The Obscurer

Month: November, 2007

Thursday 29th November 2007

Strange Kind Of Urgency

So. This morning we’re trying to get my son ready for school, and not unusually it seems to be taking ages; every time his mother or I turn our backs he stops putting on his jumper, or his socks, he stops fastening his shoes, and when we return we instead find him staring at the TV, or looking at a book, or fiddling with the In The Night Garden figures his sister received for her birthday (yes, one year old yesterday; isn’t that a pip!)

Hard to blame him, I suppose; I too would be taking things at my own sweet pace had I a choice, but the fact is that I don’t. The reason that my wife and I are rushing around while he ambles along is that he has no concept of time. While for us a glance at the clock spurs us on there is no such pressure on a child; while for us running late has real potential consequences, a child is unaware of any responsibility. For my son Mummy and Daddy are forever there to sort things out, and he always eventually gets dressed and to school (more or less) on time regardless. As a result, as my son is getting ready, and unlike his parents, he feels no sense of urgency.

No sense of urgency! Now I remember using that phrase recently in a different context, but when was it? Let me think now…mmm…now then… think, think, think…erm…of course! That’s it! I said it umpteen times last week to describe the attitude of the players as England were contriving to throw away that vital football match against Croatia that confirmed I will have to support another nation – probably Spain – in Euro 2008. Then I used the phrase a number of times the following day too, during the post-mortem at work and in the pub.

And now I remember another couple of things, from a few years back; of Razor “Neil” Ruddock describing how baffling real life seemed once his career as a professional footballer was over because the simplest things such as phoning his GP had previously been done for him; how David Beckham once explained that the reason his car’s tax disc was missing was because he expected someone else would have sorted it out. Are these I wonder examples of a sort of arrested development, a delayed adulthood on the part of our professional footballers? Could this extended childhood explain that lack of urgency on display last week, so that even when the spectators in the stands and on their settees where anxiously staring at the clock, our spoiled and pampered representatives on the pitch meandered on regardless, their lives devoid of any real consequence shy of losing a trip abroad next summer, safe as they were in the knowledge that it would be left to others to pay the price or pick up the pieces of their failure to qualify?

And if this “childishness” analogy is an accurate assessment of the evidence we have all witnessed, then I am left to ponder on that other frequently heard excuse for the poor performances of our teams abroad when they so often fail to bring home the spoils; that our footballers play far too many games, that the rigours of our domestic leagues wear out our talented players, and that you can clearly see from the way they play that our lads are simply too tired. Interesting; because as every parent knows when they offer an apology for their child’s behaviour, sometimes when we say “I think s/he’s a little bit tired” we are purely dealing in euphemism.

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Friday 23rd November 2007

In The Lost And Found (Honky Bach)

A quick word about what is – at the time of writing – the Government’s latest utter balls up; which is to say the personal and banking details of all the recipients of Child Benefit getting lost in the post. It goes without saying that this business highlights some really lamentable security arrangements over at HMRC, but as just about everybody else already has said it there is little point in me piling in and echoing the point. But beyond the obvious I am interested in the statements made by the media and opposition MPs saying that those whose details have been lost are now living in the shadow of a fear of something scary and a wee bit fraudy; because as I am one of the 25 million involved I can say for sure that I’m certainly not that bothered.

Why? Simply because we have all given out our personal details to countless organisations in our time, and whenever we do so we increase the possibility that this data can fall into the hands of unscrupulous people and be used fraudulently. In one of my previous jobs I had everyday access to name and address details, dates of birth, bank account and credit card numbers and all manner of other personal information that our 8 million customers had entrusted to us. While I didn’t have the technical know how to download the entire contents of this database, and while trawling through the system actively searching for personal details could have left an incriminating audit trail, it would still have been child’s play to copy down personal information as and when I accessed it for a legitimate purpose, if I had so wished. I wouldn’t have been able to get 25 million records in a single shot, but I could easily have copied down twenty-odd a day which would have been quite enough to be going along with.

