The Algorithm Knows I Won’t Buy It. It Shows Me the Advert Anyway

I watch quite a lot of films on YouTube, and some of the independent filmmakers on there are very good indeed. Properly good. People making thoughtful documentaries, short films and technical pieces without a broadcaster, studio or commissioning editor breathing down their neck. The price, apparently, is that every so often YouTube barges into the room and attempts to sell me something I do not want.

 
And I always do exactly the same thing. The instant that little countdown reaches zero, I press Skip. Not sometimes, not usually. Every single time. I do not wait to see how the advert ends, click through, or suddenly discover that what has been missing from my life is a new mattress, razor, meal kit, insurance policy or whatever other piece of tat the algorithm has decided to wave at me. I press Skip.

You would have thought that after a while the system might have noticed. This is, after all, an industry which never stops telling us how clever its algorithms are. They supposedly know what I watch, what I search for, what I pause on, what I abandon and what I am likely to buy. So surely somewhere in the machine there is now a fairly robust data point saying that this man skips every advert at the first possible opportunity and is therefore an appalling advertising prospect.

But perhaps that is to misunderstand the business model. Perhaps YouTube knows perfectly well that I am not a worthwhile target and simply does not care, because I can still be counted.

In that respect it is really not very different from old-fashioned commercial television. ITV never knew whether I was actually interested in the washing powder, the car or the life insurance policy. It simply sold advertisers access to an audience and interrupted the programme to deliver that audience. Commercial television could at least plead ignorance, because it had no idea which viewers had wandered off to make a cup of tea, gone to the lavatory or simply stopped paying attention.

YouTube does know. It can see that I skip at the first possible moment. It can see that I have done so repeatedly, and presumably has years of evidence telling it that putting another advert in front of me is extraordinarily unlikely to result in a sale. Yet it carries on doing it anyway.

That is what makes the modern version rather more cynical than the old television model. The old pitch was essentially, “We have several million viewers and some of them may be interested in your product.” The modern version can amount to, “We know a great deal about this particular viewer, including the fact that he has shown absolutely no inclination to watch an advert beyond the point at which we allow him to escape, but we can still put your advert in front of him.”

And there is the point. An advert can still be inserted, a brand can still be shown and another tiny unit of supposed exposure can be manufactured and sold. Whether I am remotely interested begins to look almost beside the point. YouTube does not necessarily need to believe I am going to buy the product. It merely needs an advertiser willing to pay for the opportunity to try.

So underneath all the grand talk of behavioural targeting, machine learning and personalisation, we seem to have arrived back at commercial television with better surveillance. Interrupt the thing somebody actually wants to watch, stick an advert in front of them and charge somebody else for the privilege.

The clever part may not be working out what I want to buy at all. It may simply be working out exactly how much unwanted advertising YouTube can force me to tolerate without annoying me enough to leave the platform. I skip the advert, mutter something unprintable and carry on watching the film, so from YouTube's point of view the system is working beautifully.

The algorithm may know perfectly well that I am a dreadful advertising target.

But somebody is still paying YouTube to put the advert in front of me.

And that is the bit that matters.

Your Call Is Important to Us

On Wednesday I managed to leave my Spada motorcycle helmet and gloves on a Y6 bus. I didn't actually realise this for a week because the Virago was back in the repair shop - again - so I had no immediate need for them. I'd left the helmet on the dining table and simply assumed Hay had moved it somewhere more appropriate. A motorcycle helmet is not generally regarded as a dining-room ornament.

Eventually I asked her where she'd put it. She hadn't. Bugger. Then I remembered the bus.

So, entirely my fault. First Bus didn't lose my helmet and gloves. I did. And having taken a week to notice, I wasn't exactly in a position to complain about anybody else's efficiency. But then I tried to report them missing, and embarked on an illuminating little journey through modern customer service in which I discovered that First Bus may or may not have my helmet, but it has certainly mislaid most of the means by which a customer can communicate with it.

There is, naturally, a website. The lost-property form asks all the obvious questions, but if you miss one of the compulsory fields it has a habit of resetting several of the fields you've already completed. One of those is the bus service, and you can't simply type Y6 back in. You have to scroll through a bloody great list of local services which, for reasons known only to whoever designed it, isn't even in alphabetical or numerical order. So each time the form resets, you have to go hunting for the Y6 all over again.

Somewhere in this process the system apparently decided that I was a bot. There is a certain irony in a computer making it unnecessarily difficult for a human being to complete a form and then concluding, from his repeated attempts to do so, that he must be a computer. My usual email address was now getting nowhere, so I tried my Gmail account instead. Dashlane inserted it automatically, as it always does, and the form announced that it wasn't a valid email address.

It is. Google and I have been successfully exchanging emails through it for years. But there isn't much point arguing with a web form. It has neither discretion nor curiosity, and nowhere to write, "Actually, old chap, you're wrong."

