So, is ‘Plan A’ a load of pants, Mr Rose?

Marks and Sparks is having a sale. Whoopie…

Well no, actually. I don’t think this is a ‘good thing’.

“Plan A is our five-year, 100-point 'eco' plan to tackle some of the biggest challenges facing our business and our world. It will see us working with our customers and our suppliers to combat climate change, reduce waste, safeguard natural resources, trade ethically and build a healthier nation.” (M&S Plan A website)

For a while I was willing to go along with their eco-hype. I agree with a lot of things that they’re doing. But the announcement today that they’re having a 20% off everything sale has undone all the good PR, as far as I’m concerned.

I know that we have to consume stuff; and choosing recyclable packaging is a good thing; and that trade (fair trade, that is) is a good thing for the developing world and for us here too. But the most pernicious problem (in the West) is that we all over-consume. Especially at Christmas. It makes me want to vomit.

Wouldn’t it be better for all of us, in the long run, if they sold fewer items of a higher quality at a slightly higher price?

I can’t help noticing that, since Plan A was introduced, the quality of M&S pants has gone right down. (I know Jeremy Paxman would agree with me! ) Sad to say, I’ve been buying the same old basic style for the past 20 years… And of course, these basics do wear out. I just wish they wouldn’t wear out so quickly these days. The fabric may be fair trade organic, but it’s not as thick (and strong) as it used to be, and the quality of the elastic would make Nora Batty turn in her grave (is she in her grave yet? Ah, Wikipedia suggests not… sorry)

[I see M&S has ‘relaunched’ its Plan A website too (old site vs new site; and why doesn’t the site URL appear in the title bar of Firefox? Strange.)]

What I really can’t bear is the vast quantity of totally unnecessary items (and their associated transportation, and packaging, and the transportation of the packaging…) that will be hauled from the shops today just because there’s 20% off. In my new local M&S yesterday (yes, I do go there – for mid-week fruit and veg shopping, because the big T killed off the local greengrocers years ago) they were ‘offering’ low-priced boxes of chocolates at the till. Over packaged; over priced; unnecessary*.

Minutes after I’d listened to two retail giants debate the ‘'Irrational' downturn in high street spending’ on Today this morning, the programme finished early to launch an emergency appeal by the Disasters Emergency Committee to raise funds to help displaced and distressed people in the Democratic Republic of Congo.

Yet again, at Christmas time, I'm frustrated and fed up with it all. I don’t need any more unpleasantly perfumed and over-packaged hand creams, jumpers that don’t fit and have to be returned to the shops, or kitchen gizmos that gather dust.

Instead of feeding Mr Rose’s bank account today, I’m going to give my Christmas-present-fund to the appeal, and hope that my family will be happy with my home-baked cakes instead.

Bah humbug
Rant over!

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* Mr Ms_well and I do enjoy choccies now and again. We once bought a fancy heart-shaped box from Thorntons, ate the contents and kept the packet. Now for anniversaries and whatnot, we buy lower priced bags of Fair Trade chocs and put them in the recycled fancy box. Stingy, but kinder to the environment (and our pockets).

Unhealthy competition among copy-editors

I really should be getting on with something else, but this has worked me up into such a froth that I need to get it off my chest…[Edited 15/11/08]

I’m a member (Advanced member, in fact) of a worthy organisation which, among other things, aims to raise professional standards for Es and Ps.

A few weeks ago, I received a round-robin email from this organisation containing a paid-for advertisement from a potential client seeking writers/editors to put on a “preferred supplier” list. The client in question is one I’ve been intending to contact for several years, and so I was eager to fill in the tender documents and get on their list. I’m already on similar lists, and have worked for a number of similar clients and I do reckon I’m pretty well qualified for that particular work.

I didn’t hear back from them, despite asking them to email me to confirm receipt of my submission, but I put that to the back of my mind until yesterday afternoon, when they sent out a message to all tenderers saying something like “we’ve been inundated with applicants, so many that we’re going to need extra time to sift and therefore have had to put back the planned interview dates”.

On the face of it, that’s fine. But this has got me worried.

This client is not a publisher; their work is in a neatly defined industrial sector (can’t go into detail for obvious reasons); they are used to dealing with high-level government officials, business leaders and expensive PR companies.

