Frightened of Our Own Shadows

I was looking at these new AI glasses the other day. Apparently they're "pervert glasses". They can see what you're looking at, take photographs and record video. This, apparently, is deeply worrying.

I can't get terribly excited about it. We've all been walking around with cameras in our pockets for 20 years. Before that we had cameras. Before that we had eyes and memories.

And we've managed to make something potentially rather useful sound grubby. For someone with impaired vision, glasses that can describe what's in front of them, read a sign or menu and help them understand their surroundings aren't "pervert glasses". They're potentially transformative.

But apparently the camera is the problem.

Then there are children. Put a photograph online with a child somewhere in the background and there's a fair chance the child's face will be fuzzed out. Why? What precisely are we protecting the child from?

If somebody photographs a 7-year-old child walking down the street, what has actually happened to that child? Nothing. If somebody harms or interferes with that child, that's an entirely different matter. Somewhere along the way we seem to have confused the possibility of harm with harm itself.

And the same children increasingly have to be ferried to school and back. The school gates become clogged with cars carrying children who, a generation or two ago, would simply have walked or cycled. We protect them from the perceived dangers of travelling independently by putting more cars around schools, while removing some of the independence that teaches children how to judge risk for themselves.

There are perfectly good reasons for protecting children's identities in particular circumstances. Court proceedings, vulnerable children, identifying information, stalking and exploitation are obvious examples. But those exceptional circumstances seem to have escaped their boundaries and become a general doctrine that being seen is somehow dangerous.

Children once walked to school, climbed trees, disappeared on bicycles and came home for tea. Some of what we accepted was undoubtedly too risky. We changed things, and some children are alive today because we did.

But we didn't stop there.

We've developed a peculiar precautionary culture in which almost any conceivable risk demands a precaution, regardless of how improbable the risk is or whether the precaution achieves anything. And institutions have every incentive to go along with it. Nobody gets sacked for unnecessarily blurring a child's face. They might get sacked if they don't and something subsequently goes wrong.

Perhaps this is simply what happens when you get older. You remember the world before today's conventions became conventions, while younger people simply inherit them as normal. There's also the uncomfortable fact that my generation remembers the freedoms rather better than the children who didn't survive them.

So I'm not arguing for some mythical 1960s paradise where children played with asbestos while their parents drove home drunk without seatbelts.

I'm wondering whether, somewhere between sensible protection and eliminating every imaginable danger, we've lost our ability to distinguish risk from threat, observation from intrusion, and precaution from theatre.

Perhaps I'm just getting old.

Or perhaps we've become frightened of our own shadows.

Where Are the Andy Burnhams?

My local Waitrose is a communications dead zone.

I don't mean the signal is a bit iffy, or that occasionally WhatsApp takes a few seconds to send. I mean that once you get properly inside the place, your expensive modern smartphone more or less ceases to be a communications device.

Normally this wouldn't particularly bother me. I'm in Waitrose to buy food, not conduct international diplomacy. Except that my wife and I have, without ever consciously deciding to do so, developed a remarkably efficient remote shopping support system.

I can't find something. I send her a photograph of the shelves. She tells me where it is.

This happens particularly often with Charlie Bigham ready meals, which for reasons that are no longer terribly important we call Andy Burnhams. Thus a perfectly normal conversation in our household might include the sentence, Where are the Andy Burnhams? without suggesting that the Mayor of Greater Manchester has been chopped into portions and put next to the dauphinoise potatoes.

The system works extremely well. Or rather, it works everywhere except Waitrose.

I stand in the chilled-food aisle looking for a particular Andy Burnham. I can't find it. My wife assures me they sell it. I assure her they don't. Experience should by now have taught me that this is a dangerous position to take, because quite often the thing I'm insisting isn't there is actually somewhere within my field of vision.

So I produce the evidence.

I photograph the shelves.

And nothing happens.

The photograph sits there stubbornly refusing to leave the building because Waitrose appears to have been constructed to the communications specifications of a Cold War nuclear bunker.

I therefore have to abandon the scene of the investigation and walk towards the tills. Somewhere around the front of the shop, usually as I approach the checkouts, the outside world suddenly reappears. Messages arrive. WhatsApp wakes up. My photograph finally departs.

But I can't now return to the aisle because I need the verdict. So I hang around near the tills, apparently doing nothing, waiting for my wife to examine the photographic evidence.

Eventually the reply arrives.

It's there. I can see it in the photograph.

