Architecture and Morality

I have been wandering around Leeds city centre at lunchtimes since the start of the year.

Given that one can only get so far and still have enough time to get back to the office, as you can probably imagine, the novelty soon wore off.

However, seeing as I am doing it for exercise – having cancelled my gym membership at the end of the year – I have been persevering with it, while trying to find new ways of making it interesting.

First off, I am listening to my Michel Thomas German language course a lot. All I need to take this to the next level (as we say whilst inwardly dying in management meetings) is find someone else who wants to speak German and start speaking to them. In German.

Right now, all I’m doing is walking about whispering to myself – which is, of course, the international language of the mental patient.

Secondly, I am looking up.

Most of the people shuffling around the city streets rarely raise they eyes above the level of the shop-fronts. I, however, have been looking at the uppermost parts of Leeds’ buildings and I’ve reached two conclusions:

1. There is a hell of a lot of vacant commercial property in the city centre - so if you need business premises, you should be able to get a very good deal.

2. If you flooded or buried Leeds to a depth of about 15 feet, you'd actually be left with quite a beautiful place.

There are some really fascinating buildings around which you would never give a second glance to because of the staggeringly banal contents of their ground floors. The most extreme example of former "oooh" and present "meh" surely has to be the one-time Jubilee Hotel on The Headrow – now the "Red Leopard" lapdancing establishment.

My personal favourite is St Paul’s House in Park Square (right). It looks like the Doge’s Palace, only with an “office space to let” sign pinned to the outside.

The Leeds City Markets building (at the top) would not look out of place in Paris or Vienna, despite being inhabited primarily by people offering to unlock stolen mobile phones. And the Town Hall is also a thing of beauty.

THEN, you look at what’s in between these brilliant examples of Victorian ambition and craftsmanship and you realise that if the Victorians were wrong about one thing, it was that history moves forwards towards a better future. 

Pretty much every building from the 20^th century onwards looks horrendous, cheap and nasty.  The court buildings look like they’ve been made out of Lego, for example. And they probably have. 

“Ah, here he goes again, imagining the past was SO MUCH BETTER than the present”, I hear you say. “The reason why old buildings look better than modern ones is that the crap old buildings fell down or were knocked down years ago.”

Please excuse any Prince Charles tendencies here. Some modern buildings are indeed impressive and beautiful in their own way. The Gherkin in London is quite something.

But – to me - they are things you look at and say “that’s a clever statement” rather than “that is a work of art”. Same as the difference between Tracey Emin’s bed and a Caravaggio.

 So, present-day architects: more stone-work please. More domes. More intricacy, less concept please. OK?

Tetley Brewery - or what's left of it

Another thing you notice about Leeds’ buildings is how many of them are completely derelict. I’m not talking about boarded up shops – I mean entire city blocks of buildings going to ruin. The whole area just north of the bus station, for example, around Templar Street and Lady Lane.

Clearly, no one is going to buy them or rent them in their present condition. So why not demolish them?

In fact, here’s an early policy for my future dictatorship. If a building is left unoccupied for more than a year, it has to be EITHER opened up to homeless people OR blown up and returned to nature until someone can think of something worthwhile to put there instead. 

Horsforth and my balls are drenched

Yesterday, I got completely soaked on the way home from work. When I set off in the morning on my trusty scooter, it was a beautiful sunny day.

When I say “beautiful sunny day” you will of course interpret this relatively.  

By the time I arrived at work, it had started to rain and it pretty much didn’t stop from then on. In fact, I don’t think it has stopped yet.

That morning, I did not put my waterproofs on. For some reason, I have developed a bizarre aversion to putting my heavily-armoured and waterproof overtrousers on. It has just become another one of those things I avoid doing even though I almost always feel better after having done so – like shaving or touching ham.

So I just had on normal work trousers and a leather jacket – of a style one might refer to as a “blouson”. Plus helmet and gloves, OBVS.

A brief aside to follow up on and qualify the rave review I gave the Nolan N103 crash helmet back in February 2011.  

1. If you put the helmet on and your hair or face are already a bit wet, the whole “won’t steam up” pinlock magic doesn’t work.
2. The pinlock insert itself has, over the course of a year, wriggled itself a bit loose from the visor being put up and down – and where it has ground against the windscreen, both have scratched at the top and bottom, leaving me with two regions I can’t now see properly out of.

