Most important: go to Texas, because virtually everything you think about Texas and Texans is wrong, and since coming back I’ve decided it’s actually Europeans who are dreadful people – snotty, self-important, dismissive, ignorant, petty, humourless nations with a proud history of persecution and a propensity to dictatorship. (Post-holiday blues, moi?)

Texans are great. Humour as dry as a bone, enormously hospitable and all consumed with an honest curiosity about why on earth anyone would come visit them.

I am going to be saying “Awesome!” a lot for the next couple weeks.

My mates are also great people. Ten days hanging around with such focused, straightforward, do-y people did me the power. Thanks, guys.

Swimming is awesome. I need to do more.

Tubing is not just awesome, it’s totally awesome, but doing it on the Guadalupe River at 40 Celsius is going to be rather nicer than doing it on the Thames in October, so that’s one to save for a future trip.

Aside: the ice-cream place where M bought me a bakewell tart ice-cream in Richmond today is also awesome, but is not Diet.

The Ford Escape is the worst, sorriest, most appalling excuse for a simulation of something which might under the right circumstances qualify as a vehicle that I want to write to its design team and invite them to explain themselves very briskly indeed. Whether it was drifting round corners if taken at above 2 mph, creaking as though it were ship-built, or just being completely and utterly gutless, it never once gave me a moment’s pleasure. Driving it for a week ought to be reserved for people who hurt kittens for pleasure.

I have now eaten in a revolving restaurant. (In the linked page, I am the diner on the right, enjoying a typically low-key soft drink.) And we got there by going along the River Walk — a successful urban regeneration project for once….

Perfect final activity: watching beer be bottled, sterilised, labelled and packed in the Spoetzl Brewery in Shiner, “the cleanest little town in Texas”.

Texans are proud of things; it seems to come naturally to them. On the odd occasion they do have to go looking a little harder for the prize, though. I was constantly expecting women to mention in passing that their son, Skeeter, was the tallest pre-pubertal Caucasian teen born south of San Antonio on a Thursday since 1972.

Should more spring to mind, there will be updates.

Now to the meat:

Since the coalition came to power just over a year ago

Good, so the subject is clear. From the context, you see, I thought it was about rioting. Silly me.

the country has seen multiple student protests, occupations of dozens of universities, several strikes, a half-a-million-strong trade union march

Oh, Nina, you silly romantic, I can hear the Internationale from here. How stirring!

and now unrest on the streets of the capital

… excuse me? So, framing this as a culmination of a trades union movement. Have you cleared this with the TUC?

(preceded by clashes with Bristol police in Stokes Croft earlier in the year)

*blank face*

Each of these events was sparked by a different cause, yet all take place against a backdrop of brutal cuts and enforced austerity measures.

And indeed a backdrop of acceleration due to gravity being approximately 9.8 ms^2, my having nasal hair, and the MPAA bringing lawsuits. Putting two things in the same sentence doesn’t excuse you from showing reasons for your answer. Now, please explain the difference between “cuts” and “austerity measures” — because it looks a lot like they mean the same thing and you’re just using them to park some spare adjectives. Talking of which, “enforced” leaves me near-speechless. I’d love to know what that word is doing other than rather calculatedly sitting there, looking at me with big, soft eyes, welling up with tears as a jackbooted Tory hits it repeatedly with a chain for not being rich enough to care about. What appalling condescension.

The government knows very well that it is taking a gamble, and that its policies run the risk of sparking mass unrest on a scale we haven’t seen since the early 1980s.

Because the increases in spending planned aren’t large enough? Doesn’t it really risk sparking a strain of polemical journalism — of which I think both sides have more-or-less occasionally been guilty — which cares less about accuracy than about getting the Tories out no matter what? And isn’t it the wind-up articles and the argumentum ad nauseam which insidiously tells people that these things are “understandable” and “happening in context” which actually lower the moral barriers to mass unrest on that scale? In short, are you making a responsible use of free speech?

With people taking to the streets of Tottenham, Edmonton, Brixton and elsewhere over the past few nights, we could be about to see the government enter a sustained and serious losing streak.

Sorry, you’ve lost me. Yet again, you’re putting two things in the same sentence and assuming this means they are related, or that it’s obvious they are. Let me bring bad news: it isn’t. I am reading this to learn. You are showing little evidence of being interested in teaching me.

