Another London Bus Route Goes Non-Bendy
This picture shows one of the new buses on route 25 at Stratford.
A Proper Bus on Route 25
It replaced one of the dreaded Spanish-built bendies.
Note that the bus is a Wright Eclipse Gemini 2, built in Northern Ireland. Wrightbus is incidentally a family owned company. So hopefully not for them the problems of external shareholders, who want to paddle someone else’s canoe. The company is very much involved in developing the New Bus for London. We may worry about the demise of trainmaking, but do we have in Wrightbus a company that is going places in that much neglected and very unsexy part of transport; buses?
Santander Bring Their Call Centres Back To The UK
This story about Santander seems to be part of a trend, with more and more call centres returning to the UK. What surprises me is that Santander supposedly has 25,000,000 account holders in the UK and it is creating only hundreds and not thousands of jobs by moving the call centres back.
So just how often do we phone our banks? I have phoned my bank twice in the several years I’ve been with them and I’ve e-mailed once about a piece of trivia. I also have phoned a credit card company once, as the card was damaged and I needed a new one.
So judging by the times I’ve called them, I’m fairly typical.
So Santander moving their call centres back to the UK, may be a cynical marketing ploy to try to improve their bad customer service image. But it could really be just a way to reduce their call centre to the size required.
As with the Lloyds redundancies, it will be interesting to see what employee/turnover ratios for banks look like in a few years time.
My guess is that they’ll make huge profits with only a few employees. But on the other hand, people will be very satisfied with customer support, although they’ll probably still complain about getting loans. But then the sensible will borrow their money elsewhere.
Do Successful Women Have a House Husband?
A news item in the Sunday Times today is headed Top women need ‘him indoors’
It goes on to discuss how quite a few of the top women in the City have husbands who are at home.
I will not answer my question directly, but talk about my relationship of forty years with C. Or more particularly our careers.
For the first few years, we were very typical although, some would say that your early twenties are too young to have children. We had three before I was 25 and C was 24. I worked hard to get on and by that time I was starting my first business. I was working at least 24 hours a day, seven days a week and we were living in a fouuth floor walk up flat in St. John’s Wood. So if you have to live in crap housing make sure it’s in a good location. Just north of Regent’s Park can’t really be better.
When I sold my first business, we moved to the Barbican and C went to UCL to do a law degree, as Politics from Liverpool, where your tutor was Robert Kilroy-Silk, doesn’t really prepare you for the world of real work.
For the next fifteen years or so, I was part of the team creating Artemis, whilst C was getting her career together as a barrister. We were both working hard and I got the financial rewards when the company was sold. C meanwhile gained a reputation as one of East Anglia’s foremost family barristers.
When we moved to Newmarket to start the stud, we started to evolve a new way of working together. We still had our individual careers and interests, but I would spend more time on other things, as C was now very much the major wage owner. It allowed me to develop ideas, some of which worked and some didn’t. And then when she moved to Chambers in Cambridge, which was very much Internet based, I became much more of her support at home.
As we didn’t have young children anymore, I couldn’t be described as anything more than home support.
So in some ways we’d almost come full circle.
I suspect our model has not been untypical and I’d recommend it. As the major wage-earner changes over the years, does it really demean the man to be the one who oooks after the house, when his wife can earn three or four times he can.
But we also did a lot of things together.
Shopping for instance. Some of my friends are incredulous, that for most of our life together we did the general shopping together too. When we were in the Barbican, we’d push the children up to Chapel Market next to the Waitrose I now use. So life has now come full circle in more ways than one.
Clothes shopping was often together too. C was better at choosing clothes for me and in many cases the reverse was true. I remember the year she died being in Zara and C was looking at a sun dress on a hanger. She said that it was awful and I then picked it up, realising that it would be just her size and style. She bought it and wore it all the summer. Remember that I am a designer and also an unusual man, who was taught to make clothes by his mother.
If I have any regrets about our relationship, it was that I dodn’t do more cooking. I taught myself in a few days after she died and like doing it.
So I would suspect that although house-husband is too strong a word for it, most successful women and successful men for that matter have a strong partner at home, who can help or even take charge of the mundane and suggest other ways in the serious part of their career. As an example in the latter, I helped in a few of C’s cases, by using my knowledge and experience to improve her arguments and in some other cases, I have suggested ways of improving her returns from the work.
And then there’s the need for a cuddle and more, that we all need!
Living alone is not a choice we would make for ourselves.
