maybe there is someone out there who hasn’t seen it.

We all know that the knock-on effect of the US sub prime banking problems has stretched far afield; it is now devastating the banking industry in Japan.
In the last seven days the Origami Bank has folded, Sumo Bank has gone belly-up and Bonsai Bank is planning to cut many of its branches. Only yesterday Karaoke Bank was put up for sale and will probably go for a song.
Today shares in the Kamikaze Bank were suspended after they nose-dived, while investors at the Anime Bank were left wide-eyed. Analysts report that there is something fishy going on at the Sushi Bank and staff there fear that they may be in for a raw deal, after hearing that 500 clerks at the Karate Bank got the chop.

Buy one immediately

This sounds ingenious. But what's it for, and how does it work?

Two pairs of first and second legs compromised of angular members having top portions and lower ends, said first and second legs connected at top portions of first and second legs at joints, wherein the joints further comprise pivots, and further comprising spacers located at the pivots, said spacers spacing the first and second legs a predetermined distance apart from one another…

For a fuller description and an illustration, you will have to go here.

[Thanks to Martin G]

Two Canadians

As Runyon might have put it, Conrad Black is not such a guy as I am wishing to give the large hallo to. However, it is difficult to ascribe to him the same level of infamy as, say Robert Maxwell, partly because our feelings for investors on the New York Stock Exchange cannot compare with those which we had for the Daily Mirror pensioners. And that ridiculous cardinal's get-up was a splendid effort: one cannot imagine Maxwell ever making himself look quite so silly for our amusement.

But anyone who doubts that Black richly deserves his sentence—or possibly a stiffer one—has only to assess his character by looking at the unsavoury bunch he used to hang out with, which apparently included Princess Pushy, Henry “Peace Prize” Kissinger and The Iron Lady. With friends like that, he must surely be the kind of man who should get at least twenty years in the slammer.

It is refreshing to turn our thoughts to another flamboyant Canadian magnate, though sad to learn that ‘Honest Ed’ Mirvish has died this week. He was 92, suggesting that his recipe for a long life—Keep breathing—worked better for him than it does for most people. The store in Toronto which made him a multimillionaire followed the policy expressed in the title of Jack Cohen’s autobiography: Pile it high and sell it cheap. Tesco later changed their approach, but Mirvish never did. He opened Honest Ed’s Famous Bargain House with the slogan: Our building is a dump! Our service is rotten! Our fixtures are orange crates! But!! Our prices are the lowest in town! Serve yourself and save a lot of money! and the store carried on that way.

Ed is one of the few Canadians ever involved in English public life who is remembered here with admiring affection. He saved the Old Vic from an uncertain future when, in 1982, to the delight of many, he outbid the unattractive Andrew Lloyd Webber for it; he then poured huge sums of his own money into it for fifteen years until he could no longer support the theatre’s losses, and sold it to a trust.

His death had already featured in an advertisement for the Toronto store: “When Ed dies, he would like a catered funeral with accordion players and a buffet table, with a replica of ‘Honest Ed’ on it made of potato salad”.

Let us hope his wishes will be carried out to the letter and that everyone has a good time. Such an occasion would put to shame all the lavish parties on which Conrad Black spent millions of other people’s money.

Ed got a CBE, but Conrad got a peerage.

Hole in the wall

The idea of global electronic money was invented in 1968 by a junior bank manager called Mr Hock. Wisely, he didn’t give his name to the idea, but called it Visa International and sold it to the world.

The year before that, forty years ago this week, the world's first ATM had been installed in a branch of Barclays in Enfield, north London. Here is Mr Shepherd-Barron, now 82, who, while he was in the bath, had the idea of adapting a chocolate bar dispenser, but replacing chocolate with cash.

From BBC News:
Barclays was convinced immediately. Over a pink gin, the then chief executive signed a hurried contract with Mr Shepherd-Barron, who at the time worked for the printing firm De La Rue. Plastic cards had not been invented, so Mr Shepherd-Barron's machine used cheques that were impregnated with carbon 14, a mildly radioactive substance. The machine detected it, then matched the cheque against a Pin number. However, Mr Shepherd-Barron denies there were any health concerns: "I later worked out you would have to eat 136,000 such cheques for it to have any effect on you."

The machine paid out a maximum of £10 a time. "But that was regarded then as quite enough for a wild weekend," he says.