So I tried the telephone. Via another route I eventually found a number for First Bus lost property in Bristol, 0117 904 7252. I rang it and a recorded voice told me that the number had changed, helpfully supplying the replacement, 0117 929 1613. I rang that. It was disconnected.

Other attempts to telephone First Bus produced much the same result. There were systems, recorded messages and routes through them. What there wasn't was anybody I could actually talk to about my helmet. By this point the whole thing was beginning to resemble something designed by Kafka after a short course in digital transformation.

So I abandoned twenty-first-century communications and physically went to Bristol Bus and Coach Station, where there is a First Bus lost-property kiosk. Its shutters were down and there was nobody there. Eventually I went to the actual First Bus depot at Eastgate and, after the website, the bot detector, the invalid valid email address, the telephone system, the disconnected telephone number and the shuttered lost-property office, I discovered something apparently no longer considered an essential component of customer service.

A person.

And here's the interesting bit. He was helpful. He also sported a luxurious moustache rather like mine - obviously a man who gets things done, thinks I. He listened to what had happened, took my details and said they would be passed to the appropriate person.

He wasn't actually anything to do with customer service. He was a bus scheduler. So the only person in the entire First Bus customer-service labyrinth who managed to provide me with some customer service was a man whose job was scheduling buses. The technology had failed, the official routes had failed, and a bloke with a decent moustache and the ability to exercise a little judgement sorted it out in a few minutes.

Which is really the point. I am not a Luddite. I like digital systems. I bank online, shop online, run websites and use AI daily. For routine transactions, automation is generally faster, cheaper and more convenient than waiting for somebody to answer a telephone. But companies increasingly seem to have confused automating transactions with providing customer service. They aren't the same thing.

If everything goes according to the flowchart, you don't really need customer service. You fill in the form, the database does whatever databases do, and everyone gets on with their day. Customer service becomes important when something doesn't go according to the flowchart - an email address the system doesn't like, a question the designer didn't anticipate, or simply a problem that doesn't fit neatly into one of the boxes. That is precisely when you need a human being.

Having finally reported my helmet, I decided the experience justified a complaint. So I went to the First Bus complaints website, where we reach the really rather magnificent part. The complaints system wants you to choose what you're complaining about: a service, a timetable, a member of staff, and various other things First Bus has anticipated that you might wish to complain about.

What I couldn't find was any sensible way of saying, "Your customer-service system doesn't work."

The complaints system, in other words, appears to allow you to make the complaints that the complaints system has been designed to receive. If your complaint is about the complaints system itself, you're stuffed.

So yesterday I did something I haven't needed to do to a large company for years. I wrote a letter. On paper. I put it in an envelope and sent it to First Bus in Bristol, with another copy to the Chief Executive's Office of FirstGroup in Aberdeen. There is something wonderfully perverse about having to use nineteenth-century communications to complain about the shortcomings of twenty-first-century customer service.

And this isn't really about First Bus. They merely provided an unusually complete demonstration of something that is happening everywhere. Businesses quite reasonably discovered that digital technology could remove enormous amounts of routine work. Then somebody made the conceptual leap that because most customers could now serve themselves, customer service itself could largely disappear.

The result works beautifully until it doesn't. Then the customer discovers that the telephone number has vanished, the chatbot can answer only the questions it has been programmed to recognise, the form insists that reality is invalid, and every route eventually leads back to the same system that couldn't deal with the problem in the first place.

Somewhere behind all this there are still people. I know because I eventually found one, and he solved in a few minutes what the systems supposedly designed to help me could not.

As for the Spada helmet and gloves, I've heard nothing yet, which is fair enough. I took a week to notice I'd lost them.

But in looking for them, I discovered something rather larger that appears to have gone missing.

Customer service.

The Right to Be a Bloody Nuisance

I've noticed something on the narrow country lanes around here. Your average occasional cyclist is generally quite considerate. Middle-aged bloke on a hybrid, perhaps, out for a bit of exercise rather than attempting to qualify for the Tour de France. He hears a car behind him, spots a gateway or a slightly wider bit of road, pulls over for 10 seconds, gives you a wave and carries on.

Nobody dies. Nobody's rights have been infringed. Civilisation survives.

Then there is the lycra-clad variety.

I followed one for the best part of 2 miles the other day at about 20 mph. Narrow lane, hedges either side, nowhere safe to pass. He knew I was there. There were places where he could have stopped for a few seconds and let me through. He didn't.

Now, before somebody reaches excitedly for the Highway Code, I know perfectly well that he had every right to be there. He is traffic. I have to wait until there is enough room to pass safely. I wasn't going to squeeze past him with my wing mirror brushing his elbow merely because I happened to have an engine.

But that's not really the point.

I pull over for horses. If I meet a rider on one of these lanes, I'll stop or find somewhere to tuck the car in and let them through. A horse is a large, occasionally unpredictable animal, and its rider has quite enough to worry about without me insisting on exercising every last inch of my legal entitlement to the highway.

