Is This Thing On?

Monday 21st April: Conservative leader David Cameron has vowed to “stop the government in its tracks” and make them think again over the axing of the 10p income tax band. He said he would fight in Parliament for compensation for those affected by the “disgraceful” move.

Wednesday 23rd April: The prime minister has defended moves to compensate pensioners, young people and childless people on low incomes who lost out from the 10p tax rate’s axing. Gordon Brown’s offer of backdated help came amid a continuing rebellion from Labour MPs over the issue. Tory leader David Cameron said the PM only acted to avoid defeat on it next week and accused him of “weakness, dithering and indecision”.

I’m fascinated by the current ongoing fuss about the changes to the UK income tax bands that came in at the start of this month. It provides a nice little insight into how politics works.

In the above case, for example:

– opposition politician asks for something
– ruling politician does the thing he was asked to do
– opposition politician accuses him of being weak because he did the thing he was asked to do by opposition politician

The funny thing is that these changes were announced a full twelve months ago.

It was obvious to me at the time that the changes would disproportionately affect anyone on a low income (specifically, anyone earning around £7/8K, who would previously have paid all their tax at 10% and will now pay 20% on all of their £2K-ish taxable income), while anyone earning towards the top end of the basic rate, or paying tax at the higher rate, will be better off (because the negative effect of the first £2K of taxable income being taxed at 20% instead of 10% will be cancelled out by the rest of the basic rate being at 20% rather than 22%).

So it seems odd that no one found the time to make a fuss about this at any point over the last year, when it might theoretically have been reversible. It’s a bit late now, isn’t it? Unless of course you don’t really care what happens to people on low incomes and are only really interested in jumping on the bandwagon to exploit any given situation for maximum political gain…

So. Sighs of relief all round yesterday when the Australians finally got round to granting my visa. Something of a relief, really, given that we’d already resigned, given notice on our flat, booked our flights for our big trip to South America next month as well as our one way tickets to Melbourne in October, organised our leaving drinks, and ordered 26 packing boxes from Freedom Shipping and started filling them with assorted tat.

Prior to yesterday, the last communication I’d had from Australia House had been back in February, when they sent me a form letter confirming that they were processing my application. It ended with a note reminding me that the visa processing people “do not recommend that you take any irreversible action during the processing of your application (such as leaving your employment, purchasing airline tickets, or selling your property) until and unless it has been confirmed in writing that your visa has been granted” so obviously that was advice that I took to heart.

Having said that, given that the only real requirements for this particular visa are that you (a) have been living with an Australian for at least a year, (b) don’t have a criminal record, and (c) don’t have TB, I was always fairly confident that I might just scrape through.

When we’ve previously got the same type of “dirty de-facto” visa for Sal to allow her to stay in the UK, it’s merely involved filling in an application form and sending in some post addressed to the two of us to prove we live at the same address. The Australians, on the other hand, make you jump through a few extra hoops, like getting Australian citizens to write statutory declarations confirming that yours is not a sham relationship.

They even ask you this directly. Question 74 on form 47SP, the main application form, reads:

74: Did you enter into this relationship with your partner solely to gain permanent residence in Australia?

Yes | No

Hmm. Let me think about that one for a moment…

They’re also quite big on the character requirement. This mostly means that you have to get police checks to prove that you don’t have a criminal record, but they also make you fill in the glorious Form 80, which includes such gems as:

27: Give details of all visits (including short stays) to countries outside Australia for the last 10 years (If insufficient space, give details on an attachment)

There are 7 lines for you to fill in the details.

Quite how they expect you to remember everywhere you’ve been for the last 10 years, I don’t know (especially if you happen to live in a continent that allows freedom of movement between member states and therefore don’t have any stamps in your passport for half of those trips…) My digital photos go back about 5 years, but beyond that I was mostly guessing. I vaguely remember what I did in 1998, but not to the day… And after I got to 36 trips on my attachment, I gave up.

The health checks were fun too. I went to a chap on Harley Street who apparently does nothing else but health checks for visa applicants. After the most cursory of medical examinations, during which he listened to my breathing for all of five seconds, basically just asked me if I had any health problems and then ticked “normal” on all the boxes on the form, he sent me on my way £140 lighter to get my chest X-Rays done down the road at another business that apparently exists solely to X-Ray visa applicants (this one was ironically staffed entirely by Australians, who all sounded exactly like the snobby shop assistants off Kath and Kim). With all that out of the way I just had to go back down the road to let a young New Zealander extract some blood from my arm and I was done, the whole process having taken little over half an hour.