The policies of the past year may have clarified the division between the entitled and the dispossessed in extreme terms

No, really, this simply won’t do. Please explain this division to me. I am interested. What is it? In which “extreme terms” has it been clarified? The most extreme things I can think of are the housing benefit changes and the ESA reassessments, and whilst I can understand there being a legitimate debate about them, I don’t read them as “extreme”.

but the context for social unrest cuts much deeper. The fatal shooting of Mark Duggan last Thursday, where it appears, contrary to initial accounts, that only police bullets were fired, is another tragic event in a longer history of the Metropolitan police’s treatment of ordinary Londoners, especially those from black and minority ethnic backgrounds, and the singling out of specific areas and individuals for monitoring, stop and search and daily harassment.

I do believe you just actually made a point, presumably by accident — although I see you couldn’t resist a weaselly “ordinary” in there. Though I don’t necessarily agree with you — any policing policy which did not increase its levels of monitoring in response to an increase in an area’s gun crime rate, for instance, would have to produce a pretty convincing explanation of why doing so was a bad idea.

One journalist wrote that he was surprised how many people in Tottenham knew of and were critical of the IPCC, but there should be nothing surprising about this. When you look at the figures for deaths in police custody (at least 333 since 1998 and not a single conviction of any police officer for any of them), then the IPCC and the courts are seen by many, quite reasonably, to be protecting the police rather than the people.

The IPCC are not the Crown Prosecution Service, so they don’t decide whether to bring criminal proceedings or not. They are also not the courts. They are also not juries. You may well have identified one of the reasons to have suspicions of the IPCC’s “I”, but I don’t think you have given enough to achieve your “quite reasonable”.

Combine understandable suspicion of and resentment towards the police based on experience and memory with high poverty and large unemployment and the reasons why people are taking to the streets become clear. (Haringey, the borough that includes Tottenham, has the fourth highest level of child poverty in London and an unemployment rate of 8.8%, double the national average, with one vacancy for every 54 seeking work in the borough.)

I might not agree with it, but I could understand an argument which read protest as a product of poverty and unemployment. I could understand one which described a grieving and legitimately aggrieved community rising up. I think we both have to say that your account doesn’t provide very much in the way of explanation for looting. Or at least, if it does, you’re not prepared to help me get it.

Those condemning the events of the past couple of nights in north London and elsewhere would do well to take a step back and consider the bigger picture:

Sorry again — “the events” is weaselling. Which ones? The riots? The looting? (Oh, all these terrible, loaded, negative terms for pilfering, committing larceny, having a relaxed sense of ownership….)

Anyway, you’re warning me: I would do well to look at the bigger picture. If I don’t, you imply, there will be Consequences. And they are:

a country in which the richest 10% are now 100 times better off than the poorest, where consumerism predicated on personal debt has been pushed for years as the solution to a faltering economy, and where, according to the OECD, social mobility is worse than any other developed country.

Right, I’m still waiting for you to make a point. Too many people are poor: I agree. Yes, bad. Jolly good, you’ve said something we can all agree on. What’s that? Ah, you’re objecting to the rich, not the poor. I think that’s rather a silly focus, personally. “Don’t worry, Mrs. Jones! Your poverty may be crushing, but rest assured that we think people having a lot of money is bad.” Anyway, back to your argument. The consequences are:

As Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett point out in The Spirit Level: Why Equality is Better for Everyone, phenomena usually described as “social problems” (crime, ill-health, imprisonment rates, mental illness) are far more common in unequal societies than ones with better economic distribution and less gap between the richest and the poorest. Decades of individualism, competition and state-encouraged selfishness – combined with a systematic crushing of unions and the ever-increasing criminalisation of dissent – have made Britain one of the most unequal countries in the developed world.

Oh Lord, you’ve read a book. You’re so happy about it, you’ve decided to put the consequences off for another paragraph. But anyway, let’s tackle this one. I’ve not read The Spirit Level but I’m aware it’s this year’s Nudge and I am bad for not having read it. You’re saying: there’s no such thing as [society *cough*] “social” problems; they are at root economic ones. Although you do manage to mangle equality and financial equality, which I think is rather a limit in your view of humanity. In those countries where the poor are not so very poor, you have less crime, better health, etc. (Alternatively, you’re saying that if Bill Gates moved to Britain tomorrow, I would be statistically slightly more ill than I am at present.) Because you’re not going to let an interesting point get away unruined, you repeat yourself (“better distribution … less gap”).

