The Yorkshire Spirit

Well, it’s about time I did something on this site. We don’t use it often enough. Lord knows we use all of the time we spend with each other for discussing the minutiae of politics, religion, science and other, really important stuff, like videogames and Doctor Who. So, in keeping with the prevailing spirit of me, I’m going to write a very non specific, vague and stream of consciousness style article and then attempt to pass it off as something worth reading. So, without any further ado; Take it away, myself…

So I now live and work in the wild and turbulent wastelands of Yorkshire, which is…different, to say the least. I will say I was certainly more used to having an intelligent conversation now and then, which is something that seems to be head and shoulders above what many of the people I’ve met here even seem capable of. Even a dysfunctional mess like me is given cause to wonder about how they continue to exist and function as humans. The place I work is a family-run business, with (obviously) several members of the same extended family in various jobs. There are two brothers, their mother and the mother’s partner. He’s sort of the brothers’ stepdad, but he and the mother are not married. There are a few additional staff members other than myself, but they don’t work as often.

They’re crazy, putting it bluntly. Barely a day goes by without an argument, some member of the family getting angry at another one for something they’ve done, or not done, or said or whatever. This makes the workplace a rather stressful environment for me, especially considering all the parties involved have virtually no redeeming features whatsoever. Of the four, one’s a criminal, one’s arrogant, moody and stupid, one’s a shrieking illiterate bunny-boiler and one’s a Daily Mail reading racist homophobe. Of the others, one’s a member of the BNP, one’s way too damn pushy when she’s drunk and the other is astonishingly actually a decent human being. Then there’s me, holding my ears and trying to block them all out by humming to myself.

I am becoming deadened to them now. A few days or weeks ago (I can’t remember, they all blur into one) I was at work while some kind of shouting match was occurring in the back of the establishment. The assembled customers (all 5 of them) looked around in confusion and then looked at me as if I wasn’t aware of it. My response was to turn up the stereo so I couldn’t hear the shouting any more. It was pretty much unwritten rule #1 to Not Get Involved. It’s also not after every job interview that you receive a series of advanced apologies from staff members for all the dreadful things they’ll be saying and doing to me and each other in the future. It’s not normal, and it’s just not right.

This is not how a workplace is supposed to be. I’ve had to state my case -several times- that I’m not there to document or comment upon the epic family saga, much less get involved. I’m just there to work, so they will pay me money so I can pay my rent and buy food and all the other stuff. That’s it. My interaction starts and ends with with paycheck. I’ve lost count of the number of times I’ve been called upon to weigh in on some ‘vital’ issue or another, in a series of classic “damned-if-you-do, damned-if-you-don’t” moments. They just don’t seem to understand that I simply do not care. Do something to prove you’re not idiots, or just make it worth my while for putting up with it.

In summary then; I need a new job or soon there will be murders.

Medicine and God

I apologise for not having very much to say on this topic, but I’ve made two diagrams which I believe sum it up rather well, a picture being worth a thousand words, and all. I may attempt to flesh it out later, if I can summon the rage.

The first diagram is the statistical distribution of medical phenomena, as seen through the eyes of the fervently religious.

 

The second diagram is, one presumes, how the fervently religious believe the statistical distribution must look for those without the personal blessings of God.

 

That is all.

 

No to age banding!

This isn’t such a relevant topic anymore but, dammit, it was when I started it. So here goes:

I love kids’ fiction. I really do. I love how much more imaginative they are than most adult books and how, in a surprising number of cases, how much more readable they are. What I don’t like, however, is that despite the thousands of new titles published every year the best sellers are utterly predictable. And, in almost all cases, will be bad titles. Anthony Horowitz? Awful. Darren Shan? Dreadful. Stephenie Meyer? So, so dull and with dreadful writing to boot.

What annoys me most about this is the unwillingness for parents’ to try new books for their kids. Of late, I’ve been attempting to sell the work of Chris Wooding, an utterly wonderful author, whose books really ought to sell a lot more than they do. However the fact that a large number of people have never heard of him or his books before, combined with the utterly horrible covers his publishers have slapped on them (curse you, Scholastic) has left me being almost entirely unsuccessful in my quest.

But this reticence in trying new things hasn’t gone unnoticed. Last year the Publishers Association enacted a new initiative to have age banding on the back of all kids’ fiction, with the aim being to help parents choose books that would be more suitable for their children. Of course, this wouldn’t help consumers who shop at most book stores, as the majority already have their children’s section sub-divided into different categories such as ‘Teen’, ‘9-12’ and ‘5-8’, and any that have swearing or adult themes are stickered as containing such. With the age banding guidelines being along the lines of ‘13+’, ‘9+’ etc, you can see how it really doesn’t affect a thing. And, if the shopper is still unsure about the suitability of the book, there are booksellers available in-store to direct enquiries to.

So what’s the point then?

The answer, I fear, is to enhance the ease of book buying in supermarkets. I have nothing against supermarkets, they are a convenient place to acquire delicious groceries, but as a place to buy or, more appropriately, browse for books they are just not a good place to do so. The range they stock is limited at best, and the staff will, on the whole, simply not know as much about various books as the average book shop employee. I realise that the previous statement might appear to be derogatory, but it’s not intended to be. Of course, there will be staff who work in ASDA, Tesco or whichever supermarket you happen to be shopping in, who know a lot about books, in some cases more than the people running the book stores (I’m looking at you here, Gerry Johnson), but on the whole I reckon not. And this is without the fancy tools that booksellers have to find out the answers to your book-related queries.

So, it’s the supermarkets that come out the rosiest from this age banding scheme. Supermarkets who, with their spending power, have the ability to undercut every book shop that exists in Britain at the moment. Just look at the ‘Harry Potter and The Deathly Hallows’ debacle – ASDA sold it for just £5, whilst everyone else was selling it for £9.49 which was still half price! This is something that book shops simply cannot compete with.

If age banding takes off (there is a sizeable petition against it, featuring such luminaries as Philip Pullman, Neil Gaiman and Terry Pratchett), it will strike a blow against books shops. And that, I feel, is a bad thing for everybody. Because the likes of Waterstone’s, Borders et al are good for the country. Reading is important and discovering new titles and authors is a magical feeling,  and it’s the ability to enable that which makes, among many other things, book shops a far better place to buy your books than supermarkets.