Is This Thing On?

Finally got round to seeing An Inconvenient Truth last night, although I should perhaps own up to the fact that I was on teh interwebs booking a city break weekend (complete with not-strictly-necessary domestic flights) while we watched the first half [although speaking of, we’re once again going to spend the August bank holiday in Edinburgh at the festival this year–why don’t you come up and join us? No, really, why not?]

The film turns out to be a lot more interesting than the tedium of “man delivers PowerPoint presentation” that you might expect, and despite his reputation for wooden-ness, Al Gore turns out to be an engaging speaker, with some very compelling points to make about climate change. You can’t help but think back seven years and wonder how the hell we ended up with that bumbling idiot running the free world instead (I mean, just compare this with those clips of the great Dubya giving speeches that turn up with worrying regularity on The Daily Show; even after all this time, I’m still no closer to working out how this was allowed to happen…)

Just one concern, though: at one point in the film Al recounts a list of places he’s delivered his slideshow, with his computer map zooming around the world dotting the cities as he names each one. All very good on the raising awareness front, but I wonder if there’s any place for considering whether all that jetting around the world is strictly necessary. He might end the film with “reduce your carbon footprint to zero” as one of his recommendations (oops… I’ve given away the ending now, haven’t I?) but for some reason, as we watch Gore walking through yet another airport arrivals zone, the potential negative effects of his excessive travel don’t rate a mention. I tried to think of something more ironic and counter-productive than a climate change campaigner who spends his life flying around the world, but the best I could come up with was the idea of jetting a bunch of rock stars down to Antarctica for a global-warming-awareness gig.

Oh.

POSTSCRIPT Oh, and then today I picked up my copy of the Indie at the station–they of the Campaign Against Waste, and their strong commitment to environmental issues–only to be handed the free bottle of Evian that was being given away with each copy…

A couple of weeks ago I was wondering what kind of Jurassic Park-style zoo emergency might cause them to fly the red flag over at London Zoo, and today the Indie has helpfully provided the answer: Warning: Zoo Animals Could Escape Into Park.

“An unpublished inspection of London Zoo has warned that dangerous animals could quickly emerge into the outside world, after leaping an inadequate perimeter fence. That would lead to big cats surprising the picknickers, joggers and tourists enjoying the adjoining park.”

So now I know what to look out for the next time I’m out on one of my morning runs…

Er, yeah. It’s been awfully quiet around here for a while. Sorry.

But then, you know, I’ve been away to Australia and back, and I’ve been, um, busy.

(Although not too busy to stop documenting my life, one day at a time).

By way of breaking the silence, although I don’t usually go in for memes (and I haven’t been tagged and I’m not going to tag anyone, but nevermind about that..) I couldn’t help noticing Tim Ireland’s recent question: What did you post on 20 March, 2003?

Funnily enough, my post for that very day (well one of them–gosh was there really a time when I’d post two blogs in the same day?) was rather apt.

Everything I said then still applies. It seems at the same time both a long time ago and very recent.

…asked the RAC man.

“No,” said Sal, “this is the first time…”

It was ten minutes to 12 on Sunday lunchtime, and we weren’t, as planned, loading up the car for our first trip up to the new flat. Instead, we were watching a man from the RAC attach a metal bar onto the front of our hire car and prepare to tow us to Vauxhall. This was a hire car that we had picked up just 2 hours before, at the SixT hire car place behind King’s Cross. Perhaps the massive dent in the driver-side door should have started to ring alarm bells when we picked it up, but it being the only car they had in, we felt that we had no choice but to take it. We’d been driving for barely more than ten minutes, and got as far as the top of the Euston underpass, only to discover that we no longer had a usable clutch.

By the time we’d been towed down to the only remaining Sixt rental office in London that was still open on Sundays, we had wasted three hours of our move date only to end up on the wrong side of London, facing the prospect of having to move our not insignificant volume of possessions into our new flat without a car.

In the end, we achieved this using 5 cab trips, and a couple of walks up the street. And because we weren’t going very far, it actually ended up costing about 1/3 of what we would have paid for a day’s car hire. And I was almost able to say that London’s black cab drivers proved themselves to be remarkably helpful and understanding even though we were filling the back of their cabs with stuff each time, and barely travelling more than a few minutes up the road. Unfortunately although the first 4 trips were effortless, catching the 5th and final cab proved rather tricky. It was late and cold as we stood outside the old block trying to flag one down. A cab turned up pretty quickly, but the female cab driver–the only female cab driver we encountered all day–simply refused to take us. “I’m not a removals van” she said, already beginning to drive away.

We waited 30 minutes before another cab passed by, and thankfully he agreed to take us.

But we’re in. Finally.

