Why are cyclists so stupid?

Is there something strange that happens when a grown person climbs aboard a bike?  Are they required to leave their brain at home?



Firstly, I'm sure that there are some sensible cyclists, just as there are plenty of bad car and lorry drivers, but there is a difference: in town if you do something stupid in a car you might hit a pavement or bump another car, but if you do daft things on a bike you will probably get seriously hurt or killed.

Driving through Winchester one dark evening last week I only just spotted a cyclist, dressed all in black, on a racing bike with no rear lights.  It was the equivalent of going out on a suicide mission, and when I tooted my horn at him, he gave me the finger.  Had I killed him, I have no doubt it would have been seen as my fault.

A geriatric lady riding her bike down Parchment St in Winchester....the wrong way on a one-way street.  Try that in a car and you'll be in trouble, but if you're a cyclist...

At the traffic lights on North Walls, indicating that I plan to turn left towards River Park, when a cyclist decides to ignore my signals and come up the inside of me - he only just got away with it - had I hit him I've no doubt he'd have thought it was my fault.

Traffic lights seemingly don't apply to cyclists - watch them and you'll find that most simply ignore them.

Cyclists are, more often than not, total muppets on the road.   Fact!

Xmas gender stereotyping

Just done Waitrose in Winchester for the final time before Xmas, and was struck by the degree to which people take leave of their manners and senses at this time of the year.  By 08:00 there were around 100 punters queuing to get into the store, and once the doors opened, the gender differences became apparent.

The men were all action: "I have been given my list, and I'm going to succeed in getting everything - I'm a hunter gatherer, and being a bloke is about survival of the fittest.  Why are these people crawling round the aisles?  I'm going to go round at speed, bashing into things and sighing at the incompetence of everyone else".  Shouting too:  "Hey you, where are the pickled lemons?  What do you mean you've run out of Bourbon Vanilla Pods?  No, I don't want those vanilla pods - my list says Bourbon!  Christ, I could do this in half the time if all these other muppets weren't in the store."



Winchester Woman is a different beast.  Dyed blonde hair, sunglasses in a supermarket on 23 December, and dressed as though she has had an accident with her 14-year-old daughter's Topshop wardrobe.  Really, black leggings don't work in public once a woman gets above a certain weight - as my late father-in-law (a former gamekeeper) used to say: "The sights you see when you haven't got your gun".  Winchester Woman also checks her brain in at the door once she has parked her black, tinted-windowed 4 x 4.  The preferred trolley technique seems to be to simply stop in the middle of the aisle, and abandon it. While everyone else queues to get round the obstacle, WW is off roaming other aisles in search of chestnuts and meringues, oblivious to a) how grotesque she looks, and b) the chaos she has left behind her.




Once WW gets to the aisle, I'll bet you a pound to a penny that she dumps her groceries on the belt, and then, with a dramatic sigh and expletive, deserts them in search of the four or five items she has forgotten to get. My technique is to simply shove their shopping back up the belt while they're gone, and put mine there instead.  Trust me, they love it!

And a merry Xmas to you all!  Bah, humbug.

A truly brilliant evening

I was privileged to recently see The Unthanks singing the songs of Antony Hegarty (Antony and the Johnsons) and Robert Wyatt.   None of the songs they sang would exactly fall into the Easy Listening category, and in most cases they are as far away from 'Folk' as it's possible to be, but the sisters, and the band, bring them to life in a remarkable way.

The Hegarty songs are largely focused on transgender politics and work unexpectedly well with the sisters' voices: 'You are my sister' had a totally different feel to it when Becky and Rachel shared the vocals, and 'For today I am a boy' was hearbreakingly beautiful.  As part of the between-the-songs chat, Rachel told a story of how, when Becky was little, she believed that as she grew to her elder brother's age, she'd become a boy, and then when she reached Rachel's age she'd turn back into a girl.  As the audence laughed, Adrian - the mastermind behind the project and Rachel's partner, wryly commented: "What you're hearing is the trivialisation of a sensitive man's struggle to come to terms with his sexuality" - even bigger laugh!

The songs of Robert Wyatt were more readily accessible, and when Rachel sang 'Out of the Blue', with it's chorus of "You have planted all your everlasting hatred in my heart", I just wanted every Israeli ever born to be forced to sit in a room and hear it until the message got through.   It describes the reaction of a Palestinian whose house has been destroyed, but it could apply to any conflict where civilians get bombed.  You can hear the original being sung by Wyatt at
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qOh4VqCc3-Q

Then there was the indescribably beautiful 'Sea Song', which was, apparently. where the project started.  One of my favourite songs, it was even more beautiful when sung by the sisters.

The album is out and is a joy, but should they ever tour these songs again, don't miss it.



The best word is left to Robert Wyatt:
"Quite simply, Antony & The Johnsons and I have been blessed by angels. If I had to take a single summary of what Alfie [ Robert's partner] and I have being doing over the years to the proverbial desert island I wouldn’t take one of our own records. I’d take the crystal clear interpretations of The Unthanks." Robert Wyatt

Colouring your judgement?

I read that some football pundit is having to apologise for referring to 'coloured' players.  However, today I saw a woman from a social enterprise on Sky News, talking about the work that they do with 'women of colour'.

Can anyone explain why 'women of colour' is an OK term, but 'coloured' isn't?

Why M&S made me feel like a racist

I like M&S Direct, the chain store's on-line service, because whenever I've used it, it has worked really well...up until now.  I sent friends in Scotland some wine for Xmas, and having been away for a couple of days found two messages on my answering machine from two women in one of the M&S call centres.  The problem was that neither of the messages were comprehensible - the women's accents were impenetrable, but I did manage to catch the 'phone number.

I called, and the person who answered struggled to understand anything that I said to her, and her English was so bad that I became more and more baffled, and then progressively more annoyed - what should have been a two-minute call to resolve a minor delivery issue, became a 20-minute saga.  Let's not beat about the bush: she was of Asian origin and spoke lousy English with an extremely strong accent.  Had this been a cockney or a Brummie, or someone from Northern Ireland, or any of the other British accents that can sometimes be difficult, I wouldn't have had a problem complaining, but the fact that she was Asian caused me to pause before I lost the plot.  Would she, and the manager I eventually spoke to, think that I was complaining because she was Asian...was I running the risk of being branded a racist?

How sad it is that such a thought should even cross my mind, but I know lots of people who hate dealing with call centres based overseas, simply because they've had bad experiences, similar to mine.

In the end I did complain, and her supervisor promised to go off and listen to the call.  He called me back, apologised on behalf of M&S, telling me that he struggled to understand what was going on, and made a 'gesture' of a financial nature to recompense me for my inconvenience.

Call centres are, sadly, a fact of life, and I have sympathy for the people who work in them and who suffer abuse from unhappy customers, but surely the very first criterion for employing someone in a call centre has to be that their English is up to scratch?  I couldn't care less about the ethnic origins of the call centre person I speak to, but they'd better be able to communicate with me in a sensible manner!