Nigel Farage attacks the new EU President

I watched Question Time last night and one of the guests was the former leader of UKIP, Nigel Farage.

He got a pretty hostile reaction over a tirade of insults he made about the new EU President, Herman Van Rompoy at the European Parliament earlier this week.

The specific question linked the attack by Mr Farage to the bullying accusations made of Gordon Brown. There is no doubt about it, the attack was extremely personal, and even went as far as describing Belgium as “virtually a non-country.”

Unfortunately, this kind of over the top personal attack seems to be the only kind of coverage we ever see in mainstream news bulletins of the European Parliament and I can’t help but wonder if it doesn’t leave people thinking that’s all that ever happens in Brussels or Strasbourg.

I have heard speculation that Mr Farage is attempting to be so over the top and offensive that he gets himself suspended from the European Parliament which would be the perfect publicity vehicle for his attempt to take on the Speaker of the Commons, John Bercow in his Buckingham seat. It does make me wonder though, if he might just have overdone it already.

So it all started with the serialisation of a book. The way these things often do in politics.

Now we have claim and counter claim regarding Gordon Brown and the allegations that he may have bullied staff working at Number 10.

The story would probably have fizzled out this morning, had it not been for Christine Pratt and the National Bullying Helpline.

She helpfully came forward to explain that staff from Number 10 had called the office of her charity, and even downloaded information from the website.

I do wonder if it is common practice for bullying helplines to ask where people work? I suppose that most of their callers would be talking about experiences at work, but do they actually ask for a company name?

Either way, it seems to me this is fairly Westminster Village stuff. I very much doubt that the general public are really concerned about the nature of the allegations. I would be very surprised if most of them can remember the original source was a political journalist whose book was being serialised in a Sunday paper. In some respects, I think people expect the PM to be tough, to demand better from civil servants and react passionately when things aren’t going right.

I don’t normally like to criticise the way companies do business. There are plenty of people doing that on the internet already.

There is one company however, who have served us so spectacularly badly over the past few days that I have singled them out for special treatment.

[I should point out that this post goes into a bit of a long story here, if you want the condensed version feel free to jump to the last paragraph!]

For Christmas, my father in law decided he would buy us a new TV, he knew we had been considering getting one for a while and thought it would be a good present. We were of course very grateful for that and accepted his kind offer.

So, during that dull void between Christmas and New Year we went into Currys and looked at the TV’s they had available. We had already decided that the best plan would be to get the TV delivered so they could take away the old one to be recycled. (we changed our mind about this in the end but still foolishly opted for delivery). Having settled on a particular make and model of TV, we went home to order it online. The whole ordering process was very simple and straight forward and within a few minutes we had paid for a 37″ TV to be delivered on 7 January.

Unfortunately, Currys couldn’t make that delivery happen because of the snow and ice. I wasn’t that disappointed, we still had a working TV so I re-arranged the delivery for the following Friday, the 15 January or so I thought.

On Tuesday 12 January I returned to my desk from a meeting to find a message on my mobile voicemail from a Currys delivery driver stating that my TV should have been on his van that day but it hadn’t been loaded for some reason, and to call the customer service number to re-arrange delivery. Except that I wasn’t expecting them to deliver it for another 3 days. Having called the number I discovered that a delivery had indeed been booked for Tuesday 12 January without my knowledge. Anyway I didn’t worry about it too much as I managed to rebook the delivery for the Saturday 16 January, which would mean neither of us would need to take time off work to accept it.

Part of the deal with Currys is they give you a number to call after 9pm the evening before your delivery is due for an automated system to give you a time slot. So on Friday night I called the number and was duly told that my TV would be delivered the following morning between 7.30am and 11.30am. Great I thought, we can get up and do chores around the house and then go out and enjoy the day after the delivery guys have been.

Well, 11.30 yesterday morning came and there was no sign of the expected delivery. Leave it half an hour I said, they might have been delayed by traffic or whatever. We left it for a full hour and a half, but still nothing so I called Customer Services. I was told that they couldn’t see my delivery slot on their system, but my goods were due to be delivered today so the person on the phone would email the “distribution centre” to find out what had happened and get them to give me a call.

An hour and a half later, we were still waiting. No phone call, nothing. So my wife called the same number again. This time she is told that the “distribution centre” have up to 4 hours to respond to emails. The person she spoke to said again that he would try and contact them to find out what had happened, and either he or they would come back to us before the end of his shift at 3pm.

As you might guess, we arrived at 3.30pm and still there was no phone call, so I called again. This time I was told that my goods had not even been loaded onto the lorry and were never going to arrive. Needless to say, this made me quite cross. I asked to make a complaint and was given a complaint reference number, although I was never actually asked what my complaint was. The person on the phone offered to rebook the delivery, but we have now decided that we will cancel the order and take our business somewhere else.

