A Link, but no Connection

One of the delights of one who doesn't have a TV is watching my own choice of YouTube videos.  Most evenings you will find me sitting in the lounge as the skies in the east are already beginning to darken, looking at a small screen and enjoying a variety of familiar productions, some that I have followed for years, others that are very much 'on trial' and if I find they're not so interesting as I first thought, I can easily 'unsubscribe' with no penalty.

Occasionally my cousin will recommend something she's seen on one of the independent TV channels.  (She knows that, without a TV licence, I'm not allowed to watch BBC programmed even on catch-up.)  One such occasion was last weekend, as a result of which I spent an enjoyable hour-and-a-half the other night watching an excellent tribute to the longest-running TV comedy, "The Last of the Summer Wine". 

After a run of 37 years, it's now some while since the very last episode, and many of the stars - people like Bill Owen, Peter Sallis, Thora Hird, and Kathy Staff - have died but, in the memories of many. the stories of their characters live on. I fondly recall leaving church on Sunday evenings and calling on a former work colleague in the village to watch the programme with her and her husband before returning to my TV-less home

The series was filmed in the town of Holmfirth, which, I now find, is only about 20 miles from my new home.  I've only been there once in the past, to deliver a consignment of solar panels to a private house in the town.  The firm who sold them was a regular user of the courier firm for whom I worked before retirement and, as a gesture of co-operation with them, we agreed to wear their shirts when delivering for them.  Of course, when the contract came to an end these shirts were no longer of use and, given its quality, mine has retained a place in my wardrobe.

By an amazing coincidence, I now realise that, on the evening when I watched that tribute to 'LOTSW' as it is affectionately known, I happened to be wearing that very garment!  Now I realise its proximity, I may well take a trip to Holmfirth again, to take a closer look at a picturesque place that played an entertaining part in a phase of my life that's now long gone.

The 'Silly Season'

I think it was half a lifetime ago in 1985, during my brief flirtation with newspaper distribution, that I first heard that expression.  The revelation was prompted by the variety of main headlines on the front pages, some of them at first glance seeming complete nonsense.  "They call it the silly season," I was told, "because there's no news, and the writers will grab at almost anything to fill the papers."

No news - nothing happening - what nonsense!  There's plenty to talk about: war in Ukraine and the knock-on effects on both food supply and energy prices; problems in the NHS, and the associated non-availability of an ambulance when you want one because they're all queued up at A&E; train strikes and the apparent impossibility of dispute resolution, meanwhile people can't get to work because the railways aren't running.

And any positive action to resolve some of these problems is apparently at a standstill.  As one person put it, we have a zombie government.  And why?  The whole nation has to wait while a couple of hundred thousand people - less than 0.5% of the electorate - decide who should be the next Prime Minister.  With all these important matters to be attended to - to say nothing of the climate crisis - we have to ask, why does the key step of replacing the PM have to be strung out over two months when, with a bit of re-structured decision-making, the same body of people could have been given a greater choice and a new appointment could have been made within a week.

It is, indeed, the silly season.  And on the home front, as with newspapers, there is no news.  Out of the blue, I had a phone call the other night from a distant cousin, and we fell to discussing my 'new' home and how it compared to the one that she and her husband have inhabited for the last few decades (they're now in their mid-to-late eighties).  I happened to speak of the shed at the end of my back yard, and my reluctance to go into it.  Her home backs onto open countryside, and her immediate reaction was that I should beware of rats ... a problem they have to contend with constantly.

I recalled this conversation this morning, as I looked out of my window.  I had described to her the contrast between the view to the front over a small estate built in the 1960s or -70s, and that to the rear, overlooking the backways of the neighbouring street and an Edwardian terrace, built to accommodate workers in the nearby coal-mines.  I now reflect on the way that my present front vista resembles that where I grew up.  We lived by the roundabout, so our window presented a view along a road, rather than of houses directly opposite.  Here too, there is a roundabout, albeit not circular.  There there was a lamppost on the roundabout, here illumination is from a street lamp mounted on one side of the junction, and on the roundabout is a telegraph pole.

What a contrast between my quiet street, part of what is, in effect, a cul-de-sac and the madness of the wider world, where there is panic about getting from A to B, and the real or foreseen dilemma about finding food for the family or heating the home.

But it's the silly season.

When 'in between' was Actually Last, and Far, Far Away

How are you coping with the heat?  I don't suppose I'm the first to ask you that question this summer.  You've probably asked it a number of times yourself, to family, friends, or those who might be in need.  Many have compared it to our experiences in 1976 and the water companies have just said that there will be no stand-pipes in the street this time around.  We await the proven truth of that undertaking.

