Peter Viney's Blog

Review of the Poole pantomime Peter Pan added. For years we did an annual ELT pantomime (we wrote seven or eight) and it’s always one of my favourite bits of Christmas. The review is more about panto in general than this particular one.

Christmas Market, Vienna Christmas street markets were a feature of the German and Austrian Christmas. At some point, British tour companies started advertising short breaks (and “visit the Christmas market”) as we did in Vienna ten years ago. You could buy elaborate sweets and pastries, candles and beeswax products, fruit, Christmas tree decorations, and twenty kinds of honey, and even more kinds of flavoured schnapps. Add the brisk cold air of December, beautiful buildings, lights everywhere. Tree decorations, Christmas Market, Vienna Then the idea that these were a tourist attraction caught on. Bournemouth was an early adopter of the heavily advertised “German Christmas Market” with a distinctly Germanic sausage and sauerkraut slant to the food stalls, gothic lettering everywhere and people passing out at mulled wine stalls. A few years later every major town in Britain has one. And I loath them. First, there’s very little that’s either German or Christmasy left. There’s an acrid reek of burnt pork as cheap spicy sausages are frying and a sickly wafting of mulled wine, but most stalls are selling pashmirs (scarves) or magnetic arthritis bracelets or even double-glazing. For some reason huge barrels of olives permanently exposed to the smoky air from the barbecued sausages are supposed to be appealing. They’re appalling.

Bournemouth’s got one. Not quite the same as Vienna?

Just 30 miles away: Southampton’s got one too

I was in a shop right by the market in Bournemouth. As the owner said, she paid rates (local taxes) all year round. She employs three people, so pays staff, and light and heat. She expects to generate around 35% of her annual turnover in the six weeks before Christmas, a common percentage in the retail trade. She is very careful about where she sources her scarves and belts, avoiding countries of manufacture which use child labour. Then just as the busiest retail season starts, four weeks before Christmas, wooden sheds are erected in the street outside her shop. They can sell scarves (of dubious origin) much cheaper than her because they don’t pay overheads for a year. The restaurants which run all year, subject to stringent public health regulations, find foul-smelling sausages and burgers on sale right by their shops. It’s madness. It shows no respect or concern for the local traders in these towns who have to keep open the other eleven months of the year. No wonder our town centres are dying, and genuine, interesting shops replaced by estate agents, building societies and charity shops. When Christmas mrkets were few and far between, they brought people into town and the shops benefitted. Now every town has one, so they merely leach their trade off the locals.

Anyone for som traditional German Curry wurst?

Bournemouth 2014

Hamlet review (National Theatre) added under Film & Theatre reviews.

People Who Get Up Your Nose

#1   in a long series: The eBay Seller

Picture the scene. Your local post-office. There are people working behind four counters and a single queue system.

One of the people has a CLOSED sign and is mildly and slowly sorting out some paperwork. You’d think there’d be a back-office to do it, but no, do it behind a CLOSED sign with a line of people in the queue stretching out to the street. It has to be done, but not so annoyingly in view of the public, who are entitled to think, ‘Look at the queue! Do it later.’

The person behind the second counter has just put up the CLOSED sign to go for lunch. It’s 12.30 when everyone is trying to use the post-office in their lunch break. If you were starting post offices from scratch as a business, you might say “no staff lunch breaks between 12.00 and 1.30.” Harsh? People who work in catering live with it.

The third counter arouses our sympathy. An elderly lady has two Christmas cards to go to the United States. They’re explaining that the first card is 97p postage, but as the second is 61 grams, it’s going to be a  whopping £1.98. She hadn’t realized the difference in size (slight) and weight when she chose the card. She also wants to buy this year’s Christmas stamps for the UK. Wallace & Gromit. Cracking! Only the stamps and images are so tiny that she can’t see what they are. What’s the point of commissioning artwork, then printing it too small for people to enjoy?

