Dealing with British power companies: enough to depress anyone

I apologise for my absence last week. I was a trifle depressed. Or, to be more accurate, a horse burger depressed.

Though at least I had something to be depressed about, namely a substantial dose of work-related stress. Which is less disturbing, as any depressive can tell you, than the tsunami of gloom that occasionally engulfs the sufferer quite unexpectedly, for no obvious reason at all.

I dragged myself back to work after a couple of days and promptly burst into tears when someone said something nice to me, which is never good for my image as a hardened cynic.

A cynic, though perhaps not hardened enough

Cynical, yes, though I hope not unsympathetic, because a certain amount of empathy seems critical to the whole public relations process. A lesson clearly not grasped by the power company that recently upset one acquaintance through its heavy-handed approach to transferring an electricity account into her name after the sadly premature death of her partner.

She felt moved to make a formal complaint, which swiftly elicited a computer-generated letter of apology. Which might have helped had it not been brilliantly addressed to the deceased account holder. So she complained again. Predictably, the dead man then received another, even more grovelling, letter.

This could easily run as long as The Mousetrap. Much like the apparently never-ending pursuit of my dear wife by the same power company and two successive debt collectors over a small bill left unpaid by a former tenant of the house she occupied before we got married.

Mentioning no names, but ...

For some reason these goons failed to acknowledge her notification that she had changed her surname on marriage, then unilaterally accorded her a sex change from Miss to Mr on their files. So whenever they rang her up (which latterly was several times per day) they then refused to speak to her because she was clearly not the man they were looking for. Attempts to correspond by e-mail fell at the self-same hurdle.

Imagine their delight when they somehow got hold of my personal ex-directory number, because I am unmistakably a man and might therefore be just the lead they were after – if not the bill dodger himself operating under an unlikely pseudonym.

The hole in the triangle presumably symbolises the debt which this shower set out to collect for their clients; dealing with them can only be described as Kafkaesque

Reams of documents have been photocopied and despatched by recorded delivery to demonstrate who is actually responsible for the trifling debt at the heart of this dispute, and to provide his last known address. All have been promptly lost, at which point any normal company would apologise and give up. This lot just expect Mrs Hann to go through the expensive rigmarole of sending them all over again.

My wife’s own costs have vastly exceeded the amount claimed in the first place, never mind the hundreds of pounds in fees that must have been run up by the debt collectors. I did suggest that this argued for the simple if unjust solution of simply paying them to go away but, as my wife contends, “It’s the principle of the thing”. If you settle one bill you don’t owe for the sake of a quiet life, where will it end?

But that’s power companies for you. As if charging like the Light Brigade for our energy were not enough, in my experience they feel compelled to add insult to injury by screwing up every attempt at customer communication.

Ditto the laughably named British Telecom, who make it all but impossible for me to work at home because of the unreliability of the feeble broadband connection for which I pay handsomely each quarter. I long ago gave up complaining because I could never get through to anyone who spoke my language.

"I can assure you, sir, that I have checked your line and it is working perfectly. Hello? Hello?"

I refuse to blame this on privatisation. I remember having to stand in Soviet-style queues in bleak utility showrooms to secure gas, electricity and a telephone line when I bought my first flat in 1981, and there was nothing good about those old days.

Yet somehow us customers need to unite against the monolithic service providers of this country and make it clear that they must give some priority to our simple needs for reliability, affordability, responsiveness and politeness, particularly when things go wrong.

Otherwise we might all have good reasons for feeling ever so slightly depressed

www.blokeinthenorth.com

Originally published in The Journal, Newcastle upon Tyne

Horsemeat in the food chain: seriously, why the long face?

In my day job, I have done virtually nothing else for a full month now apart from answering questions about horsemeat.

Those who have knowingly eaten it assure me that horsemeat is delicious but, like most English people, I always pass those boucheries chevalines in Paris with a shudder of distaste. Which is entirely illogical, given that I don’t even like horses.

Many other columnists have lined up to opine that we are in the midst of a huge crisis caused by our addiction to cheap food, fostered by those evil supermarkets who are constantly driving down standards and screwing their suppliers. The answer, clearly, is to pay more, eat better and support your friendly, local butcher and farmer.

Even though the roof is kept over my head by Britain’s leading high street retailer of frozen food, I am personally delighted that good independent butchers have enjoyed a boost to their trade as a result of all this nonsense.

But please be assured that it is 99.99% nonsense, and that the problem is not so much processed food as manufactured hysteria. Yes, a small handful of rogues have evidently been passing off horsemeat as beef to some unsuspecting customers. But, as the food safety specialists never tire of explaining, this won’t actually do you any harm.