You then list some things you think are bad (Boo! to individualism & competition) and then run off on a different limb for a while (“state-encouraged selfishness” is going to keep you out of the speechwriting trade for a while)… until you get to yet another point — that we are unequal! Huzzah for paragraphs. Bear in mind though that the inequality in your terms is caused by “selfishness” and “competition”, which is good, because it relieves you of the moral duty to actually do anything about poverty per se and gives you the simple option of passing the buck. Phew!

Images of burning buildings, cars aflame and stripped-out shops may provide spectacular fodder for a restless media, ever hungry for new stories and fresh groups to demonise, but we will understand nothing of these events if we ignore the history and the context in which they occur

Oh, those nasty demonising media. Thank heavens you’re not up for any demonising yourself.

I approach this as a piece of persuasive writing and I think it fails. It is too woolly, too ineptly rhetorical, too polemic. It makes claims greater than it can deliver. It is overbroad. It is lazily structured. It is self-satisfied and unquestioning and incurious and coercive and utterly dismaying that this is something the Guardian would publish with every appearance of intending people should read it.

I am an equal opportunities fisker and will happily fisk anything I find this annoying. Please send me things you think might enrage me and I will happily fisk them for you if they do.

In some ways this is nice; it’s a little trip down memory lane. But in other ways it’s actually slightly scary: the amount of sentiment stored up in what is, at root, junk, is pretty impressive. Of course some of it is good old fashioned false-economy… “Maybe I’ll need that, one day….” One never specifies what contingency might render it necessary to have (say) three feet of sealed-air anti-shock packaging so immediately available that having to order some would constitute personal or professional disaster. But still, there are little tendrils — and let’s get this in perspective, I’m talking about the very tiniest of barely-detectable twinges, not great wracking aches here — of guilt or regret or something like them, wrapped cobweb-like around these things in their places.

I suppose in a way this is like moving. Every time I did it as a kid (plenty, though not obscenely frequently) I felt (in retrospect) the freedom of complete self-reinvention, the discarding of a previous life like an outgrown shell. This is how I came out: on my first day at sixth form, four hundred miles from my comprehensive, I mentioned it in passing, was an object of headline curiosity for a month, and carried on with everything else in life with an iron self-confidence borne of that reinvention. And though I’ve moved since I’ve been in London, it’s always been within the same job, or within West London, or in some way just not really a “proper” move: there has been no sense of daring, with all due love and respect to my former (and brilliant) housemates, no real sense of jumping in the deep end or changing horses.

So perhaps this is my ode to doing something a bit more quotes-unquotes dangerous….

Moral of story:
Do not stay in tourist hotels. Ring ahead and check that they think they’ve sold you what they’ve actually contracted to supply. Never dip below four stars.

I feel like a freed hostage.

Disclosure: I am a non-politico, but I have friends with strongly held views across the spectrum. And I also understand the difference between a stated intent and an executed policy, but I am essentially handing out the rope here for these good folks to use.

But essentially, I was kind of hoping we’d get the Tories doing the financial stuff and the LibDems doing the social stuff, because the Tories may have detoxed after the bitter insult of Section 28, but I am not going to blindly start trusting them without some evidence of goodwill. The work is for them to do, not me.

Overall verdict: a lot of fine words, a lot of stuff I want to think about more, but this may not be the end of all things as we know them.

Numbers on their own on a line are page changes; numbers followed by text indicate sections in the document. Even where I had nothing to say I’ve put the headings in in case something occurs to me.

9
1 Banking
“First free national financial advice service” sounds sound
2 Business
10
“opportunities for employee ownership” in Royal Mail — is this the John Lewis Partnership model finally taking hold?

“end the ban on social tenants starting businesses in their own homes” — Jesus, this wasn’t allowed? “You’re poor! stay where you belong!” Awful.

11
3 Civil Liberties

The aspects of Labour’s government which most distressed me — that a party that freed me from S28, an unequal age of consent, and the offence of Gross Public Indecency should seek so much control and take such an authoritarian/managerial approach to society crushed me a little bit.

Freedom Bill — well, until you say what’s in it, that’s meaningless. Look at what was supposed to be in the last Coroners Bill.

