April 2008 Archives

Meanwhile I contacted the Nokia Press Office with just one simple question - how much is the normal recommended price of the battery cover for which Carphone Warehouse are charging £45?

I would have thought that was a fairly simple question to answer. Look up the list of spares, find the part and give me a price but no . . . after thinking about it for a day they suggest I contact customer services as "This is by far the best route to go about fixing the issue".

Icelandic Sagas don't last this long. If anyone knows the recommended price or knows anywhere that sells Nokia N95 battery covers without Carphone Warehouse's minimum 1,000 per cent mark-up, do let me know, in the meantime I shall contact Nokia customer services and let you know what, if anything, happens.

If you want a really good laugh go into Carphone Warehouse and ask for a new battery cover for a mobile phone. I have a Nokia N95 and the cover, a flimsy bit of plastic, lost a couple of lugs this week so is currently held on by a bit of sticky tape, very high tech

Personally I think the cover should be covered by warranty - wear and tear is a few years not a few months - but as it isn't I was expecting some rip off price of £4.99 or such like for an item giving plenty of change from 20p to produce. The first time the young lady, smiling sweetly, told me the price I thought my aging old ears had deceived me but no, when she repeated it, I had heard correctly - Carphone Warehouse are charging a staggering £45 for a bit of plastic for the back of a phone.

Not that anything really surprises me about Carphone Warehouse though, having waiting more than a year - so far - for caller display to be restored on my TalkTalk phone line, but £45 - no wonder she was smiling.

Anyone else got mobile phone or landline horror stories to relate?

Apparently according to a survey 68 per cent of the population have no confidence in Gordon Brown sorting out the fine economic mess we find ourselves in. So hands up then, let's have some names, who are the 32 per cent then?

There is an element of Emperor's new clothes about the econistas who seem to want to organise our lives from birth to environmentally-friendly, low carbon death.

No one will convince me that the eco-towns are anything but a blatant attempt to allow large scale urban development and sprawl in green belt but stick eco on it and people are convinced that they must be saving the planet.

Latest eco wheeze is to turn grassland into bio-fuel, the grassland that is not being covered in eco-towns of course. The bio-fuel industry is making the South Sea bubble look like normal business practice. All it has managed to achieve so far is the continuing destruction of rain and tropical forest on a huge scale and massive hikes in food prices as crops are grown for fuel instead of food. At a stroke food prices have been linked to oil prices.

That brings all the associated and devastating increases in poverty and starvation to the third world as well as endless price increases for the rest of us and all this is to produce a fuel which is costing more in carbon than it is saving. It takes enough food to feed a man for a year to produce just one tank of fuel for a 4x4 apparently. Eco and economics seems to be a few MPG apart on that one.

We now have TV programmes telling us how much carbon was used in their production with people presumably paid for working it out - I tell you it is becoming an industry. Why we should want to know I have no idea. Do they think people will watch Lewis rather than Foyle's War because it uses less carbon?

The problem is that if you stick eco, green, carbon neutral, environmentally friendly or any other buzz word into any hare brained scheme, pointless research or money-making scam you are feted as a prophet. I was one of those who advocated not using the oceans, rivers and wilderness as a dustbin years ago when it was the domain of individuals with beards and shirts knitted from navel fluff and have always believed we needed a viable alternative to oil but sensible argument has long gone out of the window shouted down by global warming theories which change on a daily basis to fit the weather and the latest research grant.

Next time anyone spouts on about your carbon footprint and global warming remember that it was their size tens that destroyed an area of Amazonian rain forest the same size as Cornwall in the last six months of last year and put up the price of your pint, loaf, baked beans and most other things you eat and they still can't tell you what the weather will be like next week.

There is a touch of irony about the Government being hoist with its own Human Rights Act petard, the words roost and chickens spring to mind, but for Defence Secretary Des Browne and the MoD to first of all challenge the ruling that British soldiers are entitled to have decent kit when we send them to war and then appeal it when they lose does not seem to have much to do with human rights.

Whatever the rights or wrongs of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan I would have thought that the Government had at the very least a moral right and duty of care to send our armed forces into battle with the proper equipment. If you are asking people put their lives on the line for you it seems only reasonable that you give them a fighting chance with the right tools for the job. Fine words are all well and good but they don't stop bullets.

