Monthly Archives: August 2010

If Carlsberg made accountants…

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When he is not wrestling with the Inland Revenue, filing my tax returns and grammatically bitch-slapping this blog, my accountant finds the time to indulge his own love of the written word with literary related courses. His most recent was based on a literary Italian connection, and produced a reading list that includes about six or seven books I have always wanted to read with a bottle of Prosecco.

Here is that list:

  1. Balzac, Honoré de (2007) Sarrasine, London, Hesperus Classics.
  2. Douglas, Norman (2009) South Wind, London, Capuchin Classics.
  3. Forster, E. M. (2007) Where Angels Fear to Tread, London, Penguin Classics.
  4. Godden, Rumer (1995) Pippa Passes, London, Pan Books.
  5. Hawthorne, Nathaniel (1991) The Marble Faun, London, Penguin Classics.
  6. James, Henry (1986) Daisy Miller, London, Penguin Classics.
  7. Mann, Thomas (2008) Death in Venice & Other Stories, New York & London, Vintage Classics.
  8. Spark, Muriel (2006) The Driver’s Seat, London, Penguin Modern Classics.
  9. Williams, Tennessee (1999) The Roman Spring of Mrs Stone, New York & London, Vintage Classics.
  10. Berendt, John (2006) The City of Falling Angels, London, Sceptre.
  11. Brodkey, Harold (1995) Profane Friendship, New York & London, Vintage.
  12. Forster, E. M. (2006) A Room with a View, London, Penguin Classics.
  13. Godden, Rumer (1981) The Battle of the Villa Fiorita, London, Futura.
  14. James, Henry (2007) The Aspern Papers, London, Dodo Press.
  15. James, Henry (2008) The Wings of the Dove, London, Penguin Classics.
  16. Lawrence, D. H. (2007) D. H. Lawrence and Italy: Sketches from Etruscan Places, Sea and Sardinia, Twilight in Italy, London, Penguin Classics.
  17. McEwan, Ian (1998) The Comfort of Strangers, New York & London, Vintage.
  18. Wharton, Edith (1998) Roman Fever, London, Virago Modern Classics

You can read the exploits of a cultured accountant at Pilrig 74

Get over yourself

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Passion is always good. Sometimes ill placed, but always well-intentioned. Be a stickler for the causes you hold dear I say, but be careful of letting a bad mood ruin your day. Enter stage left – Professor Rosenthal. Displaying the stereotype of the rude New Yorker, our angry heroine caused a riot in Starbucks resulting in the police escorting her off the premises, warning her never to return. Now there’s a tax payer expenditure bargain.

What could incite a learned Prof to start a riot in a haven such as Starbucks you ask? Turns out the Prof in question was highly affronted when asked by a barista if she would like butter or cheese with her bagel. Reports vary slightly but it went something like this:

Professor: May I have a multi-grain bagel please?

Barista: Of course. Would you like butter or cheese with that?

The barista is clearly way out of line here and has touched a nerve so raw the professor goes completely off her head and staff  had to call the police in to deal with her. Cleverly speaking to the press later, the Prof explained that she “…refused to say ‘without butter or cheese’. When you go to Burger King, you don’t have to list the six things you don’t want. Linguistically, it’s stupid, and I’m a stickler for correct English.”

A stickler for correct English the Prof may be, but a pompous ignoramus she certainly is. As a business, Starbucks has a USP of training their staff to make your beverage exactly as you want it. They provide a bespoke product based on your immediate wants – not an easy feat when dealing with a whack job. Any bespoke service requires investigation to ascertain exactly what the customer wants. I am also not at all sure I understand the reference to Burger King as a measuring stick for the proper use of English as I fear even our brave Prof may come unstuck when trying to rationalise the ‘whopper’.

What I find interesting about all of this is the venue she chose for her prima donna foot stamping, and not just because right now I would love a hot chocolate without cream. Starbucks is a brand. Wherever you are in the world, you can recognise a Starbucks and take whatever comfort you need from the fact that the branch in downtown Taipei is pretty much the same as the one you visit every morning on your way to work. As a global brand with a global physical presence, Starbucks has done exactly the right thing in creating an ethos, a culture and a language of its own that is internationally recognised. Yes, I would rather ask for a small drink than a tall drink. Yes, we all know the argument against the term ‘latte’. Yes, the figurative hands of Starbucks will never be clean of the blood from when they butchered the cappuccino. However, it is their cappuccino in their world. When I go to Starbucks, I never ask for a cappuccino, because I know they can’t make one. This is called living and learning, and life really can be that simple.  Of course if I was a Professor, I could flounce off to my nearest branch, ask for a cappuccino and then return it with the unhelpful remark ‘I asked for a cappuccino and this appears to be a latte with some froth. Let me try again – one cappuccino please.’  I wonder how long I could keep that up.