And, with a sinking sense of inevitability, I walk back across Waitrose and discover that she is correct. There is the bloody Andy Burnham, sitting more or less where I had been looking in the first place.

I should add that I'm not a habitual Waitrose shopper anyway. I'm much more Lidl or Aldi. Waitrose is usually somewhere I go because they have something specific I want, which makes being cut off from civilisation while I'm there even more irritating.

This would merely be one of those minor marital rituals were it not for the fact that supermarkets themselves now expect us to shop with our phones. Offers are loaded onto apps, loyalty cards are digital, shopping lists are shared and products are checked online.

The phone is no longer incidental. It is part of the machinery.

Which makes it slightly absurd to operate a building in which mobile reception more or less disappears.

There is, of course, an astonishingly advanced technological solution to this problem. Wi-Fi.

If your shop kills the mobile signal, the customer Wi-Fi should simply work. No faffing about, no elaborate sign-in process, no mysterious dead patches. Just enough connectivity to let the systems you encourage customers to use actually function.

This isn't a great social injustice. I'm not proposing a parliamentary inquiry. Civilisation will probably survive even if Waitrose continues to block the outside world.

But somewhere in that chilled-food aisle there will again be an Andy Burnham sitting directly in front of me.

And when that happens, I need to be able to send my wife a photograph so that she can tell me I can't see what's in front of my own eyes.

Whatever Happened to Gyrth?

A follow-on from yesterday's post on names - we think of Alfred, Harold, Edward and Edmund as perfectly normal English names. But Gyrth? Tostig? Wulfnoth? Leofwine? Those sound as though the parents have either joined a re-enactment society or lost a bet.

Which is odd, because there is nothing intrinsically more normal about Alfred than Gyrth. They are all Anglo-Saxon names. Some simply survived, or were later dragged back into fashion, while the others were abandoned by the roadside.

1066 did much of the damage. The Normans did not just take the land. They changed the naming habits too. William, Robert, Richard and Henry became fashionable while much of the old English repertoire faded away.

Edward survived because Edward the Confessor became a saint and later kings kept the name alive. Alfred was revived when the Victorians rediscovered Alfred the Great and decided he was exactly the sort of industrious, cake-burning national hero they wanted. Harold got the tragic-last-English-king treatment.

Gyrth had no such luck. He died at Hastings too, but lacked top billing.

Tostig was probably beyond saving anyway, having helped Harald Hardrada invade England. Not ideal nursery material.

Wulfnoth simply sounds, to modern ears, like something you would ask the pharmacist about.

That is the whole trick. We confuse familiarity with normality. Had the Victorians taken a shine to Gyrth, there would now be retired accountants called Gyrth and nobody would think twice. Instead Alfred is respectable, Harold is old-fashioned and Gyrth sounds ridiculous.

Not because it is.

Because history forgot to keep saying it.

Why Not 2 p.m.?

I was listening to the radio the other day when one of the contributors was introduced as Tuesday. My first thought was, “Well, that’s an odd name.” Then I remembered the actress Tuesday Weld. And of course there’s Wednesday Addams, who’s probably the most famous Wednesday in fiction.

Once you start thinking about it, it’s surprisingly common. There are Aprils, Mays, Junes and the occasional August. We happily accept people being named after bits of the calendar, as though that’s the most natural thing in the world.

And then there’s Tuppence Middleton, which rather broadens the field. Tuppence isn’t a day, or a month, or even a season. It’s an obsolete sum of money. At which point you begin to wonder whether there are any rules at all.

So why stop at days and months? Why not times?

Why shouldn’t somebody be called 2 p.m.? It has a certain ring to it. “This is my daughter, 2 p.m. She’s starting school in September.” Nobody would bat an eyelid at September being the child, but apparently it’s perfectly acceptable as the month in which 2 p.m. starts school.

And once 2 p.m. has broken the ice, there’s really no reason to stop. Quarter Past Three has a slightly aristocratic air to it. Half Past Eight sounds dependable, possibly an accountant. Midnight is already halfway to being a name, while Noon is surely just waiting for the right celebrity parent to discover it.

Then we could revisit the days of the week. Tuesday and Wednesday have established a bridgehead, but what has poor Thursday done wrong? Friday has possibilities. Sunday sounds rather genteel. Monday, admittedly, would be a difficult burden to place on a newborn child.