I eventually flopped into bed, exhausted, some time after 10, and quickly fell into a deep sleep. When I woke, I was convinced that it was already the morning, but my watch felt otherwise, and was pretty sure that it was actually 2:30am. Sal felt that that couldn’t possibly be true either, but when I checked again it was somehow still 2:30am.

Sal opted to take some drugs to get herself back to sleep, and I was mightily amused to see the warning on the back of her box of over-the-counter sleeping tablets: “Warning: may cause drowsiness”.

So it’s that time of year again. Our tenancy is coming to an end on the flat, and as we’ve finally got fed up with the crazy, deaf old lady who lives downstairs and likes to watch BBC News 24 at full volume at 5AM most days of the week, we’ll be moving out at the start of next month. We aren’t going too far this time, though, but that doesn’t mean we get to escape the many joys of moving. One of the best things about moving house, of course, is that you get to deal with everybody’s favourite people: Estate Agents.

One of my favourites this time was the lady who took us to see a flat a few streets away (in the wrong direction) from ours. Despite looking quite nice on the website, it turned out to be smaller, shabbier, significantly more expensive, less well located, and generally not as nice as our current place. When I queried the exorbitant rental price, the agent told us that it was “really good value for the area”, and that you “won’t find anything this cheap in the area”. Well, luckily, you can, and we did, and we’ll be moving into a much nicer flat in a couple of weeks. This also meant not having to pay her ridiculous fees–can anyone guess which agency she might have worked for if I say that they wanted to charge fees of the entirely ridiculous amount of £376, almost twice what most agents charge? (“Although unlike some agents we don’t charge fees per person”. Which is nice to know…)

Unfortunately, even though this means that we don’t have to deal with the agents to find a place any more, we do have to deal with the ones who are traipsing round our place on a daily basis trying to flog it off. This time we’ve been hit twice because they are trying to both let the property, and sell it on as an investment (presumably they don’t want to deal with another set of tenants moving out after a year because of the noise as well, but have on the other hand realised that there is a nice bit of recurring income to be had by finding someone else to take on ownership, and simply collecting the fees every time the tenants change). So we have twice as many people coming round to nose about our flat than we might normally have expected.

All of which is quite interesting, because I can see it advertised on both the rental and sales sides of their website (complete with marginally misleading photographs of the inside that they took the other week). Out of interest, I took the sale price and plugged it in to the Guardian’s mortgage repayments calculator, to see what the repayments would be, versus the rental income:

Assuming you end up paying the full asking price, and were looking at an 80% buy-to-let mortgage (apparently this is pretty standard), repayable over 25 years, at 6% (which I reckon is probably a pretty conservative estimate), then you’re looking at monthly mortgage payments of about £300 more than your rental income (assuming you can get the full rent that they are asking for). Add in the hefty service charges in our block (over £3k a year, according to one of the agents, which pays for things like 24-hour porterage and communal hot water and heating–benefits reaped by your tenants, but paid for by you) and you’re looking at a gap of at least £550 every month between your mortgage costs and potential rental income. Add in 3% stamp duty, and all your other upfront costs, as well as the agent fees if you want them to manage the rental property for you, and the cost other things like buildings insurance, not to mention other recurring costs, like refurbishing the property on an ongoing basis, and the fact that you can’t assume that there will always be tenants in there, and it all begins to look like less and less of a sound investment.

One other thing to consider, of course, is that this assumes that you have the 20% deposit you’d need to get that mortage, which in this case is a high 5-figure sum, so to properly compare any gains that you may end up making, you have to offset them against the returns you could have got by investing that money somewhere else–in the stock market say, or just by sticking it in a bank account for 25 years and letting compound interest work its magic. On the other hand, and I don’t know if they do this for buy-to-lets, but if you do manage to convince the bank to lend you 95% of the asking price, then you’re looking at paying something like a grand more than your rental income each month.

Perhaps you’re banking on capital gains, or maybe you just aren’t very good at maths and have been wowed by the promise of easy money in property investment, but I completely fail to understand why anyone would take on this “investment”.

Have I missed something?

Yet another outage from my shitty hosting company (Freedom2RunAReallyPoorService), so sorry if you were over here looking for some quality bloggage and left disappointed (or maybe I should apologise if you came here looking for some quality bloggage and found the site working as normal, who knows…)

After the last time that things fell apart, I considered moving to another host, but then things seemed to get a bit better and in the end I couldn’t be bothered.

As it happens, the hosting is up for renewal at the moment, but I have a feeling it might be too late to cancel now. And I’m still not sure I can take the hassle.

Gah! Why can’t things just work properly?

So the indie has just launched a new campaign to get retailers to cut down on unnecessary packaging. They were asking for readers to send in their own examples of ridiculous packaging, so I sent in this.

Do you think they’ll print it?