For me, just toward the end of that long summer spell in '76, came I enjoyed my very first business trip away from home.  The company I worked for had just been taken over by an American firm and, as part of the deal, their UK subsidiary in Southampton was to be closed, and their operation there was to be brought up to Norfolk and 'lodged' with our factory.  I was one of two employees who were sent to Southampton for ... I think it was a week, possibly less ... during which time we were supposed to absorb, by note-taking and memorising, all their administrative processes so that, along with just one member of their staff who was going to spend a short while after the move 'bedding it in', we could reproduce the operation in its new home.

It was an exciting time for me but, like so many well-made plans, it didn't all work out as it should have.  The details have by now evaporated in the mists of the last forty-six years, but - in the strange way that memory works - thinking of that project has moved me to recall another business trip, roughly at the halfway point between then and now, which was possibly my last one.  At the very least it was as part of my last employment before I turned to driving for a living, which was a long period of nothing but business travel, but in a completely different dimension.

In a way, these two trips bookend a career that involved many instances of a business moving from one location to another.  

Granada Inn, Santa Clara, CA
where I stayed for 2 weeks

My employer had engineered an investment in a company involved in the 'dot-com bubble', so where else would my journey be but to California.  

The Seattle office on10th Ave, East

The firm's vice-presi-dent and principal investor wanted to move the company to his own home town of Seattle.
My job was to liaise with the bookkeeper at the California office, absorb as much as I could of their administration (is this beginning to sound familiar?) and act as their accountant once the business moved, until a CFO could be recruited in Seattle.

North Bend, WA

Elliott Bay, WA

In the event, my sojourn in the US, planned for up to three months, was only for four weeks, because the recruiting process was far more effective than had been anticipated, and I spent the second fortnight actually handing over what I'd learned to the lady who would be doing the job 'for real'.  Even so, I still had plenty of time for sightseeing!

I started this off by thinking about the heat.  One of the YouTube videos I watch regularly is put out by a man who lives in California, not all that far from where I'd been.  

In this week's episode, he was bemoaning the fact that it was too hot to work outside at 96°F (that's almost 36°C).  He said he'd recently been somewhere where it was 'quite cool at 72°F' (a rather pleasant 22°C) "I like the heat," he said, "but you have to work up to it."  His comment reminded me of my experience 22 years ago.  When I arrived - it was to have been on 4th July, but someone realised in time that that was a holiday, so I was sent a week later - I was almost afraid to go beyond the extent of the shadow outside the building.  A few days later I was happily walking around the town, and on one afternoon I willingly stood on a street corner after work, in full sunlight, waiting for a lift.

I'm not saying I particularly want to get used to this level of heat but, if needs must, it's good to have that memory to fall back on, and know that - within limits, and with sensible precautions - the body can cope with the odd extreme, if taken gently.

She was Already There, Just Waiting for me!

I focus this week on a fortunate happenstance in my labours over the (now famous) eighteen children of the Kerridge family.  Like many young people growing up in rural Suffolk in the dying years of the nineteenth century, Arthur Kerridge had migrated to London in the 1890s.  In my earlier - very hurried - work on the family, I'd found him in Paddington in 1901 and in Stoke Newington in 1911.

Earlier this year, as I've narrated here from time to time, I began to consolidate my earlier research into those eighteen siblings, one of whom was Arthur.  When his turn came, I decided to try out a technique I'd read about concerning the 1921 Census.  Once an initial search has confirmed the identity of the person you're looking for, a limited amount of additional information can be obtained without paying a fee to see the original entry, or even the transcription of it.

Having found Arthur with the confidence of seeing the correct year and place of his birth faithfully presented, I was thus able to obtain two female names in the same household.  It was reasonable to assume that one might be his wife and the other his daughter.  I next looked for the birth of a Kerridge daughter in the years 1911 to 1921, using first one name and then the other.  The family name is sufficiently rare that there was only one index entry that fitted, and I thus discovered that the mother's maiden name was Millership, and this was confirmed by finding a marriage entry a short while before.  I entered the marriage and the birth into my records, and successfully went on to find the good lady's birth entry.

The final step was to see where she had been from birth to marriage.  I looked for this rather unusual name in 1911, noted the reference and found the place to enter it in my records.  I have now to link my amazement with the admission of my blinkered examination of the family I'd just found in my search.  I discovered that they were already entered there ... along with a boarder named Kerridge!  I now had the answer to the unasked question: how did he meet his wife?

