…..But especially the drivers of Arrow Trucking in the US who found out two days before Christmas that they were losing their jobs – and their rigs – with immediate effect.
Others in the trucking community have set out to do what they can (see the Facebook link on the original Handy Shipping Guide story) and we wish all you guys a happy Christmas despite your getting dumped by a firm, which by all accounts, wasn’t up to much anyway. Let’s hope it’s a turning point for you all.
…..And to the drivers who use the only access point to get into Wales, namely the Severn Bridge, after the English and Welsh authorities colluded to increase the toll charges despite a deep recession and fair words saying how much they care for the .community with a strong desire to increase opportunities for trade in the area.
…..And to the management at Eurotunnel who, despite my excusing them for all delays by stating that at least they hadn’t used the old “wrong type of snow” argument, obviously read the latest Captains Blog and decided that, actually, that was a pretty damn good excuse for all their trains breaking down and immediately issued a press release that “cold fluffy snow of an unusual type” had actually caused all the problems. Shame it wasn’t the normal square, warm stuff we usually get then.
…..And of course the politicians who worked so hard at the Copenhagen conference that they managed all the objectives they had promised, or rather precisely none of them, which of course was exactly what the bulk of us thought they would achieve.
Thought it best to put that in as I seem to have slipped into sarcasm at some point there so it’s probably best just to thank all the regular readers of the Handy Shipping Guide and those who also find their way onto the blog site for all their support over the past few months.
The news readership now is reaching astonishing levels with thousands of people in 177 different countries using the site daily.
Not bad as we actually went fully on line in September.
Don’t forget that you can freely comment on any of the blog topics just by using the “comments” link.
So thanks to all and a very merry Christmas.
Here’s a final Christmas Video – Just Don’t watch it if you’re easily offended!!!
If there’s one thing worse than being unprepared for the recent bad weather in the UK it’s the sound of everybody having the same perennial conversation; you know the one,
“Why weren’t we prepared for it? 6 inches of snow and everything comes to a full stop, my road’s impassable Boss, I can’t…”
As you can see, some of the head office staff weren’t too keen on getting on regardless
(despite the fact that because of the breaking news more people read the Handy Shipping Guide news than any other day).
Well this time the effects of a few inches of the cold white stuff, was enough to stop the entire Eurostar service for several days. At least it wasn’t the old British Rail “wrong type of snow” argument this year.
Nope this time it’s too warm in the channel tunnel.
Now everyone who ever bought a DVD for their Gran in the deep midwinter knows you can’t walk straight in the house and open it up.
If you do the condensation will be running around its internal organs the moment the cellophane comes off.
It has the same effect as dropping a fish in boiling water – it stops working.
Now even though we all know this, apparently the blokes who designed the Eurostar didn’t, and in a way, I have some sympathy.
No one probably ever thought that a sudden cold snap could turn the outside world into a frozen hell whilst the tunnel remained as snug as a polar bears cave, in fact a good deal warmer.
One dose of that heat and Thomas the Tank Engine’s electrics started to look like a fat man in a sauna, with unsurprising results.
Unfortunately the “severe” weather we’re having gives us no credibility with those in the outside world. Our Thai office delight in telling us how this is the “best time of year, it hovers around 26 degrees” whilst in explaining to a contact in Canada that “it really is jolly cold old boy” (have to maintain the colonial image, they expect it) merely results in a stony silence which is actually the sound of his hand over the phone whilst he snorts in derision.
So if I may I’ll use this brief piece to explain and excuse us British for our ambivalent attitude toward snow and weather in general.
We get a lot of weather.
That basically is that. It changes day to day and often hour to hour and that’s why it is an Englishman’s favourite source of conversation.
A Frenchman or Italian will discuss his love life, or possibly his dinner, an American his Church or his vacation or how big something is, but, first and foremost, the English talk weather.
Snow, it has to be said, rarely figures on our radar. It represents a tiny percentage of the vast morass of changing meteorological conditions we endure and enjoy and so, frankly, we generally pay it no mind.
Until it arrives. Now if you own a hill farm somewhere north of Invergarry you will sneer at the southern ponces (about 98% of the British population in your case). You will have your Land Rover and snow chains and shovel as you tour the hills after October.
Even the midges wear Barbour jackets.
But for the average, town dwelling, man in the street the only time he puts a shovel in the boot of his car is when he is burying his cat
(or more likely next doors cat)
in the woods (or possibly on the beach).
So on behalf of my fellow countrymen may I apologise for the fact that every time it snows South of Dundee the population staggers round muttering under its collective breath with a glazed look like they’ve just been given an eviction notice.
And may I also point out that, at some point leading up to and during the weekend, the ferries stopped running.
That is to say, yours truly (the Captain) thinks the technology is now available.
What’s he wittering on about now I hear you say? (metaphorically).
I’d best explain; regular readers are aware that this blog frequently drifts far from the home turf of freight and shipping matters and allows deviation through the back alleys and byways of other diverse subjects.
