The Emergency Plumbing Con

The other weekend I made the mistake of looking at the drain from my kitchen. Eeeeeeuuuuugh! Of course I don't have a "rod" and of course I'm not experienced enough with blocked drains to be sure I could clear it even if I had. How does a regular householder get that kind of experience? I have learned from previous experience not to use Yellow Pages, so I called my insurance company, who told me I was insured if a tree root had come through the drain, but not if it was just blocked. Then I called the Gas Board because I had some vague idea I might be insured through them, but I wasn't, though they did put me through to Dyno-Rod. Who quoted me some numbers which were not utterly silly and came round two days later. Sure enough the young man shoved the rod firmly on the water, cleared the blockage and also vacuumed out my sink pipes - all within a half-hour. No time-wasting with bogus investigations and surveys, no head-shaking and muttering about using fancy equipment. It's not the cheapest thing I've ever done, but I've had worse experiences. My drains are now clear and there isn't a nasty whiff when the washing machine churns out water. Worth every penny, though I will buy a "rod".

What wasn't worth every penny was what I paid the last time my drains were blocked - the previous experience I just mentioned. That time the main drain was blocked as well. When the Yellow Pages plumber took the lid off there was water with all sorts of nasty things that come out of the back of people floating in it. I was then subjected to what I later learned was the usual time-wasting fee-generating twaddle. Three hours later, he had run up a large bill and cleared the drain, telling me that I could recover some of the cost from the other people who shared the same drain. We're talking £800 here. Yes, I know. It's what one of my neighbours said when I went round explaining what had happened. I stopped out of shame after that. But like the ad says: when you need a plumber, you need a plumber. The same neighbour explained how the con works: that they spend at least half-an-hour messing around pretending to investigate where the water is coming from, not going to, where the drain is and where it joins the street, all of which is useless in nearly all cases. Then they get the equipment out, push the gadget down the drain and leave it in neutral for an hour or so while the bill runs up. At some stage under the pretence of "checking" something, they will go back to the van, turn the gadget on and within minutes clear the blockage.

Having heard this, I contacted a firm of solicitors to see if I could get some or all of my money back. Sadly, no. The contract was what it was, and of course I could not prove they were putting on an act.There's no way round it, except: 1) by your own "rod" for simple drain clearing; 2) talk to Dyno-Rod first, as they didn't have call-out charges and didn't mess around; 3) when the emergency plumber asks you for the credit card imprint before he starts, write very clearly on the card form "Valid only up to (say) £100." The lawyer said that sticks. Call the credit card company and tell them that. Of course the plumber will bitch and moan and want to leave. At this point, I suspect the following might work: you show the guy £100 in used £20's and tell him that's for him if he sorts the problem. He can tell his boss about how you played the raw prawn and he had to go. If you've got the nerve to do that, it has a chance of working.

So it's not just you. It's me as well. And someone else at the place I was working at the time. If this hasn't happened to you, don't be smug. Wait till you get a house and have to deal with all this stuff you leave to the landlord.

The Three Songs That Changed Pop Music

Given the utter nonsense that made it to Number One in the latter half of the 1960's, to say these songs changed pop music is maybe just plain wrong. What I really mean is that these songs changed what people who took pop music seriously expected from themselves if they were songwriters and from songwriters if they were fans. In fact, you could argue that these three songs created pop music as art. There are excellent articles on Wikipedia, which I am not going to precis. I'm old enough to remember when these songs first came out.

Like a Rolling Stone was like nothing I had heard before, but I got it instantly. I didn't even notice it was 6:03 long. What I noticed was the lyrics, the sound, the fierce condemnation in Dylan's voice. It was so far ahead of anything anyone else was doing, I don't think we compared it to anything else. It was just there.



And then there was Eleanor Rigby. I have a quiz question that goes "What Number One hit was sung to the accompaniment of a string quartet and was about the last days of a lonely churchwarden?" Put like that, you get the impact it had. Huh? String quartet? "All the lonely people / where do they all come from"? What kind of Number One is that? It would not get out of the studio today. When I heard it, the hairs on the back of my neck stood up. Still does. It's a punk-rock 2:09, with pace, sadness, tension and humanity. Suddenly "pop" music seemed capable of genius.



