Archives for January 2005
Country life
High points of living in the country. BTW the ground really does slope like that.
Low points of living in the country. Nothing happens. If you want proof, look at the minutes from the Parish Council Meetings. Headline news: having a post office is good.
Not to worry, I’m grateful for having somewhere to stay, and plans are well advanced for stage two of the mini-retirement.
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Global dimming
Interesting story on the BBC website suggesting that increasing pollution has moderated the effect of CO2 emmissions in recent decades, in turn reducing the impact of global warming, but that this ‘control’ will weaken as pollution decreases and the heating of the atmosphere increases. Bear in mind that it’s trailing a science documentary, though, and therefore might be prone to exaggeration.
Two items on my bookshelf to be read before I finally make a comment on the global warming phenomenon: The Skeptical Environmentalist and Jared Diamond’s obscenely publicised new book Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fall or Survive. Although I’m in no doubt it’s happening, is it the biggest threat to the world?
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Sleep yourself thin
Reports suggesting a tentative link between sleeping and obesity: those with a ‘healthy’ Body Mass Index tend to sleep 1.8 hours a week more than overweight people. (Not that plenty of sleeping is making much difference to me!)
No cause and effect is being suggested yet, but I can think of a couple of links. Maybe overweight people sleep less as they’re staying up late and snacking whilst watching late night TV. And it must be hard to get a good night’s sleep when you’ve got five stones of lard resting on your internal organs.
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Before the internet
There was Usenet. Scanning through some old Bloglines entries threw up this story about how Google is now archiving old Usenet posts dating back, gasp, 20 years. Some fun links for the geeks amongst us.
Among the highlights: First Mac rumor, first ‘me too’ post, Tim Berners-Lee’s announcement of the Web, and Linus’ announcement of Linux.
But is it art?
If you say so, Daisy Duke.
For his third solo show at RARE, Chris Larson has created a life-size replica of the General Lee (of Dukes of Hazzard television fame) crashing into a representation of the Unabomber’s wooden shack. The confluence of these cultural icons serves as a metaphor for the duality inherent in taking into one’s own hands the righteousness of the law.
The listening bank
Reading about Richard Herring’s saga with a lastminute.com order makes me want to tell you about my trouble with HSBC. I’m moaning again, so feel free to ignore.
A couple of months ago I’d whinged about how hard it was to find a bank willing to take my money and open a business account. In the end HSBC won because, well, they’d let me in. I met with the bank manager and thought we had the start of a good relationship.
One thing that must be done when opening the account is signing the mandate form to make it all kosher. My company secretary lives in Cornwall so we had to do this by post, after which I dropped the form into the branch. No problems, I received my cheque books etc and set up internet banking.
Part of the security for business internet banking with HSBC is an extremely tortuous electronic certificate process (which doesn’t work with Firefox, naughty). I didn’t appreciate this until I’d managed to lock my account by, gasp, trying to access it from a different PC. No problem, I called up and was told to fax in a form and my account would be unlocked within two hours.
It was still locked next day. I called the Bangalore branch where the agent told me they’d never received my mandate form. HSBC couldn’t verify my identity, and wouldn’t be able to until I completed another mandate.
Eventually I tracked down my manager, which as you probably know is a challenge in itself (three phone numbers, two levels of authentication). It would be ‘looked into’ and could I pop in to sign a new mandate? No I couldn’t, since I’m 35 miles away and the company secretary another 350.
I’m itchy as I’m expecting the payment of an overdue invoice but don’t want to start annoying the client until I’m sure it’s not been paid. ‘We’ll call you every morning with your balance, Mr Down. In the meantime, tell me your account number and we can do any transactions you require now, on the phone’. This did make me chuckle as it was the stringent security that got me stuck in the first place, but now there were no checks on me yet I could go ahead and spend the company’s money. Worrying given that social hacking is on the increase.
Unsurprisingly, I never got a call.
Fed up with the delay and having my messages unreturned, I sent an email to the manager.
