Awkward Customers?

          Who knows what librarians do all day? It’s apparent that they keep the bookshelves in order, but there’s probably more to the job than that – behind the scenes, so to speak. Our city library appears to be abundantly staffed by relaxed-looking individuals, untroubled by any discernible activity, yet when I’ve had occasion to rouse one of them from their seeming torpor, they have sprung willingly into action.

          Do they just wait, in a state of repressed anticipation, for opportunities to show that there’s more to the job than meets the eye? Or are they trained to keep a low profile so as not to intimidate would-be readers who are daunted by the notion that librarians have read all the books in the building and look down on those who haven’t? If so, that would be quite a sophisticated training module.

          Mostly, I have no need to trouble the staff, dropping in as I frequently do to relieve the tedium of an otherwise dull schedule of errands and shopping. I usually pick something from the local history section, so that my perambulations might be enhanced by spotting remnants of the past and clues to the origins of unusual place names.

          But, the last time I popped in, I noticed a set of books with Hangman’s Record on their spines. I couldn’t resist the grisly urge to take a look, though time was pressing and I got no further than an entry describing a complaint from one operative that he had not been paid for his last job. That was in the volume covering 1868-1899. I’m looking forward to a deeper delve to see if the hangman’s lot had improved by the last volume (1930-1964) and to what extent, if at all, they had been trained in the art of public-facing etiquette.

          Those of us who are service users rather than providers may underestimate the difficulties faced by individuals on the frontline. Confronted by all manner of client – from the polite to the rude, the apologetic to the apoplectic, or the easily satisfied to the unreasonably exacting – the person behind the counter needs all the training they can get. Of course, it helps not to have the personality traits of a Basil Fawlty but, even so, if the job involves conducting hundreds of repetitive transactions every day, even the most patient character must surely crack occasionally.

          When, earlier this week, I checked into a budget hotel, I got grudging service from a young man who was clearly not enjoying the chore of ‘welcoming’ his umpteenth guest of the day, though I didn’t take it personally, since I had said nothing other than, “Hello, I have a booking”. I reckon he was just fed up. However, he became even grumpier when I pointed out that the pen he had handed me with which to fill in the registration form had run out of ink. It was as if his day could get no worse.

          I did a stint of ‘customer-facing’ myself last week. I was helping out at a community event, dispensing hot drinks to around sixty people. In the kitchen, I found a couple of old-style giant teapots – just the job, I thought. But the modern palette is no longer communal. It has developed a taste for all sorts of concoction, with or without caffeine, plus a choice of either milk or plant-based substitutes.

           Determined not to fall into the trap of curmudgeonly disapproval of other people’s picky penchants, I put the teapots aside, filled up a giant electric urn and set up a self-service flow system, which worked tolerably well, so long as I chivvied everyone along. I even made a point of refraining from scowling whenever someone put a spoon in the wrong bowl or dithered over their choices.

          Yes, I know a thing or two about the customer interface. But do they know how much work goes on behind the scenes?

 

Reminders of the Past

          A parcel collection-and-despatch point has been installed recently outside our local supermarket. It offers freedom from the tyranny of waiting at home for your stuff to arrive, which is yet another convenience of modern life made possible by QR codes, apps and other jiggery pokery, the workings of which are understood by a few and just taken for granted by the rest of us.

          I’m no technophobe – I adopt and adapt willingly – but I do feel sad about the demise of some of the displaced, discarded and disused systems I grew up with. Call it nostalgia, if you like, but there was something comforting about post offices, postmen and the rigmarole and regalia they embodied. It just felt as if someone ‘responsible’ was in charge. (In fact, it very much was so, as the original Royal Mail was set up as a monarchic monopoly to ensure censorship of letters.) I remember, also, that the good old Royal Mail provided lucrative employment for us as students in the run-up to Christmas.