Mr Shepherd-Barron had come up with the idea of the PIN when he realised that he could remember his six-figure army number. But he decided to check that with his wife, Caroline. "Over the kitchen table, she said she could only remember four figures, so because of her, four figures became the world standard," he laughs.

A small plaque was placed on the site of the first machine on the 25th anniversary of its installation, but few people notice it. Given that there are now more than 1.6 million cash machines worldwide, it is a classic case of British modesty.

Drastic action by Xenu

When one imagines the sort of dangers that journalists in war zones face daily, it seems rather feeble of John Sweeney—who had at one time reported from Bosnia—to have a screaming fit merely because he was being shouted down by a nasty-looking Scientology spokesman and had been harassed and spied on by the organisation. However much contact with Scientologists may make your flesh creep, it’s not quite like having people with guns trying to kill you.

Of course we should all have some respect for the sincerely held beliefs of Tom Cruise, John Travolta and, according to the Church of Scientology, 120,000 people in this country, or at least make an effort to understand them before writing them off as inane drivel. So here is exactly what they believe; these are the astonishing facts revealed to the world by a science fiction writer called L Ron Hubbard in Phoenix, Arizona, in 1952:

75 million years ago an evil galactic war-lord called Xenu rounded up 13.5 trillion beings from an overpopulated corner of the galaxy, dumped them on volcanoes on Earth, then vaporised them with nuclear bombs. Their radioactive souls, or thetans, later attached themselves to human beings and are at the root of our personal and global problems today.

By whom these truths were revealed to Ron is not clear; I find it hard to see why Xenu himself would have confessed all in Phoenix, AZ, after waiting 75 million years, but then what do I know about the motivations of evil galactic warlords?

Anyway, there it is. If you want to know more about all this, further information is freely available from Scientology HQ. Well, perhaps not quite freely; I gather that fees may be payable if you are really curious.

What shall we sell?

It is a sound business axiom that an entrepreneur starting up a business must decide exactly what his aim is. In the retail trade this means identifying exactly what it is he wants to sell.

In an earlier post I described a silly shop whose owner had clearly failed to do this. Here, in a photo I took while on holiday in Pokhara years ago, is another example, though perhaps this business was not a total failure since we at least took advantage of all that was on offer, and others may also have had need of both items.

It may be that some similarly unlikely combinations of goods for sale are quite unplanned and merely indicate a hit-or-miss attitude, or possibly desperation, on the part of the vendor.

I once spent a day showing half a dozen Japanese visitors around the seaside town where I live; they were polite and appreciative, and interested in everything I told them, or at any rate pretended to be. They all clicked away happily the whole time, and one of them had a motorised camera with which he took thirty or so identical photos of a featureless and deserted stretch of shingle. As the day wore on I started to go out of my mind with boredom as we visited an exhibition of hand-made quilts at a church hall and walked about on the wind-swept pier.

We had done the Old Town and were strolling along a slightly decayed shopping street when we came across a shop, obviously on the point of going out of business, which displayed in its window some rather battered second-hand furniture, mostly sideboards. On top of one of them, at the front, was a stack of eggs, in cartons, labelled “EGGS”, with the price.

The visitors gathered around, clearly intrigued, and I felt obliged to make a comment. “Aha!, I said, “now this is very interesting. This is what we call an Egg-and-Sideboard shop. We have many of them in this part of Sussex, it’s a traditional kind of thing”.

“Mmmm-aaah!” they said, and click-click went the cameras.

I don’t think I feel guilty about this. It only confirmed their belief that we are a strange race, and it is unlikely that they will ever find out that I lied to them.

Bright ideas

The admirable Martin Gardiner (not to be confused with the equally admirable Martin Gardner) maintains on his website for the delight of all of us a continuously updated review of “some of the most promising, interesting, and intriguing examples of the latest US patents”. He has been accused of spoofing, but, as he says, no-one could make up things like these—other than those who really did have the ideas and patented them, that is. Here is a small selection:

Leg-mounted mouse pad
Chin chain
Steerable roller skates
Cucumber sandwich
Boot lacing system
Breast enhancement device
Circular shirt
Garment for two people
Potato chip bag holder
Men’s underwear with adjustable support sling (illustrated above)
Fish breeding toy for cellular telephones
Internally illuminated knitting needle
Criminal arresting assembly
Beach blanket
Shelter for small animals and pets
Burial container

There seems to be a recurring theme which suggests that an easy way to come up with a patentable device is simply to cut a hole in something: the last three listed above, for example, consist of, respectively, a blanket with a hole in it, a box with a hole in it and a coffin with a hole in it.

