Peter Viney's Blog

As an author, greetings cards make me seethe with resentment. You can only get £7.99 retail for a 400 page paperback with a beautifully illustrated glossy cover. If you take out and discard the 400 pages of text, and print a few trite words on the inside of the remaining glossy cover, you have the equivalent of a greetings card and can charge £2.99 for it.

65% of greetings cards are bought by women. If I look at my birthday cards in any given year, nearly all are from female relatives and friends. The guys don’t send them. Fair enough, I don’t send them cards either. If you hear a cry of “Great! Look! A card shop!” in the High Street, the chances are it will be soprano rather than baritone. The behaviour of women and men in a card shop is different too. If you stand in one for any length of time, you observe that those quietly browsing are female, while the odd male darts in, looks, chooses, pays, and is out in two minutes. There is a serious discrepancy in communication here. You can bet that the woman who spends fifteen minutes agonizing over the right wording and picture for someone, will apply a similarly searching analysis on the cards she receives. A woman might say, ‘That’s the nicest card I’ve seen in years!’ Her male companion’s reply will be, ‘Great! Buy five. You can send one for the next five birthdays.’ Oh, dear. It doesn’t work like that.

Those silk padded A3 sized greetings cards in a box, with pink teddy bears, cute puppies, or hearts on them are bought by males, in the mistaken belief that high price will outweigh lack of appropriacy or forethought. Late-night petrol service stations do a good trade in them, as well as in those apology-gesture cut flowers, delivered daily from Holland in massive articulated trucks. Once I was looking for a CD for my sister’s birthday in a large record store, and selected her the new Norah Jones as well as a copy for myself. The sales assistant, who knew me, asked why I wanted two copies. I said one was a birthday present and he whistled in dismay, ‘You can’t give it as a birthday present. It’s in the top twenty!’ he said. He went on to explain that any CDs or DVDs that are in the Top Twenty, as gifts, look as if they’re a last minute panic buy, in a supermarket or motorway services shop. I bought a Windham Hill piano selection instead.

Man + Greetings Cards

Women buy cards for future possible use, and have a selection at home to choose from. Men buy them the day before they’re needed. I often spend time waiting in card shops, and like the other males, I gravitate to the humour section. I enjoy the ever changing selections. Just this week I laughed out loud at the retro painting of Goldilocks staring into her bowl of porridge with the speech bubble, ‘I hope it’s organic!’ Next to it was a truculent retro baby bear staring at his porridge bowl with ‘Oh, no! I wanted Shreddies!’I can cheerfully spend ten minutes looking at the jokes, surprising myself at the ever-increasing crudity. The F-word first appeared on displays several years ago. Recently, you can find both “Happy birthday, C***!’ and ‘Happy birthday, you c***!’ which would have had a shop owner arrested twenty years ago as obscene publications. (There’s an interesting little punctuation point in why the first has a capital C.)

I was in a small card shop with a superb and original collection recently, and asked how many cards in the humour selection actually sold. The shop owner smiled, ‘Oh, we sell quite a lot. The very crude ones are chosen for people in the same workplace most often, but really the purpose of the humour section is to keep men quietly occupied whilst their female companions browse and buy lots of cards.’

How confusing. As a music fan, I have records by The Glenn Miller Band, The Steve Miller Band and The Frankie Miller Band. Now we have The Ed Miller Band as leader of the Labour Party. Perhaps he was chosen in preference to his brother, The David Miller Band, because the media couldn’t take having David Cameron and David Miller Band having a debate where they cross-called each other David non-stop.

Language viruses

Language viruses, catch-phrases and set expressions, travel like lightning. In the last few days, listening to candidates for the leaders of the Labour party speaking on TV and radio, the one you hear again and again is “Let’s move on.”

This was used frequently during the Northern Ireland peace talks, and with good reason, but was appropriated by Tony Blair who turned it into a politician’s mantra. He must have said it so many times at cabinet meetings that Gordon Brown kept repeating it in the 2010 election, and now the Milliband brothers and Ed Balls are displaying the same addiction to the phrase. It has spread to business leaders in interviews too.

