27 March 2024

Dropout

 
Well since yesterday's blogpost, I have now whizzed through all eight episodes of "The Dropout" starring Amanda Seyfried as Elizabeth Holmes. I guess that some visitors will have already seen it as it was released in the summer of 2022.

You have probably heard of Elizabeth Holmes. She dropped out of Stanford University in order to pursue a dream that would incidentally make her fabulously rich. That dream was of a blood testing system which, with one drop of blood, would diagnose health issues such as cancer, sepsis, diabetes, HIV and host of other conditions.

In one visit to a wellness centre, a member of the public could get answers almost immediately. The drop of blood would be on something like a credit card which would be popped into a fancy machine and - hey presto - the result would be displayed. Holmes's company was called Theranos - a combination of the words "therapy" and "diagnosis". Between 2003 and 2013, Theranos garnered a lot of investment and a lot of prestige too. It was scheduled to become the next big thing.

The trouble was that the system never worked. It was all a big lie and ultimately Holmes and her inner circle could not hide that fact. They had tried desperately to create a system that would match the dream but they always fell short and instead resorted to deception.

In the series, Elizabeth Holmes emerges as some sort of manic depressive with strong narcissistic tendencies. She comes to believe in her own hype and bubbles with hidden anger and frustration whenever anybody tries to cross her or ask searching questions.

The Theranos offices and labs are ultra-modern but also a hive of secrets and unsaid words. People get sacked and head chemist Ian Gibbons played by Stephen Fry commits suicide. The Holmes effect may bamboozle some but it riles others.

By the end of the series, the Theranos bubble has been burst and Elizabeth Holmes must at last face the law.

One of the morals of this recent commercial tale is that if you are going to build a great business you must build it on solid ground. The centre should not be hollow and internal connections should certainly be characterised by integrity, mutual understanding and a shared vision. "Follow my leader" may be a fun game for kids in a school playground  but in the working world of adults it can seem like the blind leading the blind.

In 2022, Holmes was sentenced to 11+1⁄4 years in jail for fraud. After various appeals, she finally began that sentence last November and is not expected to be released from prison until 2032. She made a lot of influential people look very stupid.
The real Elizabeth Holmes

26 March 2024

Updates

Surprise, surprise - Rotherham Council have no information about me in their archives. From the school where I worked, the records only date from 2008. The council correspondent suggested that I should get in touch with the school where I worked but it will be a miracle if they have any evidence whatsoever of my employment. forty four years ago. Acquiring the required P45 will be like locating The Holy Grail.

I can see what is going to happen. I will have to wait a further fifty minutes on the phone to get through to an HMRC adviser once again  only to tell him or her what I knew in the first place - that getting the P45 will never happen. I am pissed off because who ever was in error in the past, it was certainly was not me. There must be some way of waiving this ridiculous and historical anomaly.

Regarding my foot and the pain I was in ten days ago, may I say that the condition is most certainly not plantar fasciitis! As I indicated before, it is gout and though it has not entirely disappeared, the pain has altered its location and is much reduced. I am not limping any more. However, every morning I wake up and wonder how it will be today. Thank you for all your kind suggestions. Much appreciated. One day I hope to walk again - beyond the horizon up ahead.

Getting back to Sunday's "Quiztime" - when you are in a pub quiz you usually  have to go along with the quizmaster's answers - even though very occasionally you know for sure that you have been given a wrong answer. That doesn't matter. In Britain, I never heard of the young of foxes being referred to as "kits".  However, research tells me that although the word is not as common as "cub", "kit" is still acceptable. In other words, I am relenting and you can have a belated mark for "kit"! I am so generous - it hurts.

Moving on to television... Tonight I watched the international friendly match between England and Belgium. England were the better team but it looked as though Belgium might win until the very last seconds of the game when our star player - Jude Bellingham - steered in an equalising goal to save England's blushes in the pouring London rain.

Also on television, I am currently watching an eight part series called "The Dropout" which dramatises the growth of the failed blood testing company Theranos and its slightly deranged founder Elizabeth Holmes who currently resides in a Texan jail. I am enjoying this so far and will blog further when I have seen it all. In fact, I may watch another episode tonight after publishing this blogpost.

There - updates completed!

25 March 2024

HMRC

There's a government organisation in Great Britain called HMRC which stands for His Majesty's Revenue and Customs. It is responsible for gathering taxes.

