One is the loneliest number

Rare is the TV ad that makes me smile, laugh out loud then tingle all over in the space of 30 seconds.

This Lynx ad is one of my favourite on telly at the minute. It’s a real doozy. This is the full version at over a minute, but there’s an even tighter version around 20 seconds long. Both are very watchable. They’re close to my idea of the perfect ad – witty, sexy, classy, impactful – building the brand and shifting a shedload of product at the same time. So pretty much the direct opposite of the boring, cliched, ineffectual pap we put out at UK Cash Cowboys, goes without saying.

Perfect casting, music, direction and production. It’s a simple idea, brilliantly executed. A guy has a crush on a girl but he’s thwarted by fate at every turn, dammit. Until he discovers Lynx.

If you’ve ever had a secret crush on someone who always seemed out of reach… ah just watch the ad, you’ll get it.

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Why the Tories can never win the next election

Royal Mail axes collections

 

In October 2013 this pathetic excuse for a government sold off the Royal Mail to big business, like some down-at-heel aristocrat with a heroin habit flogging off the last of the family silver for his next fix. The hit it gave was fleeting, and the sale ultimately benefited the great British public not one jot. The £3.3billion it made disappeared straight into the black hole of government debt, waste and economic mis-management. Actually, it was worse than that. Because the government can’t even add up, they sold the Royal Mail at a vastly undervalued price, which by April 2014 had already COST British taxpayers £2.3billion. That’s what city investors and friends of this bunch of Eton toffs made out of their nice little earner. Thanks, Dave. Or perhaps we should call you Maggie Thatcher 2.0. The man without a soul, or principles.

The lie that’s always trotted out by apologists of privatisation is that private capital is needed to keep improving the service. But anyone who’s watched their gas and electricity bills soar into outer space in the decades since privatisation, increasing by literally thousands of percent, or seen their rail service get worse while the price of a ticket could feed a family of four for a week, will know that privatisation is all about lining the pockets of big business, plain and simple. So let’s not dress it up with all this privatisation means investment means progress bullshit. A state-owned industry can invest and develop just as well as a privately owned one. It’s just the same money slushing around in different pockets.

The true cost to the British people of a once loved and valued mail service being sold down the river is now becoming clearer, as the picture above shows. Less than a year after the Royal Mail was privatised, notices have begun appearing on post-boxes in villages like the one where I live in Forncett, Norfolk, giving notice that the level of service we have enjoyed for years is about to be consigned to history.

If you can’t read it from the picture, here is what the notice says:

“CHANGE TO FINAL COLLECTION TIMES FROM THIS POSTBOX

Dear Customer,

In order to provide our customers with the best possible service we are continually reviewing our mail collection service. Part of this on going activity involves occasionally revising collection times from Postboxes.

From Monday 4th August the final collection time from this Postbox will be 12:00 on a Monday to Friday and 10:30 on Saturday.

After this date, should you require a later collection in the area, later collections are available from the following

Norwich Road, Tacolneston at 17:00

A later collection facility is also available from the following location:

Wymondham Delivery Office, 18 Middleton Street at 18:00

If you have any concerns you should contact our Customer Services Team on 08457 740740.

Yours sincerely

Ben Cook

Royal Mail

Wymondham Delivery Office

18 Middleton Street

Wymondham

NR18 0AA

Tel: 01953 617854”

Now, anyone who looks at the picture will notice that since time immemorial the last collection from my local postbox has always been at 4:30pm. And at the risk of sounding pedantic, I’m really struggling to work out exactly how cutting the number of daily collections in half, and bringing the last collection time forward four and a half hours to midday, equates to providing me and the other residents of Forncett with “the best possible service”. Or am I just being dumb?

As if that wasn’t annoying enough, the badly-worded letter (someone at Royal Mail should inform its copywriters that ‘on going’ is all one word, not even privatisation can change that) then goes on to tell us that later collections will take place at other postboxes at Tacolneston and Wymondham, miles from here. Great, thanks. Well woo fucking hoo for Tacolneston and Wymondham. What good is that to an old age pensioner or someone without a car or other means of transport in Forncett? What about the village’s self-employed small traders who used to depend on that last post? Do they take us for imbeciles, these con-men? Are they stupid, or is it that they just don’t care, because they know we can’t do a damn thing about it?

So thanks, David Cameron and Nick Clegg, for helping destroy our postal service. Just pray that you never grow old or fall on hard times. Or have to live in a rural village when you’ve no longer got your tax-payer funded servants and armour-plated jags to pop your letters to the next village for you. Dear god, what a bunch of crooks and charlatans our politicians have become. When they’re not fiddling expenses they’re lining their own pockets by looking after their friends in the city, on whose boards they’ll no doubt pop up one day. We expect it of big business. We know they don’t give a damn for anyone except themselves and their greedy lust for ever greater profits. Just so many fat pigs with their snouts in the trough. But our politicians? The people we elected to office to serve us? We expected better from them of all people. If they won’t look out for us, who will?