‘Let’s move on’ is not simply ‘Let’s change the subject’ (though that’s what it means). ‘Let’s move on’ has nuances. It’s used in this way. An interviewer has just presented an unanswerable piece of folly to the politician / business leader. e.g. What about the time you started a war based on fraudulent information / wrecked the economy / polluted the entire Gulf of Mexico /  were found in a compromising situation with a person (or creature) you should not have been with?

The politician pauses, then says in a very adult patronising tone, ‘Let’s move on!’ It has to be said in such a way that we see the questioner as irritating, flogging a dead horse, being like a dog with a bone, while the forward-thinking politician wishes to move us to the more positive future, casting aside all negativity.

Blair was the most annoying user, substituting ‘Let’s move on!’ for things he might have said like ‘Yes, I know. I’m truly sorry.’ Ed Balls used it on Radio Four this morning. Ed Balls is a man whose courage is undeniable., Anyone with the surname ‘Balls’ who takes on the job of minister for education, thus having himself announced to halls full of teenagers on a weekly basis as ‘Mr Balls’, needs bravery, or a very thick skin. There was a kid called ‘Balls’ in my class at school. From the first day he was known as ‘Bollocks’ even to the point where teachers used it too, having picked it up on the football field. ‘Bollocks! Over here, pass it to me …’ After seven years the boy had got used to it. Anyway, Mr Balls presented an economic argument. The interviewer picked holes in. He couldn’t think of a decent answer, so ‘Let’s move on.’ It collocates with ‘Well …’ or ‘Anyway …’

The signs are that the phrase has entered phase two of a language virus. I’ve heard it used ironically in the last few weeks. One example was a wife berating her husband at a dinner party (in a joking way) for always leaving the toilet seat up. His reply was, ‘Yes. (pause) Well, Let’s move on!’ We’ve started using it within the family as the response to any verbal criticism.

‘You didn’t put the butter in the fridge last night!’

‘Yes. Well, let’s move on!’

It replaces the old catch-phrase, ‘There’s no answer to that!’

POSTSCRIPT: Someone pointed out that the three male candidates, David Milliband, Ed Milliband and Ed Balls are on radio / TV all the time, while the fourth candidate, Diane Abbott is rarely seen. It was suggested that this was because she was black and female. The correct reason, according to the politically savvy, is that the other three all went to Oxford (just like David Cameron, William Hague, George Osborne, Tony Blair, Margaret Thatcher, Edward Heath, Harold Wilson, Harold Macmillan, Hugh Gaitskell, Clement Attlee …) and she went to Cambridge (like Nicholas Clegg).

Oxford’s domination of political leadership was illustrated in the sitcom “Yes, Minister.” The minister is in a car going to Oxford and says it’s curious that there are two motorways, the M4 and M40, going close to Oxford, but not one going to Cambridge (At the time the M11 hadn’t been built). The civil servant, Sir Humphrey, explains gently that the Ministry of Tansport has always been dominated by Oxford graduates.

In decorating a room, my adventures with Monty Pythonesque salesmen (I know I should say ‘salespersons’, but all the ones this week were indeed men) continue. Yesterday was the carpet store, or rather warehouse.

Salesman:  Can I help you?
Me:  No, thanks, just looking.
Salesman: (oblivious to brush off) What are you looking for?
Me:  A natural fibre carpet, probably wool.
Salesman:  You want polypropelene.
Me:  No, I’m looking for wool. Which section are they in?
Salesman:   All our polypropelene is natural.
Me:  Natural polypropelene?
Salesman:  Yes. It’s all natural.
Me:  It’s for a kids’ room. I don’t want the emissions from artificial fibres.
Salesman:  Ah, polypropelene’s better then. Wool emits a lot of noxious stuff.
Me:  I don’t like artificial fibres. There’s the static electricity too.
Salesmen:  Wool’s worse for static.
Me: (sarcastically)  Is it really?  OK, but I wanted wool.
Salesman:  You’d be better with polypropelene.
Me:  Do you actually sell wool carpets?
Salesman:  Well, we’ve got some. But polypropelene’s better.
Me:  Where are the wool carpets?
Salesman:  We actually haven’t got that many here at the moment, because everyone prefers polypropelene.