All this is just as an introduction for those who have not yet sampled these joys. For Martin’s (often puzzled) comments, the filed illustrations and specifications, you need to go to Really Magazine.


[In an introduction, Martin had explained the basis on which US patent applications are assessed. It doesn’t seem too difficult to persuade American Patent Officers that they should protect your right to profit from some unlikely device you have invented, but their British equivalents are probably made of sterner stuff. Alan Coren described the weary cynicism with which they might have greeted John Logie Baird’s unsuccessful attempt to register his machine for sending pictures by radio:“What is it this time, Mr Baird? Raspberry death-ray? Thing for turning socks into honey?” ]

Can you or can’t you?

Bought a packet of duck legs confit the other day and found this note on the back. What on earth does it mean? That you could have frozen the stuff if the manufacturer hadn’t frozen it first, but now you mustn’t? That you can freeze it once, but not twice? Or merely that the night before the final copy was approved the whole Packaging Design Dept. (Chilled Foods Division) had been overdoing the Macedonian Merlot (5% off) at a party celebrating the engagement of Darren (Asst. Manager, Pack Warnings Team) to Sharon from Accounts?

I wasn’t much bothered because I didn’t want to freeze it anyway (we ate the legs that night: they weren’t particularly nice), but I was curious to know the answer so, as it’s a free number and I was having a quiet day, I telephoned the supermarket’s Careline.

Young Beverley was polite but couldn’t understand my question, let alone answer it. She was able to bring up a picture of the pack on her monitor but that didn’t really help either of us much; she thought it might be a new product (so what?) and couldn’t really see why I was telephoning her. After a bit of chat she said she would get someone to call me back.

No-one did so, and nearly a fortnight has passed. Not worth taking it further, I think, and I shall not name the supermarket since I do not want them to be upset about this; the poor lambs are just recovering from the the ordeal of fighting off a £10 billion bid from a private equity consortium, and we all know how that feels.

Plutocrat’s paper

The Sunday Times has long since ceased to be a serious newspaper and has been fighting OK! and Hello! for the position of house journal to the rich and famous, but although it has its quota of stories about mere celebrities, its real concern is with the very, very rich. It has a large staff producing an annual Rich List, with spin-offs, and every issue of the paper has some lip-smacking revelations about the lives of those who, they say, “make your average multi-millionaire feel like a church mouse”.

This sort of thing may have begun to pall on the not-quite-so-rich, or even on the not-rich-at-all, and the paper’s circulation has dropped by 10% in the last twelve months; it could be a sign of desperation that today’s issue provides an additional colour supplement which is essentially a paean to serious affluence and those who have it. It is called Power Play.

There is a little bit of perfunctory tut-tutting (“High-maintenance high-rollers are leaving the rest of us paupered”) but mostly this is an approving—even awed—look at the unimaginably wealthy:
"Six millionaires head for the stars… the unstoppable urge to give it away… preview of a playboy’s floating mansion… a remarkable snapshot of Britain’s young rich… want to beat gridlock? A helipad is the latest answer… philanthropy is rife among the rich… symbols of the lux life… people who have money now get the respect normally reserved for the aristocracy…" And so drivelling on, and on.

The circulation of the Sunday Times in February was 1,245,483, so it must have at least a million readers who, though not actually on the breadline, are unlikely ever to collect the possessions and participate in the activities so breathlessly described. To avoid the risk of the envy of these unfortunates turning to rancour, there are a few suggestions in the supplement that life is not always peachy up there: “Living with unfeasible wealth requires sacrifice… we feel guilty about having too much… status anxiety at the top…”

So that’s all right then: we can enjoy contemplating the dream while being thankful that our relative poverty protects us from at least some kinds of unhappiness.

The chance of a lifetime

Substitute Executive
Hello,
Would you like to make at least 1.5K to 3.5K daily just for returning calls? If you have a phone and can return calls you are fully qualified. Call us - 888-701-3877
Goodbye, Lloyd Jones

Gosh! At, say, twenty calls a day, that's $75 to $175 each time you answer the phone!

I was greatly taken with this proposal, which sounds quite legal and makes a nice change from the usual lengthy and ill-written requests for help in money-laundering. Its simple and direct approach is really appealing: in the middle range of the likely income, the job will, if accepted, bring you in around a million bucks a year.