That said, there is often a logistically based starting point, often not revealed to you, dear reader, being only in the author’s head, which starts the whole composition process off.
The starting blocks for this particular rant were, as so often the case, forged after a conversation In the Handy Shipping Guide UK office, once more a discussion centred around the rapidly declining standards of spoken and written English from many with whom we mere scribblers come into contact, job applicants, delivery drivers etc.
Now I should firstly make this clear, this is not a complaint about the way language naturally evolves, if it was socially unacceptable, nay illegal, to change and vary the way we speak, write and punctuate (to some extent) then your Captain, for one, would currently be serving a long stretch at HM’s pleasure (God bless her).
No, I’m not speaking (or writing actually) about the natural alteration of language over time, I might scream at the spell checker on occasion when the lunar eclipse causes it to switch back to default ruddy English (U.S.) from the Queens own perfect script, that time when then moon causes wives to hurl plates at innocent menfolk and whales beach themselves to the mournful howls of werewolves.
Although I still insist colour should always carry a “u” our cousins across the pond still speak and write consistently in their own way and I shout “vive la difference” (if you’re American that means I’m OK with it). After all it is in fact we English who cannot spell aluminium (see), dropping the second “ I” puts it closer to the original name after all.
The objection I, and many, many others have, is that our language is being corrupted by people who simply fail to grasp that it has reached its present form from necessity.
No matter how the tabloid crud dumb it down it is essential to retain a wide variety of expression, to attempt to avoid clichés, to use language that says precisely what one means.
“Well what can we do good Captain?” I hear you ask (that may be a voice in my head again)
“How can we possibly save society from the social leprosy, words falling from our vocabulary like rotten fingers?”
Relax Oh Reader, we have the answer.
And that is where the technology comes in.
Mobile telephone’s, or as our US cousins would say (so much more succinctly) cellphones (see that’s good verbal evolution, despite the fact my spellchecker is painting the word cherry red – obviously securely good old English(U.K. - As She Should Be Spoken mode).
Let’s face it, people bastardise our language because they’re lazy.
Text speak, what bloody rubbish!
Y dnt U C tht Kds R wld abt Txtin. Fstr thy cn spk bttr fr thm.
If we wish to save our language then technology and education provide the simplest of answers.
Like the cigarettes producers of my youth, mobile phone manufacturers want the young to be introduced to their product as soon as the umbilical is severed, and equally, as parents wanted to prevent those of us who thought it cool to puff on a Woodbine, so parents today want to ensure little Jimmy or Louise don’t end up with brain cancer at 31 because their brats are all cell phone mad.
Now nobody has proved there is any link between phones and cancer, but, like MMR vaccinations no sane mum or dad is going to expose their kids to any threat, no matter how long the odds.
OK, OK, that’s a fake produced by a Blue tooth headset company to scare you into buying their gear but I bet it got you thinking?
Which brings me back to my spell checker. Curse or blessing?
Well with little ingenuity we can turn this into a win, win, win, win situation.
How? I (imagine) I hear you ask.
Simple.
Nokia, Motorola whoever ring up Bill Gates and arrange a meet.
Nokia tell Bill they are going to produce a range of funky cell phones that come with games etc. only they aren’t phones, yes, you can ring maybe one number plus the emergency services but apart from these all calls are barred.
Bill gets to load a programme of his spellchecker on the phone, one countries language, no frills.
Well just one, the phone has a QWERTY (blimey that was easy to type) keyboard and (here’s the kicker) if there are any spelling, punctuation etc. mistakes in a message then the text can’t be sent.
Genius.
Nokia flog a cheap introductory phone to kids, Microsoft supply language software, Ma and Pa get an easy to choose, relatively cheap present for Christmas, Birthday etc. that little ‘un actually wants and youngster get to text all his mates for free (didn’t I mention the cheap rate package that dad signed when he bought it).
Can you copyright an idea?
Somebody let me know please.
Going back to the Woodbine theory just like fags (American citizens adjust spell checker to English (U.K. Gods own language) please) the make of phone the child starts with might well prove to be his brand for life.
Marketing agents can call the captain at the Handy Shipping Guide UK office.
Gordon "Buzz" Brown heads for the Climate Conference.
Last time out I was banging on about the tenuous nature of existence.
Well folks get ready for some more homespun philosophy,
The Captain is about to leap up and grasp at the coat-tails of ecoism (pat pending on the ism there).
Anyone who reads the news on the Handy Shipping Guide main page regularly may have noticed today that our game was, well, to be frank, a tad off form. The reasons for our lamentable performance, was due to several factors:
1) It’s Friday, nobody ever works as hard as they might on Friday
2) There was a distinct lack of News. This was in part due to the fact that, you’ve guessed it, nobody, including PR companies, media departments in shipping companies etc., works as hard as they might on Friday.
3) We lost all our power.
By this I don’t mean that the staff all fell to the floor limbs twitching, nor that the normal super heroic feats we perform here every day suddenly were beyond our grasp.