So that’s it then. We really are officially going now. We leave London on the 18th May to head north for a few days, then fly to Peru on the 22nd for four months of flitting around South America before flying out of Sao Paulo on the 22nd September for a brief return to the UK (first to Southport and then back to London on the 26th September for a final weekend here). Our one way flights start from Heathrow on the 1st October, and after a few days in Singapore to see our friends who’ve just moved there (because, you know, 4 months’ holiday wasn’t quite enough), we’ll finally get to Melbourne, penniless, on Monday the 6th of October…

So I guess it’s just as well that I our plans to be in South America meant that I wasn’t trying for a Glastonbury ticket this year (although, unbelievably, tickets appear to still be available 24 hours after going on sale, so I guess all that rain last year and Jay-Z must really have scared people away). I couldn’t have bought one from home on Sunday morning if I had wanted to, though, because we’ve had no internets or TV service from our wonderful provider Tiscali since last Thursday.

It’s quite a dull story, really (if you care, you can read my angry post on their support forum about it here, and my reply to someone else’s angry forum post here), but the abbreviated story is that… I used to be a Homechoice customer. Tiscali bought Homechoice, and after running both sets of equipment in the phone exchanges for a bit have started moving Homechoice customers over to the Tiscali network. Last Wednesday was my turn, and since then, I’ve had no service.

Perhaps I’ve been switched to their special “No Service” internet plan: it’s a snip at £24.99 a month, and it’s great so long as you never want to watch the TV channels or use the internet. Ideal for the busy young professional who’s hardly in anyway…

Although I haven’t had any service from them, I have got to listen a lot of Leona Lewis while waiting on hold. More Leona than anyone should ever have to listen to, really, and the only reward for this torture is that I eventually get to speak to someone utterly clueless (and apparently lacking any basic training in how their systems work) in tech support who clearly knows less about Homechoice than I do.

So anyway, if there is anyone out there considering Tiscali as an ISP, then do my a favour and don’t bother. Utter, utter rubbish.

*****

Update (07 April): I finally got my TV and internet services back yesterday, after a massively frustrating week waiting on hold, becoming intimately acquainted with the works of Leona Lewis, and speaking to poorly-trained customer service staff.

It turned out to be a problem affecting all the users who were migrated last week, but Tiscali didn’t bother communicating that to the affected users (“all aspects of our service are working correctly” said their website status page and automated fault phone line) or even their own staff. Amusingly, at one point I spoke to someone on the upgrade/migration support line who told me that everything was working fine, and then a few minutes later to someone in a different part of support who told me that there was a problem affecting all the recently migrated users. When I asked him why his colleague on the upgrade/migration support line didn’t know about a problem affecting all upgraded users, he told me that that team “isn’t kept in the loop”. Brilliant…

So anyway. This is a message to the internets: if you are considering using Tiscali’s services, please don’t. And if Tiscali purchase a company whose services you do use, please leave and go somewhere else. Thanks…

Check that timestamp. They just got in there with a minute to go.

Update:

It wasn’t just me. This week’s Popbitch says:

—————————————————–
Lily Allen’s new material is said to be “dance-
oriented”. (Her TV show’s re-commissioning was on 1st
April. BBC staff thought it was an April Fools joke.)
—————————————————–

It looks like we’ll be gone before it gets to the last couple of episodes, but I’m still delighted to see The Apprentice back on telly. I stayed up late last night when I got in to watch the first one, while a still sick Sal went straight to bed. Of course it’s the same old stuff as every other year–the same hapless, arrogant, twats giving it 110% all the way while they make catastrophically idiotic decisions and then get rightly ridiculed by siralan in the boardroom, but it’s entertaining stuff anyway.

I’d love to write something witty, but I’ll leave that to Andrew Collins and the Watch With Mothers lot, who’ve beaten me to it.

What I will write about, a bit, is the other TV that I’ve been enjoying recently. Since getting back from Oz earlier in the month, Sal and I have been watching the excellent Underbelly, a dramatisation of the retributional gangland killings that took place in Melbourne for about 10 years from the mid nineties onwards.

It’s cracking TV, but all the more remarkable for the fact that–so far as I can tell from reading old news reports off The Age website–much of what is depicted in the show actually happened, and did so pretty much the way it’s presented.

They’ve even chosen to use the real names of all the people involved, which is an interesting decision given that there are still ongoing legal proceedings involving some of these people (the ones who aren’t either dead or in prison, at least, although even some of the dead ones have a part to play in some of the ongoing cases…). Having said that, perhaps you don’t have to be totally cynical to wonder whether this might not have been a deliberate calculated move, given the publicity that was generated for the show once Channel 9 had been indefinitely banned from broadcasting it in the state of Victoria by the Australian Supreme Court. I also wonder if it is a complete coincidence that suitably technically savvy Victorians have conveniently been able to watch the show anyway, given that there were high-quality torrents of the first 10 episodes up on Mininova before even half of them had been shown on TV in the other Australian states (and the only versions of episodes 11 – 13 that I’ve seen out there so far must have been leaked by someone inside the production company, given that they are rough cuts with an incomplete soundtrack and a timer running on the bottom of the screen).