Scrapping ID cards– hooray, I am safer already

Review libel laws — review, uncharacteristically modest language from these wild rebels… expect whatever we get, I suppose.

“British Bill of Rights” — tacit acknowledgement that previous Tory policy on HRA was bonkers although this new policy may not be unproblematic

4 Communities and local government

“radical devolution” — yes, but what does that mean? Problems when there is a centre still left to be blamed, whether or not it was responsible.

“radical planning reform” — well, won’t find many people who agree with current system, but is that because planning is basically doomed but necessary? “Open Source Planning”? Jesus, these people. Oh wait — it really exists! As you might expect, link to actual Open Source is tenuous and sort of first-year English student-y.

“fast track process for major infrastructure projects” –> like 3rd runway, no doubt. Achem. Or alternatively concreting over an estuary and moving Heathrow 40 miles to the east.

“publish and present to Parliament” — nice to see the old girl getting a look in, let’s see whether this lot are really any better than Labour

“national planning framework” – done right this is good; principles agreed in a representative forum, implementation left locally. What will appeals and difficult decisions look like?

12
“more protection against aggressive bailiffs” – not controversial, surely.

“phase out the ring-fencing of grants to local government and review the unfair Housing Revenue Account” — now, let me see … this is decentralising budgetary control, isn’t it? OK, so there’s money behind the rhetoric. The HRA is a new one on me although something about being allowed to keep the revenue on selling off council houses or something comes to mind… anyone?

“give councils a general power of competence” — hmm, legalistic language. What does that mean? What powers will now be in the less-scrutinised hands of the local council rather than the well-reported-upon national government (btw, that’s an argument for stronger local reporting, not necessarily for weaker local govt)

“tougher rules to stop unfair competition by local authority newspapers” – i.e. there are rules at the moment which aren’t working. Our council used to publish an eminently recyclable glossy with a periodical hagiography of a council member and some pseudo-lifestyle nonsense padding it out — which I assume was at my expense since it had, as I remember, little in the way of advertising. I can’t say as I blame them. But then the council always seemed to be the main advertiser in our local free weekly anyway. Maybe it’s worth obliging papers to carry council notices free to preserve their financial independence? Can’t think that would help any of them keep afloat, though….

“review the effectiveness of the raising of the stamp duty threshold for first-time buyers” — and do what as a result? It’s the dreaded “review” again….

5 Consumer protection

“ban excessive interest rates on credit and store cards” – hard to believe there are people out there who don’t know these things are a bad idea and use them nonetheless, but this I’m sure they do. And it’s hardly the most scrupulous of markets.

“introduce a seven-day cooling-off period for store cards” — how will this work? A quick check suggests that such a thing doesn’t work at the moment — the model generally seems to be “10% off if you take out a card today and pay on it” which means this actually spells an additional end to selling people on the card under the influence of an impulse purchase. Humans are terribly irrational in these situations so this can only be good sense in tackling the black hole of personal debt.

“oblige credit card companies to provide better information to their customers in a uniform electronic format” – yippee! Standardised data enable comparison; standardised format of standardised data enables automation of comparison. Now those online best-product services can tell you how credit cards compare far more easily. Warning: standards are *difficult*. This kind of thing, of course, makes it all the more important that the record industry can’t cut your internet connection off just because your kids are accused (accused only, mind) of downloading songs in violation of copyright without judicial oversight. But hey. Associated with someone formally innocent of a minor civil offence? You shouldn’t be allowed to know which financial products are best for you! (yes, I know the burden of proof varies in civil and criminal cases, but hey. When did I ever let that get in the way of a good bit of rhetoric?)

13
“an Ombudsman in the OFT who can proactively enforce the Grocery Supply Code of Practice” — either very good if tackling the giant supermarket chains, or awful if it means they pick suppliers outside OFT’s jurisdiction instead of UK growers/producers…. Also, full marks for using English’s only loan word from Swedish.

“‘off-grid’” made it into the programme for government? I can’t imagine this under Thatcher.

6 Crime and Policing

“We will ban the sale of alcohol below cost price” not unreasonable….

14
“We will promote better recording of hate crimes against disabled, homosexual and transgender people, which are frequently not centrally recorded” — I get a whiff of weasel about this and would love to see what it means in practice. What’s the problem– the hate crime or the lack of central recording? But it’s good to see trans- as well as cis- people in there.