But what, scream the hysterics, if the horses had been treated with the veterinary painkiller called bute? Yes, the Government’s chief medical officer wearily explained, that might indeed stand an outside chance of making you ill if you ate 500 or 600 bute-laced horse burgers every day. Not that any trace of bute has been found in any UK products tested to date.

My client – Iceland Foods, since you ask – withdrew and destroyed a couple of batches of their burgers after the Food Safety Authority in Ireland detected small traces of horse DNA, amounting to one tenth of one per cent of the product. That particular test was not accredited for use in the UK and samples from the same batches were immediately sent to two independent laboratories for confirmation. No trace of horse DNA could be found.

All Iceland’s other beef products have now been tested and similarly proved to contain no rogue horse or pig meat. So they said so. Cue howls of protest that the company is not grovelling apologetically for something it has not done.

It’s a rum food crisis in which no one has died or, so far as we know, even been made ever so slightly poorly. As catastrophes go, it’s the equivalent of the Titanic’s head chef running out of lemon juice for the mousseline sauce to accompany the poached salmon in the first class dining room.

Meanwhile a Titanic-sized death toll has been exacted by mismanagement of the NHS in mid-Staffordshire and yet that, bizarrely, is the story that has proved pretty much a one day wonder.

I am old enough to remember what food shopping was like before the big supermarkets became dominant and the important truth is that it was rubbish.

There has been a revolution in the variety, quality, freshness and value for money of the food available to us in my lifetime that has been driven by supermarkets and is hugely advantageous to us all.

Yes, I also buy from independent shops and farmers’ markets because I am lucky enough to be able to afford to do so, but I have no hesitation in doing the bulk of my shopping in supermarkets – including Iceland – and nor should anyone else.

If you’re going to get hung up on microscopic quantities of DNA, brace yourself for next week’s shock disclosure that your raspberry yogurt almost certainly contains a trace of banana.

Please also remember that your local butcher’s handmade burgers stand every chance of containing minuscule traces of other animals’ DNA. And, unless he washes his hands with the obsessive dedication of a serial killer who has successfully evaded justice, quite possibly human DNA too.

I really hope that some enterprising tabloid does run a test for that, so that we may look forward to the next stage of the crisis: Britain rocked by revelations of rampant cannibalism among the middle classes.

www.blokeinthenorth.com

Originally published in The Journal, Newcastle upon Tyne.

Nothing is inevitable but death - certainly not wind farms

I am sure my late mother was blissfully unaware that she was quoting Jane Austen when she regularly observed that “One half of the world cannot understand the pleasures of the other.”

Substitute “passions” for “pleasures” and the gulf in understanding yawns wider still.

I am a strong opponent of “ever closer union” in Europe and look forward to the promised “in out” referendum, if it ever happens, but polls consistently suggest that the great mass of my fellow citizens do not care all that much either way (though they should).

On the Horsegate food contamination scandal, media vox pops certainly found some consumers who were beside themselves with rage at the thought of unwittingly munching Dobbin in their burgers or lasagne, but many more received the news with a resigned shrug.

Another horse joke, courtesy of the Huffington Post

Among other recent burning issues, I have not written about gay marriage because I really could not care less one way or the other. Nor do I regard it as a “scandal” that people who are lucky enough to own a house should have to sell it to fund their care home bills, so long as their partner is not rendered homeless in the process.

While Scottish independence, though a lousy idea in principle, would have the great advantage of taking whingeing Salmonds, Sturgeons and other assorted fishes with chips on their shoulders out of our newspapers for good.

Which brings me, inevitably, to the one issue about which I do feel pretty passionate at the moment: the despoliation of the matchless Northumberland countryside by the crazy wind energy subsidy scam (this century’s answer to the last one’s plague of subsidised conifer plantations – though at least we will never run short of wooden pit props for our thriving deep mining industry).

Follions as it would really look (compare the picture accompanying the planning application)

Last week’s column on the planned Follions Folly attracted a small handful of passionate e-mails of support, one castigating me for failing to appreciate the beauty of wind turbines, and another pointing out that they are less ghastly than nuclear power plants.

Well, up to a point, Lady Copper, though at least nuclear can produce large amounts of electricity consistently if not particularly economically, rather than relatively small amounts when the wind blows at the right sort of speed.

And from the great mass of the public, I suspect, total indifference. Fuelled by the sense that covering much of the countryside with gigantic turbines is “inevitable”, like German victory in World War II or the triumph of communism, and “the future”. Which is interesting considering that they combine the mediaeval technology of the windmill with Faraday’s cutting edge invention of 1831, the dynamo.

