Apathy Sketchpad

Last week when coming home from work I walked through the park, and I could see a man standing there with his arm out like he was making a videocall. It was pitch black. I thought that strange but I ignored it. Moments later there was a bright white flash all around him, so clearly he had a camera-phone with a flash. Okay. I got a bit nearer and noticed he was photographing the floor. Again strange but I’d done that too about a month earlier (although in daylight) to create a nice autumnal background image for my phone. When I got nearer, I saw he was photographing a branch. Fair enough, that’s even quite photogenic. But it was all the little white card arrows on the ground pointing at it that surprised me. They’d never been there before; they’ve never been there since. I can only assume they were his (or else he was on a thoroughly bizarre scavenger hunt).

From now on, when I see this kind of thing, I am going to ask the question that is in my head, because I don’t like the feeling that there’s a good explanation that I don’t have. It’s like if you’ve set the video to record Jonathan Creek and it didn’t finish on time.

At work, we have a big metal board which everyone routinely ignored until yesterday when for some reason we all had to start using it. It’s a list of names and a little slider so everyone knows if you’re in or out. It’s a fire rule, apparently. But there’s been a big push to keep it up-to-date now. The upshot of all this, anyway, is that we now have a bit of paper next to the exit saying “please remember to put yourself out”, and should anyone ask what it’s for we can tell them it’s a fire regulation.

I went out last night with some friends for a Chinese meal. I’m aware that Chinese tastes differ from western ones, but there were eight of us there and we all go there regularly. We like Chinese food. But apparently the Chinese aren’t very good at desserts. The last few times we’ve been there, there’s been mounting curiosity from the group about a desert called “Donkey Rolled In Mud”. I’d tasted the thing before, and I made a point of telling everyone how bad the thing was, but they ordered it anyway, probably because I couldn’t actually remember what the hell it was like, other than that all five people there last time had hated it.

The moment it arrived, the whole memory came flooding back, of course, which is good because it saved my trying the thing again. And to be honest, I’m not sure I could have usefully described it even if I had remembered it sooner: it’s unlike everything. I could no more describe it succinctly than I could describe the colour green to a blind man. (I mean a man blind from birth — the blind, not being insane, don’t insist on a capitalisation to distinguish congenital and acquired disability.)

I’m told it’s made with red beans. These, I surmise, are the brown gooey filling — presumably the eponymous mud. I can only guess that this is smeared onto the squishy grey gel that forms what I assume is the “donkey”. This stuff tastes of nothing very much, and it looks like a grey gel. The closest substance in the realm of normal human experience (if you exclude the Chinese, and how many of them can there possibly be?) is probably snot, the main difference being that some people eat snot. A more similar, but less well-known, substance is the stuff they put on cheap action figures to allow them to flip down walls — sticky enough to cling but not enough to bear its own weight for long.

This whole thing starts to resemble something that was squeezed out of a spot on one of the noses on Mount Rushmore, and so to stop it looking quite so gross it’s sprinkled with something brown and vaguely unpleasant, which clings to the tacky white mush in little clumps. The best word to describe it is “encrusted”, and not in the “diamonds” way.

The experience of eating one is very strange. It doesn’t actively taste bad, but then, it tastes so decidedly unlike anything you’ve ever eaten that it takes you several bites to realise that it’s gross, and all through that time you have to put up with the texture, which is how I imagine eating wet blu-tack must feel. When you bite through it, sometimes the bean goo moves around, and the layers of gel touch. When this happens, the layers merge. It seems you cannot have two blocks of gel touching any more than you can have two holes touching: you have one big one.

I assume the ridiculous name is there to get people curious about it. I suspect the Chinese characters next to it say “this is not a dessert — it is just a trick to see what the locals will eat”. What I’m trying to say is: if you’re ever curious, don’t indulge that curiosity. The curiosity is more enjoyable than the equivalent dessert.

I’ve seen twelve people try Donkey Rolled In Mud. Based on that experience, you have a one in twelve chance of liking it.

This is one of those times when something I was meaning to write anyway suddenly becomes topical. I choose to ascribe this to coincidence, but if you are insane you may like to instead surmise that I am a computer simulation created by another version of myself.

I was probably a couple of days away from getting round to blogging about just how intensely I dislike Ann Widdecombe, when this lands in my Google Reader inbox:

Ann Widdecombe has enjoyed a controversial political career

Ann Widdecombe set to stand down

Former shadow home secretary Ann Widdecombe has confirmed she will end her 20-year political career at the next general election.
Miss Widdecombe, 60, announced she would not be standing for re-election in the Kent constituency of Maidstone and the Weald…

…whatever exactly a Weald might be. It’s illustrated with what appears to be the BBC’s stock photo of Widdecombe, which looks like it was captured when she tried to canvass the House Of Horrors, and which appears on almost every BBC News webpage that so much as mentions her.

Well, good riddance to her, I say. I don’t like her. I don’t like her voice, I don’t like her hair, and I don’t like her politics. In many ways the last one is the most important. Rather than attempting to structure this in any particular way, I am instead going to type things as I think of them and therefore jump around the topic like some otherwise-crazed anti-Widdecombe pinball.