As such I feel that if my financial security has been further compromised by this latest breach I think it is only by a negligible amount; which doesn’t make it alright of course, or mean it doesn’t matter, but it does perhaps put things in perspective. If anything I feel a certain safety in numbers; were I to find out that mine were just one out of ten or so sets of banking details that had gone missing then perhaps I would now be checking my statements for suspiciously large payments to Mercedes Benz and British Airways and look into changing my account number. As it is, the fact that I am just one lost soul in a sea of millions of others makes it seem all the more unlikely that I will fall foul of some specific nefarious deception (he says, not so much tempting fate as tweaking its nose.)

Whenever we hand over our personal information the chances are that we are giving at least one person the opportunity to misuse it. A belief in most people’s inherent honesty, and the fact that when volunteering our details we usually benefit by receiving a good or service in exchange, makes it seem worth our while. Which brings me, somewhat inevitably, to the matter of ID cards. This latest fiasco appears to have just confirmed most people in their pre-existing view about the proposed scheme and the database associated with it, and I am no different; those in favour say that ID cards will protect against identity fraud, while those agin point out that we cannot trust our Government to keep this data safe in the first place. That latter view is the one I share and which is surely the right one; because whether it is mislaid through human error, compromised by poor security systems or quite legitimately accessed by Government employees just doing their job, there is nothing I can see to stop the information on a national database from potentially falling into the hands of the criminally minded. When we provide our bank details to a private company we only do so if we believe there is a good reason to; as the Government has yet to offer anything that bears even a passing resemblance to a good reason for collating all our disparate data into a convenient one-stop shop for the fraudster, for the time being they can fuck right off.

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Thursday 15th November 2007

Terry’s All Gold

Yesterday Stephen Gerrard joined the fray in calling for some sort of quota system restricting the number of foreign players in the Premier League. What can have influenced his judgment? Could it be the sheer mediocrity of many of the foreigners he has played alongside at Liverpool that has blinded him to the valuable contribution many of the imports have made? Would he, I wonder, be as well disposed towards some sort of quota system should it scupper a future move to AC Milan or Real Madrid, were Italy and Spain to also introduce some measures to “protect” their national teams?

There certainly appears to be a groundswell of opinion growing surrounding the matter of imposing quotas on foreign players in football. This week Michel Platini and Steve Coppell joined Sepp Blatter, Alex Ferguson and others in supporting restrictions on foreigners in the game, mainly on the grounds that it will help the development of indigenous talent. This is bollocks, of course, and the matter shouldn’t need detain us for long. Do we really think that those English players who do break through to Premier League level are anything other than vastly improved by the fact that they play alongside and against superior foreign talent? It seems so blindingly obvious to me, but so it goes. Presumably those calling for quotas are sincere in believing that such moves will remove those foreigners currently blocking out our native talent and so allow more Wayne Rooneys to grace the top flight of the game, but that begs the question “why are the foreign players here in the first place?” I am equally as certain that such moves will just guarantee our teams are cluttered up with more Ben Thatchers and similar and so protect their exalted positions. Certainly, looking back to a time before the influx of foreigners into the game I can’t exactly remember a surplus of homegrown Rooneys; rather my memory is littered with grim visions of a legion of Thatchers, and sub-Thatchers. It seems clear to me that regarding the quality of the players – if not the entertainment – we are much better off these days (and incidentally, my antipathy towards Ben is purely down to his very average performances while playing for my club, and not because of his surname, although that probably didn’t engender my instant respect.)

Perhaps more complex is the whole matter of players’ wages, but there was a similar almost-consensus the other week when, with David Beckham now more or less out of sight and out of mind, John Terry assumed the mantel of being the footballer-most-likely to be used to criticise footballers’ salaries in the Premier League. Sports minister Gerry Sutcliffe apparently “slammed” the “obscene” salary of John Terry and others; although as is often the case when it is reported than someone “slams” something, rather than making an orchestrated attack on the subject Sutcliffe probably just fielded a reasonable question by providing a reasonable answer. What was the response from the very highly paid world of football to the question of whether John Terry and other footballers are too highly paid? Well, Gordon Taylor of the PFA said, “every labourer is worth his hire and Mr Abramovich thinks he’s worth it.” Chelsea boss Avram Grant countered, “everybody likes to speak about the money of the footballers. Why does nobody speak about singers who get more money in one year than any player?” Manchester United’s Alex Ferguson similarly said, “there are some tennis players and golfers earning enormous amounts of money. Is that wrong?” while Arsenal manager Arsene Wenger correctly pointed out that “we are in an economy where the company decides who pays who and how much and we have to respect that.” All is true, but all avoid the question of whether or not football players’ wages are obscene, and the simple answer to that is “yes, of course they are.” Or, if not exactly obscene, then certainly a bit daft.

