Web designer vs client

"Unfortunately he's in court on a charge of porking a badger.”
 

Graphic design vs marketing

"It is a massive file, it looks huge on my PC screen. It is 65KB."

The cut 'n' shut

You know, there’s one thing that freaks me out: big heads. I don’t mean braggers or show-offs, I mean people who actually have big heads.

It’s a proportion thing. There was a kid at school whose head was just too big in relation to the rest of his body. He didn't have much of a neck, to be fair, but his head was as wide as his smaller-than-normal shoulders. He looked a bit like a 5-foot-tall Victorian ventriloquist’s dummy. He’d sit there in class brooding, with his tiny shoulders and massive head, blocking out the light.

There’s a lot of it about, and it unnerves me. With some its quite subtle; with other not so. When the bonce is only slightly bigger in relation to the rest of the body you might only be a bit scared by someone, and not really know why. Other heads are obviously way too big, and it’s them that I find unnerving and compulsive. It's almost like there are two different bits of people stuck crudely together and which don't quite fit. Like a cut 'n' shut.

I was on the No.17 bus this morning coming from London Bridge. I was deep into an article in the Economist, when something — a shape — out in front distracted me. A man was getting on the bus. I immediately noticed his head. How he got on the bus through the doors is anybody’s guess, but he did. As he came towards me, my first thought was – carnival float. My second – It’s a Knockout.

He sat down directly in front of me, and just before he plunged the rest of us into darkness, I just had time to notice that the next stop was mine. I got up, blind, and, fighting hard against its gravitational pull, I orbited the planet Bonce with some difficulty and shot off into space across the Euston Road.

All this reminded of another massive head and my favourite celebrity cut ‘n’ shut spot of all time.

Many years ago I stepped into a newsagents in the Tottenham Court Road to buy some fags. There, by the counter, side-on to me, stood Ian McShane - aka Lovejoy.

I used to enjoy watching Lovejoy. For those of you with better taste, or perhaps just a life, Lovejoy was a loveable rogue, with a mullet and trademark leather box jacket, who sold antiques and got into all sorts of scrapes and whatnot. He was very popular with women of a certain age.

On seeing him in the flesh I was reminded of what an odd shape he is. Basically, an enormous head and narrow shoulders sitting atop a barrel chest and tiny thin legs. I don’t know what happened there, but he’s basically a cut ’n’ shut.

How his tiny legs can cope with supporting what must be about a ton of randomly thrown together bone, fat and mullet I’ve no idea. Not a clue.

And if that's not weird enough he was standing in an odd way with his legs tightly together but his feet pointing in almost opposite directions, sort of east and west, if you know what I mean. He had on a burgundy jumper and silver-gray drainpipes. He looked like a very large glass of red wine.
 
Here though is one of my favourite cut ’n’ shut artistes, Mr Tom Waits.

Fantastic song, but look at that head…

Designer vs client 2

"There is a great font called Comic Sans in Microsoft Word."

 

Graphic designer vs client

This is so spot on…

Switzerland – armed neutrality and deception in the mountains

“The Swiss countryside is like a huge Emmental cheese: it’s full of holes!”
The museum guide in the small village of Charmey in the Freibourg canton was not talking about the effects of glacial stream erosion or hyperactive moles on the Swiss landscape, but something far more sinister – and far more impressive.

High up on the narrow (and at times gulp-inducing) winding mountain roads of the Grimsel Pass and Furka Pass, we stopped to photograph the incredible scenery. Through my telephoto lens I spotted something odd on the mountain opposite: strange little square holes cut into the rock. I discovered later that we were looking at just a few of Switzerland’s many hundreds of military bunkers.

Hang on. Zoom in a minute…

WTF

Switzerland’s landscape is literally riddled with these bunkers cut deep into the rocks. Climb up far enough (if you’re fit and not scared of heights, that is), and you may come across a lonely, cold, steel door framed in concrete and sharp rock, high up on a gusty shelf.

2000ft up a mountain. No door number, no letter box, no nothing.
The classic postman's nightmare


Drive around the countryside too and you may occasionally see strange rocky shapes in the distance, with a hole in the centre for a gun turret.

Peekaboo. Bang.

I have no idea.

I was sufficiently intrigued to start Googling on my mini-laptop. Armed with fresh info I set off again, determined to find out more…


In the sleepy, pretty village of Grampelen in the Bern canton we got talking to a German who knew of these bunkers. He has lived in the village all his life, as had his father, grandfather and great-grandfather before him. After some initial inquiries, and a couple of tall beers, he stood up and said, “Follow me, please”. We nervously followed him to his car and we drove off up the road. We stopped at a very high steep bank of tall grass. At the top we could just discern a dark shadow behind the trees at the top of the hill.

