Golden Oldie

It’s a wet Wednesday morning and I’m in the small town of Shaftesbury in Dorset, waiting for a bus to Salisbury.

I’d never heard of Shaftesbury until yesterday when I was told I would be delivering a car here. As I drove into the town earlier a large sign proclaimed it to be ‘The Home of Gold Hill.’ I’ve never heard of that either.

From the bus stop I can see a pedestrian signpost at the side of the town hall, indicating the way to this apparently famous hill. I have a few minutes to spare before the bus arrives so I follow the sign down a narrow cobbled alleyway which brings me to the top of a steep cobbled street, ridiculously picturesque and devoid of people or vehicles.

It is less than a hundred yards from the town centre and yet the place is so deserted that for a moment I wonder if it is private property. But there are no signs to confirm this so I walk down to the bottom and then back up again, still without seeing another soul.

If you’re older than about thirty you will have seen this view before, although you might not immediately recognise it. It is the setting for the black and white Hovis advert with the kid pushing the bike up the hill.

While looking this up I came across a couple of improbable facts. Firstly, the advert was recently voted the nation’s all-time favourite, and secondly it was directed by Ridley Scott, the guy responsible for Alien and Blade Runner amongst other things.

Personally I think the advert could have been enlivened by an alien bursting out of a doorway and chasing the kid back down the hill. It might still have had a chance of being voted the nation’s favourite, although not by the same people.

Where Was I?

It’s Thursday afternoon and I’m at my flat sorting through some old maps as part of a general clear out.

In the years between the dawn of the internet and the arrival of satnavs I used to print out reams of one-page maps from Multimap or Google, covering anywhere I needed to be the next day which wasn’t already covered by my shelf of street atlases.

I’ve been hoarding these ever since with the vague idea that they might one day become aids to my appalling memory – I could look back at them in later years and be able to recall those days and places again.

One of the pages catches my eye now as the ink is so smeared and splattered by rain that many of the street names are illegible. I can make out Thornaby Road – a red line running north to south – so I guess I was somewhere in Teeside, a part of the country I very rarely go to. Wherever I was heading for I must have got absolutely drenched on the way. And yet neither of these unusual circumstances are enough to stir even the slightest recollection of that day, however much I stare at the crumpled paper.

Maybe my pile of would-be memories will turn out to provide only another demonstration of my inability to recall anything much about anything much.

I think I’ll keep them anyway.

Silenced

The train pulls away from Erdington station and I look up from my scavenged copy of the Metro to see where the music is suddenly coming from.

She makes her way along the half-full carriage and then takes a seat opposite me. She looks about twenty and is wearing jeans and a white tracksuit top, with her hair pulled back in an aggressively tight ponytail. Her phone is in her hand, blaring out tinny dance music of such painfully poor sound quality that it would be unpleasant even if I liked that kind of thing.

I look up at the sticker on the carriage window and then look at her. Our eyes meet and I can see that she is ready for me, and defiant.
I know I won’t win but I still feel obliged to say –

‘This is the Quiet Zone you know.’

‘Well shut the fuck up then,’ she replies.

And I do.

This story first appeared in the online magazine Birmingham Words in 2007

Not Keeping up Appearances

It’s early afternoon on Monday and I’m in the village of Caersws in mid-Wales, waiting for a bus to Llandidloes where I’m due to collect a car from a dealership.

I’m passing the time trying to guess whether the pub opposite me, The Buck Hotel, has closed down. There are no metal shutters on the windows but in general it looks as though nobody has paid it much attention for some time. The paint is peeling badly from the black window frames. Running just below the roof there is string of small decorative red and blue lights, looking suspiciously like they may have been there since last Christmas. On the ground at the front a long trough contains a flowerbed which has long since turned feral – a mass of unidentifiable plants and weeds tumbling over the edges. In the midst of the unruly crowd a single small red flower stands out.

A white Somerfield carrier bag, blowing by on the wind, flattens itself against the plants at the end of the flowerbed but does not succeed in making the place look noticeably more run down. It lingers for a few moments and then darts away again, as if it has spotted somewhere where it has more chance of making a difference.

