by Peter Cook

Divide and rule is an old strategy. And now they’re using it to try and drive a wedge between the young and the old.

You’ve heard the arguments – the baby boom generation got free university education, we could buy our houses when prices were low and mortgages easily available, we cashed in on the property boom, our pensions are bleeding the country white etc etc.

Before young people fall for all this they need to wise up to a few things.

Not all of us went to university. Most of us left school in our teens and have worked hard and paid taxes ever since.

OK, houses were more affordable when we were growing up. But you lived in them and many of you will get the benefit when we quit this mortal coil. Our generation grew up in rented houses. No legacy there.

Many of you are still living in the houses we bought, rent free, using all the facilities and contributing nothing. Some of us left home at 16.

We don’t all draw fat final salary pensions. Some of us had to pay into private pension schemes for years, only to find the value plummeted just as we were about to reap the benefits.

So let’s not fall for this damaging slander that the baby boomers are the cause of the current financial difficulties. It’s just the politicians deflecting blame from their own pathetic efforts.

Let’s unite to fight them and not allow ourselves to be drive apart.

As I may have mentioned before my boyfriend has a penchant for staring at another man’s lycra clad behind. Last weekend, like many other weekends was rudely interrupted by the pair of them spending Sunday at a cycling event. Do hold your “where’s the harm in that? What an unreasonable girlfriend” until I’ve explained my issue with this. My main concern is not that I don’t get to see him or that I’m concerned by the love of a man’s lycra clad bottom: no I’m more concerned with the fact that this morning I was roused from a rather lovely Saturday night – don’t have to be up in the morning snooze. At six. A.M. Yes that’s correct: SIX A.M on a SUNDAY. For those of you that know me well you will understand what this means. I am a snarly, fire breathing dragon when awoken from my beauty sleep. His cycling buddy made the error of saying something about my looking less than impressed to be awake. I believe my mumbled “good morning” (social niceties, pah!) quite possibly came out more like the guttural snarl one would expect from a very.Hacked. Off. animal.

I didn’t run off to my own bed for further slumber though dear readers because what I saw next had to be observed until the bitter end. Two lycra clad men (I think they think they are ninjas/power rangers) both scratching their heads and detaching various parts of bike turning them every which direction and both trying to be the most expert “NO, I’ve done this before you know, I know what I’m doing”. Nothing like a bit of a Chuckle Brothers re-enactment to make loss of sleep bearable: “to me…to you” between the boot and the back seat, I was desperately hoping one would let go and fall flat on their lycra clad behind.  Eventually they were off after a good deal of pushing and shoving.

So now, would you like to play guess the number of puncture readers?

Sunday morning the beast  (for those that don’t know the beast is me when I’ve been unceremoniously woken up) was awoken: firstly at 5.30 by a debate over whether a cycling event was going to take place in the god awful weather. Several text messages that I heard through lovely tap tapping of haptic feedback and a couple of phone calls later it was established that the event was cancelled: could you not have simply gone and stood outside for a minute my love, that would have told you all you needed to know surely (gale force winds and torrential rain do tend to be a bit of a giveaway)?

Woken again at 8.20. What kind of idiot would wake me twice in one morning: answers on a postcard please. Was I woken the safest way known to man: with a kiss and a cup of tea? No, no I wasn’t. I was, in fact, woken by the dulcet tones of football pundits talking over a match he had watched last night “HE SHOOTS! HE SCORES! WHAT A BEAUTIFUL GOAL!” He even, despair with me here readers, he even started drumming the Match Of The Day tune on the mattress. Drumming. It. I eventually open my eyes, slowly turning to face him to give him one of my menacing stares: eyes glued to screen. Sigh. In a rage I wrap myself in all of the duvet. That’s right: all of it. Which he tries to take some back of. But I am Queen of the duvet covers. All of it is mine and mine alone.

“I’m a little bit hot now under all these covers”

“Good, I hope you combust”

Now, my love, the rule is if you are going to insist on waking me up very early (for me) on a Sunday morning (my last day off and lie in for the foreseeable future) please remember that if your arm has a cup of tea at the end of it you are much less likely to wake the beast and you could probably even get away with putting the football on without me snarling and growling at you.

Tea first. Always. Tea.First

This week I heard my wife yell “What a bunch of morons.” She is not normally given to such outbursts. Well, not that often, unless I’ve burnt the dinner.