We watched as our rather rotund Teuton began to scramble up the steep slippery incline. He was up that hill like a jack-rabbit. About ten minutes later we joined him at the top, clutching our chests. "Here, you see”, he said. There in front of us was something very strange indeed.

"What the fuck's that?", I said, with all the eloquence I could muster. "Bunker", said the fat German, smiling.

It had windows, shutters and a slate roof. It sort of looked like a chalet. But the windows and beams were painted on. Inside we discovered only the cold feel of concrete in the still, musty, claustrophobic darkness – long abandoned, but for the ghosts. A trap door in the floor lead to an underground maze of tunnels. Here's the place:

Draw the curtains – oh, you have.

Today most bunkers are demilitarised, and a few have become privately owned museums. One of them is even a hotel! A few in the past have housed asylum seekers. That'll learn 'em.

The Swiss were famous for their armed neutrality in WWII, and this fake chalet bunker system was one way of enforcing it.

Here's some more:

Chateaux Le Bunkeur

Lovely

Bunker disguised as a huge cowpat

Cuckoo! Cuckoo!

We stopped for a family-sized Toblerone.

The plan was that if it all went tits up they would abandon the lowlands and escape high up in the mountains and hills to hide, and to protect the passes. Not a bad plan, really.

They did cost a lot to build though, and the government didn’t want to raise taxes, so they opened it up to citizens and corporations to donate the cash. It was actually over-subscribed. Locals say that Adolph was so impressed by this he abandoned his invasion plans.

Well, for whatever reason, Hitler didn’t invade, and the bunkers were seen as a big success. So much so, in fact, that they kept building and maintaining them after WWII.

Throughout the Cold War they were improved and the mountains hollowed out for bigger bunkers in case of nuclear war.

We should be grateful to Switzerland for their armed neutrality in WWII. They never let the Germans use its roads or rails for military transport, which deprived Hitler of logistic routes for his Italian campaign.

Hitler is on record as hating their purely defensive military philosophy. He ordered his generals to draw up plans to invade Switzerland – but never did. Why? One reason was that he already had a somewhat busy schedule. Another was Switzerland's defences, and its landscape. German troops referred to Switzerland as Stachelschwein (a porcupine).

What the Swiss also had was sabotage plans. At the moment of German invasion, the Simplon and St. Gotthard tunnels would be blown up, as well as all bridges over the Rhine, power stations, and air-fields. Avalanches and landslides would be set off to block armour and infantry movement.

Plus, every Swiss home had a rifle – every single one. Sharp-shooting was, and is, the national sport; we often heard the crack of gunfire in the countryside (a little unnerving).

In WWII, Swiss youths were trained to shoot at 300 meters, Germans at 100. Soldiers were ordered to hold their positions to the last cartridge, and then fight on with bayonets.

I think Hitler didn’t invade because he knew it would be too difficult and too costly. It would be interesting to hear from any military historians out there who can enlighten me.

I’m liking this armed neutrality idea though: leave us alone and we’ll leave you alone. Fuck with us and we’ll fight you with everything we’ve got to defend our right to freedom, democracy and self-determination.

Prosperity needs peace in the long-term. What country has achieved that better than the Swiss?

The final word goes to Winston Churchill:
"Of all the neutrals Switzerland has the greatest right to distinction. What does it matter whether she has been able to give us the commercial advantages we desire or has given too many to the Germans to keep herself alive? She has been a democratic State, standing for freedom in self-defence among her mountains, and in thought, in spite of race, largely on our side."

Amen to that.

Politicians: what do you believe in?

I used to be a Socialist. My father was a good old-fashioned, decent, hard-working man, who happened to believe fervently in Communism. He greatly influenced me when I was young (a long time ago).

He wasn’t a politician, or a university man, or a middle-class intellectual self-loathing Marxist with his head buried in books. In fact, he didn’t read many books at all. He didn’t like to sit still. He lived his life.

He was of a particular 20th century generation who experienced what Eric Hobsbawm correctly called The Age of Extremes.


Born during a war in 1914, he grew up without many male relatives, most having been either cut to ribbons or blown up during The Great War.

As a kid and a young man he suffered the poverty of the 1920s and 1930s. Not the so-called poverty of today (only two holidays a year, only eating out once a week etc), but genuine poverty: days without food, months without heating, finding tyre rubber for resoling his shoes – that kind of poverty.