The Government's attempt to gag coroners presiding over military inquests was covered in an earlier blog and now the High Court have ruled coroners should tell it like it is and not only that, they have ordered the MoD to supply more documents to inquests. So that makes it 3-0 to the judges in what looks like being the first leg with the return at the House of Lords.

The MoD fear seems to be that if sending troops into battle with defective, missing or sub-standard equipment is deemed to breach their Human Rights and then, to put the tin hat on it, so to speak, a coroner points out serious failures contributed to the death of some poor soul then the Government might have laid itself open to being sued for compensation by grieving relatives. I don't think you need to be a QC to work that one out.

I am no lawyer but there seems to be a fairly simple solution to this dilemma - make sure your troops are properly kitted out before you start getting involved in wars. It's the old adage if you can't pay don't play.

Notice how many of the great and good are discovering other pressing engagements such as washing their hair, waxing their legs, shaving up their noses or whatever that unfortunately clash with the opening ceremony of the Olympics in Beijing.

Apparently these other engagements were well known about months ago if anyone had bothered to ask and have nothing whatsoever to do with shifts in public and world opinion or popularity ratings. As for China and Tibet? Never came into the equation old boy.

So they can placate the Chinese by telling them they would love to come but sorry they can't find anyone to look after the cat which, in turn, means everyone can save face and, more importantly, save their place at the financial trough that is China. Meanwhile our leaders avoid being seen on TV and in newspapers sitting through the ten hours of tedium, or at least I am sure it will seem that long for those who endure it, before the athletes can finally start. This of course will mean they can avoid having to show their full support to their hosts while at the same time explaining their complete lack of it to their electorate.

Then, with the smoke, mirrors and spin that is modern politics, come the next election the non-appearance, if it is raised, can become a brave stance for human rights, a move to avoid embarrassing our close friends the Chinese or even a difficult decision taken to secure jobs at home depending upon the direction of the wind and whether there is an R in the month.

Sitting on the fence with your best foot forward while watching your back, leading the charge and bringing up the rear all at the same time. Thank you for your support, I shall wear it always.

Anybody spot the story about the poor soul charged £127 by BT for a couple of phone calls he made attempting to change an appointment at his local hospital in Essex?

It seems he was charged £2.59, the rate for an hour, for each minute of the two calls of 21 and 28 minutes respectively instead of the 5p per minute rate on the 0844 number - the length of calls being because he was put on hold by the hospital which, you must admit, is a neat trick when you are coining it in for each minute a patient is on the line.

BT, as a goodwill gesture, which is management speak for we cocked up, are cancelling the bill but more alarming is the fact that the hospital, Broomfield in Chelmsford, introduced their "special low call rate number" in the first place.

There are far too many firms making a few bob on the side by charging us to call them despite the fact that we are the customer and they want our business but when it comes down to Government departments and public bodies perhaps it is time we said enough is enough. Perhaps the faceless suits who have never healed anyone in their life and who run our hospitals on the basis that life and death come down to a balance sheet should remember that those of us who pay taxes and national insurance also pay their exorbitant salaries. The unfortunate amongst us are also their customers.

The role of the managers, if they have to be employed at all, is to actually serve us and make life as simple as possible for patients and their families which does not involve grubbing around for every extra penny they can find. What next? A charge for extra sheets or blankets? Additional laundry fees for soiling sheets? Penalty charges for dying and spoiling league tables and targets?

Any other hidden charges out there anyone wants to get off their chest? Feel free to let fly.

An old friend who is one of my blog readers (possibly the only one, who knows?) has been asking what has happened with the ducks. If this means nothing to you then scroll down a few entries to the offering of March 27.

The ducks arrived on my garden pond last month, and were either the same pair who took up residence last year or had come on quack of bill recommendation. They waddled about, ate and fertilised the lawn, preened, bobbed up and down on the pond, ate some birdfood, provided some interesting viewing for our cat Missy, and seemed remarkably happy for a couple of days. Love's sweet bloom personified.