As a former government employee myself, I never needed to pay much heed to taxation for I was taxed at source and it was not necessary to submit tax forms at the end of each financial year. It was all done for me.

However, this year I have a couple of tax issues to address via HMRC. In this process I have discovered that on their system I am still listed as being employed by Rotherham Metropolitan Borough Council. HMRC sent me a letter about the matter last week. It was a big surprise as I was employed by Rotherham between January 1978 and August 31st 1980 and never since.

Last Friday morning I tried to phone HMRC  about this but our wireless house phone ran out of charge after thirty minutes. I had been kept waiting all that time. This morning I tried again with a fully charged phone but again it ran out of charge so I tried our old wired house phone.

I sat there for fifty minutes until finally, finally I was put through to a human being in the north east of England. As I waited I listened to mind-numbing muzak and an intermittent recorded message: "Thanks for waiting. Your call is important to us. Please continue to hold. An adviser will answer your call as soon as possible". You have probably heard similar false claims yourself while waiting at the end of a call.

Earlier I had heard, "Please note, this call may be recorded for monitoring and training purposes". When I hear that I always think I should be warning them that I will be doing the same! 

Anyway the adviser with the north eastern accent dealt with the matter as best he could before telling me that I would need to get in touch with Rotherham Council myself to request a P45  termination of employment certificate - from 44 years ago!

On the internet, Rotherham Council seem to be highly skilled in hiding contact details and building "chat" systems that do not address the questions you want to ask. However, I persevered and finally managed to get through to their Human Resources department where I spoke to a helpful young man who noted my request and promised it would be dealt with in the next few days. Truthfully, I would not put much money on that happening.

The time I have spent on the phone dealing with a matter that was not of my own making is time I will never be able to get back. "All of our advisers are very busy at the moment". Well employ and train some more then!

24 March 2024

Quiztime

 

Once upon a time, when I was a teacher, the last lesson of the term would frequently involve a general knowledge quiz - just for fun. In fact the classes usually pressed me to make this happen - "Can we have a quiz sir? Please!" As years passed by, my expectations were lowered but it never ceased to amaze me what teenagers did not know. I mean, most of them had been in school for ten years and yet I sometimes wondered - what had they learnt? I guess that one of the main pre-requisites of general knowledge quizzing is curiosity - the urge to know stuff but many of my charges seemed to fully lack that trait.

I was always dumbing down because as a quizmaster you certainly do not want quiz teams to feel entirely hopeless. You want them to score with some correct answers - make them feel they're  achieving something at least.

Here are ten questions that are typical of those I used to pose in those bygone days when King Charles III was merely a prince:

  1. Prince Charles has two brothers and a sister. Please name one of them. 
  2. What is the name of the ocean between Europe and North America?
  3. In nursery rhymes who ate curds and whey while sitting on a tuffet?
  4. Who was the drummer for The Beatles?
  5. A baby dog is a puppy but what is a baby fox called?
  6. London is Great Britain's capital city but what is the capital of Scotland?
  7. Which American pop singer made  albums called "Bad" and "Thriller"?
  8. What is Fred Flintstone's wife called?
  9. Which famous English playwright wrote"Hamlet" and "Julius Caesar"?
  10. How do you say, "Thank you very much" in French?
Please have a go at these quiz questions yourself. Answers given in the Comments section. How did you do?
⦿

Entirely separate - here's a photo of Ian and his Sheffield people after brunching today in "The Wild Card" on Ecclesall Road. Phoebe, Margot, Frances and Stewart were also there as well as Sarah and Zach. It was so great that they could all get together and this picture gives me much joy. Soon afterwards, Ian had to head back to London.

23 March 2024

Birthday

It was my wife Shirley's sixty fifth birthday today. The best gift of all was to have the members of  her immediate family around her. 

Yesterday, Ian and Sarah drove up from London with Baby Zachary. It was his first ever visit to Yorkshire and clearly he loved it because he couldn't stop drooling. They came up in their fairly new electric vehicle - a big black Volvo replete with technology, lights and screens. Whereas London boasts many public charging points for electric vehicles, Sheffield and indeed all other northern cities have very few facilities for such cars. However, this morning Ian located a speedy charging point by the KFC on Queens Road. It took two hours to get up to full charge.

Today we all went out to "The Rising Sun" on Fulwood Road for a late lunch. Shirley and I, Frances and Stewart, Little Phoebe and Baby Margot were of course joined by Ian, Sarah and Zach. We enjoyed tasty meals with our beers, wine and apple juice though two members of our party opted for milk. Four of us chose the homemade steak and vegetable pie with chips, gravy and mushy peas. Phoebe had beans on toast and Ian had the vegan burger with chips and salad.