He was called up in 1940 and sent to North Africa. First, Egypt and Tunisia, then Malta and finally, Italy.

Incidentally, he saw Winston Churchill give a speech while in Egypt. He said Churchill was booed by some of the soldiers. I wonder what he’d think of me now, me being a fan of the great man?

In 1944 my father was captured at Monte Cassino in Italy before being incarcerated as a POW in Stalag VIIa in Moosburg. Escaped, recaptured, escaped, recaptured. He felt most sorry for the Russian prisoners who were treated worse than dogs. They were starving and filthy – forced to live in their own shit. When my father once got a Red Cross parcel he threw some Russians a bar of soap. They knew what to do with that – they eat it.

When he got home my father weighed six-stone, and what remained of his once thick flowing hair was now just straw. He walked up his home street and right past his expectant family. They didn’t recognise him.

He was still kicking out in his dreams in his late sixties.

Eventually things got better in the 1950s and 1960s, but like a lot of people his experiences left him with a view of the world as a hard, godless place, full of injustice, inequality and unfairness – especially if you happened to have been born working class.

His old Catholicism gave way to Communism. Fairness, equality for all, redistribution of the wealth, free health care for all, homes fit for heroes etc. A lot of people felt like that after the war, and who could blame them?

My point, in case you were wondering, (I was beginning to wonder myself) is that there are two types of Socialist. They are both wrong, but one is the type who, although you disagree with them, you enjoy their company and respect them, absolutely. The other is just a bloody fool.

There are many people, particularly older people, whose beliefs may flabbergast and infuriate you, but whom you respect and listen to because those beliefs have been forged by their experiences of (an often hard) life. They have been to the very bottom. They have stared the Devil in the face and spat back at it, raging. They have worked hard, and know better than any Westminster Bubble Socialist careerist ever could.

The other kind is the hypocrite. The counter-cultural middle-class lefty, too wrapped up in political correctness and self-loathing to see or think straight. They froth at the mouth about inequality and the downtrodden masses, but they secretly detest the poor and the downtrodden. They are angry – mainly with themselves. My father would have hated them.

Polly Toynbee is the classic example of what I mean: a fake and a hypocrite of the most odious kind. From her villa in Tuscany she gets paid £140,000 a year to educate us all about the problems of the poor, and how evil the rich are for getting on. How kind of her, and how grateful the poor must be to have Polly on their side.

Her real message to the poor, though, is very clear: stay there. Take the handouts and be grateful. Be what us full-bodied Tuscan Red 1997 Socialists want you to be. Besides, we need you to stay there.

She exhibits three things here:

(1) That she’s evil
(2) A pernicious, and frankly embarrassing, student union politics view of toffy-nosed fat cats looking down on the cloth-capped poor from their ivory, marble-walled towers.
(3) Her hatred of the poor.

New Labour, the MSM commentariat, and our universities, are full of these people. Their views have not been shaped by real world experiences but by intellectual claptrap, self-loathing, selfishness, and the love of power.


So is this just how it is these days? Was it all inevitable?

Now you could argue, of course, that the world has changed; we’ve moved on. We don’t have World Wars, and we don’t have anything like the level of poverty we used to. We don’t suffer like our fathers and grandfathers did, and we should be grateful for our peaceful, safe, prosperous and characterless lives. I guess so.

Maybe our modern politicians are just a product of all this too, like we are. Ideologies are a thing of the past. All that’s left is careerism and petty corruption as the norm.

All three parties look depressingly alike in their empty, confused shallowness. They just grab and hold on to power for the sake of it, and believe in nothing.

Me and my father would disagree strongly about a lot of things now, but we would both be asking the same question of our current politicians: what do you believe in?

Fire & Steam: should the railways be renationalised?

The railways are a mess. For the majority of Britain’s rail passengers their journey, if it’s not delayed or cancelled, is uncomfortable, overcrowded and egregiously expensive. Throw in some surly, unhelpful, ill-informed staff and the whole thing adds up to a pretty wretched experience.

So how is it that the country that invented the railways, and which once led the world in rail travel, has come to this? Why is it so awful and so expensive?

I’ve just finished reading a book by one of Britain’s most respected railway historians, Christian Wolmar. His latest work, “Fire & Steam, How the Railways Transformed Britain, is a great place to start if you want to know how it all developed from the very beginning to the present day. It also provides plenty of food for thought on the causes of the railway’s current problems and on its prospects for the future.