I’m worried about who has taken part in this tender, the quality of their submissions, and most important, the prices they’ve quoted.

Why? Well, in the past I’ve gone through a similar exercise myself in order to sub-contract work during busy periods. I’ve sent out a round-robin email to fellow editors/proofreaders and received a flood of replies. Out of 20 or 30 applicants, only two or three were (on paper) suitably qualified; and in one case I gave the work to someone who really didn’t turn out to be as good as I’d hoped.

I strongly suspect that the same gang will have been part of the flood of tenders to this client*. This worries me for two reasons:

• They will probably seriously undercut my (reasonable) rates, making it look like editors work for tuppence ha’penny, (and that I’m taking the p*** with my ‘professional’ rate).
• It undervalues the society's stance of ‘raising standards’ etc., because Uncle Tom Cobley and All may have applied, regardless of whether they are really suitable for the job.

What to do? I’m tempted to raise the issue on the organisation's email newsgroup, but things have become rather fractious there lately and I don’t want to stir up a hornets nest when I’m busy. Instead, I think I’ll send a quiet note to the appropriate committee member and see what they have to say.

I can see that the editors' organisation was happy to accept the money to cover the cost of the advert, but they could have been a bit more sophisticated about sending it out. They do have a directory of members where we all list our specialisms/keywords. So they could, for instance, have done a quick trawl and only contacted people with relevant experience/skills.

All of the above sounds like I’m a bitter old bat clinging on to a stronghold of lucrative clients against young upstarts who might do a better, cheaper job than me. Erm… partly true! (Not the ‘old’ bit… well, I’m probably just about still in the ‘youth’ wing of the organisation.)

But I do wonder whether I’ve shot myself in the foot by talking to fellow editors very publicly (e.g. at conference, in the members’ journal) about what I do. Have I made it sound like a gravy train that’s worth catching?

I’ve always been slightly concerned about that, and have tried to prevent it. For instance, the NUJ lists details of hourly or daily rates paid particular clients. I’ve spoken out in favour of sharing ‘rates’, but against naming the clients, because I reckon there are some unscrupulous so and sos who’d deliberately undercut me.

And now I’m faced with the prospect that this may, rather publicly, happen. Hmm.

Interestingly, earlier this year I took part in a similar process for a different client. I successfully made it onto the list, and the client let all the list members know who’d ‘won’. I was the only member of this particularly organisation on the list.

Please don't get me wrong. I'm not suggesting I have a god-given right to this particular work; just that I'm worried about (unfair) competition, which may only increase as the recession bites and more hopefuls respond to those dreadful ads for 'profreeders'.

Not a good start to the day! But now I’d better get on with the work I do have, before it gets whisked from under my feet…

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* I do know of one other person who’s involved who does have relevant experience.

Autumn Days – a hymn that gets the bloggers' keyboards clattering

I never intended to blog about religion – it’s not something that I think about often – but here’s my second post this month pertaining to the Church of England.

On Monday I went along to my son’s junior school [‘voluntary aided’ C of E; aka the closest school to our home] for Harvest Festival. The format worked well. Each class performed a ‘sketch’ on the harvest theme, interspersed with prayers and hymns. Unfortunately, it was hard to pay attention after the first five minutes because the first hymn raised my hackles to such a degree I could hardly sit still.

The hymn in question – Autumn Days, written by former nun, Estelle White, about 30 years ago – turns out to be quite a favourite among bloggers.

It was the lyric of the first verse that incensed me (no pun in tended; this is C of E we’re dealing with!):

Autumn days when the grass is jewelled
And the silk inside a chestnut shell
Jet planes meeting in the air to be refuelled
All these things I love so well

To which I can only respond using a new acronym (pinched from Kathryn Flett* in Sunday’s Observer): WTF?

Why on earth would anyone want to praise “Jet planes meeting in the air to be refuelled”? Having Googled the hymn title, and nosied around a few of the very many blogs that seem to adore this bizarre hymn [see for instance this, and caseyleaver], I turned up a snippet from the Independent in 1996, which reports on a Norfolk-based church choir’s mutiny when the incumbent asked them to sing this ‘modern’ ditty instead of a good old-fashioned harvest hymn. White’s justification for mentioning the jet planes was, the Independent reported: “Mid-air refuelling was a wonder in the Sixties”.