Personally I have no major objection to the top players earning such daft sums. There is a shed load of money in football at the moment, and when you get a unique talent like a Wayne Rooney being competed for by a number of clubs with pots of cash then there is only one way the price is going to go; that’s just the way it is. I’m actually much less comfortable with journeymen like the aforementioned Ben Thatcher who, while poorer than Rooney, is still mega-rich. Despite having played for many teams, I’ll bet no football fan has ever welcomed Thatcher on arrival at their club, or mourned his passing; his existence in the Premier League is seemingly more down to every team needing 11 players and the league needing 20 teams; and he’s not all that bad you know, I mean I suppose he’ll do. Quite why such a bog standard talent should benefit from being (theoretically) in the same market as someone like Rooney I’m not too sure, but it seems he does. This is something I think is more obscene, if obscene is the right word; Thatcher being quite rich, rather than Rooney or Terry being stupidly rich.

But even regarding top players like John Terry, I do think it is interesting to consider just what forces have led them to their massive income. There is hard work obviously, the drive and ambition to succeed that will have led other similarly gifted or more talented players to fall by the wayside, and that is to be applauded; however hard work is only a part of it. Putting in the same hours as a cricketer, or a chartered surveyor, would result in a far more meagre reward for Terry, no matter how hard he worked; part of the reason for Terry’s wealth is the good fortune that comes from being able in a field that has so much money swirling around it. To that stroke of luck you can add another other stoke of luck, that of Terry having a natural talent for football in the first place; no matter how hard I work at my football I will never be good enough to play anywhere other than my back garden, even the local rec is beyond me. And returning to all that hard work Terry must have put in to get where he is today, even then that “drive and ambition” I mentioned earlier must surely be part nature, part nurture. In summary, then, Terry’s salary is down to being blessed with a natural talent (luck), in a very well rewarded sport (luck) alongside his own efforts (partly luck). Well good luck to him I say.

What to do? Well in the first instance, nothing. I would much prefer for Terry and others to earn the money they do than for there to be some individual salary cap or maximum wage, either in sport or in the wider economy; but this is where taxation comes in, and where for me one of the better cases can be made for a redistributive – or at least a more progressive – tax system. Critics of income redistribution often deride their opponents as envious whingers who moan childishly about redressing society’s “unfairness”; in contrast it is said that taking from the hardworking and giving to the feckless is, well, “unfair”. But as I have said, being hard working is only one of the variables that has led John Terry to his riches, and I don’t think that footballers are a unique case; luck can come in many forms. It is worth saying at this point that I am far from convinced that tax should be used for redistributive purposes, to simply take from the rich to hand to the poor; rather I can see the sense in the rich paying proportionally more in tax than the poor simply because they can more easily afford to, although I concede that in practice they are probably pretty much the same thing.

Have we come all this way just to read a defence of progressive taxation? Well yes, I reckon, it certainly looks that way to me, that and as an excuse for me to make use of the title “Terry’s All Gold”; but sometimes I just feel that the self-evident needs to be evidenced, or something, and we’ve had fun along the way, haven’t we? All I guess I’m trying to say, if I’m even trying to say anything, is that while some people may complain about Premier League salaries, the alternative to footballers – yes, and singers, tennis players, golfers and others – earning vast sums seems to involve unpleasant things like dictatorship and authoritarianism; far better to happily let such people earn their silly money in the first place. But then, rather than bluster that they simply deserve their subsequent wealth, they should accept their good fortune and realise that it’s not unreasonable for them to pay back through taxation a share of what they owe the system that allowed them to earn such absurd amounts of money in the first place. Fair’s fair.

Oh, and as for the matter of quotas for foreigners; footballers – and all other workers while we’re at it – should pretty much be able to work wherever the hell they like; don’t you think?