Between the front doors and the pavement there are a couple of wooden tables of the variety that have the bench seats built onto them. The fact that these tables are not bolted to the ground, and are still here, finally makes me decide that the place must still be in business

It would be easy to write some disparaging conclusions about The Buck, or to make a big poignant deal out of the solitary red flower. But the truth is I don’t mind places like this, where appearances are clearly not a priority, provided there is no air of menace to the dilapidation.

I would always rather be somewhere untidy than somewhere which is just too neat. If nothing is out of place then you are the thing that is out of place.

All I would change about the pub would be to add a sign in the window to let people know that they had not gone bust, something along the lines of -

‘Yes, we are still open, we’re just not that bothered.’

The Art of Unnecessary Innovation

Yesterday I collected a Lexus IS 220 from a compound near Coventry to take home for the night and then deliver to a dealership in Oldbury this morning. I had never driven this model before and when I was handed the key I realised, with a certain sinking feeling, that it was not a key at all, just a small black plastic fob.

There are several makes of car nowadays that have ‘keyless’ ignition systems. Some require the fob to be fitted into a slot in the dashboard somewhere, before a button can be pressed to start the engine. Some will not let you start the engine at all unless you have your foot on the clutch, or the brake pedal. Others will only start if you press the button for the right length of time – press it for too long and you will instigate an ‘instrument check’, which involves a few seconds of flashing lights and messages on the dashboard before the whole thing goes dark again. The only thing that all of these systems have in common is that even when you have figured out exactly what hoops you have to jump through in order to start the vehicle it will never be any quicker or easier than just putting a key in the ignition and then turning it.

(In case you’re wondering, the combination for the Lexus turned out to be a foot on the clutch and then one quick press of the start button.)

It’s hard not to think that there are a lot of people employed in car design these days who have run out of ideas for making genuine improvements and who have resorted to endless tinkering and tampering instead in the hope that their superiors might not realise that they are no longer performing any useful function.

I recently picked up a vehicle, whose make I can no longer remember, and was driving through Birmingham with my bag on the passenger seat. At one point, as I rounded a bend, my bag moved slightly. This caused a hidden sensor somewhere to deduce that my bag was a living, breathing passenger, who ought to be wearing a seat belt. This in turn set off a flashing red light on the dashboard and a loud continuous pinging. There was nowhere to pull over and so the only way to stop the alarm was to reach across, while driving, and fasten a seat belt around an inanimate object.

I wonder if this uber-safety measure has yet resulted in anyone becoming safely embedded in the front of an oncoming vehicle.

On another occasion I was driving north to Scotland along the M6. It was very early in the morning and the road were deserted. Let’s just say I may have been traveling in excess of 70mph. In the distance I spotted a police patrol car on a bridge and immediately braked hard, hoping that I had slowed down quickly enough to be able to glide inconspicuously past the officers. But the car turned out to contain an on-board nanny which had other ideas. It decided that everyone in the vicinity needed to be aware of how sharply I had braked, and automatically put on the hazard warning lights. By the time I had realised what had happened, and then found the button to turn them off again, the bridge with the patrol car on it was already in my rear view mirror.

Yesterday, I arrived home with the Lexus, pressed the button on the fob to lock it, and nothing happened. I tried pressing the button just once, then double-clicking it and then holding it down, and yet the vehicle remained resolutely unlocked. I eventually concluded that since there was nothing of value in there and no visible buttons on the doors to show that they were open, I didn’t really need to solve the mystery and left it unlocked.

I returned to it this morning to find that it would not start – the battery was drained to the point where even the dash lights would not come on. The AA man who eventually arrived to jump-start it suggested that it had probably been picking up a signal from the fob in the house and that this all-night communication had been enough to run the battery down.

Of course there are ways around all of these pointless innovations – make sure you always put a seat belt around anything on the passenger seat, and make sure you know where the hazard warning light switch is. And, if you are determined to buy a Lexus IS 220, all you have to do is buy another car as well so that you can transport the fob to another address a safe distance away every night and then retrieve it in the morning. Just make sure this extra car isn’t also a Lexus, otherwise the process will never end.

The Strange World of Forex

The wage I get for working as a trade plater varies a lot depending on how many vehicles I deliver and how many miles I drive, but generally it ranges from adequate to abysmal. For a while now I’ve been doing other bits and pieces to top up my earnings. Recently, the main one of these extra-curricular activities has been ‘matched betting’, a system by which you take advantage of the free bets and other bonuses that bookmakers offer as incentives to open an account with them. There are ways of guaranteeing yourself a profit from these regardless of the outcome of the events that you bet on. The only problem with this is that you eventually start to run out of new bookmakers to sign up with (I now have accounts with over fifty of them.)

