Binge drinking

At the Labour party conference, the problems of drinking have surfaced with the promise of "drink asbos", which apparently, is not new as Councils already have the powers. I also read that alcohol retailers and producers are meeting this week to talk about the possibility of promoting lower strength drinks.

But all of this is reacting rather than treating the cause. Go back a few years when "alcopops" first came out, we said it would cause kids to drink too much. We were told by the industry that wouldn't happen, but of course it has. More recently 24 hour drinking was introduced and we said it would give rise to more drink problems. We were told it wouldn't, but it has.

So, will they ban alcopops? No, of course they won't! Will we go back to limiting licensing hours? Of course we won't! And that's because in both cases the drinks industry might see a downturn in profits and that could never happen!

There are other possibilities. I suspect many wine drinkers are unaware of the steady increase in potency of wine. From 10% or so some years ago, wines are routinely 13% or more. That is a CONSIDERABLE jump! So why not put a greater duty on stronger wines? It has been mooted and scorn poured on the idea. Why is that? Oh, of course, it might dent the producers' profits again!

Another idea is to stop supermarkets cutting the price of drinks and pubs and bars having "happy hours". Another sensible idea. But this time it's the retailers who pour scorn on this - I'm sure you've guessed why - it's all about profit!

Welcome to the age when multi-national industry rules the country and governments do as they are told.

Freeview retune continued ...

Further to this morning's blog (below), I have now retuned my freeview box and ITV is back! So is More4 which had also disappeared without a trace, which means we can now record the programme "Without a Trace"! If you've not heard of that, it's an American drama series about the FBI missing persons section, and their hunt for those who have disappeared.

But I couldn't find any recordable episodes of "Numbers", another American crime drama, also about the FBI, but crimes are solved with the help of a mathematician. OK, I know it's silly, but it's good entertainment, and I like the home scenes of the two brothers and their Dad. You'll have to watch it to understand!

We watch to see how long it is before the maths professor says "algorithm" - normally it's not long!

Freeview retune

Today is the day to retune your freeview box if you have one. We have found reception was better in Brentwood than it is here in Laindon. In fact, after a few weeks here, ITV channels suddenly went blank. So I retuned and they disappeared entirely! I tell a lie - the one that remained was ITV2+1. Where, exactly is the logic in that?

I will retune very soon now. But the website tells me that ITV will be "variable reception", as will Channel 5. So this retune is not an improvement then!

Back to Church last Sunday

Last Sunday was "Back to Church Sunday". We had a number of visitors, there were over 60 people in our congregation, which was very encouraging. So well done to all who invited people, whether or not they did actually come! There's always another time if they didn't come!

We heard the story of Zacchaeus, read and acted out before us; about how he climbed the tree, but Jesus called him down, invited himself round to his gaff and basically changed his life. We also had a quiz on the story, the last question being the stinger - spelling Zacchaeus! Could you have spelt it correctly if you didn't have it in front of you??

If you go to church, I hope your church has as good and as encouraging a time as we did!

Basildon Heritage

I wrote a while back, a little disparagingly I must admit, about the "Basildon Heritage Trail". Well, a few weeks back we tried it out. Unfortunately I didn't have my camera, but today we went back into Basildon and I did have my camera. So here are a few photos.

First of all the Armillary Sundial, "a symbol of optimism and progress." I rather like it but I don't really know how it symbolises "optimism and progress". Unless the optimism bit is that the sun will be out in order to tell the time - which it wasn't. But never mind!


On to the "Mother and Child fountain". This was being 'maintained' last time and behind hoardings, so it was nice to see it working again. But I'm not sure what the mother and child are actually doing ...

People had thrown money into the pool and we wondered, "WHY?" But if the Council collects it up and puts it into their coffers, we might get a reduction on the Council Tax. After all, every little helps!

Next is an untitled sculpture in aluminium and wire. Maybe he didn't know what to call it - come to think of it, neither do I. But it deserves a special mention as the oldest piece of public art in town - dated at 1957.

Finally a sundial and compass built into the paving stones. It's rather good as you stand on the correct position and become the sundial yourself, pointing to the time. That is, if the sun is shining, which it wasn't, of course!

But what deserves special mention is that you have to stand on the correct month of the year, to take into account that sundials can be up to about 35 minutes out. This is because the earth has an elliptical orbit (I learnt all this from an elderly man who had a passion for sundials and gave us a talk all about it when we were in Barnet).