> Date: Mon, 22 Jan 2007 09:08:59
> From: “Matt Armstrong”
> To: waste@independent.co.uk
> Subject: The Campaign Against Waste
>
> Dear Sir,
>
> I strongly support your new campaign to eradicate unnecessary
> packaging from the products we buy. There is one particular example of
> excessive waste that particularly annoys me: every Saturday I pop down
> to my local newsagent to pick up my preferred Saturday newspaper. And
> every time I despair when I find that the supplements are all wrapped
> together in unnecessary, non-biodegradable, plastic.
>
> The newspaper in question has often been known to prominently cover
> environmental issues, and I know I am not the only person who has
> written to them to point out this hypocrisy, but they have yet to
> change this packaging policy.
>
> Clearly the only answer is to vote with my wallet by stopping buying
> this particular paper until there is a change of policy…
>
> Kind regards,
> Matt Armstrong

UPDATE: Er, no, apparently not. For some reason there wasn’t enough space for my letter (or any other letters making the same point). I can’t think why…

Although there was space for this leader article: “We must vote against waste with our wallets“. Of course I’m sure that’s just a coincidence…

Four Years?

511 blog entries, and approximately 133,291 words later, well, here we are.

A hundred and thirty thousand words? That’s enough for a small novel. I mean, yeah, admittedly it’d be a pretty rubbish novel (and one that’d mostly just be full of one grumpy man moaning about customer service), but a novel nontheless.

Has it really been four years, though? Where does the time go…?

And so, finally, at the end of the two week holiday we took last September that has now taken me FOUR MONTHS to blog (is this some kind of record?) we arrived in LA, for the briefest of brief stays.

Everyone told us we’d hate it, and I fully expected that it would be the sort of place that I would, but actually I quite enjoyed what we did and saw. Perhaps it’s because for the most part we stayed firmly put in one part of town, West Hollywood, and didn’t try to get around too much. Partly this was because, given that we were only there for two nights, we’d made the slightly ridiculous decision not to bother renting another car. Attempting to visit LA without access to a car, according to our guide book, is “virtually impossible”, but actually we didn’t do too badly. There was plenty of stuff on the Sunset Strip within walking distance of our hotel, and Hollywood itself, with its slightly shabby associated tourist attractions was just a 10 minute bus ride away.

[I’d like to make it clear, for the record, that the above was the result of random chance, rather than a concerted effort to locate it, but having spotted it, I couldn’t NOT take the picture, could I?]

Of course there’s more we would have done, given appropriate transport options, so much so that by the end of our two days we were already planning the next trip, whenever that may be (in fact, in the cab on the way back to the airport, I noticed that at one particular junction we were offered the choice between LAX to the right, and San Diego, to the left. I was briefly tempted to lean forward and ask the driver just to take the left and keep driving, but sadly I did not…)

The one time we could have used the transport, I suppose, was when we popped down to Santa Monica (and subsequently Venice) to catch up with some familiar faces, who were coincidentally in town at the same time as us in order to attend a wedding.

Despite the fact that a week of wedding preparations, not to mention having spent the day at Six Flags had clearly taken its toll, they put in an admirable show, with Rob in particular joining us for Coronas in the bar near their hotel despite barely being able to stay awake.

Impressive stuff.

Our hotel, by the way, had been selected for its sleb spotting potential: hotel residents get automatic entry to the allegedly exclusive nightclub, which is supposedly patronised by the rich and famous. We popped in on both nights, but saw no one we recognised (although a woman who claimed to be a well known fashion photographer did ask if she could take Sal’s picture: “Do you have any idea who just took your picture?” asked one of her friends. We did not. And by the time I was back in front of a computer I’d long since forgotten her name and haven’t even been able to ask Google whether that particular story checks out.)

And that, I suppose, pretty much, was that…

“The first time he flew, saw the Vegas skyline gently melt into view…”

So to Vegas, then, which we finally reached only a couple of hours later than planned. If you want to enjoy yourself in Vegas, (well, on the strip at least) then your first task is to embrace it for the glorified shopping mall in the middle of the desert that it is. “Paris”? “New York”? “Venice”? Utterly fake and ridiculous as it may be, it’s all done on such a scale that even an old cynic like myself couldn’t help but be impressed. Once you’ve accepted all that, it can be great fun.

Pretty tiring, though: even in September, any attempts to walk around outside were quickly defeated by a harsh, dry desert heat that sucked our energy away, and when we retreated to the air-conditioned cool of the casinos, we quickly realised that they are carefully designed to keep you there–we naively assumed that it might be possible to walk along the strip through each of the casinos, but, in most cases, only a fairly small portion of the casino borders the strip itself, with the bulk of the gaming floor extending out to the back. So you find yourself getting hopelessly lost and disorientated, only to realise that you are miles away from where you wanted to be in a room with no exit signs. (Presumably the idea is that you respond to this discovery by thinking “well, I can’t find my way out of this room, so I’ll just sit here and put all my money into the slots instead.”)

