Sorry. Been busy
I'VE been very remiss in putting stuff on this blog for a bit.
I've been as busy as a busy thing with busy-ness disease. I'm spending more time "content editing". That entails seeking news, persuading people to be interviewed and arranging things for my fellow reporters. It's also meant I've been on the screen less than I used to be.
Currently, I'm also doing an MA in journalism leadership at the University of Central Lancashire (Preston Poly as was).
This is also very time-consuming.
Anyway, here's my latest Metro News column.
I SENT an email to Bury Council last week. Its press office had emailed me and wanted a quick response.
But it was sent back with a notice that complained about “adult content”.
Curious, I rang the IT department to find out what had gone horribly wrong. I’d not accidentally attached a picture of anything or anyone doing anything or anyone. Honest.
Anyway, the IT lady said something about words being given scores and those scores added up. Once it reached a certain level, it would be rejected and sent back.
I asked what on earth those words could be. She said words like “confidential”, which I found a bit perplexing.
So I asked her: “Did my surname have a big score?”
She giggled and said: “Yes, I’m afraid so.”
Harrumph!
WHEN I’m eating out, I like to be able to hear the conversation that I’m having.
But I don’t think I’m being old-fashioned when I say that.
These days, in some of my favourite places, you cannot hear anything but the music.
Several months ago now, I was with three friends on a reasonably intimate table in a city-centre restaurant. I’d not seen them for a while and it would be good to catch up – or so I thought.
It was a Tuesday night and quiet (in the not-busy sense, not the not-noisy sense). The restaurant had customers on only a few tables, so the staff were a bit bored.
The music volume crept higher and higher. We could tell the staff were enjoying the music because they began to dance with each other.
Hating to be party-poopers, we asked them to turn it down. We’d come here to chat.
It went down imperceptibly for a couple of nanoseconds. Then up it crept again.
We asked twice more.
We complained to the waiter. But he didn’t seem to care.
We left, we didn’t tip and we never returned. The food, by the way, was very good.
It’s not just restaurants where this happens. I feel pretty fuddy-duddy complaining about noise. But nobody I know – even hip and trendy 20-year-olds - likes to go to a bar or restaurant where one has to supplement conversation with sign language.
The problem is the staff. They keep putting the volume up a notch or two for their own benefit – not the customers’. But they just don’t realise how noisy it’s got.
It’s a bit like when you are driving for a while and get out of the car at a motorway service station. When you get back in it, the volume can be ridiculously high because you just keep turning it up notch by notch as you’re driving along and don’t notice how loud it’s got. For me it’s to avoid hearing myself sing.
Some bars – all soulless chains – have cottoned on to this problem.
They now have all the music centrally-controlled. If you go to a Brewer’s Fayre, you can be certain that the music you’re hearing is the same in every pub it owns throughout the country and played at exactly the same volume.
It sounds horribly Big Brother-y. Everything’s centrally controlled. Choice has been eliminated. We all have the same menus, the same music, the same volume, the same drinks, the same Brewsters fun factory for the children, the same bumf boasting about this being “your friendly, local pub”.
When George Orwell wrote his essay The Moon Under Water, he discussed the perfect pub. Big Brother wasn’t part of the deal.
But one of the criteria was that the pub should be “quiet enough to talk, with the house possessing neither a radio nor a piano”,
I’m delighted that Wetherspoon’s – another chain – has taken his criteria so seriously it’s named several pubs after his essay.