And then came Good Vibrations. 3:39 of multi-tracked, fast-changing, danceable love song about a girl he doesn't know who make him feel wonderful. Queen's Bohemian Rhapsody is a bloated piece of self-indulgence by comparison - and modelled directly on Good Vibrations. Everyone loved this song: kids, parents, hipsters, teachers and squares. The production values were way over anything anyone had done, the quality of the writing was clearly of a different order to everyone except Lennon and McCartney, the singing just flawed enough to be beautiful.



Yet it was the self-consciously weird Whiter Shade of Pale that convinced The Parents that pop music could be serious. The Bach samples, the references to Chaucer's Canterbury Tales and ancient Greece, the mystery of the lyrics and the lugubrious tone and pace.



The parents just didn't get it. Not really.

The Diet: Week 4

Remember that 1,500 calorie diet? Breakfast is Alpen and milk, with two eggs and one slice of toast or a small tin of beans and a slice of toast. Lunch is a sandwich from Pret or Fernandez and Wells on St Anne's Court, with a yoghurt in the afternoon. Supper is a toasted ham sandwich and a tomato. At home I nibble on sliced fresh pineapple or slices of orange - but I'm not at home and awake for very long. At work I cannot nibble at all. It's all about keeping the insulin levels down so the body can burn fat.

It is taking its toll. First, ask yourself how much room there is for roughage (aka fiber) in that, especially when you are eating lunch at the office and get home late(r) in the evening. Now draw the obvious conclusion and don't utter it while we're eating thank you.

Second, I drink lots of water because there are a couple of hours in the day - eleven to twelve and three-thirty to four-thirty - when I am really vulnerable to the temptation to have something sticky and sweet. Anything in fact. I can barely stand the sight of food in those hours. It calls to me like a Siren and I have to drown myself in cold water from the water cooler. Like that helps. On Wednesday I had supper with my sister at Bob Bob Ricard on Golden Square, and very tasty it was too. Pickled herring with apple and beetroot salad, meat pelmini as a main course and the chocolate glory (mark 2). I'd been looking forward to that all week. My weight did not sky-rocket. In fact, on Friday evening, I weighed 90.5 kilos.

You couldn't live like this all the time. The most I can hope is that I can wean my body off it's liking for chocolate. Yeah. As if.

This Week At The Gym: Week 9

Well, last week at the gym. For the first time I did not leave Cathy Brown's Thursday boxing class feeling like a complete klutz. I had an aching waist the next day, but that was because I was moving my torso with the punches, just as Cathy tells us to. It's something you have to do to understand just how much more power it gives you. It seems impossible that a swing of the torso and a little pivot on the foot could add so much clout, but it does. It feels way more aggressive as well: an uppercut that comes from the whole body feels like the nasty and dangerous punch it is. There's still no way I can do forty squat thrusts, and the hold-the-position press-ups (hold-ups?) had me collapsing at number six, but I'm okay with that. That's what I'm there for.

The real breakthrough came on Monday, when I did something that in October 2010 I would have told you I could never do. At lunchtime I ran two miles at 9.3 kph. I felt like I had distance to spare, it wasn't the painful effort that one-and-a-half miles had been the previous week. On the Wednesday lunchtime I ran 3.5 kilometres, which is just over two miles.

And three towels under my head, together with a class tutor who doesn't try to make us do advanced exercises, means that the Pilates class is now working. I have lordosis, so when it comes time to do the rolling bit, everyone else gets going, while I lift my chin and pelvis and any attempt at rolling stops at a flat spot in my spine ten inches long. I can do one of those rolling sit ups, but only if I have a towel in the hollow of my lower back.

Lordosis will also guarantee that you'll never have that flat, sleek footballer torso and that your tummy will never be truly flat. I'll be happy as long as it's not making my coats bulge out in front of me.

Reasons I Don't Do Fluffy...

