Peter Viney's Blog

Review of the Salisbury Playhouse production added:

Review of the Cirque du soleil in Totem added under Film and Theatre reviews.

We now have DVD menus designed for the forthcoming DVD editions of  A Weekend Away and A Week By The Sea. Past and current users of the series will be able to play “spot the episode” with the objects in the pictures.

A Weekend Away:

A Week By The Sea:

We’re still a few weeks from publication, but we now have a draft sleeve design for the two-on-one edition. A Weekend Away and A Week By The sea will also be available separately.

See film review of Another Year by Mike Leigh.

New Year’s Day. I hate the fact that in Britain it’s a “dead” day. Everything is closed. But it’s not Christmas Day, so there’s no large family lunch (though we will have a family dinner this evening) or excitement. Most people are just sleeping off the night before, but I was up and about by 8 a.m., had a long New Year bath, and a careful shave, ready to face 2011.

Looking at the date, I want to write some cheques just to see 1.1.11 in print, but who writes cheques nowadays?

Usually we take down all our Christmas decorations today, but it’s going to be dinner with small kids this evening, so we’ll leave them until tomorrow. Twelfth night, the traditional date, takes Christmas much too far into the New Year. I love putting the decorations up, but after the long, slow British Christmas, I also enjoy taking them down, putting them in the attic, clearing the decks, getting ready for the New Year.

Music, on British TV, had the New Year greeted by Wanda Jackson singing Let’s Have A Party with Jools Holland. Very good, but she is getting on a bit! Last year (or the year before) was Paul McCartney duetting with Kylie Minogue, and he couldn’t take his eyes off her shapely form, and made a little too much of the hugs at the end.

Last year … and the ghost of New Years past!

This year Kylie was just before midnight. It’s funny how Kylie has become the herald of the British New Year. In my youth, it was always Andy Stewart in kilt and sporran. The skirt suits Kylie far better.

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!”