As a possible replacement for this I have been learning about spread betting on the foreign exchange markets (forex). This basically involves betting on whether the pound will rise or fall in value against another currency. For each point that it moves in your chosen direction you win a certain amount, and for each point that it moves in the other direction you lose that same amount.

I know nothing about economics, and whilst researching forex I’ve come across some odd facts. Did you know that seventy percent of Britain’s Gross Domestic Product now comes from ’servicing’ ? I’m still not sure exactly what this means but we are clearly no longer a nation that spends much time making anything anymore.

On an average day over three trillion dollars is traded in forex – more than twenty times the total of all the other financial markets put together. Here’s another odd fact – ninety percent of this trading is not done by institutions or individuals who have any use for the currency they are buying or selling, instead it is pure speculation. And another – most of this speculative trading is not carried out by human beings but is executed automatically by ‘bots’ – software which analyses previous price movements and then predicts future ones.

With stocks and shares it’s possible for the big traders, hedge funds etc, to influence prices to suit their own ends, but this cannot be done with forex, the market is just too large. This lack of control makes it more likely that exchange rates will move up and down in recognisable patterns making it possible, apparently, to consistently make money if you adopt a system that suits the currencies and timeframes you are trading in.

So, if it’s that easy why isn’t everyone doing it? Most likely it will turn out not to be that easy. But on the other hand there clearly are a lot of people already doing it. It’s worth noting that even in the ‘mugs game’ of conventional gambling there are systems such as arbitrage and each-way thieving which are reliable enough in the long run that if a bookmaker realises what you are doing they will usually pay you the compliment of closing your account.

There is a part of me that wants this plan to work well enough for me to be able to give up plating and be free from the downsides of the job – the stress of dealing with my stressed-out controller, a vindictive public transport system, those staff at car dealerships who save their charm for the people who might want to buy something from them, and those middle class homeowners who can’t wait to ask me for some identification when I arrive on their doorsteps to collect their vehicles.

Imagine if I could make a living just sitting at home trading currencies? I would never have to pretend to like anyone again.

But as a former know-it-all left wing activist there is also a part of me that is uneasy about the idea of making money without actually doing anything to earn it. And where would the money really come from? If I made £100 in the forex markets would I have won it from some other speculator who made the wrong guess, or does the whole of this great tide of speculation have some wider impact? Would I be a smart gambler or a small time capitalist?

But anyway, all I’ve achieved in three months of trading with a demo account is to lose one hundred and ten pretend pounds, so maybe I shouldn’t be worrying about the moral dilemmas of joining the idle rich just yet.

One Down

‘C_n_i_e.’

‘A fitting farewell. It’s a trick, with one plus one plus one minus zero (7).’

Bloody crosswords. Why does she have to make one clue impossible so you can never finish the things? It only took me half an hour to do all the rest of it, and now I’ve sat here for another half hour just trying to figure out this last one. Who does she think she is, the compiler for the Sunday Times or something? It’s only for the bloody parish gazette. What’s the point of making a clue so hard that none of the handful of our fellow pensioners who actually bother to look at the thing will be able to do it? She’s most likely just showing off.

I stare at the hand-drawn puzzle, rattling through the short list of words I can think of that fit there, and trying yet again to see how any of them might have a connection with the clue.

If she gets back from that witches’ coven of a book group and sees that I haven’t finished it then she’ll have won a petty victory over me. Well let her have it, I can’t be bothered anymore.

I toss the piece of paper onto the coffee table, next to the half-eaten plate of sausage egg and chips that has long since turned stone cold. I pick up the fork, idly skewer a piece of sausage with it, and then hold it up to watch a blob of fat drip slowly off the end. I put it back down with a sigh. On the other side of the table lurks a glass of my horrendous damson wine. I only drink the wretched stuff out of principle. I started making it with the idea of getting something for nothing, ‘owt for nowt’ as my old dad used to say, and now that it’s ready I feel I ought to get through it, otherwise the end result will be nothing for something – all that effort for no return, and as a Yorkshireman it’s not in my blood to accept such a thing. But at the moment the thought of it seems to make my stomach wince.