I don’t suppose you get too many reviews of wear and tear on crash helmets, but that, dear friends, you can have for free.

Anyway, back to yesterday morning when I was deciding what to wear. The sun was shining (see disclaimer above) and it is June. How bad could getting a bit wet be?

As the day wore on and the rain came down more and more heavily, but instead of becoming gloomy at the prospect of a soaking my inner Stoic took charge.

“You’re going to get very wet going home, but there’s no way you can avoid getting wet;  you can only get so wet; and as soon as you get home, you can take the wet stuff off. C’mon it’ll be fun,” Emperor of Rome Marcus Aurelius was whispering into my ear.

Knowing that it was an unavoidable certainty rather than something I had to worry might happen, off I went home rather more cheerful than pathetic fallacy might have suggested.  

By the time I got to my bike, I was pretty soggy. By the time I had cleared Westgate, my trousers were wet through.

Well, I thought, if this is what I’ve been fretting about – if this is as bad as it gets – getting wet really is something only IDIOTS are afraid of.

O reader, knew I then what I now know of the extent and hideous process by which one can become even wetter I would have balked at my overconfidence.

I trundled merrily along, zipping in and out of traffic and laughing maniacally (in my head) at the poor benighted car-drivers who would have to sit in their queues for an hour or more – just because they were scared of a little bit of rain!

Soon, though, a cold discomfort spread to my inner thighs...

At this point, I suppose I should warn you that if the thought of my inner thighs is upsetting to you, it would be advisable to stop reading now – as further, more graphic reference will continue to be made to those regions which, if I were an aircraft, would be generically titled “undercarriage”.

That is rather unpleasant, I thought. It’s not unlike that feeling you get after you’ve been swimming and then sat around in your trunks for a while – you think you’re dry, you stand up, and you realise that certain areas are in fact still very wet. Unpleasant, but tolerable.

But shortly afterwards, as I drove through Horsforth (I had decided to go home a slightly different way! I know! Mi vida loca!) I felt what can only be described as a clenching sensation – reminiscent of a prodded snail retreating into its shell.

I don’t know if anyone here has ever dipped their testicles into cold water, but it is not something I can recommend. Gradually, the rain seeped through my undergarments and dug its icy talons into my beleaguered nutbag.

At the same time, let me add, I was grappling with the fact that I had put my helmet on AFTER getting wet – and so my visor was steaming up from the inside, as well as covered with droplets of rain on the outside. Seeing the road and traffic ahead was already pretty difficult, without the added distraction of intense scrotal chilling.

But, man’s capacity for enduring suffering is great. And soon I got used to it. I won’t say that I liked it – but, hey, adversity breeds strength of character, doesn’t it?

Plus, water goes down. Once it’s there, it’s got nowhere else to go.

OR HAS IT?

I shall spare you too detailed a description of what happened next, suffice to say that under certain, possibly very specific circumstances, water can move upwards. How?

CAPILLARY ACTION!

My face froze as I felt the rainwater creeping up my bumcrack. Slowly but inexorably – like a glacier – it made its cold passage.

-------

Epilogue:

In the intensely frustrating manner of HP Lovecraft, I dare not – must not – say any more. You would all go mad from reading it.

But, I for one will never NEVER leave my waterproofs at home again, and when I look into the cloudy sky forever more will I struggle to suppress a shudder. 

Haunting the chapel

I’ve just been robbed by Henry VIII.

Yes, Britain’s favourite wife-killing fatso has cost me about £20 or so 550 years AFTER his death.

“How?”, you may well ask – unless you are already asking “Are you having a psychotic episode, Roger?”

Well, let me tell you – because the erstwhile Tudor monarch could well be reaching out his chubby phantom fingers from beyond the grave to lighten your pockets also if you try to buy a house.

The merrie maniac

Henry VIII, you may recall, was responsible for the dissolution of the monasteries. Much like our present-day rulers, he wanted to grab hold of a load of cash and give some of it to his chums and spend the rest of it on war.

To cut a long story short, when this happened the Church’s liabilities for the repair of church buildings passed to the new owners – which were then generally dumped on the local starving, struggling populace in the form of tithes.

