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on our time in France
Having been over in France recently, one obvious factor was the cost of being there. Our food bills at the supermarkets were 25% or so more than in the UK and petrol prices were 20-25p per litre more than back home, even allowing for the exchange rates.
When we mentioned this to one of the locals, who had asked if we enjoying our holiday, he blamed us, or the UK. You left the EU, you don’t pay any money in now so they take it from us. That and a left-wing government is what he thought.
We were staying in a very rural part of France where there are a lot of British people who have set up home (had we realised that we would have gone somewhere else), but one of the obvious things as we drove around were the number of boarded up shops. So many of the villages, and small towns, were almost derelict in their centres.
Now, we have similar issues here, in that shopping habits have changed and our High Streets are dying, but I have not seen anything like the general level of decay that we found in France. It has been thirty or so years since I was last in that country, a long time, and I do know how things have changed here in the UK and in the USA, where I have spent much time since my last French adventures.
The world is changing all of the time and that is inevitable, but I don’t like the way that things have gone. There was a time when I would have been happy to move to France, but then we discovered the USA and would have been happier to have moved there. Circumstances prevented the latter, even though we owned property there, but there came a time when we were glad to get out, and we, currently, don’t even want to go to the US to visit.
But France still felt comfortable for us. We have enough of the language to get by as tourists, and we enjoy the people. It saddens us to see how things have, seemingly, gone downhill for them in so many ways. The EU was not good for the UK and I am glad that we are rid of it, but France was a prime mover and I had thought that they would have been still thriving in that environment. It seems not.
We are planning to go back to France, maybe later this year and/or in 2025 and wonder what we will find in different parts to those that we saw this year.
on not dawdling in the Dordogne
The Berkshire Belle and I spent much of Sunday talking through our return to Duras next year. We are too old to do a lot of the tourist stuff, but we have not done much of that anyway down the years, it just isn’t our scene.
One of the things we look for in our holidays is to get away and relax, and another is to behave like locals as much as possible. It is not for us to seek out our fellow British holidaymakers, in fact we deliberately avoid them as much as possible. We like to shop where the locals shop, and buy food to take back to our holiday rental and cook our meals. On that basis we were planning our return to the Dordogne, to the lovely Gite that we had found from where we could shop in the local towns and bring back nice things to cook and enjoy with a bottle of local wine.
Such plans were rudely shattered later yesterday when we got an email from the Gite owners, eight days after our departure, to say that cooking smells from our stay had permeated the soft furnishings to the extend that chair covers and curtains needed cleaning. As a result they would be withholding a portion of our security deposit to cover dry cleaning costs.
We are staggered. Not once in 35 years of renting self-catering properties in Europe and the USA have we ever had such a problem. We cooked on eleven of our fourteen evenings in the property. None of the meals we cooked was especially aromatic and none took more that about 25 minutes cooking. At all cooking sessions we used the extractor fan over the hob, and on no occasion did either of us come downstairs the next morning to find lingering aromas of the pervious nights meal.
Everyone is different and has their own standards, but if you are renting out property on a self-catering basis you expect your renters to cook in it. The kitchen in this Gite was very well equipped, so there was an obvious expectation that we would use it. That said, we understand that the owners have their own standards, and that our occupancy in some way breached them, but the way that it has been handled is just poor customer service.
For nearly twenty years we rented out our villa in Florida, and would never have treated a customer the way that we have been dealt with. The upshot is that we will not, after all, be going back next year. The Gite is perfect for us in terms of comfort, but if we can’t cook in it without worrying about the consequences there is no point in renting it again.
It appears, from the email, that they have had this problem before, so why not warn renters? Were it us we would have just included the dry-cleaning costs in the rental price and then we would not have had to risk upsetting people. Their choice, and they have both lost a customer, gained reviews that mention this issue and lost our recommendations for their property to others we know.
What now for us? Well, many years ago when we were first a couple, we used to holiday in the Charente-Maritime, so we are looking to return there instead. It won’t be the same all these years later, but it is not as rural as the Dordogne and we are hopeful of another good French holiday. We enjoyed this year, it’s sad that it is an avenue that is now closed to us, but I am sure that we will find somewhere just as good in our old stamping ground.
on dawdling in the Dordogne
A number of firsts here; first post for ages, first time back in France in 30 or so years, first time driving on the Continent for about the same time and first time in the Dordogne, so much to muse on.