“We will not permanently ban a substance without receiving full advice from the Advisory Council on the Misuse of Drugs” — mealy-mouthed again. A rolling temporary ban would have much the same effect, and receiving advice is far from the same as acting in accordance with it. They’re stuck exactly where Labour were here and I don’t expect to see anything very much different in their attitude towards science in this area. Don’t forget: Facts are irrelevant, principles are what matter. People are less important than ideas. How many tractors have you produced in Ukraine this year, comrade? Hmph.

“review the operation of the Extradition Act — and the US/UK extradition treaty — to make sure it is even-handed” — again, reviewing is not the same as committing to action, but “make sure” sounds better. Gary McKinnon has a hope yet.

7 Culture, Ol**pics, Media and Sp**t (pardon the language, but I feel I have to report it)

“maintain the independence of the BBC, and give the NAO full access to the BBC’s accounts to ensure transparency” — sounds like LDs tempered wilder Tory desire to generally shaft Aunty, but financial shafting could be coming anyway given opening of accounts. Am not a licence-fee payer so don’t get an entitlement to an opinion, I guess.

“encourage the performance of more live music” providing, presumably, that it is not characterised by the emission of a succession of repetitive beats, or being played by people with disreputable hairstyles?

15

8 Defence

Some really rather good things, here.

“providing support for ex-Service personnel to study at university” — huzzah. HM Forces can be a great force for social progress but many of the people who put their lives on the line (and their families on a roller skate) for their country are doing so at a time when their contemporaries are taking ‘A’ levels and getting all the familiar letters and experiences that employers often use as a sine qua non when recruiting. Here’s hoping this is for all ex-Service personnel, and not just the Ruperts.

“extra support for veteran mental health needs” — veterans with mental health problems are a shockingly large proportion of our prison population. We should be helping.

“reviewing the rules governing the awarding of medals” — er… what? What’s the problem we’re addressing here?

“look at whether there is scope to refurbish Armed Forces’ accommodation from efficiences within the Ministry of Defence” — I grew up knowing only that PSA was useless. When I was in my teens, our married quarter was fitted with central heating for the first time — in the 1990s. You can’t tell me there’s no scope for increased efficiency amongst things in the MoD that are frankly less important than providing decent accommodation to Service personnel and their families.

9 Deficit Reduction

9th of 31, eh? Get some nice things in before the pain…

10 Energy and Climate Change

17

“LDs have long opposed any new nuclear construction. Conservatives, by contrast, are committed to allowing the replacement of existing nuclear power stations provided that they are subject to the normal planning process for major projects (under a new National Planning Statement), and also provided that they receive no public subsidy.” Has anyone here read Sustainable Energy — without the hot air? No, didn’t think so. But sensible tackling head on of contentious matter and how it will be handled.

11 Env food and rural affairs

I know nothing: I am but a simple shoemaker.

18

12 Equalities

Interesting to look at who gets to be equal — it’s still little groups of people whose equality isn’t quite up to scratch yet, rather than just everyone. Which I don’t actually have a problem with, btw: it’s just another example where you have to compromise on the purity of an idea to achieve something approaching it in reality.

“right to request… to all employees” — nice, although to my mind the right is actually to have the request considered, not to make it in the first place. Acknowledges more people could benefit from flexible working (and society in general, too, if done right, I guess….)

“stop the deportation of asylum seekers who have had to leave particular countries because their sexual orientation or gender identification puts them at proven risk of imprisonment, torture or execution” — but I suspect that this was to some extent what the old system was, too: there was just a set of decisions that said, No, no, being gay in Iran is fine, no risk there. How is this going to avoid doing that, or is it just fine words?

19

13 Europe

*FOOM!*

14 Families and Children

“investigate a new approach to helping families with multiple problems” — yes, you’re right, this Big Society idea is brash and bold, isn’t it?

20

“take steps to tackle the… sexualisation of childhood” — bearing in mind that children do exhibit sexual behaviours and characteristics, and it’s probably better to address the issues rather than banning sex education. A whole raft of things could be behind this.

15 Foreign Affairs

16 Government Transparency

“We will require public bodies to publish online the job titles of every member of staff and the salaries and expenses of senior officials paid more than the lowest salary permissible in Pay Band 1 of the Senior Civil Service pay scale, and organograms that include all positions in those bodies.” — wow, Organograms! Didn’t they have those in Barbarella?