Last year the drake seemed to take an unhealthy interest in frogs, eating at least one, while his mate seemed rather partial to tadpoles. Now tadpoles are your ultimate eco-warrior. They will devour anything organic in a pond, dead leaves, plants, dead fish, algae all vanish down their voracious gullets - they also eat their brothers and sisters, which if nothing else explains why we do not have Biblical plagues of frogs every year, and, in survival of the biggest in this case, they provide fresh protein for fish coming out of their winter stupor. Some must even survive to become adults frog, toads and newts. So to protect them and their parents and the fish - which ducks will also eat given the chance - I decided to provide my mallards with genuine duck food.

You would not believe how much the Internet says they eat in a day, getting on for a pound between them, so I duly purchased a sack of the finest duck victuals from my local farming and equestrian supplies emporium and stocked the pond mini-bar.

The ducks, whose idea of fear was to paddle furiously to the opposite side of the pond as you went past and then glare at you, watched with interest, quacking quietly to each other, as I washed out a container for clean water then cleaned a large plantpot saucer as a feed tray and dutifully filled both and placed them by the pond - I didn't want the little dears to have to waddle too far. To encourage them to investigate I even scattered a couple of slices of bread, fresh wholemeal riddled with healthy seed of course, around the containers.

The ducks duly waddled out of the pond, ate the bread, dipping it in the drinking water first - could be a design problem there - then looked and pecked at the food. An hour later they were cleared for take off on their daily flight, scattered the local wildlife with their sonic quacks as they took to the air and have not been seen since. The next lot are on grass and pondwater.

It is a bit late to start saying that politics should be kept out of sport after the protests surrounding the troubled journey of the Olympic torch through London, which no doubt will be repeated in Paris and almost every other country where the torch - looking like a novelty rounders bat cigarette lighter incidentally - wends its way.

It was politics that got us into this mess in the first place when the games were awarded to China by the IOC in 2001. Anyone who voted for Beijing claiming it would change China's attitude towards human rights and make it a pinnacle of democracy in the seven years leading up to the games was either a liar or fool. Much more likely reasons to influence voting were probably hidden in the murky world of business and arms deals, foreign aid and influence and plain old brown envelopes.

A pity though that the art of protest has not moved on one jot since the heyday of CND, Vietnam and miner's strikes in the 60s and 70s, all chants and placards and charging police lines for the cameras. A much more elegant and telling protest would have been for no one at all to have turned up and left the torch to make its tainted journey in empty streets with only TV cameras and police for company. That would have infuriated Beijing much more than what turned out to be a hard-line police approach which no doubt the Chinese authorities will claim is hardly any different to its own treatment of protesters in Tibet.

What is done is done though and it is too late to rectify a mistake made seven years ago. The world's athletes deserve their moment of glory after working for four years to compete, although even the Olympic ideal has been tarnished by the more and more commercialised IOC and its obsession with TV and sponsorship. Changing the rules to ban the likes of Eddie the Eagle and Eric the Eel did more damage to the Olympic movement than any amount of protests. The Olympics might be about excellence but first and foremost it should be about taking part.

So let me get this right. People are complaining because our much heralded new "world class" border police force does not actually have any uniforms, can't arrest anyone and does not work at weekends. I added the world class bit by the way as everything under New Labour always seems to have world class inserted somewhere in the title.

I really can't see what the fuss is about and I am sure the army of consultants, who no doubt even now are charging us for a fleet of lorries to transport their fees away, will have arranged for notices to be put up at all ports, airports and beaches informing terrorists and illegal immigrants that they are not allowed to enter Britain outside office hours or at weekends which should solve the problem.

As an aside though, working office hours in adversity is not new. When war was declared in 1939 my late father-in-law joined colleagues from the Bank of England in signing up for the London Transport Regiment - the local volunteer force.

After rapid training they were shipped off to Norway as part of the Allied expeditionary force where they were set to happily shelling German positions . . . until 5pm that is when the gunnery sergeant in charge of the battery, a shop steward on the Underground until he signed up, declared it was time to knock off for the day. For the first few days of the war in Norway a little part of England was fighting the war from nine to five with an hour for lunch. A very civilised state of affairs which lasted until the regular army officers discovered what was happening and declared war was a full time occupation.

Pity the officers are not around today, running a border force perhaps.