We last went to France, as a couple, in 1992, although I had been over a couple of times without the Berkshire Belle in 1993/4. It was in 1993 that we discovered America (yes, we know that others had found it before we did), fell in love with the country and have holidayed there exclusively since, going once, twice or even thrice, a year missing just one year up until 2019. We sold the house we had bought over there in 2019, then missed a couple of years due to the pandemic before trying again in 2022 and 2023, but neither of those trips was a great success, the latter one nearly killing me. America is no longer the place that we fell for and so, on that basis we decided to return to Europe, but where?
We wanted to try Italy, but it is a long drive and neither of us speak the lingo. Spain we did not enjoy on our one trip there, and Portugal, whilst we liked our week there on the Algarve in 1993, did not appeal for a repeat visit. We both speak a little French, the Hastings Hottie better than me, and we had enjoyed our holidays in Brittany and the Charente Maritime when we first got together, and so France it was to be.
The Wonder of Wokingham (there, I’ve got all three pet names into one blog) fired up her iPad and found us a bite in the Dordogne, about as far the other side of Bordeaux as the one we stayed at a couple of times in the Charente. It was too far to drive in a single day (the lady does not drive) and so I plotted routes for two days each way with 6-7 hours driving each day with an overnight stop.
The longest drive I have done in recent years has been the four hour slog up from Miami airport to our old villa in central Florida, so I was a bit concerned about that amount of driving, especially in a right-hand drive car on left-hand drive roads. I need not have worried: We got on fine using mainly the Autoroutes, and the little transponder that I bought for the tolls worked fine.
The gite was excellent, by far the most comfortable that we have stayed in, and so good that we have booked it again for next year. The weather was not good though, and very unseasonable. The local farmers are all concerned for their vines and prune crops and we have the ignominy of witting in the gate watching the rain whilst our doorbell camera back home showed our tom cat sauntering down the front path in the Swindon sunshine. Such is life.
Because of the weather we did not get to explore much on foot. We found one Sunday market the first weekend whilst out on the supermarket run, but is was chucking it down and when we went back the following weekend in good weather it was not on. The other market that we tried, a 90 minute drive away, was so packed that we could not park. In the end, having driven around the town twice, I parked illegally for us to use a public convenience (not a pleasant experience) and we headed back to civilisation and lunch.
We ate well though, mostly back at the gate with me cooking. We got by with our, very rusty, French and settled in to the extent that we felt very much at home. At our age we probably do not have too many holidays like this left in us, but we are going to have a short trip back to France later this year, just a quick run over with a specific purpose in mind, and will be back in the Dordogne next year.
The highlight of the trip? For me it was getting my passport stamped both ways: How I missed that in the dire years of open borders.
on Post Office Counters and Horizon, part 2
Since last week I have been doing a bit of digging into the history, and, to some extend, I have answered a few of the questions that were bothering me, but I have also exposed new ones. I doubt that I will ever get to the bottom of it all, but it has passed a few hours of my week.
Something that is bothering me is the lynch mob mentality that is running rampant. Yes, the former CEO has questions to answer. This happened on her watch and she has to accept responsibility, but what did she know? The short answer is what she was told. Some people are guilty of something here, but what exactly? Fraud, theft, perverting the course of justice? I don’t know.
What I do know is that this needs to be properly investigated. The public enquiry has achieved little other than to line the pockets of lawyers, and others. We need a proper investigation, not another lynching. The problem will be in trying to get to the bottom of it all, and in sorting out between those whose job performance was not up to scratch and those who may be guilty of some crime.
on Post Office Counters and Horizon
I have an interest in this story, in that I was a Post Office counter clerk in 1977/78, working at the Crown Offices, ie; Post Office owned and operated rather than sub-offices, at Chelmsford, Witham, Dunmow, Ontario, Brentwood and Ingatestone, all in Essex. Then in 1978/79 I worked at Chelmsford Head Post Office sending out cash and value stock (stamps, premium bonds etc) to the sub-postoffices in the Chelmsford Head Post Office area.
In 1982 I joined the team who trialled automation systems in Crown and sub-office sites around the country, a project that proved the business case for what later became Horizon. That project ended in 1984, as far as my involvement was concerned and I had no further involvement with the sub-offices until 1989 when I became Head of Operations at Post Office Supplies, where one of my teams managed the supply of forms and stationery to the Post Office in general, including the sub-office network.
So there are my credentials, for want of a better word, for commenting on this scandal. I have no working knowledge of Horizon having only ever encountered it as a customer in post offices, but I do know about balancing a Post Office till, designing, writing and testing software to run a Post Office till. I know about running said software and and developing it, so I have been intrigued by the Horizon scandal as it has developed, and there are various things that concern me.