Bring on the revolution, I say. I’ve had it with this lot. Tories, Lib Dems, Labour, you can’t put a cigarette paper between them these days. Just a bunch of centre-ground carpet-baggers who’d sell their souls to stay in power. Not a conviction politician in sight. They make Dennis Skinner look like Gladstone. All they’re good for is soundbites and spin, and empty posturing on the world stage, trying to get us into foreign wars that are no business of ours, at great cost in money and lives. Not one of the whole sorry bunch represent me anymore, or the things I really care about. The once-great NHS has been almost destroyed, as has the Education system, once the envy of the western world, which teachers are now deserting in their droves, over-worked, underpaid and under-valued. No wonder voters are increasingly turning to parties like UKIP, whose leader Nick Farage resembles the nearest thing we have to a ‘conviction’ party leader these days. At least you get the impression that he actually means what he says, even if you don’t agree with it. As for the mainstream parties, you wouldn’t trust them as far as you could spit them. Soon as they get into power they renege on all their promises. Well, they try to belittle UKIP as a mere protest vote. My answer to that is, you bet your ass it’s a protest vote. And until you get the message that if you keep doing shit to people that the people don’t like, eventually you’re going to get some shit coming back the other way. Give me back my Post Office, you thieving shits, or you’re toast at the next election.

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No, really, surely you ARE joking, Mr Feynman

Surely You're Joking Mr Feynman front cover

Knowing from experience how deflating a poor review can be, I have a rule that if I don’t get along with a book I usually simply put it aside without hurling vitriolic abuse at the poor author on Amazon. I can’t really see the point. Writing a book is damn hard enough without some talentless hater pouring scorn over your labour of love. However, if the author is deceased I figure I probably won’t be hurting their feelings, so I sometimes waive my rule.

Also, like a lot of wannabe novelists struggling to earn a living, it’s often rankled me that publishers who casually toss the manuscripts of unknown writers onto the slush pile with barely a second glance will fall over themselves to publish the floor-sweepings of celebrities. There seems to be one rule for the rich and famous and another one for everybody else.

I read one such book recently, Surely You’re Joking Mr Feynman by, you guessed it, Richard Feynman. To say I read it is a bit of a porky. I actually got about a quarter of the way through, by which time I’d almost lost the will to live.

If you’ve never heard of him, Richard Feynman was a Nobel prize-winning scientist who was part of the team that cooked up the atom bomb in World War Two. Like most people who’d read a bit about him I knew he was a brilliant physicist. He was a maverick who had a knack of explaining really complicated things in simple ways, so he became a pop star of the scientific world. When I saw this book on Amazon I put it straight in my cart and headed to the checkout without even bothering to sample the ‘look inside’ free section at the beginning. I was sure it would be an entertaining read. I won’t make that mistake again.

Sadly, from page one I found this book to be a real slog. It seemed to me little more than a brain dump of dull and self-indulgent anecdotes from Feyman’s life, that were about as entertaining as the instructions on a soup packet. The chapters read like the rambling diary entries of a socially-challenged teenager who’s convinced he’s secretly the most gifted story-teller since Cervantes. The book’s title is a dead giveaway. You could almost hear Feynman laughing aloud at his own jokes as he wrote, but they just weren’t funny. I also found Feynman’s somewhat conceited view of himself a bit surprising for such a great scientist, and quite off-putting. There was hardly a page where he wasn’t telling us how he outsmarted someone, proving some poor sap was an idiot and he was the only one with any brains. “The world is full of this kind of smart-alec who doesn’t understand anything,” he smugly notes, like some pub bore bragging about besting his neighbour. He seemed to spend a fair bit of time perving after women too in his stories, but hey who am I to talk. Anyhow, after fifty pages I tried skipping forward to a few later chapters but they seemed just as irritating, so I gave up.

In doing so I’m sure someone will tell me I’ve missed out on some wonderful scientific insights. That may well be the case but hey, life is short and there’s only so many great books you can read without wasting time on disappointing ones. I think I heard somewhere that Feynman’s book had been based on recordings of conversations someone had taped with him. If that’s so, it would explain the clumsy prose style and awkward sentence constructions. Thank god Feynman had such a brilliant career as a scientist, because he was no writer, based on this title.

If I was rating it out of five, I’d give this book no more than two stars. If it had been written by anyone else I don’t think it would have seen the light of day. That said, I’m sure it may still appeal to any Feynman worshippers or disciples out there, eager to devour the most trivial fact they can find about his life. But if you’re not one of those, and you’re looking for a well-written autobiography by a born story teller, I would check out the free sample on Amazon before parting with your dosh. I may pick up this book again at some point in the future to see if the later chapters yield up some gripping scientific yarns, but for now it is firmly back on the bookshelf. RIP, Dick.

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