I suppose it was the juxtaposition of this hymn among some very good items about Fair Trade (and a great word game that extracted the words ‘Eat’ and ‘Starve’ from the letters of ‘Harvest’) that really annoyed me about the school’s choice of hymn. They’d done so well, why ruin it with this nonsense?

As far as I can tell, the only planes that refuel in mid air are fighter jets. Not really appropriate for a junior school Harvest Festival… never mind the issue of pollution and ‘food miles’.

So I picked up my grumpy-old-woman pen and dashed of a letter to the head teacher, extolling the virtues of good old-fashioned “We Plough the Fields and Scatter” – the tune of which is attributed (‘doubtful attribution’, says Hyperion Records) to a German, J.A.P. Schulz, but is actually more correctly linked to an English folksong John Barleycorn.

Today’s lesson: If you want to get your blog noticed, add some hymn lyrics! (Though I suppose it all depends what kind of traffic you want to attract…)

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* Kathryn's column this week is well worth reading if you're an enthusiastic participant in newgroups, blogs, social networking and virtual worlds.

Teaching to the test - an educational dilemma

OK, I give in. After a very unnerving experience at my local FE college last week, I’m prepared to go along with the knockers and tutters, and admit that “fings ain’t wot they used to be” in the world of education.

Every summer there’s a palaver when the GCSE and A-level results are published, over whether or not standards are slipping. On the one hand there are employers and universities having to provide catch-up courses in English and Maths because they claim that the youth of today aren’t making the grade; on the other the government praises the efforts of school children who are gaining higher scores in tests than ever before. I’ve tried really hard to swallow the government’s explanation (while acknowledging that - ever fearful of slipping down the league tables - schools simply don’t enter their pupils for tests they won’t pass). But last week’s experience has called all this into question for me.

What should have been a straightforward “interview” at my local FE college turned out to be a nightmarish 2-hour session at a computer screen in a library surrounded by ‘uncouf youfs’ doing their utmost to get up the nose of the poor librarian who was trying to monitor their on-line doings, viz. “I’m sure Jade Goody isn’t part of your coursework”.

I’ve applied to take a City & Guilds course called “Preparing to Teach in the Lifelong Learning Sector”, as a good way to get some feedback on my teaching style before I venture forth (again) to teach copy-editing skills. I filled in the various forms, and listed my qualifications (12 O-levels including Eng Lang (A) plus three other languages, 3 A-levels, a BA, and a Post-grad Diploma). I also got a good reference from a friend who’s been a teacher for many years. Then the college called me in for an interview.

This wasn’t a surprise; it said this was standard procedure in the prospectus. They also warned that literacy and numeracy tests were compulsory. [Why does Word’s spellchecker not like ‘numeracy’?]. But the format of the ‘interview’ was certainly unexpected.

About a dozen of us were huddled in a corner of the library while the course administrator ‘explained’ the course. Then we had to sit the tests, or should I say “take the Skills Base”. (Is that really what she said?)

This took the form of two ‘interactive’ tests, where the software behind the system gauges the level of questions according to previous answers.

That was rather disconcerting! I could tell I wasn’t doing as well as I’d expected when, in the literacy test, I suddenly hit a rash of “Is the following a complete sentence?” questions.

Well, I’m pretty darned sure I know a sentence when I see one; it was the wording of the question that bothered me. I’m sure they didn’t really mean ‘complete’ which, according to my shiny new Concise OED, means : “having all the necessary or appropriate parts; entire”. The examples given were ‘complete’ under that definition, but that’s not to say they didn’t need editorial input… However, there was no tick-box for that option, only ‘yes’ or ‘no’ were offered.

The numeracy test was slightly more straightforward. There’s no other option when you’re calculating the length of the hypotenuse.

Overall I passed (though not as well as I should have done), so I avoided the Little Britain “Computer says ‘nah’” moment. But pity the other course applicants who were struggling. Instead of each of us then being interviewed in privacy, the administrator got us all back together to check through our applications and answer any questions. This meant hanging around listening to other people’s private concerns before the humiliation of being told I’m working at “Level 2, but at Level 3 in some areas” – which is enough to get me on the course, but just goes to show that in the 20 years since I graduated, the education sector has changed a lot.

