Technology That Works
The postman came about five minutes ago.
He delivered two pieces of post that mattered amongst all the old junk; a new card for Sky and a Voter Registration Form from St. Edmundsbury.
The card had been flagged up on my Sky system for about a week now. A simple message just told me that the card had been posted and could I check the post. I took out the old card and entered the new one. It worked first time. As it should.
The Voter Registration Card had only one problem. The URL was rather complicated, especially as it included St. Edmundsbury, which is not the easiest word to type. But after a couple of pages and a few clicks, I’d updated everything. Or in my case, just told them that a very lonely man, who spends a lot of his time blogging is still alive!
Seriously though, life isn’t that bad all the time.
But both systems worked without a hitch and with the exception of the URL couldn’t be faulted.
An aside here, is that if you’re developing an on-line system, make sure that the URL is short. There are lots of six and seven character ones available. I even recently acquired mx73.com. Short and memorable.
I just wonder how less stressful our lives would be if so many of the other things that we have to do in our lives were just as simple. We’re getting there, but not as fast I would like.
One thing that works round here, is that when my wife died, the Registrar informed the council, so that I got an automatic Council Tax discount, after I signed and dated the form they sent me. A very civilised piece of joined up thinking.
Do all councils work this way?
And then we have the excellent system for Vehicle Excise Duty, that has cost the Post Offices so much money, as who in their right mind queues for an hour to buy it.
Deaths, Public and Private
Every death is a tragedy for someone. Even the most noxious individual, had a mother, even if they didn’t know their father, or have any children.
Years ago, I was phoned by Haringey Council, because my great uncle had died in their care. He’d returned from Australia to find his family and after failing had ended up in an old peoples’ home in the borough. But a guy in the Legal Department of the council had taken the trouble to trace those few remaining relative after his death. He felt it was more than a pity, that he hadn’t been able to find us before my great uncle had died.
We’ve recently had a lot of coverage about Lockerbie, where unlike my great uncle, 270 died in a very public and violent way.
Over the years, I’ve met many who like myself, have lost someone very near and dear to them. But all of these, like my great uncle have been very private and the most public they have got would have been a notice in the paper. And usually only the local one.
But is the grief felt by those left behind any different?
When my wife died of an aggressive and incurable cancer of the heart, I felt totally powerless. It just gripped her body and drained the life out of her. But at least we said good-bye properly and if I can keep my dignity like she did in her last days, I will be surprised, as I don’t think I have it in me. I do want to get even, but it will be by helping those in the fight against cancer and other life-threatening diseases.
Others I know lost their partners, parents and children to accidents and heart attacks, where they didn’t have my luxury of a slow parting. They seem to take much longer to come to terms with their new circumstances. After all, they were not told to get on with their life. Or fixed up with a blind date! Many too, don’t have the financial circumstances that I have, to carry on in the same way as before.
Is the public death of a loved one any different?
In a way it is not. You still have the same grief and personal problems, although interestingly in some cases, you may well have received much more financial help and counselling.
But surely the real problem is that whereas I have been able to restart my life, the endless publicity and digging up of the issues, by newspapers and often well-meaning politicians, doesn’t help.
My heart goes out to those who can’t be left alone to suffer their grief in private with friends, family and any professionals they need, so that they can be left to rebuild the rest of their life.
An interesting aside to this is that because my wife was a barrister, we often discussed various legal issues and cases in the courts. She could not understand, why if someone was murdered, increasingly relatives seem to spend every day of the trial of the accused in Court. I agreed and if she had been murdered, I would have quietly withdrew and had nothing to do with case. She would have done the same if it had happened to me. How can you get any satisfaction from watching justice unfold, so close to home?
So to return to Lockerbie. I can’t understand the mentality of those who keep pushing themselves through all the grief again and again, by appearing on the radio and demanding more and more vengeance.
But then I think all deaths are generally a private affair, for those that are involved.
I like to think that by now, I would have moved on and built a new life that was a credit to the memory of those that I had lost.
Reasons for Small Houses
I like this article in The Times.
I sometimes wonder about selling my large house, getting rid of most of my possessions and live in a small flat somewhere in either Cambridge or London. All I’d need is a very large laptop and I could travel the world as I wished.
