Today's letters: 5 September
Simply not fare
It is all very well for Boris Johnson to blame Ken for Tube and bus fares going up (thelondonpaper, yesterday) but the fact remains that it is the public who will have to fork out more at the worst possible time for them. What do we get in return for the greater cost? Overcrowded trains and buses, nightmares on the Northern line and daily pandemonium in the rush-hour, no matter what line you’re on. This is a big test for Boris as Londoners will reasonably feel that this is his first big decision and he is already hitting us in the pocket. At a time when all our budgets are being frozen because of higher bills and the cost of living, this is the last thing we need.
Chas Carter, Hillingdon
What tosh, James
Regarding yesterday’s columnist James Camp: he writes beautifully but it’s all utter rubbish. His knowledge of women is negligible and I don’t imagine he has much luck with them. He strikes me as the sort of man who slams women to alleviate his own feelings of inadequacy, but maybe if he changed his attitude, he might find a nice lady and come to respect and appreciate them. I agree with him about the babies though: they are very sweet, but not really appropriate for the office, ladies.
Janie, London
All hail women
James Camp is so right in his column. I loved the bit about the office gossip and the appearance of cake sparking scenes of bedlam. It sounds a bit like my office. Generally, women are in more positions of power than ever before and that is a good thing but they cannot hide their fondness for doughnuts and pointless tittle-tattle. Offices would be much more tedious places without women populating them.
Steve, Bow
Help a victim
On the debate about have-a-go heroes: you all seem to be intervening for the wrong reasons, all saying there is no point helping because the perpetrators won’t get charged etc. It doesn’t matter whether the perpetrators get caught by the police; what matters is that you’ve had the decency to help out a complete stranger in a situation you wouldn’t like to find yourselves in.
Gaz, Essex
Step in, be decent
Regarding have-a-go heroes, we simply have to step in and help people, otherwise we lose everything that living in a civilised country is all about. You cannot stand idly by and watch people being attacked or whatever. Your columnist, and others, may get hurt in the process but the good deed part of it surely outweighs the pain. We cannot lose our sense of responsibility to our fellow citizens, or we lose everything we hold dear.
Atif, Perivale
Funny column
James’s column about women in the office was the funniest, most accurate I’ve read for ages! Men simply don’t stand a chance these days!
James, Kingston
Crunch fear
With all this depressing talk of the “crunch”, I am wondering how long it can actually carry on. Like a “boom”, I thought a crunch was something that made a lot of noise but was over relatively quickly. Having said that, I’ve also been reading about the “big bang” recently, and that went on for millions of years! Let’s hope this crunch is somewhat shorter lived – because I have just had my house repossessed.
Donald Arwane, Ealing
You’re no moose, Liv
Sometimes the insecurities of people make me want to weep. How on earth can Liv Tyler consider herself to be a moose (thelondonpaper, yesterday) and how can she not have had a kiss in months? She is a beautiful, talented woman and a fantastic actress. I’d give her a kiss but I doubt she’d be interested in a grim-looking old dog like me. See, she’s set me off now!
Kevin Franks, south Woodford
Thu 4, Sep 2008
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After finding out the ex is loved up and pregnant with her new fella and waking up with not much to do every morning, I decided it was time to remind myself why I canned the City job, and that there’s a big world out there beyond the Square Mile. Which was how I came to be sitting on a giant motorised duck watching the pink dawn arrive over the Nevada mountains, surrounded by 100 ravers dancing to nose-bleed techno.
Some go to Glastonbury to lose themselves. However, I knew that in my case more drastic measures were required, so I took myself off to the Burning Man Festival, where 50,000 nutbags leave their money behind and descend on Nevada’s Black Rock desert to try to forget the hideous capitalist reality that generally dictates our all too short lives.
But I found that even in the depths of an idealistic, hedonistic festival, I couldn’t escape the City. As dawn broke, I got into a somewhat garbled conversation with one of the minted German bankers who had financed this particular “duck” attraction (everyone who goes to Burning Man must make a contribution that’s not cash). He told me that he’d just heard via sat phone that my old bank, Dresdner, had been acquired by Commerzbank and that hundreds of job cuts were on the way (quite why he had been talking shop at all in the middle of all this anti-capitalist fervour was not entirely clear).
But then maybe this ain’t such a bad thing for many City boys and girls, especially those still young enough not to have Tarquin and Henrietta’s school fees to pay. This may give them the chance to reconsider their career choice and do what they always wanted. Spending a week with a bunch of naked Californians in the desert may not be everyone’s cup of tea, but most Londoners who don’t work in the City know there is more to life than spending 12 hours in the office enslaved by a highly paid job.