21

“We will require anyone paid more than the Prime Minister in the centrally funded public sector to have their salary signed off by the Treasury.” Fair enough. Providing that the sign off is, like, actually hard to get.

“We will create a level playing field for open- source software and will enable large ICT projects to be split into smaller components.” I mean, fine… but the yoke between these two clauses is not an obvious one. I wouldn’t mind a signpost. But then I’m reading in a hurry.

“We will create a new ‘right to data’ so that government-held datasets can be requested and used by the public, and then published on a regular basis.” — slightly curious really that data produced for our servants at our collective expense isn’t already available in this way as a standard part of gathering it, but I guess you need new brooms de temps en temps.

In sum: all the numbers go on the internets. Which seems fair enough. Look at what theyworkforyou have achieved with this sort of data about governance. Lots of potential (good and bad), but seldom do better decisions result from less knowledge. Providing the data are interpreted right and treated with caution. Where’s the National Statistician in all this?

17 Immigration

“end the detention of children for immigration purposes” — and it was Labour who brought this in, yes? Labour. For shame.

22

18 International Development

“honour our commitment to spend 0.7% of GNI on overseas aid from 2013, and to enshrine this commitment in law” — not bad in these economic circumstances.

“review what action can be taken against ‘vulture funds’” Note that VFs, unlike every other bit of terminology here, don’t qualify for capital letters because they are Evil. But it’s the “r” word again….

23

19 Jobs and Welfare

I can’t bring myself to think about this, really I can’t.

“We will re-assess all current claimants of Incapacity Benefit for their readiness to work” oh, bugger, I’ve started anyway. Here we go again. Has your permanent disability cleared up yet? Has your leg grown back? I don’t mind saying you’re going to cut off non-genuine claimants, but isn’t this a bit like accusing everyone in the country of fraud and then prosecuting them all to find out who was really guilty? ‘Twas ever thus.

20 Justice

“We will introduce a ‘rehabilitation revolution’ that will pay independent providers to reduce reoffending, paid for by the savings this new approach will generate within the criminal justice system.” Er, doesn’t it have to generate the savings before you can spend them?

24

“We will change the law so that historical convictions for consensual gay sex with over- 16s will be treated as spent and will not show up on criminal records checks.” I’m finding it hard to accuse this lot of pervasive homophobia right now, you know. Not a squeak of “Won’t someone think of the children?”

“We will extend anonymity in rape cases to defendants.” Laudable in a country with a press as hysterical and prurient as ours.

21 National Security
22 NHS

Another spot of dragon-slaying. This really is the final stroke of the detoxification programme. I am wildly interested now to compare this to the Tory and LibDem manifestos.

Sadly reading this makes me realise what a complicated set up the NHS is; I barely understand most of this stuff. I hope Mr. Lansley is all he’s cracked up to be.

26
23 pensions and Older People

Mostly uncontroversial I would have thought; nice to see that Equitable people will be getting a payout at (very) long last.

24 Political Reform

Ah, number 1 on the agenda for Mr. Clegg obviously suffered a bit in the deal.

“fixed-term Parliaments” — good? This election lasted from some time last Summer and wiped out a whole series of other, more important debates. Too long. I don’t know enough to make a judgement on the 55% issue.

27

AV – not right now, I’m still thinking. FPTP may not be perfect but my experience in designing complex systems suggests that that shiny perfect simple alternative you have in mind probably has some significant flaws that you haven’t discovered yet. On this sort of stuff I freely admit to small-c conservative tendencies. I don’t want an Italian government here. I don’t want the BNP in Parliament. (In fact even Caroline Lucas gives me the heebie-jeebies.)

“a commission to consider the ‘West Lothian question’” — all I can hear is Sellar and Yeatman on the Irish Question (“Henry VII was very good at answering the Irish Question…”)

“cut the perks and bureaucracy associated with Parliament” — perks for who? Vague, vague, all is vague! “We will make… the thing… be less… y’know.”

“We will ensure that any petition that secures 100,000 signatures will be eligible for formal debate in Parliament. The petition with the most signatures will enable members of the public to table a bill eligible to be voted on in Parliament.” — very few petitions, I assume, ever trouble six digits. “The most signatures” over what period? Is this going to be an annual thing, like the X Factor?