First, she signed this Early Day Motion in support of spending tax money on homeopathy, a ludicrous treatment that doesn’t work. Ann Widdecombe is in favour of spending tax money on pseudoscientific ‘complimentary medicines’ that have no clinical effect whatsoever. And it shows us that she’s not afraid to speak out on an issue just because she doesn’t understand it.

That, or she thinks herself to fully understand all topics, a theory bolstered by the general smugness that pervades everything she does and the fact that she seems quite happy to dole out advice on all kinds of things, no matter how far they are from her own area of expertise, whatever that may turn out to be. In Anne Widdecombe To The Rescue, she doled out all kinds of improperly thought out quick-fix advice. Her advice is always much the same, and stems mostly from her apparent conviction that anything deviating from ‘normal’ family life is Bad and deciding all further issues on the School Dinner Lady mechanic, that is, by assuming the first version of events she hears is the truth and anything that deviates from it must be wrong. And she believes in the Ultimatum as a good way to solve all problems. Her attitude is aggressive and uptight and she advocates it as the solution to everything. Here’s an example from her rather offensive Guardian column, where she advises people about relationships despite being famous for not having any:

My husband left his wife and child for me eight months ago. I have two children, younger than his, from a previous relationship. Despite what I feel was a very reasonable divorce settlement, my husband still spends as much on his first child as he did before, and still gives his ex-wife additional money whenever she asks for it. It all amounts to easily as much as he spends on us, his new family. I think we should be his first priority now, especially as his ex-wife is a professional woman and has ample funds for everything she and her child might need. He wouldn’t be depriving them of anything. Am I right?
Name and address withheld

He should have stayed with his wife as he vowed to do when he married her. You should have married and stayed with the father of your kids. Then you wouldn’t be in this silly mess, where the only victims are the children. Goodnight.

Very mature. Surely she should be able to do better than that: she was rude and confrontational and she made no attempt to answer the question. That, and she displayed a pathetically backward approach to relationships which suggests to me that her knowledge of the world around her is nothing approaching what I would demand for the job of running any part of it. And she didn’t even consider the possibility that it was the father of the letter writer’s children that caused the breakup of their relationship. The letter writer might be an innocent victim who, even by Widdecombe’s quaintly 1950s moral code has done nothing at all wrong, and she is simply attacking her for her circumstances. Joe Joseph can do better than that.

Her rather abrasive attitude is basically all she does throughout the whole article. The next letter is from a man who expects his vegetarian wife to cook meat for him, and her advice is to “shove a steak under the grill and mix it with whatever gunge she is turning out”. Then a mildly reasonable reply to a writer who doesn’t like their newly discovered sister, spoilt by the phrase “get a life”. Then, this:

I have been going out with my boyfriend for five months and it is driving me mad that he still shares a house with his ex-girlfriend along with other friends from university. He says he has no feelings for her any more - even though they broke up just four months before he started going out with me - and that they are never alone in the house together because of the other lodgers. I don’t care - I just want him out of that house and away from her. He earns enough to rent a place on his own, and I think he should be able to see that it is unreasonable still to be living with an ex when he has a new girlfriend who is bothered by the situation. Should I insist, or dump him? I don’t think I can learn to live with it.
Name and address withheld

Never alone in the house together? What do the other students do, set up a chaperone rota? Give him an ultimatum and don’t be wet enough to give it twice. But before you do that, ask yourself the most important question of all. You don’t really trust him, do you? If you believed him, you wouldn’t be in this tizz. Trust is the most essential element in any relationship and yours doesn’t have it, so no matter where he lives it is doomed. Take charge and make a fresh start now.

That is unremittingly awful advice. An ultimatum is the worst thing you could do. If you can’t discuss something like an adult then what chance do you have? Aside from anything else, unreasonable is not an attractive look on most people, and attractiveness is important when you’re demanding that someone move house for you at short notice. And notice is important: another vital detail Widdecombe fails to pick up on in this letter is the timing. The article came out in March. Five months before March is October, and four months before that is June. Add a little time between letter and publication, and that’s the time when this guy broke up with his ex. Student housing contracts always begin and end at the end of June, and are therefore usually signed before then. It would seem probable to me that they signed to live together before the break-up and, unlike the letter writer and Widdecombe, decided to just be adult about the whole thing and cohabit without any drama. He’s now, in all likelihood, contractually obliged to pay the rent until next July and therefore probably won’t want to splash out on a second rent payment just to satisfy his jealous and untrusting girlfriend. I wouldn’t.

And to round it all off, her advice is that the relationship isn’t working so she should end it. Possibly this explains why she is so perennially single. I don’t know how she expects the writer of the first letter to “[marry and stay with] the father of [her] kids” if her advice is to break up the moment you hit a difficulty.

