So it’s Monday. We’re all feeling groggy from the weekend. Imagine you’re walking down the street, and then this giant banana exposes itself to you… It’s guaranteed to put a smile on your face at the start of the week!
Off on a much-needed break; back Thursday. Have a good week.
On Monday, Ali and I are going on holiday.
Actually, that’s wrong. “Holiday” conjures up images of big airplanes, sandy beaches, sunny skies and, most horrifyingly, Mickey Mouse.
In reality, we’re trudging twenty minutes up the road to a hotel just outside of Norwich which, at this time of year, is usually pretty dreary.
Three nights away in a hotel only a few minutes up the road might better be referred to as a “dirty weekend” (the Monday-Thursday dates notwithstanding) but, to be honest, I doubt there’ll be much of the sticky-stuff going on, either.
In fact, what we plan to do on this much-needed break is sleep. It’ll be the first proper bit of time off we’ve had since June last year, and boy are we tired.
I’d like to think that what will happen is that we’ll get to the hotel and be in bed, fast asleep, by 9pm. We then won’t wake up until Thursday morning, when we’ll have a quick dip in the hotel’s pool before heading home.
But I’ve got two kids, and I’ve worked out what is going to happen here. You see, on a school day, getting Malachy or Jacob out of bed before the bus arrives at 8:40 is something of a mammoth task. It has to start at seven o’clock and usually results in me eventually tipping the bunk beds on to their side when I see the bus approaching. Much screaming, shouting and wailings of “I hate you” and “I’m still tired” then consume the brief five minutes before they’re chucked, unceremoniously and without their hair brushed, on to the bus and Dave drives off.
You would think that all of this tiredness would come from a hectic lifestyle and would therefore be all consuming. They swim, play outside, kick footballs around. Malachy even plays the trumpet. Yet amazingly, at the weekend when there is no school, they are both up and screaming the house down at six a.m., their laughter and shouts pretty much grating my nerves after a heavy Friday night. There’s not a hint of the tiredness they complain about on schooldays.
Come school morning, the bunk-bed-tipping has to commence once more.
And this is what worries me. Twenty minutes up the road means we’re near enough if the pub needs us, but far enough away that it won’t disturb my sleep. I’ll be able to get the full night’s kip that I’m yearning. Away from the pressures of customer service and cellar maintenance, away from the distractions of Twitter and autosport.com, I’ll be able to sit in peace and read Stuff magazine and GQ to my heart’s content, without fear of being disturbed.
But because I’m not at work, because the constant demands of the pub will be on somebody else’s shoulders for a couple of days, I’ll be awake at six a.m. There’s only so much GQ you can read and the room’s TV is guaranteed to only have a choice of Fern Britton or the Sky Poker channel. By seven a.m. on Tuesday morning I’m going to be pulling my teeth out and yearning for the chance to clean the lines.
I better take my laptop with me…
Electric cars have long been touted by the media as the saviour of all our climate problems, and by manufacturers as clean, green and very, very efficient – because they want you to buy them!
The Government have even fallen foul enough of this to grant electric cars exemption from road tax and the Congestion Charge, and the perception they’d like to have you is that they produce no polluting emissions whatsoever and that they are built in a wooden shed in the back garden of a hemp-wearing nettle-eater, just to keep the green image alive.
The problem, of course, is that to produce the batteries for these cars the manufacturers have to mine nickel, and then once they have done that they have to ship it three times around the world to a factory which produces so much pollution that vast acres of land around it are decimated. Once that’s done, the battery gets shipped around the world again to a building where it is put in to the car, which is then shipped around the world again to a place where you can buy the thing.
Then you have to charge it up, which means plugging it in to a socket in your house, which is probably receiving its electricity from a coal power station.
And then it runs out of charge before you’ve even driven off your driveway, so you have to charge it back up again.
Of course, manufacturers have had to come up with innovative solutions to get round the fallibilities of the electric motor, most of which require the coupling up of the electric motor to that of a polluting Internal Combustion engine. In order to accelerator hard enough to overtake a snail, or to switch on your air conditioning on a hot day, the electric motor gives way to a petrol engine.
