"The 'Dick Turpin' savings bank"

The banks appear to have won the great bank charges debate, thanks to a high court ruling that basically says the OFT aren't allowed to rule on whether charges are fair or not.

There are two points of view about bank account charges. The first is from the point of view of people who are careful with their cash, never go overdrawn, and aren't subject to charges. They argue that if, as banks claim, the charges they levy on unauthorised overdrafts and the like allow them to continue to offer free bank accounts, then why should they have to start paying a monthly fee on their account? Which is true, I guess.

The other view is, that in today's modern age, it costs next to nothing if the bank has to refuse a payment. They don't even send letters anymore, if you have a paperless account. In my experience, the people who are regularly running up charges on their accounts are either bad at finances, which is their hard luck, or more likely the low paid, who are only permanently running up charges because it's the charges themselves that are putting them in the red. If you are having financial difficulty, it seems a bit unfair that you are subsidising people who can easily afford to pay their way in life, by luck or judgement. Anyone can fall on hard times in the future, and we'll see if some of the smug 'well don't go overdrawn then' smart-alecs are so clever if their financial circumstances change. City centres the country over are populated with Big Issue sellers who probably didn't expect to be in a position of homelessness.

Here's a couple of examples. 3 years ago, I bought a telly over a 2 year loan, but accidentally gave the d/d details for a savings account with no money in it. That's my fault. The bank charged me because they refused to pay the bill, because there was no money in the account, and no overdraft facility. They took the charge from the very same account, making it overdrawn and incurring a charge for an unauthorised overdraft. The company taking the money charged me for the rejected payment, and because the d/d was set for the payment due date, they charged me again for being behind with my payments. That one error cost me £130 in charges, for a £40 payment, one charge being for something the bank did but wouldn't let me do, and one because there was no leeway on payment dates. Which I think is unfair. There's no way the cost to the banks was anywhere near that amount.

3 months ago, a payment took our joint account over it's limit. We were charged for this. The bank also rejected two direct debit payments, one of which was for £8. Total charges; £105. We put money into the account to cover being overdrawn - we'd already worked out we needed more money that month, but because the bank couldn't be bothered putting a letter in the post we thought we'd put the money in on time. We hadn't, and next month the exact same thing happened. Ironically, the only reason we went over our limit again, was because of the £105 charge. So, going £50 over the overdraft limit will probably end up costing us the thick end of £300.

I don't think that's fair. I accept it's my fault, but for one small error I'm penalised beyond my means - we haven't go £300 to spare. Especially when I know that the cost to the bank was limited. The bank, incidentally, has changed the charges on it's account to much less, as have others, and I suspect they didn't expect to win today's ruling. They did, and can now continue to take our money at will. And although I'm no socialist, the poor subsidising the better off is wrong.

The one thing it has done is make me more determined to end my reliance on banks, so today is the first day of my 5-year plan to pay off everything I owe. Then I can tell the banks to shove it.

Incidentally, I work for a bank. I like my salary, so will say no more than refer you to the famous words of Mark Twain;

"A banker is a fellow who lends you his umbrella when the sun is shining, but wants it back the minute it begins to rain."

another b%**!y birthday

image: creative paper wales.co.uk

I turned 37 on monday, as anyone on Facebook will know, and a week later I've not come to terms with it yet.

Which is odd. Some one once told me that if you got up this morning, it's already a good day, and he was right. So I got older, but that's to be celebrated.

Except that, as you know, I'm stuck in the past. My life ain't great at present, and every time I look at methods to improve this, people invariably require money to assist in getting out of the great rut I've lodged myself firmly into. So it's only to be expected, then, that I look to happier times, and happier birthdays.

Hm. Happier birthdays? I've been recapping some of the birthdays I've had in the past, and some have definitely being better than others. 18, I spent with family having a pub meal, which was pleasant if not exciting. 21, the family came round again, and everyone had a jolly time, I believe. 19, I vaguely remember the drunken, and exceptionally embarrassing (and ultimately, unsuccessful - unsurprisingly, really; I'm amazed I escaped without a slap, or twenty) attempts of making 'friends' with a work colleague. Oooooooh lordy, that still makes me shiver.

13, now that was a laugh. Bonfire night with some kids from school, highlights being 'Briggsy' stepping backwards onto a rocket and watching the sellotape-repaired projectile almost blow up next door's house, and the unintended (and deeply upsetting) destruction of my collection of painted Airfix WW2 fighter planes, in 1:72 scale. The day culminating in a gunfight with various toy guns, firing projectiles of disk/sucker dart variety.