This is what caused her to lose her cool. She dropped an envelope with the word “Credit” written on the front, and containing a cheque and a paying-in slip through the letterbox of her local bank. She has done this on many occasions when she is unable to call in during the working day.

Four days later the cheque had not been credited to her account, because no one knew what the word “credit” meant.

My wife discovered they had sent off the envelope, unopened, to a mysterious place called a “processing centre,” where in all likelihood it will have disappeared without trace.

What followed was a catalogue of incompetence, as she dealt with various idiots in call centres, who appeared barely capable of knowing what day it was, let alone what their own bank’s practices were.

Promised phone calls to “sort it” were not made and it was left to my wife to go on the offensive to get sense out of someone, anyone.

I was never a big fan of old style bank managers, in the Capt Mainwaring style, because they devoted most of their time and energy to the customers with the bulging bank accounts.

Now we have gone too far in the other direction, where the “managers” –  ie anyone who has been there six months longer than anyone else – are youths or girls barely out of their teens who have no power to do anything other than say “Good morning.”

It is virtually impossible to speak to anyone in your local branch by phone unless you first run the gauntlet of the dreaded call centre. Even the “local” numbers listed in the phone directory against each Kent branch of my wife’s bank are a sham.

Phone any one of them and you end up, not talking to someone in your local High Street, but, you’ve guessed it, some anonymous individual called Gary or Tracey in a call centre. You feel as if you are swimming against a strong tide. I know many people who have far worse horror stories to tell.

My wife is not alone in her experience.

A month or two back, I also dropped an envelope through my bank’s letterbox (not the same bank) but that, too, was not credited to my account although four or five days had passed. I made a personal visit and was told: “There is absolutely no trace of your envelope and cheque ever being delivered here,” the inference being that it was me who had made the mistake.

Two days later, the cheque which had never arrived was credited to my account!

Codgers wouldn’t be Codgers unless we could complain that “Fings Ain’t Wot They Used To Be” but banks provide the classic illustration of the way in which we are going backwards in so many areas of life today.

by Peter Cook

by Alan Watkins

What is stopping Medway  becoming a city? It’s the 20th biggest conurbation in the country and outside of the capital the biggest in the South East.

It is striving to improve – and hasn’t done badly with four universities, a fine campus and a new bus station. It has support in the community.

At 6/1, it was also second favourite (behind Reading) so someone fancied us. So why were we overlooked?

It could be the cavalier way that Rochester lost its city status, not once but twice (Whitehall has a long memory).

Maybe it had something to do with all the other events in 2012 and we’ve got enough to be getting on with.

There’s 200 years of the Sappers, 200 years of Charlie D, two annual festivals in honour of him and the Diamond Jubilee.

Charlie is that hirsute Victorian author and ex-news hack who wasn’t born here, spent much of his life in Pompey and Broadstairs (when he wasn’t hopping into his mistress’s bed) and died in Gravesham. Medway adopted him, but the government robbed him of his last wish, and buried him in a congested corner of Westminster instead of Rochester Cathedral where he really wanted to lie in eternal rest.

Someone worked out most of his famous scenes were set in Rochester (must have been a council researcher). We’ve bid for the City of Medway three times.

The point now is to start asking why a town like St Asaph (population 3,400) should get the title while 250,000 of us have no idea where it is.

And before any clever Welsh geographer mutters Denbighshire, that’s a county with the same size population as the district of Gillingham, Medway (93,000).

I hope the councillors are now re-examining their laid-back approach to the city bid, and comparing their lack of effort with the energy of the other contestants. Maybe Chelmsford will throw the bouquet our way next time.

It won’t make much difference: the next English city will probably be in the west, and most likely in the north-west.

I suspect the Rochester supporters will have had a collective smirk.

Right, back to the drawing board ...

by David Jones

Welcome to Luton Arches, the gateway to Chatham, or should that be the cesspit at the start of the High Street?

Good job I hadn’t splashed out on a romantic Valentine’s candlelit dinner for two or BT would have ruined it by putting me in a foul mood.

Like so many other giant corporations, BT has become an unwieldy monster in which it is near impossible to speak to anyone who can get something done quickly, especially if you have a complicated problem caused by BT itself.

My nightmare week started with what should have been a simple order to upgrade my broadband, which is connected via a phone line we use exclusively for the internet.