I wait for walkers. I wait behind cyclists until I can pass them safely. I don't sit 2 feet behind somebody revving the engine because they're delaying me.

It's called courtesy. And courtesy works both ways.

That's what seems to have been lost somewhere along the way. We've confused having a right with having no obligation to consider anyone else. "I am entitled to do this" has somehow become the complete argument.

Of course, being stuck behind a cyclist for 2 miles at 20 mph isn't exactly the retreat from Dunkirk. It takes 6 minutes. I'll survive. But that's precisely what makes the whole thing so bloody irritating. My 6-minute crawl could have been avoided by him spending perhaps 10 seconds pulling into a gateway. He loses virtually nothing. I get on my way. We might even exchange a wave.

Instead, we conduct a small constitutional seminar on the rights of cyclists for the next 2 miles.

And I don't actually think this is particularly about bicycles. It's part of something wider. We've become terribly good at knowing our rights and rather less interested in the little accommodations that make sharing space with other human beings bearable.

The bloke on the hybrid seems to understand this instinctively. So does the horse rider who waves when you've stopped for them. So does the driver who waits rather than forcing his way through.

Somewhere inside the lycra, however, there occasionally appears to be a High Court judge delivering a landmark ruling on his absolute right to maintain 20 mph until further notice.

And yes, mate, you're quite right, you are entitled to hold me up, but you don't have to be a bloody nuisance about it.

Falling Over, Properly

I have recently discovered that one of the remedies for age-related loss of balance is, apparently, garden parkour. Not proper parkour, obviously. Nobody is suggesting that pensioners should be vaulting walls, leaping over bollards and launching themselves off the roof of the shed. 

The idea is rather more modest. You get out on the grass, practise going off balance, get down on the ground, roll around a bit, learn how to fall, then get back up again without behaving as though the event requires an ambulance and a family conference.

It makes a certain amount of sense. Part of the problem with getting older is not just that balance declines. Confidence declines with it. You become cautious, then stiff, then more cautious still. Eventually a patch of uneven lawn starts to look like difficult terrain.

The snag is that grass is still quite hard, which led me to a better idea. Ball pits.

Just up the road from us is a place called My Little Town, an indoor play area for small children with numerous ball pits and all the usual soft-play apparatus. The building used to be a 2nd hand car dealership, with a large indoor showroom area, which is presumably precisely why it suited conversion to soft play. It is now almost exactly what I need. Padded surfaces, soft obstacles and somewhere I can fall over repeatedly without cracking my head on a paving slab.

There is, however, a fairly obvious difficulty. I cannot really turn up on my own. A 71-year-old man presenting himself at the desk of a children’s soft-play centre and announcing that he would like half an hour in the ball pit would probably provoke a response rather different from, “Certainly, sir. Socks are compulsory.”

So I would have to find somebody with small children and persuade them to take me. Think about that conversation. “Any chance I could come with you next time you take the kids to My Little Town?” Why? “I want to roll around in the ball pit.”

There would probably then be a pause.

I could explain proprioception. I could explain loss of confidence after a wobble. I could even produce evidence about controlled falling and balance training. None of this, I suspect, would improve matters.

My Little Town gets round one of the bigger practical problems of running a children’s play centre by making parents responsible for supervising their own children. That means the staff are not acting as childminders, so they do not all have to be DBS checked, and it also shifts a fair chunk of the day-to-day supervisory responsibility back onto Mum and Dad. The business still has to provide safe premises and safe equipment, obviously, but little Tarquin deciding to launch himself backwards into a ball pit is largely a parental problem.

Which raises an interesting question in my case. If I only gain admission by attaching myself to somebody else’s family, does that parent then become responsible for supervising me as well? Would somebody have to say, “Phil, stop throwing the balls”? If I vanished into one of the tunnels, would they be obliged to come looking for me? And if I became overexcited and went head-first down the slide, at what point would somebody quietly call my wife?

There is also the possibility that another parent would notice an elderly man apparently having the time of his life in the middle of the ball pit and ask the perfectly reasonable question: “Whose is he?” At which point my borrowed parent would have to raise a hand and say, “He’s with us.”

That could be the precise moment at which Social Services, the police and somebody from adult safeguarding all arrived together.

Which is why I have decided the whole thing needs turning around. My Big Town.

Exactly the same principle as My Little Town, but for pensioners. A proper indoor soft-play centre designed for people whose knees no longer regard getting down on the floor as the easy part. Ball pits for controlled falling, foam blocks to climb over, soft ramps for balance work and padded floors for those moments when enthusiasm overtakes judgement.

The whole thing would be aimed at restoring something older people gradually lose without quite noticing - confidence in movement. And, crucially, dignity would be temporarily suspended on entry. You would turn up in comfortable clothes, take your shoes off and spend 40 minutes rolling around in plastic balls, crawling over padded obstacles and rediscovering physical movements last attempted when Harold Wilson was Prime Minister.