It’s also interesting to us because many of the events took place in Sal’s bits of Melbourne, and some of the show was filmed in Essendon itself. One of the characters, for example, is Jason Moran, who ends up getting shot dead in front of his children (who had just finished an aussie rules game) in his van in the car park of the Cross Keys Hotel on Pascoe Vale Road. Yeah, that’d be the same Cross Keys Hotel that we’d just been to a few weeks ago for Sal’s dad’s birthday drinks…

Now, having seen the first 10 episodes, we just have the tricky decision of whether to watch those unfinished final 3 now, or wait 4-6 weeks for Australian TV to catch up so we can watch the proper ones. Decisions, decisions…

Right. If the NME tells you that Danny Goffey and Gaz Coombes of Supergrass are going to busk in Covent Garden at lunchtime, then don’t listen to them, because (as the updated news story now says), the band will be at the Royal Festival Hall instead, but you’ll go all the way over to Covent Garden and hang around for 15 minutes with some other confused people and won’t find out what’s really going on until the two paps who have also been given duff information find out where the band really are and you then end up legging it down to Embankment and over the bridge to see what remains of the busking gig…

Ah well. I might have missed the start, but it was still a more interesting use of my lunch hour than normal. I made it across to the other side of the river just in time to see Danny and Gaz (performing as the Diamond Hoo Ha Men for charity on the BBC’s Culture Show’s “let’s see how much real bands can make busking” spot) doing Beat It, which they then followed with what they described as “covers” of this band they really like called Supergrass–Lenny, Caught By The Fuzz and Diamond Hoo Ha Men.

At the end of the gig, as I hung around to watch them passing the hat around to collect for homeless charity Crisis, I overheard some confused American tourists:

Middle-aged American Lady: Who are they? They’ve got white jumpsuits on and one of them says “Randy” and the other one says “Duke”. Who are they?
American Lady’s Husband: I think they’re off TV.

American Lady: Well if they’re off TV why are they outside collecting money? That doesn’t make a whole lot of sense.

Obviously the concept of “collecting for charity” hasn’t quite made it across the Atlantic…

When XFM woke me up this morning, the first thing I consciously heard was Heather Mills talking about her divorce settlement:

Beatrice only gets £35,000 a year – so obviously she’s meant to travel B class while her father travels A class, but obviously I will pay for that.

Gosh.

How will poor 4 year old Beatrice survive on a lowly £35K + nanny and school fees?

Every now and again I go through phases of trying to geotag all my Flickr photos. There’s something very satisfying about looking at a map of the world and seeing all your pictures on it in the right places, but it is a very time consuming process, and with only about 1,500 of my 6,000ish Flickr photos on the map so far, it’s going to be a while before I get round to doing the lot.

Sadly, Flickr’s technology isn’t quite as helpful as it could be either. What with them being owned by Yahoo and everything (for now at least–I dread to think how bad things will get if Microsoft get their grubby mits on them), you’re stuck with Yahoo’s rubbish maps. Trying to put my photos from our recent Australia trip onto the map using Flickr alone would have been virtually impossible, for example, because Yahoo’s maps of Melbourne don’t really exist (unless you count a grey blob with no distinguishing features as a “map”). Oddly, their satellite pictures are really quite clear, but there’s no street-level mapping at all, even in the CBD. I’ve had to resort to installing this nifty mapping bookmarklet that lets me use Google’s much better maps to put the first photo from a particular location onto the map, and then I can drag the rest onto the same spot in Flickr.

And Flickr is equally confused by my home town. This previously geotagged photo correctly identifies itself as being “taken in Southport, England”, but this one (which I’ve dragged to exactly the same spot at the end of Southport pier at latitude 53.655505 and longitude -3.021492) was apparently “Taken in Banks, England“. A few hundred yards along the pier, closer to the town centre, we’re apparently in Brown Edge, England.

And I think it’ll be news to my parents when I mention to them that their house, despite being clearly visible on the satellite picture is not in Southport after all as we’ve all thought for all these years, but in fact in “Shirdley Hill, England”.

Having said all that, it looks like Google Maps aren’t immune to their own special brand of oddness. Looking at their maps to see where “Shirdley Hill”, “Banks” and “Brown Edge” actually are, I was somewhat surprised to see that there’s a place called Dummy1325 just over to the right of Southport. Must go and take a look next time I’m home.