17 was the first birthday I don't particularly recall getting excited about. I remember getting up, and not being fussed, getting ready and going out without any real celebration or inclination to do so. At all. Ironically, my 17th birthday was also the day the Berlin wall came down, so perhaps it's not surprising the entire day paled into insignificance.

30, I spent a weekend in a B&B in Wharfedale, which was fantastic, so much so we went back for my wife's 30th. Hers was more memorable, due to the whole of the dales being flooded; we almost didn't make it back to the b&b, but it sticks in the brain and provided some good pictures.
22. The university had organised buses to London, at £4 a head, so we could all attend a student march. So we went to London, and ignored the march to have a day in the capital. For £4. Most enjoyable.

And that's it. No other birthdays stick in the head, or stand out, sadly. Which suggests I'm either boring, or don't do anything exciting anymore, or both. Someone else once told me (a French teacher, as I recall) that life is like a bar of Galaxy. 8 chunks, 10 years a chunk, and that's it. Well, I'm 3 years off my 4th chunk, so I'd better start getting ready for 40!

Anyway. To end the week, and try and cheer me up a bit (!) here's a video. The obvious one would be Stevie Wonder singing his birthday greetings to Nelson Mandela, but that's boring and obvious and I'd much rather be reminded of Clare Grogan in her prime, so enjoy, courtesy of Youtube.

ho ho chuffin' ho

I went into a famous catalogue-shopping establishment (let's call it 'argoose') last week. End of October, and they were playing christmas tunes over the tannoy. It's started, then, the countdown to christmas.

I used to love the festive season. As a kid, it's great. It's your one chance to own a decent telly/stereo/computer. When I was 7, we all had to write letters to Santa at school. I asked for a torch, and a 'Race & Chase' slot-racing-budget-Scalextric thing. Remarkably, that's what I got, so credit to the school for organising that one! Thing is, it was exciting. Even when I got older, Christmas was still a laugh.

Then I started work. My first job was for Gateway supermarkets, in November 1988. Christmas was hard work, but a laugh. The tannoy music was cheesy, but Christmas started properly in December, and in the years after, the money I earnt in this job paid for some fantastic nights out over Christmas. Christmas Eve to me was a better night than New Year, because it wasn't as busy and everyone was up for a laugh. Even the year I was spectacularly ill on sweet cider whilst in fancy dress was a laugh.

Then something changed. I continued to work in supermarkets, for Kwik-Save and then Iceland. Back in 1988, Christmas Eve had a pattern, the morning was mad-busy with people buying fresh produce, and the afternoon went quiet as people went home to prepare for the next day. We'd all go home by 4pm.

The rot started at Kwik Save. Firstly, they opened Sundays. Then, they opened late nights until 10pm - an utter waste of time, and on the council estate I worked on, it was a serious security risk as well. That was followed by a mandate that at close of business Christmas Eve, we all had to stay late to get the shop ready for re-opening, and that took away the one perk of retail. We'd worked like idiots for a week so we could relax on Christmas Eve, but now we were being told that we had to stay late, whilst I suspect the head office and board of directors were all down the pub.

Something else changed. Christmas started in August, not December or even late-November. By December 24th, we'd had 4 months of it. In addition, customers changed. Christmas Eve became busy all day. Customers started buying more and more junk they didn't need. In reality, the shops are shut for one day, but it became really obvious that as a retailer, my job was to take as much money from the customer as possible, whether they had it or not.

And that killed it for me. Not just the 4 months of festive season, but the realisation that there really isn't any purpose to Christmas anymore, other than to spend money on crap. Crap that in reality, on boxing day will probably be half price. Crap that is readily available throughout the year, but we've been programmed to buy it in December.

People hear this, and then tell me 'Ah, but it's for families'. Hmm. It's the perfect time of the year for people to be made to feel inadequate that their family isn't perfect, particularly those who've lost relatives. You get cards from people who you've not seen for ten years, and cards from people at work you see every day, for God sake. TV is full of trash, even more so than usual, and the Queen gets to patronise her long-suffering subjects.

So, if I appear grumpy over Christmas, I apologise, but truthfully it has no meaning to me anymore, other than to sit in front of the telly enjoying some time off work with a fridge full of beer, Which I think is a bit sad. I doubt Santa will be bringing me a torch this year!

I've stopped wanting to ride my bicycle

Well, I did it. I went out on the bike. 8 miles into Pateley, and 8 miles back.

10 years ago I'd have ripped up the road. It'd have taken an hour at most. Bradley Wiggins, Lance Armstrong, Graham Obree, they'd have been left in my wake as I flew through the roads of Upper Nidderdale at phenomenal speed, arcing through the corners, stood on the pedals up the hills.