There would, of course, have to be medical cover. Not just a first-aid box and somebody who once did a course at work. St John Ambulance, properly stationed in the corner, with a defibrillator prominently mounted on the wall. Not because anything would necessarily go wrong, but because the sight of 30 pensioners gambolling in a ball pit would make all of this seem less like an optional extra and more like responsible management.

And beside them, not a coffee machine. Absolutely not. An independent barista and cake maker.

Proper coffee, made properly, with a decent slice of cake afterwards. There is no point restoring confidence in movement if the reward is instant coffee from a machine and a wrapped flapjack with the texture of roofing felt. In fact, this could be part of the business model. Twenty minutes in the ball pit, a controlled roll off the foam ramp, then a flat white and a slice of Victoria sponge while you discuss whether Brian, 78, really ought to have attempted the tunnel backwards.

That is rehabilitation I could commit to.

The waiver would need careful wording. Participants acknowledge that climbing, crawling, falling over and behaving like a 7-year-old may result in bruising, embarrassment or an unscheduled conversation about blood pressure.

There would also have to be an advanced section for people who had completed the introductory course and were now considered sufficiently competent to fall over with confidence. A slightly deeper ball pit, perhaps. More difficult foam obstacles. And, for the truly committed, pensioner wrestling.

Not WWE pensioner wrestling. Nobody is being hit over the head with a folding chair and I do not want an 82-year-old coming off the top rope. I mean supervised grappling on thick mats, learning how to shift weight, roll out of awkward positions and recover balance while another pensioner tries, in a civilised and age-appropriate manner, to interfere. No gouging, no spitting, no punching.

Although I can already see how it would go.

Two sensible retired accountants would begin by practising controlled weight transfer. Five minutes later one of them would discover a competitive streak he had not used since 1987 and somebody would be trying to apply a half-nelson while St John Ambulance quietly moved the defibrillator 6 feet closer.

There would clearly have to be grades. Beginner Ball Pit. Intermediate Falling Over. Advanced Pensioner Wrestling.

The certificate would be magnificent.

“Congratulations. You are now qualified to be pushed over by Derek.”

Eventually, of course, somebody would conduct a proper study and discover that all this nonsense actually worked. Falls would reduce. Confidence would improve. People would become more mobile, and getting up off the floor would cease to be treated as an emergency procedure.

Then the NHS would become involved.

At that point My Big Town would have to be renamed the Centre for Dynamic Proprioceptive Rehabilitation, because no publicly funded health programme can admit that the treatment consists largely of pensioners rolling around in a ball pit, wrestling each other on padded mats, followed by coffee and cake. There would be referral forms, outcome measures and somebody would eventually devise a 12-point Ball Pit Functional Mobility Assessment.

The wrestling would become “assisted resistance-based postural recovery”. The cake would almost certainly be removed on nutritional grounds. And by then the whole original point would have been forgotten.

Children spend their early years falling over, climbing things, rolling around and getting back up again. Older people spend theirs trying desperately not to. Perhaps we have got that slightly wrong.

My Big Town. Soft play for pensioners, proper coffee and cake, pensioner wrestling for the advanced pupils, St John Ambulance standing by and a defibrillator on the wall. Perhaps the idea isn't stupid.

 

 

The Garage Has Eaten My Washers

I wanted 2 washers. That was the entire job. Nothing complicated, nothing remotely deserving of an afternoon. I have a box of assorted washers somewhere in the garage or workshop. I know I have it because I have used it often enough, and because buying a box of assorted washers is exactly the sort of sensible thing you do so that, when you need 2 washers, you can simply go and get them.

 
Except the box had vanished.

I looked where it normally lives, then in the places where I might reasonably have moved it. After that the search became progressively less rational, because garages encourage that sort of thing. You start with some confidence in your own filing system and end up opening drawers that have no conceivable connection with the object you are looking for, just in case some previous version of yourself had a moment of inspiration that now looks indistinguishable from idiocy.

Still no washer box, so I decided to make an espresso and take it into the garage while I continued looking. This seemed civilised enough. There is no reason why the disappearance of a box of washers should also deprive me of coffee.

A little later I went back into the kitchen and realised I had left the cup in the garage. So I went back to fetch it and discovered that the cup had now disappeared as well.

This was rather more difficult to explain. A washer box can vanish in a garage because there are boxes everywhere and because things migrate. But the espresso cup is about the size of an egg cup and I had been drinking from it only minutes earlier. I knew roughly where I had been standing. It should have been one of the easier objects in the building to locate.

Apparently not.

I carried on looking for the washer box and eventually opened a drawer. There, for reasons entirely beyond me, was the espresso cup. I have absolutely no recollection of putting it there. At some point I had evidently decided that a workshop drawer was a perfectly sensible temporary home for crockery, and had done so without the event making enough impression on my brain to survive for more than a few minutes.

This, I think, is the real nature of garages. You go in with a clear purpose, but the place interferes with the chain of thought. Something catches your eye, which reminds you of another job, and before long the original object has become merely one unresolved matter among several. The garage itself seems to operate on a different filing system, in which things are never exactly lost but are placed somewhere you would never think to look until you are searching for something else.