Exit me, stage left. Ah, well. Today will be the lighting shop.

I went to buy a small TV with integrated DVD, and went to the John Lewis store in Poole, where I found the one I wanted, the Sony KDL-22BX20D, had risen from £269 last week to £299 this week. So I went to the Comet warehouse store at Fleetsbridge to check out 22” integrated TV / DVDs. The store had an appalling picture, fuzzy and covered with white dots on every TV, compared to the crystal-sharp TVs at John Lewis. This is my conversation.

Me:                   I’m looking for a 22” TV / DVD combination.
Salesman:      Goodmans and Ferguson. £179.
Me:                   No, I want a quality brand.
Salesman:      JVC?
Me:                  Maybe. Have you got a Sony?
Salesman:      Sony don’t make TV / DVD combinations.
Me:                  Yes, they do. I was just looking at one in John Lewis.
Salesman:     They don’t.
Me:                  Here’s the John Lewis sales token with the model number.
Salesmen:      Oh, yes. We don’t stock Sony because the DVDs overheat.
Me:                  You said Sony didn’t make them just now.
Salesman:      Well, they do. But they catch fire.
Me:                  I think Sony probably know how to make DVD players.
Salesman:     Anyway, Samsung’s the same as Sony. We’ve got Samsung.
Me:                  I don’t think it is.
Salesman:     Oh, yes. Samsung, Sony and Sharp are all the same.
Me:                  You mean they all begin with “S”?
Salesman:     No, I mean they’re all made in the same factory. They just have different badges on.
Me:                  I see. Well, thank you …
Salesmen:      Don’t you want one?

No reply. I was already walking towards the door.

* Footnote: In the end, I bought the Sony from Amazon, free delivery, £249, and had it before lunchtime the next day. I constantly bemoan the loss of shops with real people to Amazon, but some days you know why it’s happening.

This month I’ve been taking a long hard look at the Storylines grading scheme with a view to rewriting it. Some of the ideas that have come out of this have been added to the existing article Preparing Reading Schemes which is now three paragraphs longer.

“The Author” repeats some stats on the brave new world of digital music, in the context of the excitement among writers about the alleged but hypothetical fortunes to be made from e-books.

An American site (www.informationisbeautiful.net) calculated how many downloads etc a musician had to sell to earn the “US minimum monthly wage”. This is how it runs:

Self-pressed CDs … 143

iTunes album downloads … 1,229

iTunes track downloads … 12,339

Then it points out that now music is often streamed rather than downloaded. To earn the minimum monthly wage from last.fm a track would need to be played 1,546,667 times in a month.

On Spotify, a track would have to be played 4,549,020 times.

As Bob Dylan sang with The Band at the Isle of Wight Festival, “Who’s gonna throw that minstrel boy a coin?”

Not digital media, that’s for sure!

New article on Listening and mobiles added to ELT articles.

They drive you mad. Our eco-friendly fridge let’s you put about three items in before it starts beeping to demand that you close the door. The timer on the microwave beeps loudly (and doesn’t stop).  So does the one on the oven. The electric induction hob beeps if any pan touches the control panel. You can find yourself cooking with quadrophonic beeping erupting simultaneously. And because three of the items are the same make, they have exactly the same beep so you can’t work out whether it’s the microwave, the hob or the oven.

Then you get in the car. Karen has a Suzuki Splash, and when you take it out of the garage you have to negotiate the drive in reverse. It doesn’t just beep at you to put your seatbelt on but beeps with increasing volume and speed. The thing is there’s a hedge along the side, and I can see much better without the seat belt on. I’m in my own drive. When I get to the end, I’m often going to stop and get out to let the family on board. I don’t need a seatbelt. Why can’t they disable it when you’re reversing?

Don’t even ask about the computer’s beeps.

Next door they’re building a new house. For health and safety reasons every digger and other motorized equipment on the site beeps loudly when it’s reversing. They start at 7 a.m. The beeps are to warn builders to get out of the way. At 7 a.m. I couldn’t care less whether they succeed.

So for recreation and to cover the noise, I’ll turn on the radio. Oh, no! They’re playing the old novelty song, “Beep! Beep!” by The Playmates.