Beim Kaufengehen

A real treasure trove in my inbox, from Clive and his daughter, my niece, Caroline. First two, from Waitrose in Sundridge Park, where the one in German is more comprehensible than the second, to whom chicken seems to be important.

And then two from Waitrose at Bromley South. A fairly sparse barbecue and Lies and Tangerines, a new film by Mike Leigh.

Blackpool? And I don't say this often: WTF?

Just over a year ago a draw with Blackpool meant that Charlton's relegation to the third circle of hell was confirmed. They (Blackpool) were rubbish (admittedly, so were Charlton, but we'd got used to that by then). I blogged that match wondering how they weren't in the relegation mix too, and assumed it must have been because they never gave up, in contrast to Charlton, who gave up in the warm-up half the time.

Well, once again I've proved my lack of skill as a pundit, since Blackpool have got into the Premier League through the play-offs. I haven't followed the second division this season, so don't know if they've suddenly acquired some skill or if they've just built up that spirit. But to go from last season's team to promotion is astonishing. It's a huge achievement by Ian Holloway, and if he stays with the club it'll be fun to have him on telly more often next season.

I'd rather have Blackpool and Holloway in the Premier League than a lot of the teams and managers that are there, and I wish them well, but surely they've got to be the hottest favourites for immediate relegation since, well, Burnley last year.

A slippery slope?

When I used to do training in complaint handling, we had a session where we invited participants to think about a complaint they had made, and whether it had been handled well or badly. It was incredible how often the same names turned up. In the bad column, British Gas, mobile phone companies, banks. In the good column Marks & Spencer and Waitrose featured very often for their no-quibble approach and imaginative solutions.

So I shouldn't have been surprised by what happened after I made a comment on the Waitrose wine website on a wine I had bought from Waitrose. I wanted to warn people that it was basically undrinkable. (Believe me, if I can't drink it, no-one can.) It wasn't corked (it had a screw cap) but was so strongly sulphurised you could taste nothing else.

Within a day, I got an email saying my comments would be forwarded to the customer service team, to investigate the possibility of a refund. I hadn't asked for that, but why not? This was good complaint handling. But it didn't progress on to be effective complaint handling. I didn't hear from customer services within five weeks, and so I've had to complain again. By this time, I definitely did want a refund. I realised that if I'd taken the wine back, I'd have got a refund without question. I'm still waiting for an answer but there seem to be two people dealing with it.

So why the slippery slope? After you've been dealing with complaints for 15 years, there are two things that can happen when you stop. Either you celebrate that you never have to deal with a complaint again, or you become a serial complainant. I might have just crossed the line.

Charlton 2 Swindon 1

It was good to end the season with a win.

Four Lions

I wonder how many people will go to see this film thinking it's something to do with the England football team? Nobody, of course, I was being stupid for comic effect. Without giving anything away, I can say that the film has very little to do with football. It does have a lot to do with being stupid for comic effect, though, in that everyone in the film is an idiot. Some have seen a lack of any moral drive as a weakness in the film. It's true that it doesn't offer any answers, but if the film has any message, it's that idiocy is everywhere and is a Bad Thing. Which I had kind of suspected all along. But it gave me several good laughs along the way.

It was the first time I'd been to the pictures for ages. What a horrible experience it is these days! I went to the Greenwich Odeon on a Tuesday afternoon, so it wasn't exactly crowded. When the cinema opened at 2pm it was already full of the smell of popcorn, which they obviously pipe into the foyer area. I hate the smell of popcorn. And then the trailers, which made quite sure I'll never see the films they advertised. One of them even gave away the fact that the film stars Nicolas Cage. You'd want to keep that quiet, surely.

Four Lions itself is made by Film 4, so it's shot with the television screen in mind, and the biggish screen didn't add anything to it. But I feel cool and trendy now I've seen it, so it was all worthwhile.

Rejected

Dear reader, you may think that I post anything that crosses my mind on this blog. Nearly, but not quite. Often I start writing something and (unbelievable, I know) decide it doesn't work. Here's a list of posts that didn't make it past my rigorous quality control:

Two witnesses
You're a moron, I like that
Giving tea and taking pee
Unreported
Teaching failure
Pressure of blood

So much wisdom there, that I've failed to share with the world.

Burley Cross Postbox Theft

Back in December I got all excited about a new book from Nicola Barker, and yesterday I read it. It should be clear from the earlier post that it would have to be a very bad book for me not to love it. In fact it's brilliant, and really funny.

Here's the set-up. A post-box in a West Yorkshire village has been broken into, and the letters have been found in a binbag a few miles away. The letters are sent to a village policeman, who has the task of reading through them and trying to work out what's happened, and who's broken into the box. At the end of the book he gives his findings.

The whole book consists of the letters that were found, topped & tailed with letters giving the policeman his instructions and giving his findings.

The overall whodunit plot is quite slight, and really rather unimportant. What matters is the letters themselves, in which Nicola Barker brilliantly creates a variety of personalities and their intermeshing stories.

It's probably a book well-suited for me and my former colleagues. Reading through the letters is quite like reading a file of documents, and at times I was tempted to start a chronology and use post-it notes.
Even closer, one of the first letters is written to a council official by an aggrieved but chatty citizen. A long rambling letter, it contains 100 footnotes, one of which (64) reads "I will return to this important detail a little later!" How familiar is that?

Fair warning, though, that opinion on Amazon is evenly spread; clearly some people hate this book as much as I love it.

(If you want a proper review, there's a really good one in the Telegraph http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/books/bookreviews/7686236/Burley-Cross-Postbox-Theft-by-Nicola-Barker-review.html)