           A few streets away from the high-tech parcel point there is a post-box set into a wall. Its cast-iron face is pitted with age, even though it is painted resolutely red, as fresh as yesterday’s job. But it has an unusual feature, an obvious later addition, a white enamelled plate, cut to fit, that has been screwed to the flat surface around the envelope slot. It bears the grand insignia of Elizabeth Regina and, while rusting badly around the edges, conveys, in an authoritative black typeface, the following message:

NOTICE LETTERS WHICH CONTAIN COIN IF POSTED AS ORDINARY LETTERS WILL BE CHARGED ON DELIVERY WITH A SPECIAL REGISTRATION FEE OF FOURPENCE.

          The notice is plainly redundant and yet it seems that responsibility for its removal has not been assigned to any of the organisation’s current employees. My hope is that, on the contrary, its non-removal has been mandated by some official Keeper of National Treasures, for without it, we would miss that ever-present visible link to our culture, our heritage, our whacky, make-it-up-as-you-go-along spirit of “that’ll do”.

          The uninitiated (i.e. younger generations) would, if they were to stop and read it, marvel at the fact that people actually did send coins through the post, safe in the knowledge that they were under the Crown’s protection and guaranteed to be delivered as promised – or compensated for if not. And, as a footnote, don’t you love the way that the word ‘fourpence’ evolved from its forbear, ‘four pence’ and, in so doing, acquired a sonorous familiarity? So much nicer than the modern equivalent, 4p!

          You’d have to be quite contrary to deny that instant electronic transfer of funds is more convenient than physical methods. Similarly, the cell phone has been overwhelmingly adopted by the world’s population. And yet, Sir Giles Gilbert Scott’s telephone kiosk, obsolete though it plainly is, remains an essential part of the classic British streetscape – so much so that tourists queue to have their photos taken inside or beside the iconic booths set in places of historic import. There was, in the 1970s, an ill-conceived attempt to replace it with a modern design but, faced with derision from such discerning critics as Bill Bryson, who likened it to a “cheap shower stall”, the new version never really appealed to the nation’s heart and soul, though it did sort of fit with the architecture of Euston Station.

          I doubt that Amazon’s parcel facility will stand the test of time and endure as an icon of street furniture design, but should we care? It doesn’t really belong to us anyway – it’s Jeff Bezos’ baby – and it’s a case of easy come easy go, a stop-gap facility until the flying drones take over and children ask their parents, “What are those funny red boxes on the street for?”

From Micro to Macro

          Did Donald Trump tip-off his commodity-trading pals five minutes before making an announcement that he knew full well would influence the global price of oil? If he did, he was guilty of illegal insider trading. If he did not, then it was simply lucky timing for those few practitioners who made the bets that earned them billions of dollars. If I were to place a bet on the outcome of an investigation into the matter (in the unlikely event there will be one), I would not be giving Trump the benefit of the doubt.

          I was listening to this news item as I carried out a mundane task in the kitchen. My Other Half, who is a self-described “starter not finisher”, had prepared a sauerkraut mix of beetroot and red cabbage and left it to ferment in a cupboard, where I had come across it a few weeks later. Since she was away, it fell to me to find some jars, clean, sterilise and fill them, then mop up the purplish-stained aftermath.

          It’s not that I’m complaining (I’m used to being the finisher around here), it’s just that I want to illustrate a point. My OH, having recently joined the CND (yes, it’s still going) had gone off to join an annual peace camp outside RAF Lakenheath, where American bombers are stationed. If I were to place a bet on the outcome of CND’s seventy-year-long mission, it would not be on the abolition of nuclear weaponry. But that is beside the point: what counts is that alternative voices are heard and seen to be heard, for how else do we learn to question what is too easily taken for granted?