Another exhibit in the Trail you can partly see in the sundial picture below is the Basildon bell tower. "The only steel and glass bell tower in the world" Wow! What a first for Basildon! Actually, the Trail is worth doing. Well, if you live close by, I'm not expecting people to travel for 100's of miles ...

Basildon Musings

We cycled in to Basildon this morning. The first shop we went to was Maplin and the lad said items over a certain amount are removed and just the empty boxes are displayed because of the incidents of theft. They can't even leave batteries out without them getting stolen, he said. Then we went into the bakers and the lady suggested we moved our bags to under the seat because there's been a spate of bag snatching.

You might be thinking the day didn't start very well, but that's not true. We stopped at one point to take a picture (see blog above ...). There were two lads sitting on a seat, one with a mobile phone. One of them asked us if we enjoyed our cycling, where we had come from, etc. There are nice lads out there - even if they are wearing hoodies!

But back to the bakery. They advertised a "Meal Deal" of a sausage roll, jam doughnut and a bottle of water for £1.49. A meal deal it may be, but not a balanced meal deal! My wife did, however, point out that it was diet water!

At this point I was making notes, so I'd remember what to blog and thinking back to the thefts from Maplins I wrote down "battery knickers", then realised there shouldn't be the 'k' at the beginning of 'nickers'. My wife, seeing what I had written, said, "That would bring tears to the eyes!"

It wasn't too serious a trip to Basildon.

We were looking at 'Worship' on Sunday last week, and then at our Bible Study. We find a glimpse of heavenly worship in Isaiah's vision. There the worship of the seraphs was expressed in these words:
Holy, holy, holy is the LORD Almighty;
the whole earth is full of his glory.

It occurred to me that there's a tension between the two lines. The first expresses in no uncertain terms the "otherness" of God, in that God is "thrice holy", as someone once commented. God would seem to be far from us, in his heavenly temple, with seraphs attending him. He is the transcendent God.

Yet the next line says his glory fills the earth! He is not just "above the clouds", far from any of us. In fact his glory spills out over all the earth.

These two points each pose a different challenge. The first is a helpful counter-balance when we get too familiar with God. Yes, he is our Friend, but he is also holy, almighty God and we stand in awe of him.

The challenge in the second line is to recognise his glory on earth. As we look around it's easy to trouble, tribulation and torment; to see injustice, hunger and suffering. Where is God's glory? Maybe it's in the beauty of the countryside, if I will stop long enough to notice it. Maybe it's in the kind deed, the positive word, even just the smile of one person to another.

I was standing in the queue waiting to pay at the Tesco petrol station on Saturday. I was aware there was an older man in the queue behind .me. A younger man came in and said to him (I can't remember the exact words), "Thank you for backing up to let me through, that was really good of you. You've restored my faith in human nature. Have a nice day," and walked out.

Full marks to the older man who gave way and full marks to the younger man who came in to thank him!

It ain't all bad out there!"

Things must get quieter!

Someone complained to me that my last three blogs have been depressing! So, sorry about that to all my readers! Actually I'm hoping things will settle down. It's been a hectic two and a half months.

In that time I've started a new job, we celebrated the birth of our fourth grandchild, we moved house, we celebrated our ruby wedding anniversary and my wife celebrated an important birthday (one ending in a nought!). The final one was celebrated with family coming round to one of our daughters and a bouncy castle in the garden. No broken limbs I hasten to add, and most people had a bounce!

But back to everyday living, which is not without hassle. For instance, we received our first Christmas catalogue last week!

Oh, and by the way, apart from a garbled message left on our answerphone, we've not heard anything yet from Virgin Media ...

Moving Tribulations - the Latest

Further to the blog about our letters of complaint.

The one to Nationwide resulted in a lady ringing up, apologising for the problems and explaining that the third person I spoke to had got it wrong and a report was going to her and her manager. She also promised £50 in compensation for the problems and to reimburse the telephone calls, etc we had to make (it's an 0845 number, and not free on our service!).

So that's that one. The second letter of complaint was to Virgin Media. Have we heard from them yet? What do you think ? ...