The most infuriating part is that I know the washer box will eventually turn up. It will probably be somewhere perfectly visible, in a place I have already searched more than once. I will stare at it for several seconds and wonder how on earth I failed to see it before.

Meanwhile, the original job remains undone.

I went into the garage wanting 2 washers. I came out having discovered that I am apparently capable of filing an espresso cup in a drawer.

The washer box is still missing.

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.

The £93 Aeroscreen That Nobody Can Buy

There’s a curious bit of psychology going on with an aeroscreen I’ve been watching on eBay.

A new one is generally about £141 on a Buy It Now basis, which is the normal asking price and something anybody seriously looking for one will establish fairly quickly. Then up pops an auction starting at £93.

Now, as an ex sales executive selling high-value equipment, I’m hardly unfamiliar with anchoring. I spent years around pricing, negotiation and buyer psychology, so I know perfectly well what that first number does. What amused me was that, despite knowing all that, it still worked on me.

The moment I saw £93, I stopped thinking of the aeroscreen as a £130 or £140 item and started thinking that perhaps I could nick it for under £100. So I put in a snipe at £95.50.

The 50p is my own little bit of bidding psychology. Plenty of people bid nice round numbers, so I tend to add something odd on the end in the hope that one day somebody else has bid £95 and my £95.50 wins it. Whether that is clever or merely another example of auction psychology is open to debate, but I’ve done it for years.

Anyway, the auction ended and I didn’t get it. Nobody did. The reserve hadn’t been met.

That was the point at which it struck me that the seller had probably made a fairly fundamental mistake. I don’t know what his reserve is, but I’d guess somewhere around £125 to £130, which is perfectly plausible if comparable new aeroscreens are sitting there at £141.

The problem is that he hasn’t anchored the buyer at £125 or £130. He’s anchored them at £93.

Once £93 is in your head, £95 feels sensible, £100 still feels like a bargain and £110 starts to feel as though the bargain is disappearing. By the time the bidding gets anywhere near £125, you’re no longer thinking that you’re still saving money against the £141 Buy It Now price. You’re thinking that the whole reason you became interested in the auction has vanished and you might as well just buy one elsewhere.

That is what I find interesting, because I knew all of this before I bid. I knew the market price, I knew what anchoring was and I knew exactly what that £93 opening figure was doing, yet I still approached the auction as a chance to buy a £141 item for £95.50 rather than as a chance to buy a £141 item for perhaps £125.

The seller, I suspect, thinks he is creating excitement. Start low, attract attention, get a few people bidding and let competition do the rest. That can work perfectly well if there are enough bidders and enough competitive heat, but this is an aeroscreen. It isn’t an iPhone. It’s a niche item with a relatively small pool of buyers, and most of them will probably know roughly what a new one costs.

So instead of attracting people prepared to pay £125 or £130, he risks attracting people like me who are interested precisely because they think they might get lucky at £95.50.

The reserve then makes the problem worse, because it reveals that the attractive opening price was never really available in the first place. The listing says £93, while the seller has a quite different figure in his head. Those 2 numbers are doing completely different jobs.

I suspect he’ll relist it, and if he relists it on exactly the same terms I wouldn’t be surprised if much the same thing happens again. Somebody bids £95, somebody else perhaps goes to £99 or £103, the reserve isn’t met and the auction ends without a sale.

If I genuinely wanted £125 for it, I’d be inclined to start somewhere near £125 and forget the reserve. Then £125 becomes the reference point and the buyer approaches the auction thinking that this is roughly what the thing costs. Alternatively, I’d simply put it up at £130 Buy It Now and let somebody decide whether they wanted it.

What I wouldn’t do is advertise £93 and then quietly refuse to sell it for anything like £93, because the seller thinks he is selling an aeroscreen when what he is actually selling first is an expectation. At £93, the expectation is that somebody might get lucky. At £130, the expectation is simply that this is what the thing costs.

Once you’ve put the wrong expectation into the buyer’s head, it can be surprisingly difficult to get it out again.

And that, I suspect, is why the aeroscreen may keep coming back. And why I bought another at £141.

Results Day, Brought to You by the News Industry

School results day has become one of those annual media rituals that now arrives with all the subtlety of a royal wedding.

Television crews descend on schools. Reporters wait outside the gates. Teenagers are encouraged to wave bits of paper in the air while photographers search for the perfect shot.

And I find myself wondering when this became normal.

When I sat my exams, you didn't even go to school to collect your results. You got an envelope through the post. You opened it at home. You told your parents. End of. The world carried on turning.

Of course, some people were thrilled and others disappointed. Exam results mattered then, just as they do now. What didn't exist was the assumption that every personal milestone had to be converted into a public spectacle.

Every year we see exactly the same photographs. Smiling pupils leaping into the air. Groups hugging each other. Proud teachers standing in the background.