…I’m without access to my accounts. I have no information about my
accounts. I have no idea when I will have access again, and
communication about this has been no-existant unless I do the chasing
myself…
Still no response. A bit of googling and application of commonsense lead me to the email address of HSBC’s Chief Exec, Michael Geoghegan. As if by magic, within the hour I receive a phone call from Tony Hooper, South East Commercial Manager. Nice bloke, drop me a line if you get stuck and want his phone number. Everything was, of course, sorted straight away. Geoghegan’s office followed with a reply.
Thank you for your earlier e-mail and I am sorry that you found it
necessary to write to me about the difficulties you have experienced in
setting up your new business account with HSBC…Please accept my sincere apologies for the inconvenience this has caused
you.
Yours sincerely, Michael Geoghegan, Director & Chief Executive
HSBC Bank plc
My point is… well, my point is that it shouldn’t be this way. Why do I have to write to the CEO to get a cock-up solved? Why did it happen in the first place? If there’s one thing I learnt in two years at Thames Water (and I’m sure I learnt something), sitting near the ‘High Level Correspondence’ team, it’s that if you want something sorted out then take it straight to the top.
Dear reader, I tell this story on behalf of others who may experience a frozen, locked HSBC business internet banking account, and offer my advice on how to solve it. (I put that bit in for the Google search.) You poor bastards.
Before its takeover and rebranding as HSBC, Midland Bank’s slogan was ‘The Listening Bank’. In one ear and out the other, it seems.
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We have a winner!
Congratulations to Matsy for beating the Law Luck and winning something! Seriously, good stuff. Shame the league website doesn’t reflect your achievements.
If you win the City Wednesday Premier League, where next? Europe?
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London: Bread and Circuses
I chanced upon a pamphlet written by Jonathan Glancey, The Guardian’s Architecture Correspondent. (A pamphlet! I didn’t realise people continued this long-standing debating tradition, good to see it’s still happening but I wonder if it’s an excuse for not being bothered to write a whole book 
).
It’s a passionate, thought provoking read. The core of his argument is that, like the Roman view that all that’s needed to avoid discontent is bread and circuses, public money has poured into London’s landmark projects rather than invested in the crumbling infrastructure of our* city. The Dome; the Tate Modern; the Millennium Bridge; The Royal Opera House; the Royal Court at the British Museum: all expensive and popular new developments. Meanwhile there is a dearth of investment in the new transport projects desperately needed to keep London moving, and an urgent demand for more, better social housing. The balance is all wrong, and Glancey’s right.
*Yes, I know I’m living in a field at the moment, but that’s not for long
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The Sage Gateshead
**Rant starts**
On my trip to Newcastle we popped into the new Sage Gateshead, a landmark building designed by Norman Foster and his crew. I was quite excited about seeing this as I admire a lot of his architecture and this was a multi-million pound building seen as key in regenerating Gateshead. It’s the curvy one on the right, behind the bridge.
It was a disappointment.
For me, the building doesn’t work architecturally, nor as a tool for community regeneration. The Sage houses two halls and a smaller performance space, standing alone under a curving roof with views across the Tyne towards Newcastle. The hall buildings themselves look smooth and simple from the outside (we weren’t allowed inside) but the overarching roof reminded me of standing in a warehouse. The overall effect, with the streams of visitors passing through, is of a trip to B&Q on a bank holiday weekend.
The nearest comparison I’ve seen design-wise is the Sydney Opera House, where the integration of the halls with the structure is seamless. The SOH also provides a much stronger visual image for the city compared with the Sage which competes against the BALTIC and the new pedestrian bridge as the landmark Tyneside building.
If the Sage is (in my uneducated opinion) of questionable architecural merit, it certainly fails to engage with the local community. Look at its neighbour BALTIC, where free entry allows anyone to attend. Or the Millennium Bridge which provides a handy link and does much to tie the north and south banks together. Both have been very successful.
The Sage, meanwhile, rests up a plinth above the level of these other attractions, immediately reducing the accessibility to passers-by. It has a pedestrian ’street’ running through it, but this is controlled by doors and patrolled by security guards, marking this as a private space even if it belongs to ‘the people’. Once inside, there is nothing to ’see’, nothing to entice visitors to learn more about the building and its activities. The halls are locked, there were no public performances when we passed through on a busy Saturday lunchtime. As both Paul’s parents and his girlfriend commented to me separately, they know nothing about what goes on in the Sage and, whilst they’d like to attend something there, it’s hard to find out what they might enjoy.