The Gas Saga

I promised to tell you about our gas problems. When we entered the house before we actually moved in, we thought we could smell gas. So the second time I called the gas emergency service. The man came, and in his normal helpful way said, "You've got a leak," turned the gas off and walked out with a smile on his face.

So we called in a gas engineer from the yellow pages who took a long time but in the end found a leak. A joint had not been soldered properly and he said he had to report it to Gas Safe. That is the new body which has replaced Corgi. He said they would send someone round to inspect, then we could have the gas connected.

A day or so later the person dealing with things on behalf of the church telephoned Gas Safe to ask why he'd not heard and was told as they didn't have his telephone number, they had written and he'd have to wait for the letter. It duly came and told us to phone up to make an appointment (!?!) Why couldn't the woman have made the appointment when he spoke to her? We haven't got an answer to that one.

The earliest they could do was a fortnight later, which meant we would be without gas for two weeks - no hot water, heating or cooking. But that wasn't their problem they said, their inspectors are fully booked up. After I (unusually for me) got rather upset over the phone, she found out that another inspector could do it a few days earlier.

It was all a bit of a storm in a teacup, and the problems were rectified the same day. Except that there seemed to be another leak. This one was under the concrete floor, in a pipe that was laid when the house was built. So a few days later, a new gas pipe was laid to the kitchcen and all was well.

So, another letter of complaint, this one about how Gas Safe handled things. I mentioned Gas Safe to another gas engineer, who said, "They are a shambles. They are worse than Corgi." His words, not mine!

The Tribulations of Moving House

Moving house is supposed to be a highly stressful thing to do. Apart from anything else, there's all the people whom you have to notify of your change of address. What makes it all the more stressful is when they get it all wrong, and you have to endure more phone calls and call centres.

For us, let me give you our top three:

1. Virgin Media

I reported favourably a little while back. Well, I take it all back now! In our previous house we had telephone and broadband via a BT line. Our new house, however, has cable, so I asked for the old service to end at our old house and a new service to begin at our new house. That was OK, they said. "Could I keep my old email address?" I asked. "Yes," they replied.

When I rang up to check on something I asked again about using the old email address and they said it was no problem. Connecting up at the new house went smoothly and I had various "automated emails" telling me my old service was ending.

Then I got a bill for another month's broadband and calls on the old house! On ringing up they said it was an error and they would cancel it. I just asked again about ensuring that we kept our old email address and was told, "Oh, no! That goes when the old contract ends!"

So, folks, if you email us, it will soon change! In the meantime I'm composing my letter of complaint for misleading me, presumably so they could get the sale ...

By the way, do watch www.youtube.com/watch?v=dNBjV10X64A a song about the fact that if you die, Virgin media still bill you for broadband. Very funny ... unless it happens to you.

2. Nationwide

As we don't own the house we have moved into, we are not responsible for buildings insurance. We had both buildings and contents insurance with Nationwide. So the request was quite straightforward really - end the buildings insurance and transfer the contents insurance to our new address.

The telephone call seemed to go well enough. But then I got 2 different letters on the same day, saying different things, and neither was what I'd requested! Another telephone call and the person seemed to understand what had happened and all seemed well. Until I got the letter from that saying they had cancelled the buildings insurance and they would be happy to quote for contents. What!?! I rang them up. To transfer the contents insurance was not possible (why did the first person not tell me??). So there was about 6 days during which I was not insured.

Finally I've got contents insurance on the new place. That letter of complaint will be written after the one to Virgin Media ...

3. esure car insurance

When I rang to tell them my address change, I had just received their letter to tell me it would soon be renewal time. So I asked about this on the phone. The premium would be the same, he told me. I asked if there was a better deal, and all of a sudden my new address means it's about £50 cheaper! Had I not asked, of course, I think the original cost would have remained. "Customer loyalty" these days means you get more expensive premiums. Always shop around - OR - just ask for a better deal!

But back to esure. Nothing came through, so I rang. You know they ask you for your postcode and your house number, and the rest of the address comes up automatically. Well they did that, so they sent it to my new house number and postcode, but the rest of the address was the old one??!? After this came a flurry of letters and motor insurance certificates! The best one insured me from 14/09/2009 to 13/09/2009 Yes, that's right! I was insured for minus one day! Does this mean I pay a negative premium?

They seem to have got it right now, and only two phone calls later!

So, there we are. The joys of moving house!