I pick up the remote from the arm of the sofa and switch the TV on. Antiques Roadshow! I had forgotten all about it. This is more like it! I settle back into the sofa and relax. I could watch this programme every day for ten years and still learn nothing, but for me that’s not the point. I love the enthusiasm of the team, and the etiquette with which the show is conducted. That is how life should be. None of those charming people will go home tonight and find themselves sitting on a threadbare sofa, picking at cold food, drinking nasty wine, and gazing at the TV over the top of their propped up feet, with one toe sticking out of an undarned sock.
On the screen an elderly couple are being told that their collection of garish clay pots, made by a long-deceased distant relative, should be insured for around two thousand pounds. They beam at each other and nod their thanks to the sagacious man in the tweed suit and red bow tie.

When was the last time we looked at each other like that? When was the last time we really looked at each other at all? Silence and sniping are the ways we communicate nowadays – everything else has withered away after thirty-nine years. Like that old joke goes, I could have killed her and been out by now. Could have killed her maybe three times over. That woman has been a millstone around my bloody neck.

I think I’m as fair-minded as the next man, but sometimes it seems to me that the world was a more sensible place before womens’ lib. came along. These days every woman must have the right to try and upstage and belittle her husband at every opportunity.

‘C_n_i_e.’ What the hell is it?

But then again, what is the point in fretting? We are both too long in the tooth to change our ways now. This is how things will be until one or the other of us pops our clogs. Probably me.

Lord, how I depress myself sometimes! I brace myself and then pick up the wine glass and knock the contents back. It leaves a coating on the inside of my mouth that feels as if it could take the skin off. I decide that I’d better have a glass of water to wash it down with and so I heave myself up and head for the kitchen. As I’m returning there is the sound of footsteps on our gravel driveway. About time! She must have been gassing to her cronies again. But the letterbox flaps once and then the footsteps recede. I frown and make my way to the hallway to find that there is a glossy leaflet awaiting me, extolling the virtues of a new pizza delivery firm. I drop it back onto the floor and return to the sofa. The last one of those we tried had so little flavour that we may as well have eaten the bloody leaflet instead. What a con!

Con?

The word rings a bell somewhere in my head. Yes, of course! That could very well be the ‘trick’ part of the clue!

I pick up the sheet again and see what progress this makes. If the first part is ‘con’ then the whole thing probably means ‘a fitting farewell’, while the last four letters somehow signify ‘one plus one plus one minus zero.’ A standard clue for the letter ‘i’ is ‘one’, as in Roman numerals, so that is probably one ‘one’ taken care of.

‘Con_i_e.’

Confine? Confide? What kind of farewell begins with ‘con’? I wouldn’t put it past her to use Latin or some other foreign language. Au revoir? Adios? Auf wiedersehen? Nothing even close. I stare across the room at the tattered old dictionary sitting heavy on the bookshelf. Can I be bothered? No – there must be hundreds of words beginning with ‘con’.

On the TV a middle-aged gentleman is having his collection of distinctive walking sticks examined. He has about two hundred of the things. Whoever would have thought there would be so many different types worth collecting? He owns one ancient stick which has a gargoyle’s head on top of it, and which was apparently once owned by royalty.

But I can’t concentrate. That damned clue has wormed its way into my brain. I’m so close now; all I have to do is get the dictionary and start ploughing through the ‘con’s and sooner or later I’ll have the answer, and then the victory will be mine.

The gentleman is being told that his collection could be worth up to six thousand pounds. Six bloody grand! I look at my own plain old stick propped up in the corner and sigh as I get up to fetch the dictionary.

I pull it down from its perch, find the ‘con’s, and then begin to scan through for any that are seven letters long, ending in ‘e’. The first possibility is ‘concise’. This can also mean pertinent, and could therefore perhaps be the ‘fitting’ part of the clue, but there is nothing that could be interpreted as meaning farewell.

Next comes ‘confide’ and ‘confine’, which are similarly unhelpful. Then after a couple more pages I find the odd-looking ‘coniine’. The double ‘i’ leaps out at me straightaway – ‘one plus one’. And the ‘ne’ on the end could be ‘one’ minus ‘o’. But how is this ‘a fitting farewell’?