It may seem bad now, but a recession could turn out to be the best thing that ever happened to them
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With a sigh of resignation, you squirrel away your Waitrose account card for the next boom and don your balaclava in readiness for an undercover Aldi operation, careful to bring along your M&S bags for life for fear that your neighbours may suspect the new slum-shopping habits. Then you bump trolleys with them and share a quick status anxiety blush before cracking on.
The bad times are here again and, where you once casually flung your till receipts aside like an annoying quiff of hair, you now analyse them with the scrutiny of a nuclear chemist deciphering a difficult formula.
It’s not long before
you start getting excited about visits to Poundland and all the Soviet-quality products you can find for next-to-nothing.
Then, when you’ve taken your haul back home, you end up chucking half of it away, nursed by the fact that it only cost a pound or 30, if you add it all up.
The trip to Pizza Express with the missus is replaced by an outing to the all-you-can-eat Pizza Hut buffet and a crazy night on the tiles substituted by a quick stroll down the local chippie, a few bottles of Tesco Value Pilsner and a DVD from your LoveFilm 30-day free trial. Two-for-one restaurant vouchers are appearing like daffodils in spring and even Big Issue vendors are looking on in sympathy as you walk by.
You amble towards winter with your jumper collection on red alert, wondering what flimsy rescue vessels the PM will send your way, just to claw back some of those gullible fool votes that are heading BNP-wards.
Perhaps he’ll announce a free mug of hot tea for all those who can’t remortgage their homes to pay the elephantine gas bills. Well, if he does, I’m in. I’ve run out of teabags and don’t get paid for a couple of weeks. Milk and two sugars please, Mr Brown. Just the way I like it. Only problem is: where are the biscuits?
Mario, 40, of south London, works in customer relations
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It’s all down to organisation. In any office, the ladies construct an invisible CIA-style communication network with each other. Thus equipped, they are able to alert each other to the appearance of an attractive male visitor or some free cake by a simple look/raise of the eyebrow. Synchronisation of their lunchbreaks to within a millisecond of one another? Check. Identical TV viewing the evening before to ensure the smooth running of morning gossip? Check. Any gossip-related incident occurring in building instantly uploaded to all the females within 0.04 nanoseconds of it occurring? Check.
Secrets are shared, fashion tips exchanged and strangely flavoured tea bags swapped. A form of collectivisation this effective has not been seen since Stalin’s Russia.
And, like a dolled-up version of the Borg, ladies seemingly have the unique skill of operating as independent beings but as soon as one senses she is being wronged, any other females in the locality are activated like beacons being switched on and leap to her defence.
And if any event is guaranteed to bring an office grinding to a halt, it’s the appearance of a baby. Despite these small, noisy beasts contributing nothing more than shrieks and a foul smell, they draw all the females in the locality like moths to a lightbulb. Workstations are abandoned like modern versions of the Mary Celeste, with half-eaten salad pots and partly written emails the only trace of their absent owner. Phones go unanswered, tumbleweed blows across the floor and the only sound to be heard is a mass cooing.
So how do they get away with it? Simple: us guys are too disorganised to mount any resistance against such ruthless and efficient harpies. Face it, guys: the age of man is dead...
James, of Brighton, is a project development officer
Your comments
The survey claims we’re no longer prepared to stand shoulder to shoulder with our bobbies on the beat in the fight against the thugs. Too right, mate.
But in my case it’s not necessarily because I don’t want to get involved – only an idiot wouldn’t want a safer neighbourhood – but because I’ve been let down by Her Majesty’s finest once too often. Let me explain. Unlikely as it may seem, I have actually been a proper London have-a-go hero (stop laughing at the back).
And what did I get for my jaw-droppingly brave, gobsmackingly selfless, and deeply out-of-character heroics? Er, I was entirely let down by the bungling, amateurish, bureaucratic, nonsensical, Keystone Cops-level policing of the Met. Cheers for that, lads.
I was on a train out of King’s Cross and unlucky enough to find myself circled by 12 leathered, frighteningly lairy scaffolders from Letchworth spouting violent racist filth and intimidating everyone. Of course, being British, no-one said a word.
As I left the train, a bar-room brawl type scrap spilled out of the carriage doors all over my feet. A bloke was on the floor getting a kicking and I had no alternative but to get involved. (This was not so much a moral imperative as the simple, unavoidable and deeply inconvenient fact that they were bleeding over my shoes.)