          Notwithstanding the old saying that “behind every woman out there trying to save the world is a man at home doing the laundry” *, it seems inevitable that the small, domestic matters of everyday life preoccupy us, often to the exclusion of wider issues. It wasn’t really necessary for Maslow ** to categorise our needs into a hierarchy, but his having done so makes it easier to articulate the instinctually obvious: that we need food, shelter and rude health before we can start to contemplate the ‘higher’ things in life, like education, art, science, sport, diplomacy and derivatives trading. It is, therefore, understandable that so many people lack knowledge of or interest in the geopolitics that really shape their lives, when those lives are so configured that the effort of simply fuelling their existence saps their energies.

          But, to her credit, my OH is doing her bit to save the world on the micro as well as the macro level. She has become involved in the rescue and renovation of a local community centre that, along with a school, is part of housing scheme built just 25 years ago. Sociologically speaking, the development made sense, insofar as it was designed to cultivate neighbourliness. But its designers could not foresee the impact of diminishing municipal budgets and the rise of social media. Starved of funding, it has fallen into disuse, its functions partly ceded to Facebook and the like, digital platforms that may supplement but do not replace physical proximity as a driver of social interaction. Its revival would be a significant correction to the tendency to live insular lives within densely populated neighbourhoods. Without solid, local foundations, how can we hope to build a wider, stable society? The hope is that micro adjustments will lead to macro improvements.

          I was talking this through with a friend over coffee one morning, when he drew my attention to the recently discovered archaeological evidence that coffee was being drunk in Britain 200 years before it had previously been documented. The habit was not widespread and was probably confined to a small clique of commodity futures traders, whose venture failed to gain ground and who died in relative poverty.

*Acknowledged: the subject is controversially binary.

**Abraham Maslow proposed his psychological theory, The Hierarchy of Needs in 1943

 

A Walk in the Park

          It seems that everywhere you go in urban Britain, you’re never far from Victoria Park. The ubiquity of recreational green spaces named after our late Queen reflects the history behind their establishment, rather than a fashionable name-trend. These eponymous parks were founded in an era of rapid urban expansion, when British pride and exceptionalism, fuelled by colonial expansion, were personified in the Monarch, to whom all credit was due and for whom lots of things were obsequiously named.

          Not everything. The very first publicly funded municipal park did not credit Her Majesty for its existence. Birkenhead Park, Merseyside, established in 1847, is proudly named after its pioneering community – and rightly so. Nor was it conceived as a scrap of grass surrounded by trees: the magnificence of Joseph Paxton’s design (which is said to have influenced Frederick Olmstead’s New York Central Park) retains the power to impress visitors to this day.

          But, back to Victoria’s legacy.  Our local VP, at Stonehouse in Plymouth, while certainly not magnificent, does serve the community well with its sports fields, dog-walking and picnic areas, all bordered by specimen trees. And there’s more to it than meets the eye, as was told to us by the local history buff who guided us through and around it last week.

          He showed us JMW Turner’s sketches and watercolours of the spot, made in the 1830s, when the now-infilled land was a tidal creek like so many others on the South Devon coast. His scenes are idyllically pastoral, depicting a steep, wooded bank and cultivated fields on the north side and grand houses on the south, with individual moorings at the ends of the gardens.

          What happened to change all that was population growth. The creek, into which the original spring still flows (albeit now through an underground pipe), became something of an open sewer and an inconvenient impediment to local transport. Moreover, the Royal Naval hospital on the north bank (whence derives the phrase, “up shit creek” – or so legend has it) and the nunnery on the facing south side both used adjacent land for burials, adding thereby to the unsavoury nature of the place as it developed in the years following Turner’s romantic depictions.

           All this is hard to visualise now, as you walk or cycle through the park. Although their historic, landmark buildings remain, the hospital has long been a Grammar School for boys, the nunnery was sold off and converted into flats and, though the tell-tale gravestones are not immediately apparent, bodies from the hospital and nunnery remain buried under the unconsecrated scrap of ground behind a high stone wall.