It’s not all bad news, however. Manufacturers have been working on cleaner alternatives for a while. Take the Mercedes BlueTec solution, for example. A small, clean yet incredibly powerful diesel engine with very little emissions appears to mean that you can have an S-Class powered by a measly 1.3 litre engine that runs on nothing more than wee, while other manufacturers are touting hydrogen as the way forward. Very clean and efficient, some are even saying that when it’s parked up the car would be able to use its vast built-in power station to operate your house, but the trouble is that hydrogen is inherently unsafe and ultimately means that we are all going to be driving around in potential mushroom clouds.
But the biggest problem that manufacturers seem to be facing is noise. When a Range Rover V8 bears down on a little old lady crossing the road, the chances are her hearing aids will pick up the sound of the burbling engine and warn her of impending danger. The Tesla Roadster, however, can nip from zero to sixty in a smidge under four seconds and can rocket on to a top speed of 130mph, all without making any more noise than mopping a floor, which means it doesn’t matter how good granny’s hearing aids are, she won’t hear it coming before it kills her.
To get around this problem, electric car manufacturers have decided to fit big speakers that will project the noise of a real engine. The sound will emulate that of a real engine as it speeds up and slows down, giving the driver and passer’s by the perception that it is a real, gas-guzzling behemoth while all the time encouraging trees to grow new leaves.
There are even rumours that drivers will have the option to change the engine noise to emulate whatever car they want. So, owners of a G-Wizz can fool people with the sound of a Ferrari F430 engine, while drivers of a Lightning GT with a strange sense of humour could potentially drive along with the engine noise of a British Leyland Allegro rattling out of their speakers.
All of which got me to thinking, obscurely, about the computer game Sim City. In the game, once you’ve built your city, you can choose to let your denizens live in relative peace and harmony with nothing more to worry about than the fact that you’ve forgotten to build a water supply to their house, or you can switch on Disasters. This, in effect, means the computer will decide – randomly – whether a tornado or an earthquake is going to destroy part of your city, or whether a dinosaur is going to take an afternoon stroll over the power station.
So I find myself wondering if manufacturers of electric cars could build a similar feature in to their playlist. With disasters switched off, owners could simply drive along in relative peace to the dulcet tones of an Aston Martin V8 but, when they’re feeling fruity, they could switch disasters on and the computer could, at any given moment, decide to make it sound like the exhaust had fallen off.
That could give the RAC a few headaches…
It’s all so complicated it makes me glad of my four-litre straight-six.
Conned in to wandering around town this morning rather than mowing the lawn, I found myself feeling rather hungry. Tempted by Wetherspoon’s tremendous breakfast offer, just £2.69 for a Traditional Breakfast, Ali and I made our way in to a nearby establishment and promptly set about choosing what we wanted to eat. And immediately I was disappointed.
If ever there was a shining example in how not to offer customer service, this was it. Several of us stood waiting at the bar, while three bar staff chatted inanely in the corner. One customer, desperate for his ten a.m. triple vodka and lemonade, dared to call “when you’ve got a minute” to them, which seemed to enrage at least one of them further.
From what I could tell, this poor chap had done nothing wrong and was simply waiting to part with his hard earned cash. Instead, the women wanted to talk, but his polite prodding had meant that they had decided to make him wait. However, by making this decision – yet knowing he was next in line to be served – they decided that this meant all of us had to wait too.
Eventually, one of them deigned to serve him, and we got moving again. The trouble was that by the time the barmaid had served him and then moved on to me, it was difficult to tell whether the Old Growler was a special they had on the pump, or the barmaid herself.
Getting cross with me for asking for a breakfast baguette with bacon – which is how it’s put in the menu – she admonished me for not simply saying a bacon baguette. When I asked for a decaf latte I was simply told, “no.” No what? “No you can’t have one.” There was no other explanation. So I asked for a regular coffee. “Well do you want a regular coffee with milk, or a regular latte?”
I was so confused, I no longer knew what I wanted – other than that I wish I’d gone to the pub down the road that was charging £4.95 for a breakfast, but in which I knew I could get what I wanted with out having to feel like I’d done something wrong.
I know full well that if a similar attitude had been proffered to customers in my pub, people would have complained and walked out. Yet here, we all simply stood meekly by and let it happen. In a day and age when pubs are struggling, this is the last image we want the public to be getting of our fine trade.