I thought long and hard about it, but although returning calls doesn’t sound too onerous, and is certainly well within my capabilities, it seems likely that some of them might come in at an inconvenient time (such as when I am having my breakfast), and the admittedly generous rewards would not be worth the resultant stress. So in the end I decided not to offer my services, and to leave the opportunity to someone who needs the money more than I.

And our Gold Service demolishes your windscreen!

Here is an account of an incident. It is not very interesting but reading what the outcome was may be helpful to anyone who is involved in a similar situation.

Last month someone said to me: “I suppose you know your car's got no front number plate?”. I hadn't noticed, and when I went back to the carwash I had visited earlier that day I found the plate and its plinth lying on the ground. So I filled in a claim form and sent it off with this photograph.

I then had a standard letter from a heavy mob introducing themselves as the claims handlers for the car wash owners (a major oil company):
Please advise in writing why you are holding our client responsible. For you to succeed in a claim you need to show that [our client] failed to follow legal requirements imposed by legislation, or otherwise failed to do something it should have done, or did something it should not have done.
Without prejudice to liability, please forward two repair estimates in respect of your damage. We are currently making enquiries into this matter.

In reply to this drivel I merely wrote:
…I am holding your client responsible because their car wash tore off the number plate of my car…. The car was a standard model in excellent condition and there can be no reason for it to be damaged other than some fault in the car wash mechanism…. I enclose a repair estimate from the franchised dealer who normally services the car.

Their reply was brilliantly fatuous:
...enquiries do not reveal any liability on the part of [our client]. [Then, repeated, the paragraph about having to prove that their client failed to do something they should have or did something they shouldn’t have…]
We can confirm that there were no reports of any similar claims involving the car wash and no faults with the car wash have been found. In addition, we are able to confirm that 57 vehicles went through the car wash on the above date without incident….. we do not believe that the damage sustained to [sic] your vehicle is the result of a breach of legal duty. Therefore, we regret we cannot be of any financial assistance in this matter.

This was beginning to get more interesting, so I consulted m’learned friends. Their advice was that a judgement could go either way, but that it might be worthwhile to write another letter. So I replied:
I have taken legal advice, and it has been pointed out to me that
1. Your client, on the evidence of the photograph and the receipt which I forwarded to you, does not dispute that their carwash caused damage to my car which cost £107.42 to repair.
2. The fact that your client received no other claims for similar damage on that date or subsequently is irrelevant, as is the fact that no faults have been identified in the carwash machinery.
3. Your client has a duty to ensure that their carwash does not damage any standard model cars put through it. Clearly in this instance—which may or may not have been a unique occurrence—the machinery did cause damage, and a judge is likely to take the view that your client’s denial of liability is nugatory.
Therefore, unless I hear from you before the end of the month that your client has reconsidered the matter of compensation I shall institute proceedings to recover the full cost of the repair.

I was not optimistic, and the only reason I went to so much trouble was because I had waited for years for an opportunity of using the word “nugatory” (quite appropriate here, though it is also what they call factories in Montélimar).

It seemed a good idea to make clear that I was keen to make a substantial nuisance of myself, so my letters were on a heading describing me as Freelance Journalist (which I very nearly was in the fifties), and indicated that they were being copied to Mr Robert Gibbs-Williams of Messrs So-and-So (top City lawyers: I have no idea whether they employ him, or indeed whether he exists at all).

Just before the end of the month I was told, or rather advised, as lawyers say, that:
Our investigations have revealed that no other incidents of that nature have been reported [you’ve already told me that, you idiots]. However, as a gesture of goodwill we are arranging a cheque in the sum of £107.42 to be despatched to you…

So my advice to anyone who suffers a similar misfortune is: Never Give Up.

Cutting the crap

The excitement generated in us by what comes through our letterbox has reached an all-time low this week. In addition to the usual junk mail, we have had messages from the candidates of the three main political parties, plus the Greens, though nothing yet from the Official Monster Raving Loony Party or from the Provisional Loonies known as the UKIP.
Only one item really captured our interest. Unlike all the others it was not adding to the waste matter on our premises but offering to remove some.

This seems us to raise a number of questions:

• Calling cards? Such coyness! They might have chosen a snappier name, something like Turdaway Limited or, following the current trend in company names, why not Petpoo Solutions?
• What exactly is the meaning of the asterisk against the price referring to the note in small type at the bottom: Conditions may apply? Does this mean the price varies according to the condition of the item, wet or dry?
• Is the cost of £3.99 the total or per item, and
• Is there any limit to people’s ingenuity in devising ways to make a living?