Modesty forbids detailing the heroics – suffice to say I now have a vague idea what a punchbag feels like. But my intervention allowed the victim (and me) the chance to leg it.
Amazingly, the “poor bloke” was a Detective Inspector in the Queen’s Royal Protection Squad. Within 30 seconds, what seemed like half the Met had mobilised and nicked the scaffolders. The knowledge these scumbags might do a few weeks at Her Maj’s pleasure almost made up for the black eye and fat lip. But what happened? An officer visited me and revealed the police had lost the paperwork (and the victim was one of the Met’s own, remember), meaning the thugs never saw the inside of a courtroom.
Again, cheers for that, lads. Get involved again? I very, very much doubt it, officer.
Paul Baldwin, 37, of Winchmore Hill, is a journalist
The truth is, they make you feel lonelier than before you signed up. There’s a time arc here that begins with creating your profile, viewing lots of dateless people and thinking, “Blimey, this is an Aladdin’s Cave of totty”. Crucially, over time, you realise that you’ve been on the same site for years and all you can see are the same old faces. Then you get all reflective and ponder why these people are still alone. Like you.
Although the principle of sticking all the single people in one place is intriguing, there’s something harsh about it too – spirit and personality gets sidelined for a description. Physical attraction is relegated to some holiday snaps or worse, the “website pose”. There’s no room for laughter. No conversation, no actual chemistry.
As I get older and more rational, I’m less inclined to believe in fate. That said, there’s something beautiful about meeting The One (if she exists) randomly. There’s always a story too: “I wasn’t going to go out, but...” or: “I decided to grab a coffee, which I never do, when...”
There’s nothing romantic about this: “I was paying £30 a month to sift through nature’s rejects when I happened upon Whizzkid76.” It doesn’t quite have the same zing, particularly when you’re telling the grandchildren.
Don’t get me wrong, I know I’m being a miserable old git. Perhaps dating sites are great. Perhaps that attractive girl who wrote: “I am looking for a man who will give me true happiness, show me love and care, who is humble yet very strong in his words,” actually meant it, and isn’t just a fiction created by bored male teenagers or a Russian crime syndicate targeting the lovelorn and wealthy.
So that’s my tuppence worth. Dating sites are great. They’re just not much cop when it comes to dating.
Fweng Ebola, 34, of west London, is an office manager
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When 18th-century moralphilosopher and father of modern economics Adam Smith wrote: “Man is an animal that makes bargains; no other animal does this – one dog does not change a bone with another”, he was reckoning without the typical City boy.
One would hope that in these enlightened times it wouldn’t be so difficult to strike a bargain; but too often we find we’re dealing with a self-serving dog.
Recently, a high-flying City lawyer saw fit to demonstrate his true colours with a fresh-faced intern. Showing her another side of the capital, he took her to a Soho strip joint and allegedly promised she could “advance her prospects” by having sex with him.
The girl subsequently high-tailed it to HR, and cost the City slicker his dignity and a six-figure salary.
Now, it’s true that strippers and bankers, like birds of a feather, flock together. Yet it is entirely different to turn your mack on the starry-eyed dreamy intern who fetches coffees each morning with dizzying enthusiasm. In this drunken night of debauchery, vanity and animal instinct reigned supreme.
It begs the question, how do attractive City girls deal with it? One might think that this lawyer’s idiocy is an isolated case but, alas, I found myself in an almost identical scenario.
Months back, I left an impression on one sly director at the office, and he invited me to interview for a lucrative position on his team. Finally, I thought, someone had noticed that I was working like a dog.
So I was surprised, but not alarmed, when he emailed me an off-site location at which I was to be interviewed. After all, I wouldn’t want to be caught interviewing for another team on home turf. But when I arrived at the Mayfair address, it was apparent I was to be interviewed over a Michelin-starred dinner – sea bass, a bottle of Bordeaux, some talk about how his wife didn’t understand him, the lot. And then he asked me to spend the night in one of the hotel suites. As I stumbled out on to Park Lane, I literally screamed in the middle of the street. I had risked my already unstable job for a director’s rabid sex drive.
The fact that City girls work like dogs may never be taken seriously by the senior guys for one simple reason: they’re dogs. I realised that if I left a job every time a director made a pass at me, my resume would be so chequered I would never get hired anywhere.
As a City girl, you’ll always get more than you bargained for.
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