          Our guide pointed out the remains of the dogs’ drinking trough, replenished by an ornamental stone fountain, the shattered pieces of which can now be found in another local park. Back in its heyday, VP boasted a bandstand, but that too has fallen victim to the lack of funding for public spaces. The ornate, original park-keeper’s house has survived demolition by conversion into a viable café but, otherwise, upkeep depends on volunteers. If it weren’t for “friends of” various parks around the country, our public amenities would be woefully neglected. As ever more of our commonwealth is gobbled up by private ownership, ours becomes an increasingly poor country run for the benefit of a few very rich individuals.

          Still, one can dream. From one of Turner’s perspectives, the soft, rural landscape is identifiable as today’s urban location by the inclusion of Stoke Damerel church on a rise in the middle distance. Looked at this way, on a balmy, optimistic sort of day, it’s possible to imagine how the landscape used to be attractive enough for an artist to want to capture its harmony. A walk in the park can be so much more than a constitutional, don’t you think?

 

Over-specced?

          Is it commonplace to have three different sets of prescription spectacles – one for reading, one for screen work and one (varifocal) for general use? I have all of these plus another set of varifocals that are photochromic so that I don’t have to carry sunglasses around as well. I should also mention the several pairs of off-the-shelf readers that are strategically stashed around the flat, the campervan and even my wallet, where I keep a pince-nez the size and thickness of a credit card – just in case. For the first 45 years of my life, I didn’t need any of these. Is it payback time or something?

          Not that I should complain. Before the invention of optical lenses, people born with impaired vision just had to live with it. As for those whose sight deteriorated with age, things were more complicated. If, for example, you were apprenticed to make a living from a skill that required acute vision, you could find yourself prematurely redundant by middle-age. As for reading and writing, for most of history, most people were illiterate. In places like palaces and monasteries literacy was perpetuated by employing scribes – a renewable human resource. But the invention of lenses spawned the business of optometry. The eventual spread of literacy led to its growth into a vast and sophisticated industry.

          So much for the potted history; I was on my way to get new photochromic varifocals to replace the old, battered and scratched pair, when I passed the barber’s shop and saw a chance to get smartened up. There are two barbers working the chairs, one from Iraq, the other from London. I prefer the Iraqi, so I check through the window to see he is free before I go in. On this occasion, he was apparently applying the finishing touch to an almost bald client and there was no queue. I hopped in, hopefully. But, within minutes, I was followed through the door by the Londoner, who peeled off his coat, looked at me and said, “Next?”. I made my way, like a man condemned, to his chair.

          The Londoner was trained in the ‘bish-bash-bosh’ school of hairdressing, where he boasts of having been taught that it should take no more than 15 minutes to accomplish a “decent” haircut. He usually clocks in well under. The results are decent enough but, compared with the Iraqi’s more lavish attentions, one is left feeling short-changed.

          Then there is the conversation. The Iraqi (who owns the shop) is quite happy not to converse but to listen to the songs of his budgies, who live in a cage in the corner, while he attends meticulously to every individually misaligned hair. The Londoner expresses views, the most annoying of which is his theory – based entirely on anecdote – that thousands of young men died of heart attacks after being vaccinated for covid 19. He knew at least one of them, personally. I would have argued the case for statistical analysis but for fear of an even worse haircut – that and the limitations of time: I was out of the chair in about nine minutes.

          I went on to meet my Other Half at the opticians, where she was set to approve the style of frames I had previously scouted. “I’m the one who has to look at them when they’re on your face,” she had said, but it turned out my choice was acceptable to her – and modestly priced, to boot. Job done, she took off and I sat with the salesperson as he totted up the cost of the specified lenses and put forward a case for the more expensive, branded ones (who knew that lenses sold per prescription varied in quality according to brand?). I opted for the ones that cost the lesser of the two fortunes quoted.

          When I was on YouTube that evening, a prolonged advert popped up selling some wonderful German-made specs that, so they claimed, would suit everyone’s needs and eliminate the need to have different specs for different uses. I don’t know whether Alexa had been listening in but, if she had, her timing was unfortunate. What I would give for such a marvel!