What we don't see are the pupils whose results didn't go according to plan.

We are constantly told that young people are under unprecedented pressure, suffering unprecedented anxiety and struggling with unrealistic expectations. Yet we seem perfectly happy to transform one of the most stressful days of their lives into a media circus.

Not everything needs a camera crew. Not every success requires a photograph. Not every disappointment needs an audience. An examination result is a piece of information, not an entertainment format.

Call me old-fashioned, but I still think an envelope through the letterbox had much to recommend it.

You opened it.

You dealt with it.

And then you got on with your life.

Baked Beans

I noticed a tin of baked beans in the cupboard while reaching for a coffee pod - yes, I know, not exactly eco-friendly - and found myself looking at the words Baked Beans.

Baked beans.

They are not baked, are they?

I had never really thought about this before, which is odd because I have been eating them for most of my life. You open the tin, tip them into a saucepan, heat them up and eat them. Or put them in the microwave, which is what most of us actually do now. At no stage does baking occur.

Apparently they are soaked, sealed in the tin with the sauce and cooked under pressure. That is perfectly sensible, but it is not baking. It is beans being boiled inside a tin, although I accept that this would not be a particularly attractive thing to print on the label.

Presumably there was once some connection with beans being slowly baked in an oven, and the name simply carried on after the method had changed. Or perhaps people thought baked sounded nicer. It does. Baked suggests warmth, a proper kitchen and something taking its time. Pressure-cooked suggests the food has been interrogated.

But we have all gone along with it without question.

I do not feel cheated. A baked bean is still a baked bean, even if it is not baked, which is itself a slightly ridiculous sentence. They are cheap, filling and very good on toast. I shall continue buying them.

It just bothers me slightly that the entire product is named after the one thing that does not happen to it.

I went into the cupboard for coffee and came out mistrusting beans.

The Algorithm Thinks I'm Commercially Useless

Hay is convinced Amazon is listening to her. She looks briefly at something online, or mentions it at home, and within hours she is being followed around the internet by adverts for it. Shoes, furniture, kitchen equipment, whatever it happens to be. Amazon has apparently stationed a small commercial intelligence unit in the sitting room.

I don't get that. I can spend days looking at motorcycles, carburettors, sidecars, welding equipment, classic car parts and tools of increasingly doubtful necessity, yet the adverts mostly leave me alone. The exception is motorcycle clothing. I have been bombarded with motorcycle clothing, but unfortunately for the advertising industry I won't buy that new either.

That was when it occurred to me that the difference is not that Hay is being listened to and I am not. The internet has almost certainly profiled both of us perfectly. The difference is that Hay looks at things which are still being manufactured. Most of the stuff I research was last available new when John Major was Prime Minister.

I am not usually looking for a current product from a retailer with an advertising budget. I am looking for a used carburettor from a dismantled Yamaha, a sidecar built before anyone had heard the phrase lifestyle brand, or a Triumph panel being sold by a man in a shed who regards email as an unnecessary complication. There is no glossy marketing campaign for any of that.

Even when the algorithms find something they can sell me, such as motorcycle jackets, they run into the same problem. I look at the advert, decide the price is ridiculous, disappear down a small rabbit hole of reviews and protection ratings, then buy one second-hand from Facebook Marketplace.

So the internet is not failing to understand me. It understands me all too well. Somewhere, a computer has reduced me to: retired male, motorcycles, classic cars, engineering, high browsing activity, almost no chance of paying full retail price.

Hay is a potential customer.

I am an administrative overhead.

The Big Dipper, Days 1 & 2

One day into the restoration, the £250 Watsonian already started explaining itself. The image below, I should explain, is not the finished article, but the template.

The trouble with bringing home an old sidecar is that it does not remain merely an old sidecar for long. Yesterday it was a faded black Watsonian Monza which Hay thought looked like the first car from a Big Dipper I was planning to build in the back garden.

Her sister thinks I'm building a bobsleigh for the Old Sodbury bobsleigh team, who intend to compete in the next Winter Olympics.

Today it has become an archaeological excavation, a structural investigation and, inevitably, a design exercise. I have barely had it 48 hours.

The first job was simply to establish what I had actually bought. Once the body and chassis were separated and the accumulated Yorkshire weather began coming off, the answer was encouraging.

The chassis has been smothered in underseal. Normally that can mean either somebody was trying to preserve the steel or somebody was trying to hide it. In this case, the frame appears solid. There is some pitting, but nothing which suggests it is quietly turning into lace.

The underseal can come off, the metal can be cleaned and inspected, and the frame can then be properly primed and painted. I had briefly considered polishing part of the front rail back to bare steel and lacquering it, although that may depend on what remains after 60 years of corrosion and enthusiasm.

The front bumper rail is another matter.

After scraping the paint from the joints between the front rail and the rest of the chassis, I found a distinct golden fillet. That is a strong indication that the rail was brazed rather than welded, which would be entirely consistent with British tubular construction in the 1960s.