AXA Takes The Moral Route
AXA has announced that it has decided not accept referral fees from personal injury lawyers.
This good stance may cost them a few millions, but how much extra business will this moral stance gain the company? After all, companies in retail like John Lewis, IKEA and Dixons in my experience lately, have used similar approaches. So why shouldn’t an insurance company attempt to make money by doing the right thing?
Let’s hope other companies do similar things! After all people have limited amounts of disposable income these days, so are they more likely to do businss with a company with a good ethical stance.
Would Any Sane Person Buy Into the Greek Privatisation?
Let’s say you are the CEO of a utility company, which has a good record of managing water supply in say, Britain, France or Germany.
If you were asked to participate in the buy-out of a Greek water company would you be interested? Given the feeling in Greece and the attitudes of the workers to the proposed privatisations to help bail the country out, I think you would probably say no, as you value your health and you don’t want to be fired by the shareholders of your company.
I suspect very few companies will actually get involved in providing the finance, unless the prices are so low. But then if that is the case, Greece will not be able to meet its debts.
So are we back to square one with the Greeks?
No! Square zero maybe or even square minus one!
On the other hand consultancy about the privatisations might be a nice wheeze! But who will pay you, if no-one will provide the finance.
Why Businesses Have a Cash Flow Problem
When I moved in here, I had a small problem and a local builder came round and fixed it. They did a good job and got me out of a hole.
Yesterday, six months later, I got a bill for the work. The only surprise was that it was probably about twenty pounds less than I had expected.
As I usualy do with bills that aren’t worth disputing, I decided to pay it immediately. I have given up on cheques and always pay bills by direct transfer. But there were no bank account details on the bill or even an e-mail address. So I had to ring them up to get the information I needed. And the phone was engaged.
I do think this is typical of many small businesses and is it any wonder they have a cash-flow problem!
I’ve Just Been Spammed By Pitney Bowes
I thought they were a respectable company, but an e-mail from them has just ended up in my spam trap.
So they’re now on my “Never do business with this company” list! It won’t make any difference to them, as far as I’m concerned as I use proper stamps anyway.
But when will these companies ever learn?
Why Are Loaves Square?
Apparently, we’ve now had the square sliced loaf for fifty years. In my years, that’s fifty years too many.
But have you ever wondered why Britain fell so much in love with this awful product? Here’s an e-mail, I’ve just written to the BBC.
In the 1970s, I did some work for a major bakery group in the UK. I dealt with top management, some of whom had been bakers. And very much of the old school, who knew their bread.
So I asked why we had so much bad sliced bread and did they eat it.
They didn’t eat it and to a man, they took a sack of flour home and then baked it themselves.
The reason there was so much square sliced bread was that van drivers in those days were paid by commission and they could get most commission by cramming that sort of bread in the van. So they wouldn’t distribute the better class of bread, which didn’t fit so well.
Another interesting fact from this period, was that a lot of bread got returned to the factory. Harold Wilson and his government felt this waste pushed up the price of bread, so they banned returns. Do you remember happy bread, which was a different colour for each day?
In fact, the non-return policy, meant that the price of bread rose, as the returned bread had a whole lot of uses like animal feed, which then became unprofitable. The returned bread just went into the waste bin at the shops and then probably into landfill.
All in all it’s a sad tale, which shows that often the reasons for things being the way they are, are not what you’d expect.
I’ve also just watched the BBC Breakfast report on 50 years of the awful sliced loaf. No wonder there are so many coeliacs or those that are allergic to wheat-based bread in the UK, judging by what goes into it. All of those bakers years ago were right!
The Match Tax
I’d never heard of this, but whilst walking back to Bow Road station to come home, I saw this plaque.
Plaque Commemorating Opposition to the Match Tax
I’d never heard of the Match Tax. But of course, the old Bryant and May factory is just round the corner. It’s now up-market housing called Bow Quarter.
I can’t find much about the Match Tax on the Internet, except for this proof copy of the stamp that would have been used. It was never implimeted because of a public outcry.
He Who Pays the Piper Calls the Tune
It looks like Fifa and Sepp Blatter have broken this major rule of both life and business, in that four major sponsors are unhappy at how the organisation is run, according to this report.
How many others will join them?
As after all the rich and powerful, who run such businesses, like to give people a good kicking, just to show you don’t mess with them.
This is one Blatter and FIFA will lose, as you may be able to fool some of the people all of the time or all of the people some of the time, but you can’t fool all of the people all of the time.
The Anonymous Widower 