I should tell you that Wolmar is something of an old Trot. Not only do you come across the expression ‘the masses’, a lot, but barely a page goes by without a little dash of ‘well-to-do’ bashing. In his view, the early days of rail travel were a messy, confusing, laissez-faire free-for-all of unscrupulous entrepreneurs, shady dealings, and unnecessary competition and line duplication. And of course there were lots of rich folk lording it up while the poor scrabbled around in cloth caps and had to walk everywhere. You get the picture.

Leaving aside Wolmar’s obvious political bias this book is very well written. It steams along at a fair old lick and Wolmar’s writing is elegant and expressive. His comprehensive knowledge and obvious enthusiasm for the subject really help bring this often ‘anoraky’ subject to life.

The book starts with the famous Stockton & Darlington line in 1825 and ends with the High Speed Rail Link into St Pancras for the Channel Tunnel. Thankfully it never lapses into train-geekery detail, but concentrates instead on the railway’s social and politico-economic context. There are chapters on the railway’s vital contribution to both world wars, on the role of women workers, as well as interesting (if totally biased) information and anecdotes about the early influence of the unions.

For me, the book gets really interesting during the ‘golden age’ of British Rail. I can imagine some readers stifling a guffaw at that last statement, but perhaps that snort of derision would be a tad unkind to old BR? Whereas the first few decades from 1948 were pretty awful for most commuters, (it didn’t help that BR held on to steam far too long), it did gradually improve as it eventually learned how to run as a unified system. In fact, come the 1980s the service, compared to now, was largely excellent.

Could it be possible, then, that all those stories about poor service, hopeless inefficiency and curly, indigestible sandwiches were mostly myths? Could it be possible that we would be better off now with a nationalised service – one that ran as a unified service? Wolmar thinks so, and I have to say he gives plenty of compelling reasons why.

Not surprisingly, the author is convinced that the privatisation of the railways was, “badly botched”, “unnecessary” and “an almost complete disaster”. Although he does admit that freight has benefitted from the move, in every other respect privatisation has, so far, proved to be an expensive mistake.

“The biggest irony,” says Wolmar, “and indeed failure, of privatisation was that far from reducing the cost of the railways to the taxpayers, it soared to unprecedented heights”.

Personally, I don’t believe privatisation is solely to blame for today’s poor rail service. It has more to do with decades of underinvestment and from being used by successive Governments as a political shuttlecock. We must also consider the understandable, but often debilitating, health and safety measures introduced countrywide after the dreadful Hatfield crash.

I am not totally convinced about nationalisation because I think a lot or our problems today are to do with the sheer volume of people using the railways. And it’s clear to anyone, particularly anyone who travels regularly through London, that the system is seriously struggling to cope. This has more to do with huge levels of immigration, as well as the Government’s poorly thought-through housing targets that see flats springing up everywhere but with no increase in travel infrastructure to cope with the extra demand.

As I say I remain sceptical, but this excellent book has given me food for thought. I’m all in favour of privatisation where it works, but I’m no ideologue, and maybe it is just possible that a unified State-run monopoly might just be better for passengers in the long-run, compared to what we have now which is effectively a series of private monopolies that are actually costing the customer more than BR ever did.

Whatever your opinion on the subject, if you are even vaguely interested in the railways this is a book I would very much recommend.

Gardeners' question time: are you local?

Monty you terrible c**t

There’s been some brouhaha going on recently about Monty Don, food imports and growing your own vegetables. Via the eminently sensible Fat Bigot I found an argument raging over at The Devil’s Kitchen. The Devil was insisting that dear old Uncle Monty was an idiot and he offered the following paragraph as proof:

“Monty Don, the former BBC Gardener’s World presenter, said the UK could run out of food ‘within weeks’ because the country is so dependent on imports and it was essential for the country to grow more of our own food. He urged businesses around the country to follow the lead of the National Trust: ‘If every household, business, office or factory dug up a patch of land there would literally be millions of allotments made available. This is just the start of something really big.’”

In one respect, of course, it is ridiculous because not every house, office, or factory has a patch of land. So, it’s not going to happen anyway. But the Devil’s response was a bit over the top. He is convinced that were the National Trust’s dream (and it is a dream, let’s face it) to become a reality it would plunge us all into “the biggest famine since the late 1360s”.

Personally I can’t stand much of Monty. I prefer to get my gardening tips from Gardeners' Question Time on R4. But really this seems like a lot of brouhaha over not very much. The Devil even goes on to quote a “medieval historian” blogger who gets truly bent out shape about it all. Unfortunately, so does her reasoning:

“Christ, haven’t these people learned anything? If living off our own fucking local food was so great, our ancestors wouldn’t have escaped in relief from doing it as soon as conditions made it possible. Pardon me while I descend into teleological historicity, but isn’t one of the purposes of chronicling human development to avoid past mistakes, rather than to do the same stupid shit all over again?”