This is unexpectedly helpful. A brazed joint can be reheated until the bronze filler melts while the parent steel remains solid. With the chassis properly supported, the original front rail should therefore be removable without cutting into or shortening the side rails.

That would make fitting a polished stainless replacement considerably easier. The old rail can be withdrawn, the joints cleaned and suitable sockets or spigots fitted to accept a removable stainless front section, retained by discreet bolts or pins. It would be removable, replaceable and easier to polish.

This is the sort of thing which begins as a way of avoiding unnecessary expense and ends with an ex-navigating officer commissioning a bespoke stainless component because he did not want to spend unnecessary money.

The wheel presented a similar temptation.

The tyre is a Continental 4.00-10, and the seller described the wheel as a Mini wheel. The 4 hub studs, however, are on a 3¼-inch pitch circle, which is not a standard Mini fitting. A bespoke 10-inch wire wheel could be made, provided I wished to spend somewhere around £700 improving a £250 sidecar.

I do not.

The existing wheel and hub will therefore remain. They can be rebuilt, cleaned and painted, perhaps with a polished hubcap or some other modest embellishment which suggests period engineering without drifting into plastic imitation wire-wheel trims from a child’s pedal car. Watsonian have a suitable hubcap for £99.99.

The interior was less encouraging.

It is black, rough, knobbly and deeply uninviting. It looks less like somewhere to carry a passenger than somewhere local authorities used to store grit.

I initially considered smoothing it with filler, but the body will flex and filler has a habit of responding to movement by cracking in public. Upholstered panels would improve it, but they would also add weight and provide damp with somewhere private to settle.

The more sensible solution may be simpler.

I have a considerable quantity of grey industrial floor paint left over from the garage. It is tough, repels almost everything and is not very far removed from the colour of the Virago. More importantly, it would stop the interior looking aggressively funereal.

There, that's better.

A removable rubber mat can cover the floor. Thin coloured plastic panels could be fitted to the sides like door cards, using lightweight trim fixings rather than building an entire drawing room inside it.

That would conceal the worst of the original moulding, add very little weight and remain removable if water gets behind it.

Because water will get behind it. This is Britain.

The floor construction initially caused some confusion.

At first, patches of exposed wood made it look as though the plywood formed the entire floor. Then it appeared to be sitting in a recess in the GRP. Then it became clear that the plywood is supported by the moulded fibreglass recess and glassed over from inside, apart from a small damaged area where the covering laminate had broken away and exposed the timber.

The plywood itself appears remarkably sound.

It has lasted since the 1960s with little more than red primer and black paint on the underside. I have stripped that underside back to bare wood and see no reason to entomb it permanently in resin.

The plywood supports the tub and should remain visible and accessible. One day, perhaps around 2086, somebody may need to replace it. It would be discourteous to make them excavate it from beneath half an inch of modern composite material simply because I had bought resin in bulk.

I will prime it with an exterior wood primer and finish it with the same industrial floor paint. It will be sealed, protected and still readable.

The original arrangement lasted about 60 years with considerably less sophisticated protection, which is a fairly persuasive product test.

I have already repaired several rips in the GRP and reinforced the moulded recess which supports the plywood base. The plywood was sound, but parts of the surrounding fibreglass had split and were plainly doing rather less supporting than Watsonian originally intended.

That has now been dealt with using fresh glass cloth and resin, extending the reinforcement beyond the damaged sections rather than merely sticking the tears back together and hoping they would forget what happened.

It is not glamorous work, but it has clarified the construction. The plywood carries the floor loads, while the GRP recess locates and supports it around the perimeter.

Strengthening that junction should prevent the old cracks simply reappearing a few inches further along, which is fibreglass’s preferred response to a purely cosmetic repair.

The 3 seized bolts near the front were rather less cooperative. They passed through the plywood and secure the remains of a substantial steel bracket inside the footwell. It has rusted away at the bend, which initially made the whole arrangement seem perverse. Why put the steel inside the tub rather than underneath, where it could support the floor?

The answer became clearer as the construction revealed itself.

The bracket performs 2 separate functions. Its upper half forms part of the sidecar’s attachment system. The lower connection ties it to the sidecar chassis, while the upper connection carries the link onwards to the motorcycle. Both are reached from inside the tub.

This is the upper half as you can see where it has rusted away from the rest.

 

The lower half did something different. It continued down the side of the footwell, turned across the floor, rose again to meet the other side and the corresponding chassis fixing pass-through. It was secured by those 3 bolts through the plywood. Essentially a large U.

Watsonian had therefore combined the motorcycle attachment and the front body mounting in one large and rather complicated piece of steel.

One option would be to reconstruct the broken bracket temporarily, using cardboard or a bent welding rod to establish its original shape, and then have a complete replacement fabricated. That would preserve the factory arrangement, but probably at considerable cost.