The definition is: ‘n a liquid, highly poisonous alkaloid found in hemlock (Conium). – Also conia, conine or conin. [Gr koneion hemlock]‘

I can’t see a connection there, and yet the rest of it seems to fit so well. I ponder over this for a minute and then throw the crossword down again in frustration. I’ve had enough of the bloody thing. The silly old mare has probably made a mistake anyway.

I stand up to put the dictionary away, but find that I have to sit straight back down again, my head is spinning and I am suddenly short of breath. What on earth is going on? My mind starts to race.

Should I phone a doctor?

Could I even get to the phone?

Maybe I should give it a minute. Maybe it will pass.

But the panic just seems to make my breath grow shorter still.

I look up at the clock. Twenty past seven! Where the hell is that bloody woman?

This story was short-listed for the Fish International Short Story Prize in 2005, and appeared in Raw Edge magazine in 2007

Changes

I’m widening the scope of this blog to give myself a break from only writing about trade plating.

If anyone has been unable to access the site in the last couple of weeks this was due to me changing the privacy settings while I made some alterations, and then forgetting to change them back.

A Brief Guide to the Outside of Raglan Castle

It’s midday on Friday and I’m outside Raglan Castle, in Monmouthshire.

I often drive past here on my way back from south Wales and have stopped several times before with the intention of looking around the place. The first time I came the castle was besieged by workmen who had so covered it in scaffolding that it didn’t seem worth hanging around. The second time it had just closed for the day. The third time I finally realised that you have to pay to get in, and was once again deterred.

Today I’m still in two minds about what to do, having forgotten how much the admission fee was. It turns out to be £3, which seems reasonable enough. But, this being the school holidays, the place is particularly busy. In front of me a couple of young boys are play-fighting boisterously with wooden swords which is, of course, exactly the kind of thing that boys that age ought to be doing on a trip to a castle. But I seem to have gotten into a mindset now where only the perfect opportunity to look around the place undisturbed will do for me.

The car park consists of a large area of short grass in front of the castle entrance, and while I’m hanging around hesitating I notice that there are one or two things to be seen here, for free.

On a small section of old grey stonework, presumably the remnant of something bigger, there is a plaque explaining the role of the castle in the English Civil Wars. At the time Raglan was owned by Henry Somerset, the first Marquess of Worcester, who was a staunch Royalist and reputedly the richest man in the country. In 1646 Cromwell’s Parliamentarians laid siege to the place and subjected it to daily bombardments for several months before Somerset eventually conceded. It was the last of the great aristocratic homes to fall, and the new occupiers immediately set about trying to demolish the main tower, although this proved harder work than they had anticipated and so a large section of it still remains.

Behind the wall with the plaque on it, in the very back of the parking area, stands a venerable old oak tree which still seems very much alive despite having lost a long vertical strip of bark and being so hollow at the base that it looks almost as if it has decided to stand up out of the ground, perhaps  in preparation for walking Ent-like away over the fields.

Oak trees can live for over five hundred years, so it’s possible that this old specimen was already here when Cromwell’s men arrived armed to the teeth and grimly determined to gain entry to the castle. I wonder what they would have thought of a man who was put off by a small admission fee and a couple of kids with wooden swords?

Give Us a Clue

It’s about half past nine on Friday morning and I’m walking through the centre of Lincoln on my way to a dealership on the edge of the town.

The cathedral dominates the skyline here, not just through its size, but through the size of the hill it sits on as well.

On the grassy slopes at the bottom of this hill I can see a statue, which from a distance looks like a knight in armour swinging some kind of large, unwieldy implement, which presumably has some religious significance. But when I get closer I can see that it is neither within the cathedral grounds nor (probably) a knight. More than anything it now seems to resemble a man attacking a speed camera.

It stands outside the Usher Art Gallery, which does not open until ten o’clock, although the gates leading from the road up to the main building are open.  There seems to be a small plaque at the statue’s base and so I walk over to see if my guess is anywhere close. But it is just a blank metal surface. Maybe I’m being encouraged to think for myself, which seems rather annoying at this time in the morning.

The statue is clearly making some point about something, but if visitors are expected to not only work out if they agree with it, but also what it might be in the first place then there ought to at least be a coffee machine next to it.