I recall writing here about an earlier example of a pre-recorded discovery, so I had decided against telling this story here today.  However, as I look back over a busy week, I notice a couple of similar 'already there' situations, which I can now add  for interest.

I wrote last week about wrestling with QuickBooks, in an attempt to revitalise an account that hadn't been used for some years.  Apart from the historic entries already in the system, another problem I face is my aim to utilise the program to record information relative to a number of different sectors of an operation.  It appears - and I hope I will be proved wrong - that the field where this information can be input is not available when entering bank receipts and payments ... which is one of the key areas of what a charity does!

On Thursday, I faced the possibility of having to revise every single transaction that I'd already entered, but yesterday I looked again at one of the reports that I'd printed out in my efforts to establish what was going wrong.  I noticed that in one column was listed the totals, by account, of all the entries that didn't have this information.  All I had to do was to transfer these numbers - about 40 of them - to the right place and ... Bingo!  The next report I ran had all the results I'd expected to see, and nothing that was unwanted.  It appears to be 'all systems go' from here on.

I also mentioned last week a lull in my work for WEBBS.  It came to an end earlier this week.  When I received a second assignment the other day, I was warned that one chapter would need to be re-typed because the original had been over-written by half of the next chapter.  As I looked into it, I wondered how this could have happened.  I have no proof, of course, but it did seem possible that the 'save' operation offers the name of the file last saved.  Suppose the typist had got halfway through the following chapter and needed to take a break for a meal, perhaps, or simply to ease the mind.  It's the easiest thing to simply hit 'return' instead of keying in a new filename, especially if fatigue had been building.  There was already a name on the screen ...

So, having realised just how common this phenomenon is, I'm now wondering what next I shall look for when it's right under my nose ... for good or ill.

Pleasantly Commonplace ... almost!

For my title this week I'm indebted to a Facebook comment by the man who is almost certainly my oldest friend.  We were at primary school together almost 70 years ago.  He wrote (I won't bore you with the context), "In standard English, 'nice' means pleasantly commonplace.  In American English it seems to mean high quality."

So this has been a nice week - very commonplace, and quite pleasant.  With my WEBBS work on hold just at the moment owing to an imbalance of the data flow higher up the chain, it's been quite relaxing.  Apart from a few exceptions, one day has been very much like another.  I've railed against the irrelevance and introspection of the news on the political scene; I've spent much of the daytimes at my desk; and in the evenings I have delighted in a variety of YouTube offerings ... including, last night, a most apposite episode of 'Yes, Prime Minister'.

The desk time has been divided - somewhat unevenly - between my continued researches into the family history of my cousin's husband's great-uncles and -aunts, and teaching myself how to use an on-line accounting system (and how to overcome the problems created by my misunderstandings thereof).  

By and large, the weather has matched this daily similarity.  Here in South Yorkshire we've been spared this week from the lesser extremes of heat in the south and rain in the north-west.  It's been wet most mornings, but clearer and drier later in the day.  I have an arrangement with my neighbour regarding the regular offerings in my garden by her cats.  I convey them to an suitable container on her side of the fence and she does what's necessary thereafter.  This week I've been quite absorbed by the challenges of the computer screen, and have often missed the opportunities to deal with this, and one afternoon I effected a 'bulk delivery'.

And so to those 'exceptions' to the routine.  One morning I spotted on Freecycle (I still can't get used to calling it 'Trash Nothing', although it's still only three syllables) an unused pair of slippers just my size and took advantage of a sunny afternoon to make the 37-mile round trip to the outskirts of Sheffield to collect them.  On Monday, following medical advice, I left the car where it was and made the journey by bus and on foot to Doncaster Royal Infirmary for a small surgical procedure.  (Driving after anaesthetic wasn't recommended.)  The outcome of this was minor and decreasing discomfort, and I have an appointment at the surgery in the next town to have the stitches removed early next week.

I'm now wondering what the next week will bring to this 'almost common place'.  Watch this space to find out.

A Solution in Search of a Problem

I confess it ... I'm a bit of an addict when it comes to spreadsheets.  Indeed, I remember one occasion when I said that I think in terms of them.  Certainly, when I'm confronted by a table of figures that's the first thing that comes to my mind.

I've been using this data processing phenomenon for the last 40 years off and on, right from having on my office desk an Apple PC with 5¼" floppy disks and 34KB of usable memory once the program was loaded.  Needless to say, in that time I've developed a degree of skill that is quite widely useful.  One evening this week I participated in a zoom meeting where I was able to offer help in this direction should it be appropriate to their needs.