Now, I am not an unreasonable person, I understand that the weather can effect deliveries and sometimes they just can’t go ahead as planned. That’s fine, I didn’t have a problem with that. The issue is having to wait 5 hours from when a delivery was supposed to have been made, to be told that it was never actually coming in the first place. That kind of communication failure is an appalling way to treat customers and one that will cost Currys my business in the future.

Now things are beginning to get back to normal, I’ve finally got chance to write a bit more about the weather we have had over the past few days.

I’m sure you don’t need me to to tell me that the conditions recently have been quite unusual for the time of year. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not handing this blog over to weather forecasts though.

The trouble is I’m bored of the snow now. I mean when we had that first lot back before Christmas it was a novelty. Now though, as the cold weather has lasted for almost 4 weeks I have had enough.

If we could all get back to normal now, and focus on the excitement that a forthcoming election will bring that would be great.

Having just moved house, we were hoping for a quiet few days before Christmas to get last minute preparations done, maybe unpack a few more boxes before the big day itself. It seems though, that wasn’t to be, as not content with a bit of the white stuff at the weekend, we got a heavy covering yesterday afternoon and evening.

The net effect of this was the journey home from work turned into a nightmare for many, with roads gridlocked and vehicles struggling to get up the smallest of gradients. Personally my first problem was that I had been planning to get the bus home, but all services were suspended at lunchtime. Having managed to secure a lift home with the wife we then spent a total of around 4 hours driving from Newbury to Thatcham. A distance of some 3.8 miles which would normally take about 15mins.

The good news was that we made it home safely about 7pm last night, while unfortunately many others were forced to either abandon their vehicles or stay in emergency rest centres. The weather does seem to have been a bit better today, and certainly there has been no more snow although they are predicting further freezing temperatures overnight so I am not looking forward to the journey to work tomorrow morning.

So as I have already said on Facebook and Twitter, we finally exchanged contracts on the new place on Friday, with the move planned for next Friday (11th Dec)

As you might expect, this is a pretty big deal for us. After 4 years of happily living in Salisbury, we are heading north to be closer to work, parents, friends and other stuff.

Despite the short time frame, there is still loads to sort out including trying to find a removal firm who can actually help lug all our stuff the 50 miles up the A303. We thought we had it sorted of course, but in typical british style it has all gone a bit wrong at the last minute.

It means that between now and the end of the week, we will be living an increasing number of boxes and bags, as things get sorted into that which has made the cut and is coming to the new place, or the other stuff which isn’t.

The most annoying thing as far as I am concerned is that because the place we’re moving to is currently connected to the world using the Virgins*, we will need to have a BT line put in and god knows how long it will take to get broadband set up. The up side is that the new place can apparently take advantage of the BE Broadband network which is a bit of a result.

*We had the Virgins here for a while, but what with being a pair of social butterflies (yeah right!) the package just wasn’t value for money with TV channels that we never watched.

There have been loads of posts about the importance of Google Wave.

The new toy from the clever chaps in Mountain View has been helped by the scarcity of invites which means that plenty of people who are keen to peak in and see what all the fuss is about can’t.   

I managed to get an invite a few weeks ago, (thanks Steve!) and I’ve been messing about there ever since. So first impression? It’s a bit quiet. The fact that very few people I know are actually on makes usefulness limited. Combined with this is the fact there is no easy way that I’ve found to check if someone is actually on.

The idea though, is quite innovative. You can have a conversation with as many or as few people as you like using many different applications and devices at the same time. I can see the benefits, but it will take some time for them to become really useful.

Incidentally, I have a few invites. Drop me a line if you’re interested and if you’re already on then by all means connect to me its my first name dot my second name at googlewave dot com.

I use twitter quite a lot. In fact some people might say I’m addicted.

Anyway here’s a word cloud from my tweets over the past year. Pleased to see the wife gets in!

www.twitter.com/philspray

I have a confession to get out of the way before I go any further, this isn’t the first ever blog post I’ve written. Some of you may even have read earlier attempts at blogging made at this very address.

The reality is unfortunately I am spectacularly bad at blogging commitment. I have tried lots of things to keep me on the wagon, moving from Livejournal to Blogger, to Wordpress to Tumblr and back to Wordpress. I’ve also tried writing personal stuff, political stuff or just general stuff but in the end I’ve either lost interest or decided to start something new.

Now you’re probably thinking this is not the most auspicious start to a new blog, but I think it’s important to get my previous infedlities out of the way early on so we can both move on and put them behind us.

So there, hopefully this time I’ll be better, I’ve started optimistically and have a few new posts running around in my head. So it can only go well right?