She continues:

“The other problem with eating only local produce is, of course, that delightful as these shores may be, we’d all be eating nothing but turnips and parsnips from November to March. A four-month diet of root vegetables might solve the nation’s obesity problem, but the incidence of malnutrition (particularly things like scurvy) would soar to fifteenth-century levels!”

It’s an enjoyable rant, but it’s bollocks. Firstly, she seems to know fuck all about vegetable growing in modern Britain, and secondly, no one, as far as I can tell, is saying that we should stop all imports, plough up the country and work the land clad in sacking singing ‘Hey, Nonny Nonny’, before dropping dead at 22 clutching a turnip.

If Monty Dung had been saying that the Government should appropriate large swathes of the British Isles and force us all to grow our own vegetables because if we don’t we’ll all be dead by next Thursday week, then the rants and brouhaha would have understandable and justified. But they weren’t.

Calm down. It will be alright.

If more land were used for growing vegetables it would mean more people eating fresh stuff that tastes of something. And unless they are among the very few who have a huge plot and lots of time on their hands then most will still buy lots of imported supermarket stuff anyway. It really isn’t a ‘one or the other’ scenario.

Growing your own does have all sorts of benefits, and surely a little bit more self-sufficiency and self-reliance – should people choose it - is hardly going to plunge us all back into the 1360s.

My dad had a double plot allotment and fair-sized back garden, all full of veg. How he managed to do it all while holding down a full-time job I’ll never know. Unfortunately, his wages, as a compositor at the Evening Argus newspaper, were a pittance, and that allotment allowed us to eat fresh produce every day very cheaply. It was bloody hard work though.

My father acquired the plot on January 1st 1976. Not a good year for gardeners. Little did we know that that year would be so hot and so dry for so long. It became a full-on drought. The ground was like brown rock. and although I was only eleven, I spent almost every weekend and a lot of evenings after school, carrying can after can of water, back and forth, back and forth…

My Sundays started at 7am with water-carrying, digging, weeding and more water-carrying, and were punctuated by regularly banging my head inside the tiny, cluttered shed whilst looking for stuff. I’ll never forget that shed. It was full of the biggest spiders that have ever walked the earth. They were gigantic hairy beasts that watched my every move. I don’t care how much good they do in the garden, spiders are utter bastards and that’s an end of it.

We would finish about 1pm and carry whatever veg we did have back in the wheelbarrow for mum to cook. And God was I hungry…

I did learn two important things though: how to grow vegetables, and the value of hard work.

This year I will grow potatoes, broad beans, peas, onions, carrots and sprouts, and there will be successional sowings of salad stuff like radish, lettuce and spring onions. I don’t need to, of course; I do it because I want to. It’s a very beneficial hobby that gives me fresh air, exercise and that deep sense of satisfaction you get when you know you’ve done a good day’s physical work. As a commentor on the previous post said, it's good for the soul.

At the end of the day I will pull up some veg, hand them through the kitchen window and Mrs B will prepare them. Within the hour they will be disappearing down our gullets. And they will taste wonderful.

The next day we will make a list of the other veg we feel like eating and then we'll go to the supermarket for some imported stuff. It seems to work just fine.

The Tornado!

I travelled to town on Saturday and arrived at Victoria station to see lots of men of a certain age rushing towards platform nine with cameras. The place was buzzing with excitement. Intrigued enough to follow them I soon found the reason for all the excitement. There, in all its shiny new apple livery glory, was the Tornado: the first steam locomotive to be built in the UK for almost 50 years.
As dozens of dewy-eyed enthusiasts snapped away, or just stood in unselfconscious reverence, I have to admit that I too was awestruck. It is beautiful. And behind the magnificent engine were the Pullman carriages, full of couples, separated by art deco lamps, on a Valentine’s Luncheon/Dinner special.
The Peppercorn class A1 Pacific steam locomotive was built by the A1 Steam Locomotive Trust which raised around £3million to build it at a tram works in Darlington.
But this wasn’t a shell of an old train that was rebuilt and lovingly restored. This was made from scratch, each part machined to perfection over 18 years. It's a fantastic feat of engineering, and it’s good to know that the skills that made this possible are still very much alive in Britain.
As one passenger remarked on the Tornado’s first journey, “In these dark days, to have something like this is absolutely brilliant.” Too right.

And this leads me rather nicely on to my next post…