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Wednesday 7th November 2007

Negative Publicity

Leaving Borders bookshop on Saturday, I turned on my heel when the headline on the front page of the Evening News caught my eye, and reaching the newsstand I read

‘Cool Cash’ card confusion
Ciara Leeming
3/11/2007

A LOTTERY scratchcard has been withdrawn from sale by Camelot – because players couldn’t understand it.

The Cool Cash game – launched on Monday – was taken out of shops yesterday after some players failed to grasp whether or not they had won.

To qualify for a prize, users had to scratch away a window to reveal a temperature lower than the figure displayed on each card. As the game had a winter theme, the temperature was usually below freezing.

But the concept of comparing negative numbers proved too difficult for some. Camelot received dozens of complaints on the first day from players who could not understand how, for example, -5 is higher than -6.

With that, having read enough and with my misanthropy suitably sated, I left Borders and walked the short distance to my car, where after a brief bout of weeping I drove off and thought no more of it. My thanks, then, to Chris at qwghlm.co.uk who managed to read on further than I did; I now realise that things were even worse than I had feared.

Tina Farrell, from Levenshulme, called Camelot after failing to win with several cards.

The 23-year-old, who said she had left school without a maths GCSE, said: “On one of my cards it said I had to find temperatures lower than -8. The numbers I uncovered were -6 and -7 so I thought I had won, and so did the woman in the shop. But when she scanned the card the machine said I hadn’t.

“I phoned Camelot and they fobbed me off with some story that -6 is higher – not lower – than -8 but I’m not having it.

“I think Camelot are giving people the wrong impression – the card doesn’t say to look for a colder or warmer temperature, it says to look for a higher or lower number. Six is a lower number than 8. Imagine how many people have been misled.”

Where to start? As Chris says, the phrases “Camelot…fobbed me off” and “I’m not having it” leap out, as does the assertion that “people have been misled”; but that’s not all. That the shopkeeper was allegedly as equally baffled is a cause for concern, while the politician-like diversion of stating that “Six is a lower number than 8” – true, but in this case irrelevant – is almost impressive in its own way. Of course, in her defence it is said that Tina “left school without a maths GCSE”, but I’m pretty sure “numbers” are still covered in the national curriculum at some stage; it’s not as if Camelot were expecting people to do quadratic equations on the hoof.

Now it is worth saying at this juncture that we should be careful about what has been attributed to this poor unfortunate. Newspapers have been known to bend the truth at times and so we should perhaps be wary about relying on direct quotes that may well have been edited (or made grammatical); far better to stick to the facts as far as we know them. But one fact that is particularly nagging at me is that it appears that only the M.E.N. has covered the story, there’s nothing in the national press. Why? Could the answer lie in the fact that our interviewee is, in that immortal phrase, “from Levenshulme”? In which case I think we have reached the end. Here is someone so ignorant of the most basic mathematics (which is lamentable enough), who then compounds the offence by stubbornly refusing to accept and learn from her error, who though wholly in the wrong still complains to the company and is subsequently offended when pointed in the direction of a simple arithmetic truth, and who finally responds to this outrage and injustice by going to the papers!

If these were the actions of one solitary moron we could laugh it off; so why aren’t we laughing? It is enough surely that “Camelot received dozens of complaints on the first day” that the game came out; but that knot of dread we feel in the pit of our stomach is because we fear this is symptomatic of something much bigger, and much, much worse.

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Tuesday 6th November 2007

Sland Main

So I’ve voluntarily given up my season ticket for Eastlands, and thanks to our “Frank” Shinawatra I’ve been forced into selling my shareholding in Manchester City; so what should I do with my money instead? Well, watching the half-time adverts while sat in The Queen’s Arms last night, during the piss-awful tedious toss that passed for City’s 1-0 victory over “Roy Keane’s Sunderland”, I was presented with this opportunity.

You could be watching Barclays Premier league in your living room
For just £9.99 a month & no annual contract
Subscribe at Setanta.com

At which I sighed, polished-off my second pint of sublime draught Stella that slipped down sweet and cool as you like, then ambled to the bar and ordered one more. Returning to my prime spot, slap-bang in front of the pub’s generous 40”+ plasma screen, I sank back into my seat and briefly pondered the kind offer while savouring my third exquisite pint.

Now just why would I want to go and do a stupid thing like that?

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