Add to this the fact that ticket prices will inevitably be high and therefore only attract those with above-average disposable incomes. I suppose this is what frustrates me the most, not only with the Sage but with all of these multi-million pound lottery-funded buildings. There’s an irony that most of the cash comes from a form of regressive taxation, and many buildings are sited in poorer inner-urban areas as a catalyst for urban regeneration, but most of those benefitting from the investment are middle class and middle aged. They’ll use the facilities offered and get out again as soon as possible.
It’s something that’s annoyed me since I wrote my disseration (yawn) about the Edinburgh Festival Theatre and its relationship with the local community. Or rather, lack of it. The EFT was plonked in the middle of a working class community, many of whom would love to have seen a show there but could never afford the tickets. Meanwhile, the theatre itself ran into financial troubles due to… poor box office sales. Now, The Sage proudly talks of going into local communities and collecting their stories about playing games as kids in the 1930s. But many of these people can never afford to attend a performance in one of the halls. What a lot of twaddle.
Credit must go to Gateshead City Council for pushing ahead with these constructions and the Angel of the North, but I wonder if the Sage is the most expensive and least effective of the set.
**Rant ends**
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A geographer’s dream
For several years I advised on the usability of the UK government’s National Statistics website. Reflecting the immense complexity of information available, using the site can be a challenge (confession: when looking for data, I don’t use the search tool, instead I phone up the customer service centre in Newport and get them to talk me through to the appropriate information), but to the credit of the site owners it has come on leaps and bounds in the past four years compared with the previous designs.
One of the most important web developments offered by the ONS is Neighbourhood Statistics. Going into much greater detail than its commercial rival upmystreet, the primary purpose of NeSS is to deliver Census statistics and other geospatial indicators at the micro (sub-ward) level. This should both improve the targeting of public investment in regeneration, since data can now be analysed in any combination of geographical areas rather than restricted to local authorities or electoral wards, and enable assessment of its effectiveness.
That’s just background to explain why I find The Guardian’s use of the recent census data so interesting. A map has been created that charts the distrbution of different ethnic communities around London. It raises a multitude of questions about our city, how it has evolved, how its population interacts and what this means for the future.
Walk up the road from Tooting Broadway to Clapham along the path of the Northern Line. First you’ll pass the restaurants and shops supported by Tooting’s large Indian and Sri Lankan communities, selling exotic vegetables and newspapers in alien languages. Stroll past the Wimbledon Sewing Machine factory and we’re into the Polish community of Balham with its distinctive churches and clubs. Half a mile further it’s the heart of Yah country, a generally unattractive but dominant species living in Clapham with its own language, nightlife and a unique perception of ‘value for money’.
Traditionally urban geographers locate immigrant groups in the centre and inner suburbs of a city, with middle classes further out. The London map shows that life is not as simple as that. Why are South Asians in Tooting and Americans in Kensington? How did these communities first settle in these places? The story of Caribbean immigrants first staying in an old airraid shelter at Clapham Common Station, and using the Brixton Labour Exchange to find work, leading to Brixton’s role at the centre of Black London life is the only one I know. Why Poles in Balham or Sri Lankans in Tooting?
Taking a step back, I find it remarkable that we live in such close proximity to each other yet rarely interact. For example, my exposure to Asian London is limited to the Banana Leaf restaurant, Costcutters and staring at the woman in the flat across the road. Although I don’t believe in the assimilation of different ethnic groups into the mainstream, white vision of Britain (is that what citizenship ceremonies are designed to do?), we should talk more often with our neighbours regardless of their background. Much of this problem, however, probably stems from what Lewis Mumford described as urban anomie rather than perceived cultural differences.
As for the future, is it better that different communities continue to lead their parallel but separate, disinterested lives? Or should there be more contact between and mixing of communities? I don’t have an answer.
Quiz question: which of these three groups had the largest presence in London in 2001 – Ghanaians, South Africans or Australians?
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