The months are equally unfair. April, May and June have been admitted to polite society. August has got through the door, although perhaps more often as a male name. But where are January, February, October, November and December? December in particular sounds perfectly plausible. “December, your dinner’s ready.” I can hear it now.

And if Tuppence is allowed, the possibilities become almost limitless. We could revive Ha’penny. Perhaps Guinea for parents with grander aspirations. There must surely be room for Shilling, although I suspect young Farthing might have a difficult time at school.

Perhaps in fifty years’ time nobody will think anything of meeting someone called 4.30 Thursday afternoon. And when we’re introduced, we’ll smile politely and say, “Oh, that’s a lovely name.”

Because apparently Tuesday is.

How to Make Visitors Feel Welcome

We were walking from the campsite at Sandy Haven into Milford Haven, following the coast path through Gelliswick, when we came across a planning notice.

Normally, planning notices are about as exciting as a council tax bill. This one wasn't.

The former Gelliswick caravan park is being brought back into use, but the plans go rather further than simply reopening a campsite. First comes camping and parking. Then, if the scheme develops as intended, woodland walks, sports areas, a coffee shop, workshops, a community resource centre, green space, eco-therapy and rural crafts.

In other words, somebody has had the radical idea of taking a redundant coastal site and turning it into something useful for both visitors and local people.

It immediately made us think that, once it opens, we might come back in the motorhome. It is right by the sea, on the coast path, with Milford Haven within walking distance. Given that the old caravan park took touring caravans and motorhomes, it is exactly the sort of place we would use.

And that made me notice something else. A surprising amount of parking around here is free.

No app. No QR code. No machine demanding your registration number, inside leg measurement and first-born child. You can just park and go somewhere.

It turns out there is a reason for some of that. The free car park at Sandy Haven isn't Pembrokeshire County Council's at all. It belongs to Herbrandston Community Council, which describes it as one of the few car parks in Pembrokeshire that remains free to use. Around Gelliswick there is also plenty of roadside parking where, remarkably, nobody has yet found a way of monetising the act of stopping a car.

Pembrokeshire County Council charges quite happily elsewhere.

At Christmas, though, the County Council has made its car parks free at weekends specifically to encourage people to visit the towns and support local businesses.

So they know perfectly well that free parking can encourage people into town to spend money. It just seems to be an insight with a rather short seasonal shelf life.

And that is what makes the Gelliswick project interesting. The whole idea is based on encouraging people to come, stay, walk around, drink coffee, spend a bit of money and perhaps wander into Milford Haven as well. The point is to make the place worth coming to, then make it easy to stay.

Councils do have a habit of looking at a car park and seeing a tidy little revenue stream. Charge £5 and the spreadsheet says you've made £5.

Except perhaps somebody takes one look at the charge and doesn't bother. That's a coffee or lunch not bought, a shop not visited, perhaps an afternoon spent somewhere else. None of that appears in the parking department's figures, naturally.

Of course parking sometimes needs managing. Where spaces are genuinely scarce, sensible charges can encourage turnover and stop someone leaving a car in a prime town-centre space all day.

But there is a considerable difference between managing parking and treating every arriving visitor as a source of income.

We were already doing exactly what this sort of regeneration is supposed to encourage. Staying nearby, walking into town, buying things, looking around and thinking about coming back.

If you want visitors to bring money into your town, perhaps don't start by charging them for the privilege of arriving.

Outsourcing Dog Ownership

Somewhere along the line, owning a dog stopped meaning owning a dog.

People buy a dog, then pay someone else to walk it. They pay someone else to groom it. They pay for doggy day care. They hire pet sitters when they go away. There are dog psychologists, dog trainers, dog spas and, presumably, dog therapists for Labradors struggling with separation anxiety.

An entire support industry has materialised around people who want the emotional benefits of owning a dog, without any of the accompanying inconvenience.

Don't misunderstand me. I'm very fond of dogs. But dogs are, by their very nature, inconvenient. They need exercise when it's raining. They need feeding when you'd rather stay in bed. They need attention when you're halfway through a television programme.

That's the deal.

Yet we've somehow convinced ourselves that paying three different people to perform the actual dog-owning bits still counts as dog ownership.

The economics are fascinating. A person buys a dog for companionship, then spends a small fortune outsourcing the companionship.

At that point, one has to ask an awkward question.

Why not just get a cat?

Cats have spent thousands of years perfecting the art of requiring almost nothing from human beings beyond occasional food and a warm windowsill. They don't expect a daily march around the local park. They don't need a haircut that costs more than a gentleman's barber.