Balancing a till is a matter of the value stock and cash that you started the accounting period with against where you are now, taking into account what business you have transacted in between. In my day it was all manual, and if you were over or under then you had probably counted something incorrectly, and a re-count would usually find the error. There was always the chance that you had paid out someone more than you should have (if you underpaid them they would normally let you know) or failed to charge the correct amount, but such circumstances were very rare in my experience. A big over/under was the easiest thing to find because there were fewer places to look for it: It was the £2.67, or similar discrepancy that was difficult because it could be anywhere and you had to do the whole lot again. Sod’s Law decreed that it would be almost the last thing that you checked that would reveal the error.
Working with the automated systems that we trialed you still counted your cash and value stock, but now the system told you what should be there. The systems made life easier, and from a business point of view, more efficient in that hundredweights (literally) of paperwork could be dispensed with. Balancing your till, certainly in the two offices that I was involved in supporting, became easier.
As I understand the Horizon issues the losses were in four figures or worse. Some of the losses that I have seen would have been the best part of a day’s worth of pension or family allowance payments, so how on earth could they be right? There were always the odd rogue amongst the Post Office employed clerks and the sub-office ranks, but I know how that sort of theft works, and how it is discovered. None of the cases involving Horizon that I have read about fit the pattern. No, I do not have all of the facts, but I smell a rat here.
It is possible that there is a glitch in the software, maybe more than one, but I am not convinced. It would have to be a very poor system and I doubt that. In any case, the laws of chance require that the odds of an error would go either way and there have been no reports of mysterious overs, only losses. I’ll speculate no further on that.
There have long been rumours within the business that it was possible for the centre to make amendments to local details. Now that was always a possible system requirement, but when we looked at it back in 82-4 it would only have been possible with an audit trail and there had to be evidence of what had been done available at both ends and an audit report on such transactions was available. What was happening with Horizon I don’t know.
For me it is obvious that there was something wrong. I know how thorough The Post Office investigations were for many things, I was often one of those investigating wrong doing of all sorts, and, having found something wrong on my patch, had to pass it on to others to investigate. It seems to me that none of these Horizon cases were properly investigated, and that the mounting evidence of a problem was ignored.
Until I moved on to other things in 1996 I would have been sure that the senior management in Post Office Counters would not have allowed this scandal to develop, but the people that I knew well and worked with up until then all moved on or had retired by the end of that decade. I am not aware of knowing anyone involved in Horizon, although there may be a name or two emerge that rings a bell. I would love to be able to talk to someone on the inside to get an understanding of what happened and how. The Berkshire Belle, my wife of more than thirty years now, is also very distressed by the scandal because she knew the sub-office network better than I did. She worked to support it in various capacities as she climbed through the ranks over fifteen or so years and attended their conference every year from the late 70’s to 1989 (when we went to the Scarborough one together). If any of you out there remember Fay from Swindon, then that is she. Feel free to say hello via this site if you’d like to.
There is a group of people who knowingly allowed this scandal to develop. They have caused pain and suffering to people and should be held to account for it. It is a national disgrace.
on managing, yesterday and today
It is 52 years since I took my first step into management. It was just a small step, I ran an estate agency’s branch office where the only employees were me and a part time typist. I learned about responsibility, but nothing of any significance over the eight or nine months that I was in that job as far as managing people was concerned.
My next outing as a manager was about two years later when, for two weeks, I covered for someone who was on holiday. I knew the job that I had to do, but my team was two pairs of middle aged women, one pair in the mornings and the other in the afternoons. I was clueless in directing them and they ran rings around me. I made such a hash of it that it almost stopped my career progression with that company on its tracks.
I started to watch other managers and began to understand a little. As always there were good managers and bad, but I started to see why and I was on the cusp of being given my own department to run when I upped sticks and left. It was a stupid move and six months later I moved again. In this, latest, job I restarted progress towards becoming a manager.
It took me twelve years from starting work before I finally got into the managerial ranks but, once there, I made rapid progress and had a good run, making it from the shop floor to the boardroom. We had processes, rules and laws to comply with, but decision making and leading your people were fundamental parts of what we did. If you were good enough at those you did well.
Today’s managers seem to lack almost all of the freedom that we enjoyed. Computers don’t guide the modern manager in the way that they began to do for me, now they make many of the decisions; scheduling hours, ordering stock and more. Artificial Intelligence (AI) is taking over and I am aware of systems that drive many of the things that a manager would have been expected to get right.
I wonder what skills I would be looking for if I were asked to assess someone for a management role today. Leadership would be a given, but what else if the machine is making all of the decisions? Almost none of the managerial skills that I might have looked for in terms of being able to assimilate, assess and react to information seem to be applicable in the modern environment. There is one though, and it is ever more applicable in today’s environment, and it is the ability to create a workplace that the team feel comfortable, safe and valued in.