Still with me?

Tithes were then gradually abolished over the following few hundred years.

OR WERE THEY?

Turns out, no one is quite sure if certain bits of land across the country are in fact still liable to pay for repairs to church buildings in whose parishes they may happen to be. The records are sketchy.

In 2003, a couple were charged £100,000 for repairs to an ancient chapel on a farm they had inherited.  The good old House of Lords decided that the Human Rights Act didn’t apply – which is surprising considering how many of its members have undoubtedly inherited ancient chapels.

And so, we return to the present day and the preposterous Chancel Repair Liability Search – for which I have just paid my own tithe, on top of all the other pointless costs on which I have already bent your ears. Eyes. Whatever – sense organs generally. I’m fairly sure I haven’t touched anyone about it.

As I said before, records in this area are sketchy. It’s not clear, even if you check all the available paperwork, whether the property you are buying is potentially liable.

With the same enervating uncertainty as Ant and Dec telling an unpopular celebrity that “it might be you” who has to face the Bushtucker trial (but less than half the charm), Chancel Repair Liability Searches can only tell you that you “might be” liable for a whopping great bill at some unspecified point in the future.

And on what grounds? On the production of some tattered scrap of paper found in the crypt of some OTHER church, which says you are.

That is, if the institution which stands to benefit from finding such evidence digs out documentation which was available only to itself. Now that’s justice.

And so, whither goest risk, hither cometh the insurance industry. You can insure yourself against the danger that you might be financially fucked forever by a law that you not only didn’t know applied to you, but which you couldn’t know applied.

In 2008, the government refused to do anything about this Kafka-esque state of affairs. Its reply to an online petition said:

Chancel Repair Liability has existed for several centuries and the Government has no plans to abolish it or to introduce a scheme for its redemption.  

The Government acknowledges that the existence of a liability for chancel repair will, like any other legal obligation, affect the value of the property in question, but in many cases this effect can be mitigated by relatively inexpensive insurance. It is for the parties involved in a transaction to decide whether or not to take out insurance.

And so the demands of the past over the present are sanctified by the availability of insurance.

Perhaps legal anomalies of this sort are just the price we pay for our “living” constitution – the appendix or coccyx of the body politic.

Indeed, we have many thousands of apparently humorously quaint and charming laws, some 800 of which the Law Commission is looking to get rid of later this year.

Isn’t it delightful that we live in a land where you can technically be pilloried for not tethering your goat correctly on St Swithin’s Day?

No it isn’t – and here, the drummer out of Blur explains why. As he says:

There is no such thing as "technically" being a criminal

Let me paraphrase (and draw perhaps slightly stronger conclusions than a Labour candidate might endorse): these laws put power into the hands of the state which may subsequently be used to suppress activities you had no idea were illegal.

That a person can be criminally liable for something he or she had no idea was illegal and which has never consistently before been treated as illegal is the essence of injustice.

The persistence of these ancient laws is a merkin for the arbitrary exercise of state power – they are the Patriot Act hiding on the village green.

Yeah, it’s only £20 – but it’s the principle of the thing, innit. 

Top Ten English Place Names

The roast cream of old England

Having spent some 15 hours or so as a passenger in a car on English roads this weekend (including two hours at Markham Moor (northbound) services on the A1 awaiting recovery by the AA), I have had more time than usual to reflect on the wonderful variety and velvety richness of our English place names.

Rejoice, sons and daughters of merrie Englande, in the inventive dexterity of your mother tongue.

Rejoice also, for no matter how much modernity - or post-modernity or whatever shit era it is we currently live in – would iron out every crease and rumple of history into a smooth, shiny, ECHR-compliant, sensitivity-trained monotony, the powers that be ain’t never going to be able to change these names for something more reflective of the way we live today.

If they try, however, I am going take out a trademark on “Diversity Good Community” – which is surely some people’s dream future name for London.  

Before I begin to sound too much like the comments section on a Telegraph blog page and make reference to “ZaNU-Labour”, let me explain the methodology.