We had an off-site meeting to talk about the goals of our little section recently. The first part of the exercise was a new-age-y fluffy thing about drawing pictures to tell everyone something about yourself without using words. Everyone else did primary-school houses and schools and The Bank's symbol and like that.

So this is one reason I didn't. A couple of years ago, in a distracted moment when I should have been paying attention to something more important, I wrote this down.

1959-60 Uplands Infant School
1960-61 Northumberland Park Infant School
1961-65 Belmont Junior School
1965-67 Erith Grammar School
1967-70 Hampton Grammar School
1970-72 Kingston College of Further Education
1972-73 Polytechnic of Central London
1973-76 Exeter University
1976-78 London School of Economics
1978-83 Freightliners Ltd / British Rail
1983-86 Hertz Europe
1986-89 Davis Associates
1989-90 Control Securities
1990-93 The RiverBus Partnership
1993-96 Unemployed
1996-97 Teacher Training
1997-98 Accounting Temporary work
1998-99 Global Crossing
1999-2001 AT&T (UK)
2001-03 Sonera UK
2003-04 Contracting
2004-05 Inclarity plc
2005-07 Contracting
2007-present The Bank

That's nine different educational establishments in nineteen years and fifteen different jobs or situations in thirty-two years! D'ya think there was a problem somewhere?

Things I Saw Where I Lived and Walked: Part 27

Clear blue skies are rare in London now. When they arrive, it's an excuse to walk and take pictures. I may wind up just taking pictures of the blue.

Absolute Radio has its offices on Golden Square, which has been for a while the coolest single place in London.

Central London has cranes all over it. According to which economist you listen to, cranes are either a leading indicator of economic activity or a lagging one. In London, it's so hard to find development opportunities outside the City (which marches to a different drum) that building is basically random, more, I suspect to do with ego than economics.

Emerge from the ICA and this is the light that greeted me. Late afternoon winter. My personal favourite.

This Week At The Gym: Week 8

I may also have neglected to mention that I'm on a diet. That's because I want to lose weight, and I want to do that partly because lugging ninety-five kilos around at my age is getting a bit much, but also because I am vain - to the point where the only mirror in my house is in the bathroom and used for shaving. It's a door from a bathroom cabinet I threw away and it's not even attached to the wall. (Very vain people don't look in mirrors.)

The idea that you can lose weight by "exercising" is right up there with the idea that you can save enough money for a decent pension as one of the bigger bits of codswallop passed off as sensible advice. The human body is a very efficient machine which with training can run an entire marathon on a very large plate of pasta and some water. According to the tables, running at just over 9 kph for an hour (!) at my weight will burn 940 calories. So if I run for four hours, 36 kilometres or roughly a marathon, I will burn one pound of fat. So let's just drop this "exercise helps you lose weight" thing. It doesn't. What it does is make The Diet easier to bear, and I suspect it helps even out the blood sugar and stop the metabolism going into Low-Power Mode quite so frequently.

The US Army has a Weight Control Program which at Appendix C on page 41 gives you an idea of the kind and amount of food you can eat. It is also simple and smacks of common sense - also since the US Army can't afford to have its troops falling over from silly diets, I'm inclined to believe it. Of course this means I look at the calorie-count labels in Pret and other places. 540 calories for the Tuna Fish Bloomer?! 400 for the Chocolate dessert?! 350 for the Smoked Salmon? 500 calories for a bar of chocolate and 100 for a luxury biscuit?!

The Big Lesson is: stop eating the junk: the morning croissant, the afternoon bar of chocolate, the bag of crisps, let alone the three pints of beer and MacDonalds that you put away and I don't because I don't drink. Next is avoiding food that spikes your blood sugar and therefore insulin response: for me that is mashed potatoes, rice and Stockpot's apple crumble, amongst others.

So just after Christmas, I set out on this diet. 1,500 calories a day. No junk, no fast-action carbs. Basically, I eat what I usually eat, but in smaller amounts and without the extras. It is working, but by God am I glad I don't have to do it forever.

Gory details to follow.