More recently, she made a programme called Anne Widdecombe Versus Prostitution, in which she made a token effort to stamp out prostitution (which is ironic given that when she’s supposed to be helping run the country she’s happy to lend her face to basically anything, not just populist pseudo-political drivel, but Celebrity Fit Club and even advertising pasta or supporting Doctor Who villains — she’s kind of like Neil and Christine Hamilton, except that they can hold a relationship together). I didn’t watch this show. I only found out about it because Charlie Brooker didn’t enjoy it either. I did see a clip on Screenwipe of it, though, and it went much like this:

“You used a prostitute.”
“Yes.”
“But you used a prostitute!”
“Yes.”
“A street prostitute.”
“…Yes.”

I don’t think the idea that other people might think prostitution is basically okay had occurred to her, which is strange considering that she was talking to prostitutes and their customers.

As if all that wasn’t enough, look what she calls her website! “The Widdy Web”? What the hell is that? And she writes for The Daily Express — a rag whose primary business model is little more than exploiting dead blondes for profit. (Actually, that may explain it.)

And all that, and I honestly can’t think of any good she’s ever done. I checked her entry in Wikipedia and it seems she’s held two positions of major national power and the only thing Wikipedia lists that she did in that time was to visit every prison in the country — which is exactly what I expect of her: all perfectly good PR but nothing of any substance or evident use. Probably she spoke with the inmates and said “well, you shouldn’t have broken the law in the first place, then you wouldn’t be in this silly mess”.

Maybe I’m missing something. If any of you can tell me any small good that Widdecombe has ever done for the world then please do, but as of right now, everything I know about the woman, even after research, leads me to dislike her.

What, I ask of you, is she for, and why do people in these constituencies continue to elect these inane celebrities when they could be electing representatives?

A while ago the Carbon Trust stopped me in the street and gave be a pad of post-it notes. They were shaped like little feet and had carbon-saving tips written around the side and the Carbon Trust logo on the bottom. All this means that there’s only a very tiny area of paper that can actually be used (which means, when combined with the fact that nobody in the world recycles post-its, that they’re laughably carbon-inefficient), but I put that area to good use this afternoon before I left work for the day:

Today I phoned Yorkshire Water. I had to do this because my old landlord insists on bill receipts in order to claim our deposits back. I’d phoned them before, about six weeks ago. They told me then that it would take “seven to ten working days” to get a receipt. I said okay, and a month later phoned them back to ask where it was.

They said that their system said it had gone out and I insisted it hadn’t gone all the way out so they said they’d send me another. Again, they said it would take “seven to ten working days”. That was, as those of you who are good at maths will doubtless have worked out, two weeks ago. To be exact, eleven working days have passed. Those mathsy types I just mentioned will already know this, but it is important so I’ll make it explicit: eleven is more than ten.

So today’s phone call was me asking them to have a third attempt. A month and a half and two attempts has so far not been enough for Yorkshire Water to print out a bit of paper and put it in the outbound mail bag. The guy on the phone told me he’d send me a bill. He told me it would take seven to ten working days, is that okay?

I told him that no, it wasn’t really okay, because I have £500 waiting on this receipt and it simply doesn’t take two weeks to send a letter and both times they said that before they didn’t bother to send me anything.

He said that they had sent them both; says so on the screen. Possibly, he suggested, the Royal Mail had lost them.

Both of them? That’s not very, very likely, I asked, is it?

It could happen, he insisted.

So I’ve done some checking. (One thing I love about having a blog is that you’re allowed to be really anal and nerdy about utterly trivial stuff — I know from experience that the same things in everyday conversation get you mocked.) According to this page, the Royal Mail lose 14.4 million out of 21 billion items of mail every year. That means that the odds of any one bill receipt going missing are a hair under 0.07%, or one in 1,458 and a third. The odds, therefore, of them losing any two bill receipts are one in 2,126,736-and-a-ninth. The odds of Yorkshire Water being incompetent seem somewhat higher than that. Especially since, even if we grant them the 2-million-to-one failure of both deliveries, it still takes them two weeks to mail a letter.

I’ll let you know if and when they get back to me.

I just read this story on the BBC. The story itself, that a young boy died in a “prank that went wrong” presumed to be copying something he saw on TV, is obviously very sad, but I found the rest of the story very heartening. The report avoids fingering any particular shows or even blaming TV in general, the cause of death isn’t presented as an absolute, and the parents and reporter refrain from any knee-jerk demands to ban things or limit their availability, or censor them in any way. They specifically say “We don’t really know what happened but we think he was up to something because that was the type of boy he was.”

Instead, they used their small amount of access to the national press to say nice things about their late son. That’s a fantastic attitude, and they are to be commended for it. And then they’re having a funeral with brightly coloured clothes — something Sean would have wanted instead of something traditional.

More power to them. If we had more parents and reporters who took this kind of attitude we’d have a lot less tabloid-fuelled idiocy trying to push dumb legislation like Sarah’s Law onto the law books. And I bet they cope a lot better this way, too.

Oh, so that’s what that was… I assumed someone had dropped something heavy in the next room.

Shockingly enough, unlike the entire British media, I do not consider “hyped book being sold way below wholesale price outsells more expensive books which were less hyped” to be big news. So please stop reporting it as such.

Danish Photography

Here are some photos I took in Denmark recently. Denmark is very expensive. They are here, as much as anything, to try out Google Web Albums, or whatever it’s called these days.