1. While I like smut as much as the next man, I am ruling out places like Bell End, Cocking and the many places that begin with “Gay” on grounds of being clichéd. You will see innuendo below, but I hope it will at least be relatively virgin innuendo.
2. This is not intended to be a complete or fair list. It’s pretty obviously focused in certain areas. If you have better suggestions, put them in the Comments section below like a good boy/girl.
3. In no way do I vouch for any of these places being actually funny, interesting or unusual. I don’t think I’ve actually been to any of them – I have just seen their names on road signs or on maps. I have no doubt that if I went to any of them and saw a Nisa Local alongside a prestigious new development of David Wilson Homes, or a high street with a Primark, a JD Sports and a load of charity shops, I would find them just as dreary and depressing as almost everywhere else in this country. If you want villages that are actually weird in the sense of interesting as opposed to weird in the sense of creepy, I refer you to the fiction section.

So, without further ado, let the listing commence!

Tydd Gote, Lincolnshire

As previously discussed, I love goats and so a village named after them AND spelled wrong has got to be on the list. Tydd Gote is deep in the Fens, where Lincolnshire, Norfolk and Cambridgeshire not so much collide as seep into one another.

There are a whole host of Tydd-prefixed villages around there. Most of them are named after boring saints (not even good ones, like Botolph or Guthlac) – but you’ve got to love the Gote.

Barnoldswick and Oswaldtwistle, Lancashire

I can’t even say these words without pulling a Wallace and Gromit face. I would like also to give an honourable mention to Birtwistle Standroyd Bungalows in Colne, as delivering the ultimate Lancashire hit.

Heckmondwike, West Yorkshire

Roll that one around your palate, savour the earthy taste of Yorkshire phonemes and contrast with the above. That is the difference between chewing a white red and a red rose for you.

Lumbertubs, Northamptonshire

This whole area looks like a dreary modern suburb, but that name reaches straight out of the Middle Ages and grabs you in its hairy, calloused grip.

Donkey Town, Surrey

We used to live just a few miles from Donkey Town and yet we never went there. How amazing would a town of donkeys be? Probably about as amazing as Dewsbury.

Blubberhouses, North Yorkshire

That is a name that speaks for itself in all its Anglo-Saxon glory.

Lickfold, West Sussex

I promised you smut. Lickfold is very near to the almost as ridiculously-named Lurgashall, in what can only have been intended as an early public health warning.

Burton Coggles, Lincolnshire

Or, to give it its full name, Byrton-en-les-Coggles. Don’t let the sun go down on you here unless you know the secret of man’s red fire.

Hampole, South Yorkshire

Just off the A1, near to the city of Donk. Never fails to raise a smile.

Clenchwarton, Norfolk

Not far from Tydd Gote lies my favourite-named place in the whole country. Regular readers of the Comments section will know my fascination with the word “clench”, and here it is seared into the very land.

Say it out loud and you can taste the piece of grass in your mouth, feel the clay hat dribbling down your head and the rough canvas smock tickling you on the clenchwarton. If there is a more English place - nay WORD - out there than this, I have yet to hear it.

The Illusion of Safety

If it is remotely possible, I am not going to go within one hundred miles of London during the Olympics.

That’s not as a result of a curmudgeonly refusal to join in the spirit of things. I do quite enjoy watching the Olympics. When else do you get to see women’s weightlifting and doubles table tennis in the same day?

Anyone who watched the Beijing Modern Pentathlon show jumping event in 2008 – complete with untrained race horses charging headlong into the fences – will know that there will be some great stuff buried away on the red button coverage.

No, I will definitely watch some of the Olympics – but on TV. I once went to a live sporting event (the 1995 Oxford-Cambridge boat race) and it was crap. Never again. You can’t see properly, there’s no commentary to explain what’s going on, you can’t go to the toilet (in peace, at any rate...) and there are too many people.   

The reason I will not be going anywhere near London if I can help it because if I wanted to live under martial law in a place where the interests of the native population are subordinated to impressing visiting dignitaries, I would go to China or Bahrain. 

As the government installs missile batteries on the tops of buildings in London, one has to wonder exactly whose benefit they are doing this for. Because – and if any counter-terrorism experts or military brass are reading this, please feel free to correct me - if you shot down a hijacked airliner over any part of London, bits of flaming wreckage are almost certainly going to fall into heavily populated areas, aren’t they?

