Confabulations

After scraping the ice off my car this morning I decided that winter is well and truly here. For some of us this means a magical time when we make Xmas cards, sing carols and learn how to make mince pies. For the rest of us who are over the age of 11 it means freezing walks to the bus stop or spending 10 minutes every morning trying to defrost the car and getting your fingers stuck to the steering wheel.

Winter is a perilous time. You spend each daylight hour ensconced in an office and leave in pitch darkness, either back to a freezing house (you can’t afford the heating these days) or down the pub, where at least warm air is paid for by someone else. Outdoor activities are basically a no-go and all that’s left is drinking and The One Show. It’s no wonder winter sees the highest level of suicides during the year.

What can we do to dispel the winter blues? I’ve found the solution…The Slanket! You may feel stupid wearing it, until you realise that no-one will see you and you don’t have to tell anyone.

Slankety goodness!

I was thinking the other day about the credit crunch and how it’s affecting our lives. Some people are being made redundant, others are finding their household bills going up. Most of us will probably spend less this Xmas but most importantly, we’ll be cutting back on big expenditures like new televisions and holidays abroad.

The UK holiday market will see a boom next year as those expensive flights abroad look less attractive. Hotels will also suffer unless they can offer a good deal. Holiday parks on the other hand and rental villas will do well because they’re a cheaper option. Self-catering holidays mean you don’t have to spend money eating out every night, and if you’re in a holiday park, even if it’s in some far away place like Orlando, you can pick and choose activities each day instead of spending money travelling around the country.

The humble caravan will make a comeback, and those of us who might have gone abroad will now consider spending a week in The Lakes using a chemical toilet. None of us will be tanned next year, but at least a week cooped up in a caravan while it rains will make a change from a week cooped up in an office while it’s sunny outside.

Baffling, isn’t it? You spend your life assuming that bars, hotels and even hospitals just buy their furniture from MFI like you or I (not any more, obviously). It turns out that they actually buy their stuff from specialist manufacturers who build furniture that stands up to far more wear and tear than your tidy L-shaped settee at home. So, for example, a chair in a hospital might need to be cleaned hourly and survive enormous traffic volumes as patients come and go and have to sit down/up and generally mess around.

Food for thought!

I’m not entirely sure when it became socially acceptable to wear fashionable glasses, but now it seems every designer, ‘artist’ or vaguely well-heeled person owns a pair. Gone are the days when you could choose between one style of NHS specs and you were a source of ridicule for your able-sighted friends. Now you can spend literally hundreds of pounds on designer frames in various shapes and colours. If you’re uber-fashionable you might even want to get a pair of rimless glasses (mainly worn by architects and bald men).

It’s quite astounding that some plastic glasses can set you back £XXX, but that designer label isn’t cheap. From D&G to an independent fashion retailer, each new style represent someones ‘personality’ and is snapped up straight away. Now, the able-sighted are unfashionable and find themselves sat on the doorstep of cool.

I read a story in the Daily Mail the other day about a bridegroom and best man who were stabbed by an angry neighbour because they were playing music too loud at the wedding reception party. Now, this seems like a little bit of an overreaction. After all, wedding receptions tend to be one-offs and anyone who gets angry enough to stab someone over it is probably not right in the head. But I do have some sympathy for those suffering noisy neighbours – having grown up in a peaceful, detached house, my adult life spent living in various flats certainly came as something of a surprise.

There are dozens of possible noise complaints. The upstairs neighbour who has wooden floors and insists on walking around in high heels at all hours of the day and night. The teenager in the next flat along who turns on his gangster rap as soon as he gets home from school, and turns it up loud with his bedroom window open. The person who turns their washing machine on at 3 in the morning. Even having a flatmate with different sleeping patterns can be a nightmare if you have thin walls.

What’s the solution to all this? Well, good acoustic insulation would certainly help but in a lot of cases it can’t be done. It’s hard to convince your landlord you have a noisy flat without measurements to prove it and anyway, some noise like impact noise from shoes isn’t really stopped by normal insulation.

White noise generators are said to help because they drown out the noise of televisions etc, but do you really want to listen to one noise to cancel out another? My solution is to just move. Find an older property with thick walls and live there instead!

I’m not the most financial-minded person in the world. In fact, I only really care about how much tax I pay on my wage and how much my petrol and heating costs. So when the government announced their VAT rate cut to 15% I wondered how it would affect me. As I understand it, I’ll pay less VAT on ’stuff’ like a new television or whatever, but I’ll pay more in National Insurance contributions next year to make up for it.