How lovely it was to be with our family - all comfortable in each other's company - with our three darling grandchildren. You never know what the future might hold but today was a day to feel blessed and fortunate.

Much later, back at our house, Ian ordered an entirely vegan Chinese meal from "Wawin Chinese". It was delicious and there was plenty of it. In fact, I would say that too much was ordered. The excess is currently in the fridge and I guess we might have some of it at lunchtime tomorrow.

I am so sorry that there are no pictures of the family event. You see, because the others all have expensive camera phones, I decided to leave my own camera at home. Instead, at the top there's a picture of a removals van that Shirley snapped on Friday morning. She was helping a friend to move house. Oddly, the van had been driven over from Hull where my football team, The Tigers are based. Hull is sixty five miles from here

22 March 2024

Catherine

Once, by the Chao Phraya River in Bangkok, Thailand, I threw some bread into the water at a point where stone steps rise towards a riverside temple. Almost immediately, a congealing, writhing scrum of desperate, gluttonous fish rose up from the murky depths to compete for that bread. Audibly, their tails and fins slapped the brown water.

Think of Catherine Middleton as the bread and  disreputable newspapers and social media outlets as the greedy fish  - feeding with impunity. Manufacturing tales, promoting lies, endlessly speculating. Filling columns, contributing to the unholy din, mocking  and disparaging,  saying what the hell they wanted to say.

And now that Princess Catherine has told her sad and ongoing personal health tale, do any of those who were in the feeding frenzy pause for a moment to say "Sorry!"? No, of course they don't.  They would probably prefer more of the same because truth does not sit comfortably in their agendas.

Sitting on a wooden park bench, Catherine looked older and thinner as she gazed into the camera. She has obviously been to hell and back - not that the voracious fish mob would care.

I'm not a royalist and for large parts of my life I thought of The Royal Family as an archaic encumbrance that symbolised  historical privilege, preventing ordinary Britons from breaking down the barriers to success. My views have mellowed somewhat  over the years. I think of Prince William as a decent, intelligent and compassionate man who fell in love with a good woman when he was at university in Scotland. Their three children seem adorable.

William and Catherine have done their royal duties for this country. They didn't run away to California. They were steadfast and uncomplaining, supporting good causes and trying to make a difference.

The least they could have expected was some kindness, some respect, some quietness when cancer crept into their lives. Instead, they were met with a deluge of intrusive nastiness. I wish them both well and hope that with the assistance of medical people, Catherine can leave this nightmare behind her and finally get the all clear.

21 March 2024

Norton

The old photograph shown above was snapped in the summer of 1947. The location was 25 Langton Road, Norton-on-Derwent, Yorkshire. That is where my father was born in 1914 and where he spent his happy, carefree childhood.

Through the second world war, my paternal grandfather Philip had a milk round in Norton. Churns of local farm milk were brought to the family home where there was a small bottling plant. Then crates of the milk were heaved aboard the  little cart shown above before early morning deliveries were made with the kind assistance of the horse.

I suspect that the picture was taken on a Sunday - the day of rest. On the cart you can see four people and a dog. There's my father's sister Evelyn - born around 1918. Then there's my grandfather Philip holding his dog and my grandmother Margaret holding her grandson, Peter Thewliss who was Auntie Evelyn's only child . The photo was probably snapped by Frank Thewliss - Evelyn's husband.

How I would have loved to step into that scene to introduce myself but I was not yet born. I came along in October 1953 which must have brought a glimmer of joy into my father's life for his mother Margaret died in January of that year and his father Philip died in September  - just a month before I arrived into the world.

They were in their early seventies and I never met them and so sadly they played no role whatsoever in my life. They are buried in Norton Cemetery with their youngest son - my Uncle Jack who was killed on active duty with the Royal Air Force in 1940.

Co-incidentally, my daughter Frances is soon to have a long weekend break in Norton with a friend who also has two young children. Frances was surprised to learn of our strong family connection to that place and she plans to visit her great-grandparents' grave while she is there.

The milk business was taken over by my Uncle Tom and I remember standing in that same yard some twelve years after the old photo was taken. By then Uncle Tom had invested in an electric milk float. They tend not to eat hay or drop doo-doo on the street.
25 Langton Road, Norton - courtesy of Google Streetview

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