What Starbucks have done is to make coffee a versatile designer drink. In a world where you can design your baby, I think asking if you would like butter or cheese with your bagel is at the tame end of the designer/choice spectrum. Starbucks too are sticklers for the correct use of language, except they mean Starbuck-ese.  You can ask for anything you like at the counter, but you have to use their terminology; you gotta speak the lingo. And what’s wrong with that? Walk into any business in any field, there is always an internal language. Why penalise Starbucks however stupid you feel ordering your friend’s skinny venti iced mocha, extra chocolate, no whip, or tall Americano-please-don’t-give-me-a-long-black and hot milk on the side. They even provide big boards with Starbucks to English translations.

A friend of mine who lives in Spain once took me to a typical Catalan coffee shop for a ‘cortado’. I drive my friend nuts because I can’t pronounce the ‘t’ properly, however when alone I seem to be able to smile my way through any translation problem. The cortado is simply the best coffee in the world and would seem to be a simple espresso with hot milk. Although when I ask for that over here, it never tastes the same. Of course, the Spanish drink it at 10am in the morning with a shot of something medicinal and 40 fags on the side which is impossible to replicate in the UK. Would I trade  Starbucks for a traditional Catalan greasy spoon with my cortado served by a hirsute and overweight waiter with a fag in his mouth and an attitude you can see from space? You betcha!

The point I am trying to make is this: if Starbuck-ese pisses you off, why don’t you make your own coffee at home and boycott Starbucks altogether? Just don’t tell us about it; however good you think your English is.

A latte is a latte by any other name

Big Jessies and Rude-Boys

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It would appear while my back was turned that things have changed on the recruitment front. Now, even if you have had an interview, employers do not bother to get in touch to let you know if they want you for a second interview or if you are just not the person they have been looking for all this time. Even if you e-mail them to thank them for their time and reiterate your interest in the role and ask directly if they want you for a second interview (after a week’s wait), their response is blowing in the wind.

When did common courtesy fall out of the workplace? I don’t care how busy you are, or how important you think your role is, if you can’t find the time to respond to an email with a brief ‘thanks but not thanks’, then it is not a new employee you need but a serious rethink of your business. Because you suck. And not in the good way. It makes you look cowardly, and I can’t think of anything worse in a business. I would thank you for doing me a favour by not employing me – because who the hell wants to work for you, you rude son of a bitch – but I can’t be bothered.

Grrrr!

Books that Change your Life

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Guest post by Gordon Binnie – diver, mountaineer-er, cyclist, runner and book devourer

Birdsong by Sebastian Faulks

I first read Birdsong in 1995, not long after it was published. I was incredibly moved by the story and although I have re-read the book a number of times since, I found that the impact of that first reading has not dimmed with the passage of time.

The novel is in several parts and spans nearly 70 years, beginning in 1910 in the city of Amiens in northern France and ending in England in 1979. Whilst there are various stories woven throughout the book, the main story arc is Stephen Wraysford’s experiences in and around the trench warfare in northern France in World War I. 

Before we reach the trenches however, we are introduced to Stephen’s troubled, complex, and intelligent character by way of his part, and subsequent emotional turmoil, in a damaging affair with a French woman trapped in a loveless and barren marriage, before the outbreak of war.

We are then taken four years on, to a time and a place we have only read about, only heard about. Those grainy images on black and white film of the horrors of the ‘war to end all wars’, show speeded up images of these desperate, innocent young men, on all sides of the conflict, led to a senseless and brutal slaughter in the thousands, the hundreds of thousands: the  millions. 

This countless death, for me, is where the book comes alive. This is where Faulks makes his fictional account of one man’s experiences in the trenches seem more real than any of the film I have seen. Faulks takes us deep inside his main character’s thoughts as he struggles to survive, physically and mentally, in a place that is truly beyond what men should ever be capable of thinking of doing to fellow men.

The battle scenes, particularly the infamous Somme attack, are immensely powerful reading, though it is not just the graphic descriptions that shock and then numb the senses, as much as the realisation of the colossal scale of the slaughter and the knowledge that these killing fields are a part of our history. The novel may be fiction but the main events are not in doubt.

The book is intensely thought provoking, urging the reader to probe their own mind and challenging the reader to try to comprehend the horror of the distorted, twisted, utter chaos that has become the soldiers’ reality.

I have never before or since, encountered a novel that touched and moved me in such a way. I will always remember this book and I will always have a copy of it in the house. I know I will pick it up in future and to re-read parts of it again, and again.