“We will give residents the power to instigate local referendums on any local issue” — nothing stops this from happening now: A campaigning group in Twickenham, for instance, set up a referendum carried out by the independent Electoral Reform Services. This means nothing at all unless there is some obligation on a local authority or other body to seriously consider referendum results where those results reach a certain threshold, surely? (Rather like the right to request flexible working — the important part is not the right to ask, but the obligation on the employer to seriously consider the request.)

28
25 Public Health
“greater access to talking therapies” — laudable, but these are still constrained by the supply of therapists. How will they ensure this supply is adequate to demand?

26 Schools

29

So much to think about… but I note with personal interest: “We will help schools tackle bullying in schools, especially homophobic bullying.” The talk is certainly being talked. How will the walk be walked?

27 Social Action
30
28 Social Care and Disability
29 Taxation

“personal allowance” — this seems sensible. Can’t think of an objection. Better than the 10p rate…

“budget resolutions to introduce transferable tax allowances for married couples” — last time I looked, this included civil partnerships. Does it still?

31

30 Transport

Electric vehicles! Yay!

31 Universities and FE

On the other hand I could be persuaded to do certain things to myself, including this absolutely stunning Dr. Teeth tattoo…

via boingboing.net

So I bought a very cheap book from Waterstones’ online store and decided to download it legally. First off, I had to install Sony’s Reader Library software. Sometimes it’s called the EBL, which means the same thing, you just have to kind of guess that. It looks like an Air app, but installing it requires a restart (my first in a month, but hey, I’m open minded at this point).

Now comes the fun part: downloading the book. Waterstones give me a page telling me I have to have Digital Editions installed (which, as it happens, I know I don’t, but their sales completion page disagrees with their own eBook FAQ). So I click on the Digital Editions link to see if I really can install it — and am told that whilst doing so is mandatory and supported, it is also “System”, which means impossible and unsupported:

(By the way, the brown button is a link, which I clicked hoping it would explain what was going on, but it takes you to this page. Ho hum. I’d like to know what the minimum system requirements are, because I’m doing all this on a month-old Core i5 iMac with 4GB of RAM and about 900GB of spare disk space, so their target market here is going to be pretty slim: Crays? A Beowulf cluster of them?)

OK, think I, I am bigger than this. Just because they’re saying I have to download Digital Editions doesn’t mean I actually have to download Digital Editions. I can use the EBL (that’s “EBL” for “Reader Library”, remember) instead of Digital Editions. So I ignore the warning on the site and nervously click the button anyway. Sure enough, a file downloads. Woo! I am having a success here! Much happiness. This is a “licence file” which is a pointer to content held somewhere else. Now all I do is double-click the file, and Reader Library launches. Woo!

Now it advises me that, to open this file, I will need to authorise this computer for Adobe DRM. Fine, think I, this is OK; in fact I *have* a Digital Editions account for when I was playing around with this when I first got the Reader before there was Mac software for it. So I tap in the email address, click in the password field, and then my keyboard stops working. Ten minutes of grief later, including fetching an old keyboard from the wardrobe in case the Sony software was unhappy about Bluetooth keyboards being used on password fields (laudable security-consiousness?) I realise that you actually just have to restart a random number of times and never use the mouse and then sometimes you will be able to type in the password field.

Deep breath, cup of coffee. Not that I would, but if I were to have taken the piracy route, I would now have been fifty pages into the book. As it is I have a new piece of software and a headache and less money and a wonky muscle from trying to extract the keyboard from the top of the wardrobe. But all this has been carefully planned out by all these nice people so probably it’ll all be very smooth now.

But of course, it isn’t.

Having finally got the thing to accept that, yes, these keystrokes are intended for that textfield, I triumphantly click on “Yes” to authorise this computer. The dialog box closes and… well, that’s it. It’s closed.

Skip ten minutes with Sony’s online help, Waterstones’ FAQs, and I learn that if I select “About Reader Library” it will tell me whether the computer has been successfully authorised for Adobe DRM. I duly so select and discover that all my clicking has had no effect whatsoever as this computer is not authorised, etc. etc. You could see this one coming, right?

So I repeat the whole sorry business. And it’s miserable.

And it doesn’t work.