The more elegant solution is to separate the 2 jobs. The surviving upper section can be cut back and faired neatly at the break, leaving it to connect the motorcycle to the sidecar chassis. A new transverse cradle can then run across the front of the chassis beneath the floor, supporting the tub in much the same way as the existing support at the rear.

There is one remaining qualification. The vanished lower section probably prevented the upper bracket from pivoting around its lower chassis connection. I will therefore probably jst fabricate a bridging piece that replaces the rotted bend and attaches to sound metal on each half of the bracket.

The bolts have had roughly 60 years to become emotionally attached to the remains of the bracket and now refuse to turn. They will probably have to be cut or ground off, carefully, without setting fire to the plywood or converting the surrounding fibreglass into airborne misery.

Anyway, after trying to extract the bracket from its fibreglass shroud, it quickly became clear it was rusted to hell and beyond repair, so the entire thing will have to be fabricated. I'll probably make it in 2 parts for ease of fitment, joining the two halves with an overlap before encasing it in fibreglass.

The problem was hardly unique to Watsonian. Lotus was wrestling with much the same issue in its early fibreglass cars - how to put serious loads into GRP without crushing or cracking it. The answer was broadly the same: let the fibreglass provide the shape, and put steel reinforcement wherever the loads actually enter the structure.

While smoothing the area around the footrest, I discovered what appeared to be a small brass identification plaque. Unfortunately, I discovered it by removing some of the writing. This was not my finest archaeological moment. Fortunately, enough survived to reveal the number S-83. The S prefix dates the body to 1965, making it a Mk2 Monza, and 83 appears to be its individual production number.

I have photographed it and will now leave it alone. Further restoration might improve it to the point where nothing remains.

The nose trim has gone rather better. The Watsonian badge was discoloured, its mounting boss was ruined and the aluminium spear beneath it was bent and tired.

The spear has been straightened, cleaned and lacquered. The badge has been restored and painted. The missing boss has been replaced with a jam jar lid. This sounds less impressive written down than it looks. Once lacquered and fitted, the lid no longer resembles anything which once contained marmalade. It looks like a proper pressed mounting boss.

Restoration is partly engineering and partly ensuring nobody can identify the household packaging involved.

The screen is unlikely to survive. It shows signs of having been heated and bent into shape when it was made, and the cut lines are not particularly true. Replicating it from polycarbonate would be possible, but cutting a large curved screen neatly is not as easy as the internet pretends.

More importantly, I am not sure I want it. Even if I replicated it, to look original I'd need to source or make an aluminium surround. Much too faffy.

A Brooklands aero screen would suit the Monza rather better and give it a more purposeful appearance. I could build up the front edge of the cockpit with sculpted expanded foam and fibreglass, creating a low scuttle into which the screen could be properly mounted. It may not even require building up.

And because I have already made burr-walnut dashboards for the GT6, I am now considering making one for the sidecar. It need not be entirely dummy. A shallow walnut panel could contain a clock, a GPS speedometer and a USB charging port. The passenger would then know the time, how fast they were travelling and precisely how much battery remained while having no influence whatsoever over any of it. A discreet grab handle beneath it might also be useful, particularly once the GPS speedometer begins confirming what the passenger already suspects. Below is the ChatGPT mock-up, although the image on the lower right needs some consideration about the angle of lean.

It'll probably end up looking like a 3 wheeler Morgan, on 1 wheel.

Then there's the paint, which in places like it was done with Tesco's black eggshell, with a stippling brush. That all needs laborious rubbing down before filler is applied to imperfections, and rubbed down again. Lots of rubbing down - and then some high build primer, and more rubbing down.

The original seat is still in Barnsley because I forgot to put it in the van. This may also prove fortunate.

I had already found a £27 reproduction Eames DSW-style plastic stool which looked roughly the right shape to use as a former for a low-backed fibreglass seat. Since then, I have found 4 of them on Facebook Marketplace for £40, which gives me 4 separate chances to cock it up before having to admit the idea was flawed in the first place. However, it's worth a try in order to get something more ergonomic than a couple of padded boards.

The white shells are about 2.5 cm too wide at the bottom for the Monza cockpit, so they will require some surgery before they can be used as formers. That is not necessarily a problem. Cutting, narrowing and reshaping one is rather the point, and I now have 3 spares waiting to learn from the first one’s mistakes. If it works, forgetting the original seat after a 6-hour round trip will cease to be absent-mindedness and become an early design decision supported by bulk purchasing.

So, after two days, the sidecar has acquired a known age, a restored badge, a grey interior, a jam jar component and several competing plans for its future. The chassis is better than expected. The plywood is sound. The damaged fibreglass is already being repaired. The missing ironmongery can be made.

The interior needs rescuing from blackness, the front rail needs rethinking, and the screen may be replaced by something Watsonian never fitted but perhaps should have.

It is still, according to Hay, the first car from a fairground ride. But it is now a 1965 Watsonian Monza Mk2, serial number S-83.

That sounds much more respectable - even with a jam jar lid on the front.