Tim Martin, chairman of pub chain J.D.Wetherspoon’s, might have garnered support from the pub industry last week by speaking out against the Government’s draconian policies towards alcohol, but his pub company could do with some lessons in customer service.
Perhaps, if minimum pricing becomes law, a standard for minimum service could be introduced too.
I’m not a superstitious person, but there are times when I wonder if there are truths to the rumours that you shouldn’t walk under ladders, step on cracks or let black cats cross your path.
Most of the time I’d say they were folklore, urban myths and bedtime faerie tails designed to spook small children – I’ve broken enough mirrors and spilled enough salt in my time to think it’s nothing more than fabrication – but Friday 13th is one of those days I just shudder at the thought of. There’s always a problem in any given day, usually surmountable, but the tails surrounding this particular date usually mean that we generate the bad luck by expecting it.
Take today, for example. I woke this morning to the sound of a road sweeper whose massive vacuum cleaner had decided to work in reverse, blowing chunks of hoovered up road debris across the path in front of the pub. I should have taken that as a sign the day was going to get worse, but I didn’t. Instead, I watched BBC’s Click, on which they detailed a website about mind-mapping that I was quite interested in, so I went to the website, fully intending to spend just ten minutes perusing the site and before I knew it there were just ten minutes until the pub needed opening, I hadn’t done the cleaning, and the dray order needed to be placed.
At 11:30 – door opening time – I found myself still vacuuming as customers hammered on the door waiting to be let in. I hadn’t had time for a wash and my hair was portraying a distinct Something About Mary… style.
I had thought that maybe my bad luck for the day was going to subject itself to just bad hair and a touch of tardiness, but then the school rang to say that Malachy was being sick. Fortunately, Barmaid Bryony was on hand to stand the bar while I dashed to the school to retrieve him and I prayed that the day wasn’t going to get any worse.
It probably wouldn’t have, but then Ali decided she wanted me to drill some holes in the kids’ bedroom wall to put new bedside lights on. Drills and me don’t get on too well at the best of times, but when I discovered the drill was still outside, hidden behind the log box where it had probably been since November, I realised it was just going to get worse. The drill worked, amazingly, but the chuck-key wouldn’t undo the clasp so I couldn’t change the drill bit. Cue an impatient me drilling holes in the wall far larger than I needed to mount a simple fitting.
The evening session came around and poor old Bryony turned up for work. The customers love her, she’s pretty and personable and everybody enjoys her company – until a customer asked for a Scotch and Dry Ginger, in return for which they got a Scotch and Ginger Beer. Then, in a flurry to sort her mistake out, she inadvertently knocked a whole glass of wine over a customer – and it wasn’t even his glass of wine!
As if my evening couldn’t get worse, we offer a great deal for customers on a Friday night – Ace it Fridays. The idea is simple: called double-six in some places, the customers are handed two poker dice and if they manage to throw two ace of clubs, they don’t pay for the drinks in that round. Most Fridays the doubles don’t come up.
Tonight, of course, I’ve already given away four free rounds to victorious customers, and the shift isn’t over yet…
I wrote this blog originally for The Publican website and it was posted on Monday 10th March 2009. The original can be read here: http://www.thepublican.com/story.asp?sectioncode=16&storycode=63043&c=2
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For some time now, the march of the supermarket has created a dramatic change in the way we shop and steadily gobbled up all but the hardiest of small retailers.
Following in the business models of giant American retail corporations, who swept through US towns and decimated small businesses in the seventies and eighties, Tesco have employed similar tactics in the UK throughout the nineties.
Today, in the twenty-first century, they’re going after the villages too.
With pubs failing at a ferocious rate, the Mail on Sunday – not necessarily a friend of publicans in recent times – has reported that the supermarket giant has recently put in applications to purchase at least ten pubs that have been forced to close.
Pubs become attractive to companies like Tesco because they don’t require lengthy applications for change of use, as licensing for food and alcohol is usually already in place for such buildings and the article intimates that the sites targeted by the chain are town outlets.
But how long before they start getting into the defunct village pubs too?