Then we look at counter four. The cheerful eBay seller. He or she has two large square bottomed canvas bags, groaning with parcels. They’re going across the counter one at a time, and some have to be Recorded Delivery (Signed for), and all of them need a certificate of posting. Cheerful eBay seller is on friendly terms with the counter staff. Why not? They’re mainly used to paying out money to people, so taking money in is positive. Cheerful eBay seller spends 45 minutes in the post office twice or three times a week. Of course, Cheerful eBay seller could buy a home franking machine, and pay the post charges electronically, but then that leaves rather a large trail for the Inland Revenue, currently taking a long hard look at eBay businesses (as well as everything else). So Cheerful eBay seller simply “hogs” the post office and creates long queues. That IS the post office’s business, and Cheerful eBay seller is spending a fortune with them (without eBay and amazon and online business generally, the post office would have collapsed in terminal unprofitability five years ago), but it’s the “mixed use” which causes resentment. They have needed for years to separate out their businesses, which are (a) being an agency for government transactions and (b) helping people post letters and parcels. They’re not the same business. Within the “post office” business they need to sort out the “commercial user” (eBay seller) and ordinary user (elderly person buying a stamp). The first is important to their survival, but shouldn’t be mixed in with the second.

Far worse is Miserable eBay seller. I watched him last week for the whole twenty minutes I was in the queue. He was having a long mobile phone conversation, simply handing parcels and packets over when the counter person said “next one”. No eye contact, no conversation. The person serving him must have felt like a machine. I couldn’t cope with such customer rudeness. I’d have to say, “Either you’re posting stuff or making a phone call. Decide which!”

The experience of sales bullshit is repeated every time you buy something. I’ve been keeping my Xerox printer going for a year with horrible streaks, constant jams and the door falling off daily, hoping to use up the existing ink supplies, as the new bits I need cost more than a new printer. The ink in mine came in great big 11,000 page cartridges, and so I wanted to get the fullest use, but the cyan ran out (it continued to work for 8 weeks after it told me to replace it though), then this week the yellow ran out. The cyan reached a critical point and now it will only print in black and white. It’s also jamming three times a day. So off I set to buy a new one. A little research online told me that a similar specification new Xerox cost £349 + VAT (a fraction of what I paid for the old one).

So to Staples. I looked at the printers on show. High-gloss black is the colour of choice for 90% of models. 100 sheet capacity. 150 sheet capacity. Cartridge life 200 pages (or on one, just 65 pages).  It’s obvious that like early Kodak Brownie cameras with film, they sell the printers at cost, or a loss, in the hope of selling ink. The biggest they had was a Brother at 150 sheets storage and 2200 page ink capacity. The equivalent Xerox is 530 sheets storage and 6500 ink capacity from solid ink pellets. I thought my Xerox was flimsy (the door falling off constantly aids that impression) but compared to the Brother, it’s built like a tank. I was about to leave when the hovering salesman got to me.

Salesman:  Are you looking at printers?

Me:  Yes, but I’m not looking for a home one. I want an office one.

Salesman: These are office ones.

Me: Right, but 150 sheet capacity isn’t office size.

Salesman: It’s the biggest you can get.

Me: Office ones take a ream.

Salesman: What’s a ream?

Me: (and this place sells paper!) It’s a block of 500 sheets of paper. You’ve got lots of them over there.

Salesman: (sharp intake of breath) Two thousand pounds.

Me: What?

Salesman: That’s what it costs for a printer like that.

Me: £349 plus VAT for the Xerox.

Salesman: Does it fax?

Me: Fax?

Salesman: All these are fax machines too.

Me: I don’t want a fax machine.

Salesman: Very useful. Fax machines. You can send documents to people over the phone line, you know.

Me: I haven’t sent a fax in ten years. When I had a fax machine, I got twenty faxes a day trying to sell me fork-lift trucks.

Salesman: And scanners. They’ve all got built-in scanners.

Me: I’ve got a scanner. A proper scanner.

Salesman: This one’s got a telephone in it. With a two hundred number memory. And a little LED display so you can see what it’s printing.

Me: I can see that on the computer screen.

I didn’t wander away this time. He did.  So online you go. Next day delivery, and yet another retail business gets another nail in its coffin. I know why they don’t sell big Xerox or HP printers … if they did, their ink sales business would be seriously dented.

Review added under Film & Theatre reviews.