So what if I don’t want a new television? The VAT cut isn’t going to put any more money in my pocket whatsoever. In fact, I’ll be worse off next year because I’ll have to pay for this so-called ’saving’. As far as I can tell, the government are going to screw me over royally next year so that I won’t be able to buy anything I do want, like jewellery or furniture or other useful things. So thanks for nothing government, you’ve made me poorer yet again.

The BBC have released a handy stress test so you can find out just how stressed you really are. In these times of economic doom and gloom, especially moving into the so-called “festive” season, many people are feeling the pinch, being pressured at work and generally getting depressed. Interestingly, the BBC’s scale of stress goes from ‘normal’ to ’severely stressed’. There’s no ‘under-stressed’ category for those people who are completely unaffected even by the news they’ve lost their jobs, homes and owe some very nasty men a large amount of money. Because those people exist, even if they’re often classed as ’sociopaths’ and confined to hospital chairs whilst being watched over by mental health professionals.

So what do you do if you find you are stressed? It probably comes as no surprise – you don’t need a test to tell you that you worry about money, could do with working less hours and wince every time you remember someone else you have to buy an Xmas present for. The BBC have a stress guide to help you cope, but if it’s anything like their ’surviving winter’ guide we’re sure it will offer such classics as ‘try to stay calm’, ‘think positive’ and ‘take a deep breath’.

Why is it that when the first snowflakes fall, the UK goes into a sort of snow-craziness of excitement mixed with terror and fearmongering. It’s snowing! Oh no, whatever will we do?! Let’s go out and play, but not before checking for 8-car pile ups on most major roads.

Even the BBC have gone a bit overboard this year – their how to survive winter guide includes such gems as ‘put the heating on’ ‘wear a jumper’ and ‘remember to eat’. Thanks for that.

The thing is, these elderly people who are so at risk during the winter months have survived far more winters than the rest of us. Surely they’re better equipped to know what winter is like – after all, when they were young we used to get a few feet of snow, not just a few centimetres. It’s the youngsters we should be worried about. Those hoodies only provide so much warmth and one cigarette hardly makes a fire, unless they’re into arson.

We Brits love to complain about the weather so it doesn’t matter if it’s a heatwave or a frost – even rain makes the news and lets be honest, it rains most days. Snow is much rarer and the news cover is inversely greater. In fact, people are probably so worried about the dangers of snow that they go out and drive too carefully, causing an accident that could otherwise be avoided. I’m not saying the BBC are completely responsible but they could certainly use a more positive editorial slant. “Snow to cause chaos across country” for example could be rewritten as “Snow to provide fun for millions”.

Just a thought.

At the moment the default retirement age in the UK is 65 – this means that employers can terminate an employee’s contract when they reach that age and basically force them to retire. If you want to stay on beyond that age you have to request it in writing and you’re not necessarily going to get accepted. Now, some clever HR folk want the government to scrap this retirement age and let people work as long as they like.

As if anyone wants to work beyond 65!

Well, maybe there are some people in really fulfilling jobs who’d love to stay on, but they’re the sort of people who wouldn’t be terminated anyway. For most of us retirement age is a long-awaited occasion when we finally get money off the government and can pursue other hobbies like gardening, staying up all night, installing hand rails throughout our homes and becoming cantankerous. I for one would vote for the retirement age to be lowered to 21. The government could fund it through adsense – I’d even help them to build the website. Forcing the elderly to work when they should be out getting divorced and finding toyboys is tantamount to abuse, so please support forced retirement for the good of the nation.

A report this week showed that in the workplace, loads of people aren’t safe online. They either open email attachments willy nilly, post confidential information onto the internet or use the same password for multiple websites.

Hang on…use the same password? No! Way!

I’m being sarcastic. Think about all the different services you use online – your email, your facebook account, your online banking, that world of warcraft forum you don’t talk about…the list goes on. Now imagine you have a job that involves using an intranet or some sort of online application – basically, most jobs nowadays. You’ll have a password for your computer, one for the intranet, one for more for secure documents, one for your work email…the list goes on!

Remembering all of these passwords is nigh on impossible. When you add into the mix the PINS for all your credit cards its no wonder even the best of us have ’senior moments’ at checkouts when we get our PIN number backwards or just type in “help”. That’s why the password for your telly box is 1234 – telly box makers understand that we can’t remember any more passwords so they give us a simple code that you just have to guess every time. It’s physically impossible to guess it wrong.

I know that online fraud is rife and we really should look after our security, but they need to invent something that does it for us. We are but frail beings and Wikipedia has taught us not to remember anything anyway. Either that or they need to let us go back offline – give us paperful bills and offline banking. We never needed passwords then, just a signature and no-one could be bothered to counterfeit those. Right?