Back in the real world, 40 minutes there and 50 minutes back is what it actually took. Every single muscle in my body is now screaming at me to go to bed until tomorrow morning. Muscles I had genuinely forgotten I had. Legs. Arms. Back. Even my stomach is complaining.

I'm actually quite depressed at how unfit I've become in a year and a half, and I'm clearly going to have to do something about this. 8 miles a night for the next week at least.

But not tomorrow. Looks like the bus again, for a week or so at least!

I want to ride my bicycle

I've spent the afternoon making my bicycle roadworthy again. To be fair, it only took some work on the brakes, but it's now in fine fettle and raring to go. Unlike it's owner. I'm 36, and my fitness is the lowest it's ever been. I actually ran the cycle down our lane (approx. 500 yards), went back up the hill, and wondered whether or not I should ring NHS Direct for advice such was the burning in my chest. Had I have made the call, they'd never have got a coherent word out of me.

Consequently, I need to start using the thing again. Long gone are the days when I would randomly go on a 90-mile round trip to Scarborough for a day out, on the racing cycle I put together myself - the picture at the top is that very bike, in fact, before I was dumb enough to put it on eBay. I can still tell you the brand name of every part of that bike down to the number of teeth on the chainwheel/rear cluster, and regret selling it still.

And then I remember why I sold it, because it had 14 gears, all in the high range. It was like owning a Ferrari, lovely but not practical for nipping to the local supermarket. It went like stink off a stinky stick, but relied on the rider to be fit and agile, something which I'm not anymore. Hence, I got a new one with more suitable gearing a few years back, which needed repairing today to make it roadworthy again, and now it's done I've no excuse not to get fit again.

Restoring my rapidly-flagging fitness is only a secondary reason for this sudden re-interest in cycling. The prime reason for doing this is because I've no money, and at £80 a month I could save a fair bit by forgetting the bus and cycling the 16.6 miles between Harrogate and Leeds. Each way. I've done a regular commute that was 10 miles each way before. I also regularly cycled to meet a train at Selby on a 6 speed folder, which was 8 miles. So I'm confident I can do it - if I stay fit enough. Watching cyclists fly past our stationary bus in the regular morning traffic-jams in Leeds is also providing inspiration.

I've mentioned this to Mrs B. The conversation goes "I'm going to cycle to work." "No you're not". End of conversation. Ultimately, Mrs B thinks I'm going to be squashed by a car/bus/truck/JCB (delete as applicable), but I genuinely don't believe it's any more dangerous than crossing the road. My moped is far, far scarier to ride, and at the pace I used to cycle at it's probably not much quicker in it's current, speed-restricted, state. The highlight of my youth was overtaking old, flagging (usually Tomos - brand, ie rubbish) mopeds. Hilarious fun, watching said-moped riders face as some upstart on a Raleigh Pursuit flew past, pedalling flat out, laughing uncontrollably as sweat poured from his brow.

Anyway. I have a day off work next Wednesday, and will go for a trial run then. My bus ticket runs out Tuesday, so either I renew it on the way home or go for it.

10 BORDER 0 : PAPER 0 : INK 7: CLS

I'm about to go off on a huge nostalgia trip, for which I'm not even going to apologise. But if all this reminiscing about the past winds you up, you'll hate what's coming.

Still here? Excellent. Take a look at the picture above.

They're both mine, I rediscovered them during a recent clearout. For those who don't know, the one at the top is a Spectrum+ 48K. Below it is a ZX81. Somewhere in the garage, I have an original Spectrum, complete with rubber keys.

The ZX81 is older, but I guess the Spectrum is the most important of the two to myself. It started life as a rubber-keyed 16K model, was upgraded to 48K, and had the improved keyboard added later still. It had 8 colours (16 colours technically - light and dark shades of each!), which improved on the ZX81 which was black and white, low resolution, 1K memory, and no lower case characters. Plug the Spectrum into the TV now, and it still fires up the start screen, although the keyboard refuses to accept any input which I reckon is because the Kempston joystick interface was faulty and killed the rest of the computer. (The ZX81 works, but you need a particular type of old TV with manual tuning, and the wind needs to be blowing from the north-east at exactly 14.3 MPH. Its temperamental, to say the least!)

Possibly, none of the above paragraph made any sense to you. It made no sense at work on Wednesday, when I was trying to explain what this machine was, to no avail until someone piped up 'It was an old games console'.

Which I guess it was, kind-of. If that's what you wanted it to be. But it was more than that. It was programmable, and it let you write your own games if you had the time and patience. With the right adaptor, it let you write letters and print them out. Clive Sinclair, who owned the company that invented and sold these computers once claimed that the ZX81 could run a nuclear power station. Doubtful - the add-on memory module reset by moving it, so one knock and we would be clearing up nuclear fallout for decades.