The upgrade was due to take effect on February 14, which indeed it did. That was the good news. But early that same evening we discovered that our second number, which we have used as our main landline for more than 25 years, had been closed.

I then spent an hour on my mobile, pressing at least 20 different option buttons, and my blood pressure rising with every passing minute. During the course of conversations with seven different departments, all of whom passed the buck to another department, I spoke to BT staff in call centres from Scotland to India. The trouble is that there is no option button labelled “Massive BT cock-up.”

By the time the full horror of BT’s foul-up began to emerge, I felt as though I was sitting round the table at the Mad Hatter’s Tea Party. I couldn’t get sense out of anyone.

Someone, somewhere, had decided to switch all my numbers around and, at the same time, deleted the line I have used for 25 years and replaced it with another, completely different, number – without telling me.

But who could restore the status quo? Not one of the numerous people I spoke to. Quite simply, they were unable comprehend what had happened, or why, let alone find a remedy.

The saga became more complicated every time I tried to explain it. After another hour on my mobile, I ended up trying to explain my problem to a nice young man with an American accent. Where are you speaking from? I asked.

“Manila in Philippines,” he replied. Manila! I couldn’t believe it. But he did say he thought he could unravel the mess. Finally, I thought, I’m getting somewhere.

“It’s complicated,” he said. “Tell me about it, “I replied. Then I lost the connection. My blood pressure was in danger of becoming life-threatening.

Then I had a call from a nice young lady in India, whose English wasn’t great, but she explained that it had all been “a mistake” and that my phone line would be restored within a couple of days. I didn’t share her confidence.

But then I discovered something called the BT Community Forum, through which you can email UK-based BT troubleshooters who can actually do something, quickly, about  phone and broadband problems without the need to get involved in the infuriating merry-go-round of selecting options.

If you think my story is complicated, I told one of the team, try explaining it to someone in New Delhi or Manila. Another apology. It seems the catalogue of errors was caused by someone trying to rectify the situation and making it worse, though no one has yet been able to explain why a totally new phone number was created to replace the one I have used for so long.

Everything is now – almost – back to normal.

Meanwhile, the farce continues, as I have just received a letter from BT Customer Services thanking me for my “order” to change my number – to the same number I have used for 25 years. You couldn’t make it up. I’m just praying that this crazy letter has been overtaken by events.

Time for another blood pressure tablet, I think.

by David Jones

Call me cynical if you like – and lots of people do – but the one thing you can always be sure of in Medway is that apathy will rule OK when it comes to consultation on an important local issue.

Take, for example, the fiasco over the Medway Test – Medway’s version of the 11-plus – last year.

For the past seven years, pupils have taken the exam in test centres, rather than their own primary school.

This system has never been popular with parents because the children have to go to a designated test centre – a local secondary school – to sit the exam in unfamiliar surroundings.

After errors and delays during last September’s tests, Medway Council promised to consider allowing pupils to sit the exam in their own school once again.

The blunders in September led to a record number of complaints on our website about a single issue. More than 500 parents demanded action.

The council embarked on a consultation exercise to seek parents’ views and guess how many responded? Just 47. Despite this lamentably poor response, the council’s cabinet will be asked later this month to start the ball rolling for some pupils to sit the exam in their own school this September, with a full return in 2013.

No doubt there are many thousands of parents out there who believe this is the correct decision but, as is usual in Medway when residents are asked for their opinion, hardly anybody bothered.

The same apathy afflicted a public meeting in Medway last month over social care charges. Six people – yes, six – attended a meeting called by the council.

People can hardly complain if the council does what it  likes in view of such a pathetic turn-out. Likewise, parents would have had only themselves to blame if the council had decided that public interest in the 11-plus issue was so limited that the status quo would be retained.

It may be that some parents felt they were wasting their time taking part in a consultation exercise. Sadly, the council does have something of a track record of consulting and then doing what it intended anyway.

In the case of the Medway Test, the council and notably education boss Cllr Les Wicks, received such a kicking in the local media that they dare not have ignored the protests.

Having gone through a consultation exercise, they might have argued they could justify keeping the test centre system because of the poor response.

And, if they had, I expect that considerably more than 47 parents would have complained. Too late, of course. But that’s how apathy works – or, rather, doesn’t.