This is not so much in the physical sense, because that should be a given, rather it is in the psychological arena, and the key to it is being able to act as a barrier between the company and your team. Let the good stuff flow through, anything positive, involving praise or general corporate information, but as a wall against anything negative. You may be getting hammered by your boss over some element of performance, but the way that you handle that with your team is important.
The ability to lead people is going to outlive anything that AI can do, and a good leader will still stand out, especially the ones that can create an environment where their team can learn, make mistakes and grow. Such places are happy ones, despite any day to day frustrations that life throws up. Creating them is a skill that we need to cherish.
nice guys don’t come first
I ran into an old colleague last week, not someone that I had worked very closely with, but our paths had crossed a lot over a dozen years or so as we made our respective ways through the labyrinth of a large corporate empire. We took ourselves into a nearby hostelry to escape the rain and have lunch.
As always on these occasions we re-fought a few old battles through rose tinted glasses. We had sometimes been on the same side in these, sometimes not, and when she made that observation I offered the argument that there should not have been sides: surely the objection should always have been to the benefit of the organisation.
That, she said, was where I had wasted my opportunities, and cited two incidents, about five years apart, where I had moved to operation that I was leading into another part of the corporation, but on both occasions I had, personally, lost out. I could have had a much more successful career if I had put myself first and made sure that I was going to do well out of the changes but, instead, I had put the organisation first.
Both organisation changes had seen me shunted sideways rather than moving on up and, whilst there was recognition of my talents, the lack of self-interest and self-promotion was seen as a weakness: I was too nice.
I’m not sure that I can accept the last point, for I don’t think that I was that nice, but overall I can see that she was right, for, once I got into any sort of position of influence, I was primarily interested in doing what I saw as good for the business, and the consequences for me were only ever secondary.
In some ways that was a weakness, in that I should have thought that element of the proposal through, after all, I had worked everything else out, but, for me, that self-interest was somehow distasteful and so I did nothing about it, although I always tried to look after my team in these deals.
Whatever the outcome I was always able to look into the mirror and feel comfortable with the image that I saw. I got through working to my own code, the one that evolved from the way that I was brought up, and, above all, for the most part I enjoyed my time in a suit. I had some fun, and, for me, that is more valuable than having scrambled up another couple of rungs on the ladder.
on buying lists
I dislike cold calling in all its forms, and I know that I am not alone in that feeling. That said I have, over the years, cold called and have had some success, so I know that it does work. If done well.
I have just dissolved my limited company after 23 years. whilst I have had to weed out cold call emails from my mailbox ever since I set it up, for some reason I have been receiving 5-10 emails a day from a variety of suppliers since I started the dissolution process.
It is patently obvious that these are from people who have bought a list and have not sense checked it or done any basic research, they are just firing off emails and hoping. Good luck to them, but I will not buy from anyone who has not done anything to check whether what they are selling is likely to be relevant to me.
An example would be the ones who want to offer me training packages for my employees: I do not have any employees and offer many of these courses myself. Likewise, mentoring. A look at my website would have told them that I do that too. In fact a look at my website now will tell them that the business is no longer trading.
I mentioned that I had had some success at cold calling down the years, and it was because I did a bit of research before making contact. Maybe it wasn’t really cold calling in the strict sense, more warm calling, but the principle was that, when I made contact, I had a bit more chance because I knew something about the potential client.
I have never bought a list of contacts in any of my various roles, employed or self-employed. I don’t trust them, no matter how carefully verified the seller of such a list tells me it is. I could think of better things to spend my money on.
I do have some sympathy with the people making the calls from call centres, after all they are trying to earn a buck and are just doing what they are told to. But would I deal with the company that has engaged the call centre? No. At least not through any such call.
A personal view, and maybe one that you don’t agree with. You can always tell me why.
on life and death
Sorry that I have not posted for a few weeks, but I have been in hospital. Some eleven years on from one infection trying to finish me off, another made an attempt, and, like the first one, came close to getting me.
This time I am going to take a while to fully recover. The previous one took nearly six months to get over. This one may take a year, but at least I am still here.
I am in not too bad a condition for 70, but this sort of thing just goes to show how thin the line is. A random event within my body nearly brought an end to everything, but it could have been an accident of some sort. No matter how healthy you are, the Grim Reaper can swipe you away at any moment.
Normal service should be resumed from today onwards. I’ll cover this event in a bit more detail in the next Life Log.
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