Apparently, some 19,000 military personnel are going to be deployed in London to make sure that foreign investors...I mean sports fans...are kept safe. More than are currently in Afghanistan.

Which brings me on – in my mind, at any rate – to this “little” device I was recently given on opening a new bank account.

I put in my card, type in my PIN and it gives me an access code which I can use to log in to internet banking.

If I don’t have it with me though (or if I have broken it my attempting to put it into my wallet and then sitting on it), I can log in using a number they sent me...in a letter.

So as well as being too big to carry around with me other than in a large bag, the machine is actually pointless because the security it offers is hopelessly undermined by the “back door” Nationwide have kindly provided.

Both the rooftop stingers and Nationwide’s calculator (which doesn’t even do maths) are designed to give the illusion of safety. In fact they create more risk by encouraging complacency about real threats.

100 posts...and for what?

So, this is the hundredth post I have written here on Oh Dear. How Sad. Never Mind.

Let’s take a look back over the highlights.

...

Errr

...

In March last year, I posted a picture of Peppa Pig, which was a HUGE HIT.

That’s it.

Did you enjoy it?

Ooh, you are lawful

Every aspect of popular culture is very keen to tell us how interesting and exciting the legal profession is. The books and films of John Grisham and others and endless TV series – like Elvira’s favourite “The Good Wife” – all paint a picture of lawyers as Ubermenschen.

They’re cleverer than you and me, they’re richer than you and me, they’re harder-working than you or me, and they’re either more ethical than you or me or more ruthless than you or me. Sometimes both. 

Because sometimes, doing the right thing demands a lack of ruth.

Ordinary people (like you or me) are mere cattle to these soaring beings. Only they can protect us, save us or vindicate us, poor victims that we are – only they can enter the Holy of Holies and look The Law straight in the eye.

Which is why every encounter I have ever had with the legal profession has been such a crushing disappointment.

When I did jury service last year, the barristers were very well spoken but they were utterly pedestrian in questioning witnesses and presenting their cases. It was extremely unsexy.

Nevertheless, some of my fellow jurors were not disabused of their preconceptions of these titans walking among us. To them, the sheer impressiveness of these bewigged posh boys was utterly convincing, notwithstanding what they actually said. They were thrown into confusion by the fact that one said one thing, while the other contradicted it. Fortunately, there was a nice, posh, old man in an even bigger wig who told us what to do.

But at least that bore some resemblance in outward form to the mental picture of the legal profession we have all built up.

I await eagerly John Grisham’s upcoming “The Conveyancer”.

As previously mentioned, the Sicilies are moving house. After Stamp Duty, legal fees make up the second largest expense of the average house-mover.

Has anyone ever met a conveyancing solicitor? I haven’t. In all of my house moves, I have never once seen face-to-face the person who I paid to do this work.  

And what does this work consist of? Sending me letters asking me to get things for them, waiting a few days, and then passing those things on to another solicitor, who will write a letter to the other party (after a few days), as far as I can tell. Being a conveyancer must be much like being a personal trainer, insofar as it involves getting paid to make the person paying you work.

On one occasion, this involved Elvira and I driving from Woking to Oxford on a weekend to put some paperwork through the letterbox of a locked and closed solicitor's office - just to make sure they had it on Monday morning. 

If you pop down to WH Smith, you can pick up a DIY Last Will and Testament kit for a few quid. Go back 20 years or so and if you wanted a will, you had to get a lawyer to do it for you – no doubt at the cost of several hundred pounds.

Today, most conveyancing seems to get done in glorified call centres by unqualified or semi-qualified legal executives, overseen – on paper at least – by an actual solicitor.

And it can, because much like making a will, conveyancing appears to be a semi-skilled bit of administrative work which has been mystified by the self-interest of the legal caste into yet another tax on getting anything done.  Godspeed the day when you can print a DIY conveyancing kit off the internet and this professional closed shop is broken up.

Maybe I’m wrong. Maybe it’s really just like it is on TV. But somehow, I doubt it.

I know that my own line of work is little better than the fleas that plague the vultures feeding on the rotting carcass of late capitalism, but if a tree fell on the whole legal profession and no one was there to see it, would anyone care?