Another thing that you have to be prepared for in Vegas is, well, the other patrons… Of course, this trip was not the first time that Sal and I have been to the, er, “larger than life”, USA, but our previous trips together had been to cosmopolitan New York, and before that most of the time I’d spent in the US had been in the big cities of the North East. So we were slightly unprepared for one aspect of spending time in Vegas: the sheer number of super-sized visitors.

One morning we had to be up really early in order to get away to the Grand Canyon, so we decided to grab a quick bite at the all-you-can-eat buffet in our hotel. Our early start meant that we joined the line for the buffet within a few minutes of it opening. There, in front of us, were some of the most, ahem, impressive human beings we’ve ever seen, several of whom looked like they might have eaten the person in front of them while they were waiting. Funnily enough, on the one other occasion we visited the breakfast buffet (when we arrived at a sensible time like 9:45, shortly before it closed) the clientèle was noticeably slimmer.

Our trip to the Grand Canyon, by helicopter, was probably the highlight of the whole US trip, although we were punished for our earlier thoughts when the dimensions of our fellow passengers forced us to sit in the middle of the helicopter–for safety reasons everyone travelling had to be weighed, and then that weight had to be distributed evenly around the cabin. In our case, unfortunately, this meant that the much larger couple also in our group were distributed at the sides, in the window seats, whilst Sal and I were asked to sandwich ourselves between them.

Other than that, though, it was an amazing experience. Never having been in a helicopter before I wasn’t sure what to expect, but it turns out that the sensation of flying in one feels much more like being in a hot air balloon–you just seem to float upwards and glide smoothly along–as opposed to the bumpiness of a plane. (Having said that, I’m not so sure about the “safety” video that they made us watch before going up, which contained gems like “If a door should open in-flight, do not be alarmed.” Luckily we were not required to put this piece of advice to the test).

In the evening, after our helicopter flight, we did something many tourists in Vegas never do: we left the strip and headed for Downtown. We’d had a tip-off about a locals’ bar there sometimes frequented by the likes of the Killers called The Beauty Bar, and had vowed to head over there and check it out. Our cabbie didn’t have a clue where it was, so we just asked for Downtown, and hoped for the best as we sped along Las Vegas Boulevard past the cluster of wedding chapels, resisting the temptation to ask him to swing into the drive-thru chapel.

We found it eventually, after asking directions from an old-school bouncer at the entrance to one of the old-school casinos on Freemont Street. The bar itself, which is styled like an old hairdressing salon, turned out to be having some kind of 50s night (or maybe it’s like that every night, who knows…) attended by all the cool kids from Vegas–and a smattering of teddy boys who looked like they remembered it from the first time round–who had all got properly dressed up for the occasion and were doing some impressive swing and jive dancing. We were in no way cool enough to be in there, so we installed ourselves at the bar drinking cans of Corona and watching. We also bought ourselves tickets to come back the following night to watch The Brain Jonestown Massacre (they of DiG! fame). They played out back in the parking lot, decked out with fairy lights, like something that might happen on The OC. We didn’t have an emotional crisis while failing to watch the band, though; we just stood in the crowd, listened and clapped. (And looked around carefully to see if any of The Killers–or anyone else famous–had turned up. They had not–I later found out that they were playing a gig in London that night–but they seemed to have sent along in their place a bunch of people who looked a bit like some famous people, including American versions of Rhys Ifans and Badly Drawn Boy). I hate to say it, but we left at 1 AM with the band still playing in order to get back to our hotel bed in preparation for our early flight to LA the next day. Having missed one flight already this trip, we weren’t about to do miss another one.

“Swore he just saw Elvis, playing poker at Dunes…”

Oh, and there was a bona fide sleb spot while we were in Vegas, too: wandering down to grab breakfast one morning, we noticed a crowd of people standing around watching a cordoned off portion of our hotel’s casino floor, where some unspecified thing was being filmed. To begin with, all we could see were some bored looking extras, but then we overheard someone in the crowd loudly announcing that it was in fact the filming of Ocean’s 13 (and clearly that’s a franchise with unlimited possibilities–Ocean’s 27 anyone?). As the extras closest to us were being arranged, we figured we’d hang around for a bit–shortly afterwards we were rewarded with Al Pacino, who turns out to be a tiny man. Anyway. Keep your eyes peeled for Ocean’s 13 when it comes out. If the rest of the film is up to the quality of the “Al Pacino walks into a restaurant” scene then I’m sure it’ll be a cracker…

What a tiny man
walking through the casino
It’s Al Pacino!