With their immense buying power meaning that they are able to force breweries to sell to them extremely cheaply, a fact not lost on publicans who then have to bear the brunt of the difference as the breweries try to make up the losses in selling to supermarkets, and their somewhat cavalier attitude towards volume sales, these supermarkets provide a greater risk to the future of pubs than any competition or legislation we currently face.
Tesco themselves have even admitted in the past that their below-cost price policies could be a factor in teenage binge-drinking. More than a year ago they promised to work with the government to end price promotions on alcohol, but today we still see regular heavy discounting on alcohol in the retail sector while Happy Hours in pubs are frowned upon.
They even argue that, whilst aware their price-policies are associated with binge-drinking, violence and disorder, they can’t lift their prices because of fair-trade laws.
Suggestions such as restrictions on selling to under-21s or higher levels of tax for alcohol sold by the off-trade have also been dismissed as either unfair or unfeasible by both the companies themselves and the government. Yet they would certainly help redress the balance between supermarkets and pubs, which are expected to police and manage the sale of alcohol in a manner that the likes of Tesco don’t appear to be.
Sadly, though, I wonder how long it will be long before you’ll be able to drive through a village and call in at The Tesco Arms where, rather than a nice pint of IPA or an imaginatively named Bishop’s Farewell, you’ll be given the choice of Tesco Value Bitter or their Finest Ale.
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Since the original story broke, Tesco have denied that they are specifically targeting pubs: http://www.thepublican.com/story.asp?sectioncode=7&storycode=63069
So the Honda Formula One team has been saved from a miserable fate by ex-Ferrari supremo Ross Brawn, who’s promptly gone and plastered his name all over the team.
It’s great news for Jenson Button, who otherwise would have had to spend this year posing around Monaco in a Honda Clarity FCX, and for Rubens Barrichello, who is reportedly staying on as the sport’s elder statesman.
Honda were a team that should have been challenging for top positions this year, after a dire two years during which they put all their eggs in one basket: the 2009 championship. And then they pulled the plug at the end of 2008. So, while the team undoubtedly has a good chassis and a great set of facilities behind it, the unrest of the past few months and the uncertainty as to whether they would even make it to Melbourne in three weeks time will certainly have set them back a bit.
Brawn’s next challenge is to generate an income for the team – and that means finding sponsorship. Surely, he
must be heading straight to Braun for a lovely partnership?
Ross Brawn’s only other coup could be to coax Michael Schumacher away from Ferrari, and maybe even bring him out of retirement for a season or two and get him driving to show Jenson just how it’s done.
Since the day she became famous for her character Rachel Green in the US sitcom Friends, Jennifer Aniston has been equally famous for her hair. She’s also been in the number one slot of my Top 5 Female Celebs I Just Would… list.
Others have come and gone, but Aniston and her famous shag have remained at the top for the best part of fifteen years, despite her turning 40 last month.
In fact, my wife has already been told that if Aniston were to walk in to my pub, divorce papers would be served on Ali straight away. I don’t think she’s overly impressed with that arrangement, but there you go.
One thing Jennifer seems to share with my wife, however, is a ridiculous trait for spending lots of money – especially on her hair. The star’s famous hairdo has been the speculation of many magazines since her rise to fame, but this week it’s come under even more intense scrutiny after it was revealed that she spent £40’000 on her latest 'do.
Apparently, in order to achieve the natural look she sported at this week’s UK premier of Marley & Me, Miss Aniston’s latest film along with Owen Wilson, she insisted that her hairdresser was flown in specifically to arrange it. The stylist’s travel costs, hotel costs and over-inflamed bill have all been covered by… somebody. It’s unclear whether Aniston has paid the exorbitant charge, or whether it has been picked up by the studio.
Either way, it’s mighty expensive. And, as I struggle to comprehend Ali spending £40 on a haircut, spending a thousand times that just to make sure it looks natural seems somewhat… wrong.
Even divorcing my wife wouldn’t cost that much. And that’s saying something!
Yes, I’ll confess I’ve spent the night on my own, suffering insomnia and therefore dabbling with the look and feel of my blog. Again.
This time, the idea was to try and make it look something like my Twitter feed. I probably failed and it didn’t cure my insomnia, but at least this time the theme is more unique to me than pilfered from some site somewhere on the etherweb!
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