Principally I’ve learnt that they don’t seem to trust anyone’s ‘previous’. Everyone had to sit these tests, regardless of how many (or few) GCSEs or Doctorates they had.

I can only draw the conclusion that the skeptics are right after all – those stunning GCSE results and all those A* grades count for nothing if “computer says ‘nah’”.

Arriving home in a froth, I wasted time searching education websites and discovered that there are plenty of practice tests out there that I could have worked on to boost my score, dammit. So if you’re ever thinking of “improving your skills base” (!), avoid the humiliation of a less than perfect score by giving these a try first: readwriteplus or TDA practice materials.

It seems a sad fact of 21st century life – you really DO have to “teach to the test”.

Thought for the day: “We don’t need no education; we don’t need no thought control!”

Goodbye Grange Hill… and good riddance

So, today sees the broadcast of the last ever episode of the BBC's 'flagship' children's drama, Grange Hill. Well, now I'm 42-and-three-quarters I'm a bit out of their target demographic, I guess, but I'm really glad they're finally getting rid of GH.

The show's been running for 30 years, so back in 1978 when it started I'd just 'escaped the horrors of the English comprehensive system', that is, I'd been packed off to an all-girls boarding school to try to keep me away from the trouble-makers and get on with some proper study.

Our TV diet was very strictly controlled (Top of the Pops on Thursdays; Dallas on a Saturday; Robin of Sherwood on a Sunday) and so I only saw Grange Hill in the school holidays. And I remember that it definitely did conform to the prejudices I was being force-fed - that the comprehensive system was a disaster, that kids bunked off, cheeked their teachers, got into trouble, and teenage pregnancies were the norm.

Of course, I now know different (hey, they have bullies, drugs, and teenage pregnancies in boarding schools too, folks!), but I didn't find it entertaining then, and I don't like it now.

These days, though, I see the programme in a different light - as a parent. (Watch out: rant approaching!!)

The thing is, instead of stretching kids' imaginations and engaging them in things they'd never otherwise encounter, GH just reflected back 'real life' which, for some kids then and now can be dull, depressing, frightening and lacking in opportunity.

It's not so much the bad behaviour that bothers me. Mischief can be entertaining, and 'cute', providing it doesn't go too far (I'm still a fan of Dennis the Menace and his pals; not so sure about Horrid Henry, though). What gets to me is that the kids of GH often had little respect for the adults around them (admittedly, some of the adults certainly didn't deserve any). I can't help wondering what subliminal effect GH had on classroom behaviour then and now.

There were some great shows back then that were eclipsed by GH. And GH started a trend for grittier children's shows, so that today the BBC's offering is pretty low-grade - too many progs are just imitating adult reality TV formats.

One last thought: I'm not saying that all kids' TV should be Blyton-esque; but the schedulers ought to bear in mind that programmes for 13-year-olds are probably also watched by their 6-, 7- or 8-year-old siblings.

Can we scrap Tracy Beaker next please?

I'm fine… and how are you?

Why do radio journalists insist on wasting valuable airtime asking all and sundry about the state of their health? It's a mystery.

Whether it's Jeremy Vine or Eddie Mair, just about every blasted call follows the same tedious pattern:

"What do you think, Mr X?"
"Hello, Jeremy/Eddie [insert tedious presenter of your choice]; how are you?"
"I'm fine, Mr X; how are you?"
"I'm fine. Now, about house prices/dog fouling/obnoxious teenagers/telecoms rip-offs…"

Aaaagh. It drives me crazy.

To make matters worse, 90% of the population seem to think this is also necessary for business calls. I'm sorry, but I really don't want to give the details of my health to every poor soul manacled to their call-centre desk.

You would think the centre managers would have realised what a total and utter waste of time this is and, given the overwhelming drive for profits over customer service, they'd have cut all this nonsense out of their "scripts" ages ago, but apparently not.

Or is it just that 90% of the population feel much more kindly disposed to their fellow human beings than I do?