In my experience nothing is inevitable apart from death (we all know now that taxes are pretty much optional if you are rich enough to pay for the best advice). So I shall keep banging the drum for the total madness of wrecking a peculiarly beautiful bit of countryside, designated as of High Landscape Value and right on the edge of the National Park, just to put a bit of extra cash in someone’s pocket for the next 25 years.

The last week has seen the creation of a website - http://www.fightfollionswindfarm.co.uk - and Facebook page, which both feature a rather more realistic photomontage of the development than the one accompanying the planning application, plus some interesting height comparisons with existing turbines and buildings. Do please take a look and “like” the Facebook page if you feel so minded.

A public meeting has also been arranged at Whittingham Village Hall at 7.30pm on Friday for everyone concerned about the issue. Curiously, the applicants’ agents have declined an invitation to come along and explain why the turbine would be such a good thing for us all. Suggesting either total confidence that they are going to get their way regardless of what the yokels think, or a contempt for the views of the local community that almost beggars belief. Perhaps, indeed, a bit of both.

In a county that has already more than done its bit to help meet renewable energy targets, there can only be one sane response to opportunistic proposals for large turbines in beautiful, sensitive and remote locations. Just say no. Please.

www.blokeinthenorth.com

Originally published in The Journal, Newcastle upon Tyne.

Just my luck: living with someone who knows it all

I am constantly being told that I am a very lucky man - usually by my wife, though other, perhaps less biased, observers do chip in from time to time to back her up.

But even at my most cynical moments, I can see how fortunate I am to share my life with someone who knows the answers to absolutely everything. Which is all the more remarkable when one considers that this repository of omniscience is only three.

Mrs Hann recently tried to give our elder son some helpful advice on how to handle our new puppy, but he cut her short with: “The thing is, Mummy, I know all about dogs.”

The child who knows everything - including the fact that he doesn't like having his photograph taken

Similarly, our attempt to improve his understanding of the food chain was dismissed with the assertion, “Don’t be silly, Mummy. I don’t eat animals. I eat food.”

At some point one of us is going to have to explain what actually goes into the sausages and fish fingers that are currently just about the only things he will eat, apart from lightly disguised refined sugar and – bizarrely – smoked salmon.

But I am certainly not going to volunteer for that assignment, because I don’t suppose he will be any more willing than the rest of the great British public to believe me when I try to offer reassurance on the quality of processed food.

Having spent the last 35 years mainly working on and for food companies, first as an investment analyst and then as a public relations consultant, I have undoubtedly visited more production lines than the average citizen, and I can offer this insight: I have never once been deterred from eating products like pies, pasties or sausages by seeing what went into them or the way they were handled.

I confess that I always ducked invitations to view that essential part of the process that sees live animals converted into meat. If I had to kill my own, I might well become a vegetarian tomorrow. But since meat exists, and is delicious, it would require much stronger principles than mine not to indulge in it. 

True, I have never visited a burger production line, the focus of so much recent angst, but I cannot imagine that different principles apply there. The food industry has its pirates and corner-cutters, like every other, but no mainstream British food manufacturer or retailer would ever set out to con its customers by deliberately flogging them a dead horse.

Perhaps the most interesting thing about the Horsegate imbroglio is how hard the media has found it to whip up (no pun intended) hysterically aggrieved consumers. Most of them seem more interested in cracking jokes, some of which have been rather good.

A surprisingly high proportion also seems open in principle to eating horsemeat, if it were properly marketed as such. I am not amongst them, but only because my views on what constitutes acceptable food were set in stone more than half a century ago.

To this day I cannot bring myself to eat rabbit, which my mother ruled out because of then rampant myxomatosis, and I remain childishly sceptical of most seafood that doesn’t come coated in breadcrumbs or batter.

Our 11 month old cheerily shovels down anything he can get his hands on, and would be as unfazed by horse as the hungriest French paysan.

The next Michael Winner in training

But then I seem to remember his elder brother took the same omnivorous approach at that stage, before his focus on sausages and fish fingers developed.

Maybe we could get him some therapy on this when he goes for counselling about the trauma of watching a puppet impersonate Jimmy Savile on CBBC’s Tweenies on Sunday morning. A great cue for more outrage, this time on the failings of the BBC, even though precisely none of CBBC’s target audience would have the slightest clue who Jimmy Savile was.

The simple fact is that, even in the best-run organisations, mistakes occasionally happen. We should calmly find out why, to ensure that they do not occur again. If anyone would like to borrow a small person who knows absolutely everything to help with the investigations, please just let me know.

www.blokeinthenorth.com

Originally published in The Journal, Newcastle upon Tyne.