To keep on top of developments and possibilities, I subscribe to a constant stream of 'daily tips' by e-mail.  These are provided by Allen Wyatt, an acknowledged guru of the system, who lives in Wyoming, USA.  Apart from these skills, which have resulted in many books and on-line courses over the years, Allen has recently opened a YouTube channel, in which he showcases some of the attractive scenery of his part of the United States.  He doesn't post there very often but, in my opinion, he's well worth watching.  As regards many of Allen's daily tips, however, I find my reaction is 'That's useful, but would I ever need to use it?'

The zoom meeting I referred to above was hosted by Make Votes Matter, which I mentioned in last week's post. One question raised was 'how can we make Proportional Representation better known?  When my turn came, my answer was something of a sidestep.  Feeling apologetic, I said, "I'm more of a worker than a thinker".  After all, my offer of help was very much along the lines of 'give me a challenge and I'll deal with it', rather than that of introducing any new strategies.  

Very much in the same vein as my thoughts about Allen Wyatt's Excel tips, I suggested that PR is a solution in search of a problem and I explained this by telling my own story.  Although I've been a voter for more than 50 years, I have never been represented by an MP of my own political persuasion.  I moved from a safe Conservative seat to another safe Conservative seat, and I'm now living in a safe Labour seat.  Never has there been even a remote possibility of my being represented by a Liberal or Liberal Democrat MP.

To my utmost surprise, one of the others in the meeting responded, "You've just answered the question, Brian.  Your personal history is the very way in which we can explain to people who live in safe seats their need of PR.  It's the only way they can have satisfactory representation."  With  a Single Transferable Vote system, a number of constituencies are combined to elect three, four or five MPs.  This means that the votes of those electors who support other than the present firmly-established party are combined and, together, may be able to return one out of all the MPs for this much larger constituency as their own representative.

Irrespective of the political subject under discussion, I came away from the meeting pleasantly satisfied that, although I hadn't realised it at the time, my thoughts and feelings addressed a question that I had felt unable to answer.

From Both Sides Now

I confess, I was out yesterday and completely forgot that it was Friday - the day when I usually write my blog.  Consistency is important, though, (and that's a phrase that has current significance, I realise) so here are a few thoughts about something that has been on my mind for the last ten days or so.

When Boris Johnson was finally persuaded to resign, one thing was inevitable ... an election to find a successor to him, both as party leader and, de facto, as Prime Minister of our United Kingdom.  I'd forgotten just how long and protracted a business this is although, apparently, the 1922 Committee have taken measures to speed things up a bit.

Essentially, the process is in two parts, rather like a French election.  Firstly the current MPs of the party reduce the many candidates to just two.  Secondly, these two are presented to the membership of the party countrywide, to determine which of the chosen two will be the new leader.  The first part of this process can take up to two weeks.  At the start, any candidate who can't find among his or her fellow MPs a required minimum number of supporters is eliminated.  Then the MPs vote in a succession of ballots at each of which the candidate getting the least number of votes is eliminated, until just two remain.

When I first heard how this was being done - I think it was when David Cameron resigned after the Brexit vote in 2016 - I thought, 'How stupid'.  If they were to use a Single Transferable Vote, all unpteen candidates could be presented to the membership from the word go.  It would then take, say, three weeks for the votes to be returned, each showing the voter's preferences and the new leader could be in post within a month.

After all, the MPs' selection process puts into human form part of the counting procedure in an STV election.  The candidates getting the lowest number of votes are eliminated and their votes go to their next preference.  In the actual Conservative party process, they have to decide who else to vote for; with STV that decision process is expressed at the outset.  What's missing in making this comparison is the re-allocation of excess votes over and above the minimum required to elect the winner (the Quota).

My own criticism of the system ended at this point with a declaration that, of course, the Tories would never decide to use STV.

The non-partisan activist group advocating proportional representation, Make Votes Matter, goes a stage further than I did.  Stripping the whole consideration back to first principles, their most telling analysis is simply this.  If the Conservatives really believe that First Past the Post is the best system, the only good way, to hold an election, then they would use it to elect their leaders.  They would send out the complete candidate list to the membership and whoever came out with the most votes would be the winner.

But they don't.  As MVM's leaders have pointed out, 'If FPTP is not good enough for them to use themselves, why should they force the general electorate to use it to elect our MPs?'