This was much simpler. The electricity failed.
Then it started up again, just long enough for us to start work again and then bang.
The lights went out, literally.
Unfortunately the fault was more than a little elusive and, whilst all about went around to discover if we were in the middle of a general or specific power failure I was transported back to the heady 70’s, three day weeks, transport workers strikes and all that (sighs of pathetic nostalgia from all readers over 50).
Finally the fault turned out to be office specific. A tired piece of wiring was discovered and electricity board seals tampered with by expert hands that had been using and abusing customs seals for decades (allegedly), repairs made, and the twenty or so times the lights had literally gone out in a few hours were almost forgotten.
Not quite. For in the long moments of darkness and confusion it became obvious how dependant we have become on all the trappings of modern life in a civilised country.
Flick a switch you have light, turn a knob – heat, a tap –water and so on. There is always food in the shops and money to buy it, transport is easy, we complain about the tiniest things, not the right kind of biscuit or crisps available, the train is half an hour late, you know the sort of thing, you are likely as guilty as the rest.
And that’s when it came home to me how important this Copenhagen deal really is. Sometimes when you watch a football match and one side attacks incessantly with no luck you instinctively know they won’t score that elusive goal. They could play on for another half an hour but you just know that it isn’t written, it’s not their day. You know it and the teams out on the pitch feel it too.
For me that’s how Copenhagen feels, or rather the situation we are in. We have to do something concrete to reverse the effects of the problems we are causing ourselves and our fellow man. The problem we have is that we are these days led by little men. Somehow we have to ensure that everybody is on the same page on this one, and, unfortunately I don’t think it’s going to happen. Promises and speeches will be made but I can’t see the generation of PR savvy wasters, shysters and swindlers that pass for many of the strictly average politicians we are now cursed with can grasp the nettle and organise a night of celebration in the place the beer comes from.
The thing which may save the day is the overwhelming feeling I have that the man (and of course woman) in the street really wants to see dramatic changes in energy use and the consequential cutting of pollution. If the will of the people prevails we may be in with a chance.
And one other factor. I watched in awe the other night as two scientists, Austrian I believe, revealed the artificial trees they have developed. Looking vaguely like a tree shaped like one of those early machines used to present an illusion of a moving object as you peered through slits in the side of a spinning drum, a zoetrope.
These tree contraptions grab carbon dioxide from the atmosphere in huge quantities. I believe the figure quoted was 60 million “trees” could absorb all the CO2 we produce at any one time.
The special plastic which catches the CO2 is then rinsed and carries on sucking the nasty stuff out of the atmosphere. So what happens to the CO2 you ask? Technology still needs a bit of work but apparently if they sort out this big underground storage idea you simply place the trees around the dumping site, the position of the trees in relation to areas of pollution is irrelevant, they simply grab the same amount wherever in the world they are, lowering the overall amount of pollution. The recovered CO2 goes straight down into storage in whatever form they mange to convert it to.
So don’t despair just yet, but let’s be clear, no matter how clever we think we are Nature, in all her glory is waiting out there for us to screw up. And if a little thing like the power going down for a few hours can cause such confusion, what are we, and more to the point, the next generation, going to do if we screw this one up.
A horror story in the international press the other day as I checked up on the opposition got me thinking about a few things.
Firstly how tenuous life is and also just how lucky we are.
Yes I do mean we.
You might be there considering your own mortality and how to put an end to it at this precise moment (although reading this would be a bit of a risk at such a time - even I don’t think of this blog as a sort of scripted Happy Hour) but no matter what your state of mind you are still one of the lucky few, oh blessed band.
I know this because you are reading this from a computer screen, and unless by some unfortunate mischance it is on display in the window of a tekkie shop somewhere cold and dangerous with you sliding down the frosted window after some terrible accident, these being the last words you ever see, then believe me you’re lucky.
Today’s fateful tale came from India.
A waste truck driver was delivering a load to some God forsaken landfill site where labourers toil amongst the muck, seeking waste metal and other goodies from each load of junk.
In the usual scramble to be first, seven people, three of them children, could not avoid being buried alive when the truck slid part way into the pit, tipping its load upon them.
The unknown driver panicked and ran off and by the time rescuers had dug the unfortunates out, all were dead.
So life is, as I say, tenuous.
My reading of that scientific Bible by the wonderful Bill Bryson (A Short History of Nearly Everything) just lately, doesn’t help.
By the time old Bill has finished quantifying just how insignificant ones life is and the frankly miraculous fact that you are even able to read this or indeed anything else, one is wont to turn to either:
a) God
or
b) the bottle.
So as we move to what for many of us is the festive season, take a minute to consider just how lucky you really are.
Take the time to look at the rolling waves, or smell the difference in the air under the trees, you know the sort of moments, soppy stuff.
And thank whatever God (or bottle) you have that you don’t earn a pitiful living working on the dust heaps of the subcontinent for less than a quid a day.