Cats understand modern life.

Dogs, on the other hand, still operate under the quaint assumption that if you bought one, you might actually want to spend time with it.

Perhaps that's why cats always look faintly amused.

The Banking System Has an Undo Button. It Just Won't Let Me Use It

This morning I intended to pay £7.28 into my NatWest Reward account and managed to pay £728 instead. I think this may be the 4th time I have done something similar, so clearly the decimal point and I have unresolved issues.

Fair enough. My mistake. But that is really where the interesting bit starts, because the transaction itself took seconds. I entered the amount, authenticated it and off it went. NatWest's systems apparently saw nothing particularly remarkable in my paying roughly 100 times the amount I actually intended to pay.

You might have thought that a banking app could spot that sort of thing. It knows the balance. It knows the amount being paid. A simple message saying, "You appear to be paying £728 against a balance of £7.28. Are you sure?" would probably have saved everybody some trouble. Banks are quite capable of detecting unusual transactions when they want to, so this hardly seems beyond the wit of man.

Still, people make mistakes, and software generally allows for that. The problem is that once I have made this particular mistake, I cannot correct it myself.

The £728 has not disappeared. It is sitting as credit on my account. It is still my money. NatWest knows where it came from, knows where it went, knows that both accounts are mine and knows that the receiving account is now substantially in credit. Yet there is no straightforward way for me to reverse the excess payment back to the account it came from.

Instead I have to contact the bank.

That sounds simple enough, until one actually tries it. The automated voice system could not understand what I wanted because, apparently, my problem did not fit one of its approved categories. It had a stock number of things it was prepared to discuss and "I accidentally paid £728 instead of £7.28" was not among them.

At one point I was directed to another telephone number. I rang it. The number was no longer in use.

Eventually I got through to a person. By then I had already been through the bank's security process once, but I had to go through it again. That proved rather more fraught than it needed to be, which added another layer of irritation to a problem that was, at heart, very simple.

And then came the explanation that the transfer back was still "pending", which was why it could take 24 to 48 hours.

That is where the whole thing becomes particularly difficult to defend.

If I use the account to pay a retailer, the transaction is authorised immediately and, from my point of view, the money is gone. I do not get 24 to 48 hours in which everybody pauses for reflection. Yet when the issue is simply returning an obvious excess payment to the account it came from, suddenly the machinery needs a day or 2 to process it.

I appreciate that card settlement and bank transfers are not technically identical processes, and I am not claiming that the banking system literally moves every penny from one ledger to another the instant I tap a card. But that rather misses the customer's point. The system is perfectly capable of making the consequence of my payment immediate. What it apparently cannot do is give me an equally immediate way of correcting an obvious mistake.

And that is the part that grates, because banks have spent the last few decades shifting almost every routine task on to the customer. We transfer our own money, set up our own payments, manage our own cards, authenticate ourselves, download our own statements and generally do most of the things that once required a visit to a branch. Mostly this is an improvement. I have no great desire to go back to queueing behind somebody paying in the contents of a biscuit tin.

But there is an obvious asymmetry here. When automation saves the bank money, I am trusted to manage things myself. When automation would allow me to correct an obvious error, suddenly a bank official has to become involved.

I can pay almost anybody in Britain in seconds. What I cannot apparently do is return my own accidental overpayment to the account it came from.

There may be perfectly sensible regulatory or technical reasons for putting controls around this sort of transaction, and I am not suggesting NatWest has deliberately designed the system so that it can sit on my £720.72 for a couple of days and earn a fortune from it. That would be a fairly heroic claim over £720.72.

But there is still an interesting question of incentives. Making it easy for customers to move money into an account is useful to the bank as well as the customer, so the systems exist and they work quickly. Spending money to make it equally easy for customers to undo their own mistakes is rather less obviously useful to the bank.

And my £720.72 is only my £720.72. Multiply similar errors by however many customers make them across the banking system each day and the total is presumably not trivial. Whether banks make any meaningful profit from those temporary balances is almost beside the point. They certainly have little commercial incentive to make the correction process frictionless.

From the customer's point of view, though, the solution does not appear especially exotic. If an account has been put into credit by a payment from another account in the same customer's name, allow the excess to be returned to the originating account. Authenticate the customer in the usual way, limit the amount to the credit balance and send it back where it came from.

That is essentially an undo function.