Now fuming, and convinced that, were there justice in the world, every person responsible for this user interaction fiasco would be burning in a pit of molten glass, I decide to relax, let my mind wander, and remember that I am an intelligent software designer and that I can figure this out. Of course, the answer is to install Digital Editions (let’s just remind ourselves that, for reasons I am not authorised to know, my system doesn’t meet the fabled Minimum Requirement), authorise *that* on first run, and then restart the Reader Library. Then double-click on the book. Sorry, the licence for the book. Then it opens, then it downloads it. I weep with very joy.

Then I drag the book from the “Library” entry to the “Reader” entry and am prompted to authorise my reader…. which was fine, actually, but you can imagine the thoughts pounding through my mind in enormous nervousness.

Moral of the story: a legitimate purchase cost me a couple of quid for a sample book, about an hour and a half out of my Sunday, a headache, a pulled muscle, and total loss of any remaining calm. I realise that there are all sorts of very difficult issues here for Waterstones and for Sony in keeping publishers happy and in providing support across multiple third parties, but let’s be clear:

• There was no consistent attempt on Waterstones’ part to explain what I, as an end user on a supported platform, needed to do to get the content I had purchased. The only attempt there was was basically wrong (“You must install Digital Editions”). I would recommend they test their usability on the entire product stack because even if 90% of this wasn’t their fault, it’s still their brand I had the relationship with. And I am telling people how bad it was.
• Sony, Sony, Sony. You have finally done Mac support. I love you. But please user test your site and call your software by the same name throughout. I beg you. And I know it’s difficult-to-impossible with the geographically fragmented content market to give consistent directions to users, but see if there’s anything you can do. And fix the Adobe DRM in Reader Library – it’s the sole reason people install this over, say, the excellent and free-as-in-speech Calibre, so you should be testing the bejesus out of it, not releasing something that kind of works. This does your brand no good at all. And I am telling people how bad it was.
• And oh, oh, Adobe. I don’t know what to say. You’ve found a market for this, you’ve sold it efficiently, but you are not delivering a good customer experience. You are, in fact, conspicuously inserting yourself as yet *another* party into a transaction which, even without your help, would have been significantly less pleasant than just plain old stealing. Sort out the message I get on the Waterstones site. Sort out the Sony Reader Library software for them (it looks like an Air app and I would assume Sony are just plugging in a DE authentication module from you rather than building one of their own)

So, maybe I will occasionally buy the odd non-free eBook through this route. After all, I’ve sorted all the tools out now. But I dread the day one of the parties upgrades something and I lose another Sunday afternoon to trying to have a bit of Wodehouse to flip through. And all of this because I was trying to give you my money! You’ve got to do better than this, guys. Manning manage to sell ebooks I can download immediately and read easily without any of this piddling about at all. Every page has my name on it. I have no objection to that, none. I have never pirated one because they’re damn good books and I believe it’s right to repay the authors. But where you are concerned, I am a pirate and must be protected against. So I, who try to do things the legitimate way, lose my temper and my hair while someone who is not so inclined can very easily just go and download the thing in five minutes and read it on any of his devices.

Could you just put up a paypal link accepting donations and let me get my content from BitTorrent? That would definitely be way, way simpler.

1. “Gosh, a lot of you are actually driving very sensibly” — which is a shame, because a lot of them actually are for once.
2. “Your strategy of revving it high, throwing it in first and then rapidly releasing the clutch has achieved its predictable effect in making you go sideways. Why do you look so perplexed?” — because not everyone has quite got the hang of it.
3. “I don’t care, ma’am, if one word from your children could bring peace to the Middle East: I am not walking in the road to avoid them when you have them strung out across the entire pavement.” — because I am not always completely lovely to everyone
4. “Yes, you’re right; your rear fog intensifier *should* be turned on, even though there is no snow and visibility is perfect. It is, as you so astutely surmise, an infra-red lamp which melts away the snow to the benefit of the driver following you. You are being public-spirited and are not merely an idiot who is blinding everyone.” — because sometimes I’m not above low sarcasm
5. “Would you like to get in?” — which I would have said, after stopping and opening the boot, to the woman following me home from work, who had dyed her hair three shades darker and whose roots were starting to show. Not that she was close or anything.
6. “This looks just like a chocolate box” — because it really does, down my road. Smoke curling out of chimneys, tree branches laden with snow, little fox footprints everywhere…

Do feel free to share your own words of wisdom, frustration or delight in the comments….