Steaming Ahead
It was fascinating to hear that the land speed record for steam powered-cars was set in 1906 at 127 miles an hour. Incidentally, this is just a mile an hour faster than that of the Gresley A4 Pacific, Mallard set in 1936. And Mallard was built for daily service!
They’re having a go at the record soon.
The car was developed by Donald Campbell‘s nephew.
Peterborough Cathedral
On Monday I had to visit Peterborough and went over the cathedral.
Peterborough Cathedral
Peterborough has this reputation as a rather grim overspill town, but it has a beautiful cathedral, which like several in the UK are old Abbey churches. In fact when Henry the VIII dissolved the monasteries it was the sixth richest in England. The cathedral has one of the largest mediaeval painted ceilings in Europe.
But Peterborough is also the birthplace of my paternal grandmother. She was a Spencer and her father was a builder, who according to legend build some of the city. I’ve recently met a distant Spencer cousin, whose ancestor was also a builder, who built part of Armley in Leeds.
The strange thing about Monday’s visit was that I’ve just looked up Whitsed Street, where she was born on Google and I parked the car in the next street.
Missing Apostrophes
There has been a lot of talk lately about missing apostrophes. One guy in Royal Tunbridge Wells has gone as far as painting them in where he lives. It provokes this piece in the Telegraph, from the wonderfully named Harry de Quetteville.
But leaving punctuation out of road signs is not new. Look at this one from Ipswich, which has been there for some years.
St. George’s Street, Ipswich
This sign is actually a lot newer than the one at the other end of the road, which was one of the old-fashioned cast ones.
My father was always hot on punctuation. But then he was a printer and was always having arguments with customers about it. Although not specifically punctuation, the thing that really got his goat was when to use the plural form of verbs.
So which is correct.
The Chairman and the Board of Directors request your pleasure at the opening of their new factory.
Or.
The Chairman and the Board of Directors requests your pleasure at the opening of their new factory.
You can argue that in the first, there are more than one of them, so it’s request, but in the second they are a single entity, so it’s request.
Do we have a pedant out there, who can tell me what is correct?
In addition I am a stickler for layout. Nothing annoys me more than when I get a document or read a web page, which is poorly laid out. My father was the same.
There is no excuse for bad design.
Afghanistan
I have two views on Afghanistan; we should stay and we should come home.
It’s difficult and I think that whatever we do, the number of casualties we are suffering in the country, can’t be sustained for ever. Although rightly, we focus on the number of dead, there is also a real problem in the number who are injured. Wikipedia gives a lot of details.
One telling figure in the article is that between January 2006 and June 2009, we have had to medically evacuate 2,192 personel from Afghanistan for medical reasons. That’s an average of just over 70 a month. Almost three times as many troops have been admitted to UK Field Hospitals for reasons of disease or non-battle injuries, than for those caused in battle.
Can we sustain those losses? And how long before everybody in the UK knows someone who has been killed or injured?
Whether politicians like it or not, we are getting to the point where we have to negotiate our way out of Afghanistan.
A Small Note on a Grim History
I had to pick up a friend from the ferry at Harwich after football and whilst waiting I noticed the following.
Kindertransport Plaque at Harwich
We mustn’t forget what happened. Especially, with all the troubles around the world.
I have no religion, but my family is a potent mix of Jew and Huguenot. They all came to Britain because of oppression.
Can anybody say that refugees in the past have not enriched our country and it’s culture?
Changing Face of Ipswich
I took these two pictures in Ipswich on Saturday.
Civic Drive, Ipswich - 1
Civic Drive, Ipswich - 2
These two views fit together. In the first one, you see the old Crown Court and the space where the Civic Tower used to be and in the second, you see the AXA offices that have been reskinned and turned into something respectable and a good working environment.
All of these buildings were built at the same time, but why did they pull down the Civic Tower, rather than refurbish like the AXA offices? Was it because it was built to a much lower standard?
At my party yesterday, a surveyor said that civic and NHS buildings are now designed without air-conditioning to save money. Is this short-sighted? I suspect so and in twenty years time, we’ll be upgrading them to make them a decent working environment.
As a postscript to this, I went into Debenhams to try to find something. The air-conditioning had failed, but even with the lights turned down, it was oppressive.
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Busy! And it’s my birthday!
The Anonymous Widower 