The thing is, during the 1980's you had two options in life. People wax lyrical about 1980's music, but between 1983-1989, I can't really place many songs. That's because instead of visiting school disco's, I was sat in my bedroom, destroying my eyesight on a black and white telly, writing pointless programs - or even worse, copying them line for line from magazines. Copying computer programs was long-winded, laborious, but when the program failed to work you could learn an awful lot about programming by trying to de-bug your 6 hours worth of typing.

When I did my A-level in computing, I had to adapt to other programming languages. But, this was stupidly easy for me because I already knew the basics. Later during my HND, I picked up Pascal programming far easier than about 50% of my year, because I'd already learnt most of the techniques. Still now, I can implement IF..THEN..ELSE statements in Excel spreadsheets. So, during the 80's when everyone bought their kids computers without having a clue what they did, or why, under the pretext that 'it'll help with their homework', I guess it really did help with mine. It probably help me avoid a lot of homework too, I 'lost' an awfully large number of books at school due to homework not being done, because I'd been up until 2am attempting to get Bilbo Baggins out of the Goblin's dungeon.

Of course, with modern PC's and Internet access, computers really do help with homework. Computers are now a tool, and pretty much anyone can use one because you don't normally need to write your own program. It also helps that computers generally work together - it's a choice of Windows/Linux PC, or Apple. In 1982 when the Spectrum was born, there were numerous computers, and none of them were compatible with each other. BBC. Oric-1. Dragon 32. Commodore 64. Jupiter Ace. Even computers made by the same manufacturer were incompatible. The two computers above had similarities, but just because Sinclair made them doesn't mean the older programs worked on the new computer!

These computers were all but dead by the 1990's, and the replacement Amiga's/Atari ST's that replaced them where far, far more advanced and useful, setting the platform for today's modern computers. I moved to an Amiga because my friends had them, as I got a Spectrum because most of the people my dad worked with had them - attitudes to pirated software were lax compared to today.

Anyway. Enough reminiscing, but if you've never seen this, I guarantee it'll bring back a flood of memories for any other saddo's like me. Granted it's been around for ages, but I still like it. And if you want to relive your Spectrum experience, well there are a load of emulators here.

A grand day out

It's nice to type up a blog entry about something I actually enjoyed, rather than the usually whinging that seems to have become a habit of mine recently, but yesterday I had a day out with Mrs B at the annual Nidderdale Agricultural Society show. And, I have to say, it was a bloomin' good day out.

Last year, the 2008 show (held in Pateley Bridge) was my first ever visit to an agricultural show. The Nidderdale show is held 8 miles down the road from where I live, so is quite an important event in my hamlet and around the local area. In fact, the Nidderdale show attracts entries from all over the country, in part because it's the last show of the year, and therefore the last opportunity to display your animals before they go away for the winter. It's also a good excuse to get together with like-minded people, and discuss farming matters. I enjoyed it as a day out, but some of these people I suspect rarely meet anyone on a day-to-day basis, and the show is a real chance to get together that rarely happens in the hill farming communities.

I went to the Great Yorkshire Show earlier in the year, but didn't really enjoy it, mainly because it was so big. There didn't feel like any local input, there wasn't anything there I could properly relate to. That's not true of the Nidderdale show. It's like a very big, very well organised village fete. I got the tickets from the farmer 3 doors away, who helped organise it. The bloke from down the road was stewarding the sheep. The lady next door had entered about a million things into the handicrafts section, and from last years successes, she probably expected some decent prize money as well!

Anyway. The only disappointment of the day was the non-attendance of the 'White Helmets' Motorcycle Display team due to swine flu, although the chap who replaced them was pretty impressive - jumping off ramps on a quad bike isn't something I would recommend you try! The animals were all turned out exceptionally well, and there was a particularly good turnout in the sheep classes as you'd expect in a predominantly sheep-farming area! The food tents were OK, but a few more wouldn't go amiss - an opportunity to promote local produce was probably missed here. And of course, there were some unfeasably large vegetables winning prizes in the food tent.

You may also remember this post, suggesting Janet Street-Porter got off her butt and offered more support, after her measly £5 donation last year. Well, I'm pleased to report, having perused the 2009 catalogue, that she entered chickens and pigs into the various categories. I've no idea whether she won, or indeed if she was there, but a large pat-on-the-back is required. I entered nothing this year, to my disgrace, although I've earmarked the categories which will receive my patronage this time. You should come along and see them for yourself!

Nb. I'm not sure how many prizes my neighbour won, however I can confirm at least, that she won in one out of the four flower arranging categories AND took the prize for the best display in all four categories. Pretty impressive, I'd say!