If I accidentally delete 5 pages of something in Word, I do not have to telephone Microsoft, negotiate with a voice system that cannot understand why I am calling, get referred to a number that no longer exists, authenticate myself twice and then wait 2 working days for somebody to restore paragraph 7.

I press Ctrl-Z.

Banking has somehow reached the position where I can make the error instantly but cannot undo it instantly, even when there is very little ambiguity about what has happened or where the money should go.

The technology clearly exists to move the money. I have demonstrated that part myself, repeatedly.

After the 4th encounter with this particular problem, I am beginning to suspect that the decimal point is not the only thing that could do with redesigning.

Marshmallow Inbound

There are no missiles called Marshmallow. Nor Fluffy Bunny. Nor Gentle Breeze. Nor Cuddles.

Instead we have Storm Shadow, Hellfire, Brimstone, Tomahawk, Meteor and Sea Viper. Apparently it is not enough for a missile to contain several hundred kilograms of high explosive and arrive at considerable speed. It must also sound as though it has been named by a 14-year-old boy designing a computer game.

Storm Shadow is particularly good. As if the several hundred kilograms of high explosive weren’t sufficiently intimidating.

I understand why this happens. Weapons need names, and nobody at the Ministry of Defence is going to stand up at a procurement meeting and announce that Britain’s latest long-range precision strike weapon will henceforth be known as Trevor.

But why not?

Imagine the intelligence briefing.

Multiple Trevors launched from aircraft over the Black Sea. Frankly, I’d find that more worrying.

There is obviously an unwritten rule that military equipment must sound aggressive before anyone has even switched it on. You can almost picture the committee rejecting Mild Concern, Firm Rebuke and Quite Cross because they didn’t sound sufficiently lethal.

And yet the name makes precisely no difference to what the thing does. Call Storm Shadow Marshmallow and it still flies hundreds of miles, finds the coordinates you gave it and rearranges the target fairly comprehensively.

Indeed, Marshmallow might have a certain psychological advantage. Nobody wants to be the commander who has to report that his headquarters has just been destroyed by a Marshmallow.

Forget Hellfire.

Marshmallow inbound.

The LNG Jetty That Disappeared

Walking around Milford Haven, I noticed something rather odd.

The LNG jetty is there. You can see it. Satellite imagery shows it. Ordnance Survey mapping shows it. Ships berth at it. I was under the bloody thing.

Yet on one Google map layer, it simply vanishes.

This is not some forgotten fishing quay. Milford Haven contains 2 of Britain’s 3 LNG import terminals and is a rather important part of the country’s energy infrastructure.

Presumably it is just a mapping anomaly - different datasets, simplified mapping, perhaps some peculiar treatment of industrial infrastructure.

But there is something wonderfully modern about a vast LNG terminal, handling a significant chunk of Britain’s gas supply, being physically impossible to miss while apparently not existing on the map.

Perhaps energy policy works the same way.

When a Coffee Cup Needs Instructions

We stopped for coffee while walking the Pembrokeshire coast path at Milford Haven.

Around us were tankers, tugs, pilot boats, jetties and terminals. An entire harbour full of things designed on the fairly sensible principle that engineering has to work.

Then I was handed a coffee cup that required instructions.

Push.
Pull.
Blast.

Blast?

The thing looked like a cross between a takeaway cup and an escape room puzzle, with four flaps around the top and no obvious place from which to drink.

Then came the sugar sachets. Outside. Beside Milford Haven Marina. You tear one open and the empty wrapper immediately attempts to make for Ireland. And, of course, there is nowhere to put it. No tray, no little waste pot, nothing. So you're trying to control hot coffee, sugar, a spoon and several tiny airborne pieces of litter while simultaneously working out how the cup operates.

Fortunately, because we were walking, we had our own cups with us. So we poured the coffee into them. Which rather raises the obvious question. If a specially designed coffee cup has to be decanted into another cup before it becomes practical to drink from, what exactly has been achieved?

The coffee was excellent and the service was friendly. This isn't really about the café. It's about the modern urge to redesign perfectly functional objects. For centuries, the brief for a cup was simple. Hold liquid, protect fingers, allow drinking.

Job done.

Now it apparently has to be innovative, sustainable, distinctive and accompanied by operating instructions. Milford Haven is surrounded by engineering worth hundreds of millions of pounds, all ultimately judged by one question.

Does it work?

Our coffee container didn't.

The solution turned out to be a cup.