Review added of the film (see film and theatre reviews)

I’ve been a fan of Louis de Bernieres since his first book, The War of Don Emmanuel’s Nether Parts. I bought it new in hardback, and bought every book since. I bought Captain Corelli’s Mandolin on the day of publication, and foolishly failed to sell it when copies of the first edition were selling for £400. That figure plummeted when the film came out (and wasn’t very good).

So it’s with sadness that I say one short story in the latest short story collection, Notwithstanding, is unworthy of him. The story Colonel Barkwell, Troodos and the Fish is simply an ancient joke, elaborately written up. The story is well-known. There’s a dinner party. They’re going to serve fish (or chicken). The cat eats some. They serve the guests. They go in the kitchen and find the cat lying there dead. Everyone rushes to hospital and has their stomachs pumped. They return to find a note, ‘Sorry, I killed / ran over your cat …’ Let’s not even consider whether a hospital would think a stomach-pump effective for rapidly-multiplying salmonella bacteria, though de Bernieres does get around that question by making the Colonel in the story so obnoxious while insisting on a stomach-pump, that the doctor decides to let him have it.

The Sick Cat: Illustration by Paul Sample from Connections in Reading A

I wrote a version of this story myself back in 1986, as The Sick Cat in Connections in Reading A. In my feline-friendly version, it’s chicken rather than fish, and the cat survives too. And I had an illustration from that great illustrator Paul Sample (above). I don’t accuse de Bernieres of plagiarism (though I believe he was an ELT teacher). I had heard the story when Tony Blackburn told it on the radio, and adapted it. It’s in several joke books. Richmal Crompton used similar in a William story in the 1930s. De Bernieres wrapped the old joke elaborately and did it far better than me, but please! For a major novelist this is shameful.

I would add that the excellent story The Happy Death of the General in the same Notwithstanding collection first appeared in a newspaper magazine in 2001. It’s customary to announce the earlier publication in the front matter. De Bernieres put all the previously published references in the back, hidden in a long Afterword. You don’t see them until you’ve finished, because who reads the last two pages of a new book first?

A Funny Thing Happened To Me: Streamline English Destinations, Unit 10

This reminds me of  A Funny Thing Happened To Me, a story I wrote with Bernie Hartley  in 1980 for Streamline Destinations. Five years later Jeffrey Archer used the same story in A Quiver Full of Arrows. Someone then accused us of lifting it, and we were appalled. Not so much at the idea of having lifted it, but from the idea of lifting it from Jeffrey Archer. In fact we all took the basic story from Woody Allen. Bernie and I changed Woody Allen’s ‘s mistakenly purloined cigarettes on a train to mistakenly purloined biscuits in a station café. Archer didn’t take as much trouble and wrote it just as Woody had told it.

Language viruses continued. After years being irritated by the previous government mantra of “Let’s move on …” (see below), we find that the Coalition has abandoned the catch phrase, but sadly replaced it with an equally irritating one. “End of story.”

It’s used to say, “You’ve been told my view. That’s it. I’m too important to answer further questions or to listen to any counter-argument whatsoever.”  One particularly arrogant twerp of a minister at the Conservative party conference managed to say it three times to the BBC interviewer within a couple of minutes. I’ve heard it three times since from ministers, most recently this morning.

It’s different to “Let’s move on.” That’s oily, and obnoxious, casting the questioner as someone who won’t let go of a point that has come to bore everyone else. “End of story” is just plain arrogant.

ADDITION:

Last night “Have I Got News For You” had a clip of the new Children’s Minister avoiding an interview in a corridor. This guy couldn’t even be bothered to complete the phrase. He just snapped “End of.” at the interviewer four times in thirty seconds.

R.I.P. Norman Wisdom, died aged 95. To his surprise, this comedian found himself an icon in Albania in his declining years. Apparently his movies were the only Western films shown during the communist era.

Anyway, on Radio Two, they told a story to mark his departure. A few years ago, the European parliament was debating regional food names, like Parmesan cheese, Brunswick ham,  Bakewell tart, Cornish pasties and so on. The debate turned to Normandy butter. The French delegate spoke at length, saying issues would be resolved by the natural common-sense of the farmers of Normandy. At this point, the British delegation were crying with laughter. The simultaneous translation through their headphones was “All problems will be solved by Norman Wisdom.”