Getting an apprenticeship isn’t easy

My nephew has not had the easiest start in life. Oh, don’t get me wrong, he grew up as part of a loving family, has a doting mother and four gorgeous siblings, and a fantastic auntie and uncle who took him on all sorts of adventures (guess who that might be). But he suffered with “glue ear” when he was young, ended up having to have grommets and now has mild hearing loss; he also has mild dyslexia. So his education wasn’t the easiest. He dropped out of sixth-form college after having been badly hurt in a car accident – as an innocent pedestrian I should add.

Since when he’s had a series of jobs, none of which really offered him the career potential that he is capable of. Earlier this year, inspired by a friend of his, he decided he’d like to qualify as an electrician, and started looking for an apprenticeship.

Well, you would think, with all the politician’s talk about creating new apprenticeships, that wouldn’t be too hard. What they don’t tell us is that in order to qualify for an apprenticeship, and register at a suitable educational establishment, you have to have a job first! Yes, you have to persuade an employer to take you on, pay you a sum of money (the amount seems to vary between different colleges, but it doesn’t have to even be as much as the minimum wage in some instances) and then agree to release you one day a week for three years to enable you to get your qualification.

How does having to find a job before you can become an apprentice help create jobs?

Anyway, Mrs Meadowend emailed just about everyone we know over the summer; some of our friends responded very helpfully (you know who you are – and thank you) and my nephew secured a couple of interviews. We were all delighted when he was offered a job, as an apprentice trainee, at an electrical engineers and contractors near where we live in Buckinghamshire. The company has been very generous; they are paying him a bit more than the minimum wage and also for the day he spends at college – neither of which they are obliged to do. So he registered at our local college for his apprenticeship training just in time at the start of term in September.

Now, find somewhere to live

OK, that’s one hurdle over. Now he, his partner and adorable four-month old daughter (I know, I am her great uncle, so I would say that, but she is adorable) need to find somewhere to live nearby – they had been staying with Mrs M’s sister – nearly an hour’s drive away when the roads are clear – not really conducive to getting to work by 7:30am.

And here we encounter another problem. There’s no chance round here of them finding social housing, so they have to find somewhere to rent in the private sector. Because he’s on such a low wage, and his partner is on maternity leave, their total income entitles them to receive housing benefit.  ”That’s handy.” you might think.

However recieving housing benefit automatically disqualifies you from renting from most private landlords! You see, if you’re a private landlord there’s a good chance your insurance won’t cover you if you rent to someone with income from a “third party”. This is because councils, which are responsible for paying housing benefit, often change their mind and reduce their estimate of the rentable value of a property, and therefore reduce the benefit. So as a landlord you may have accepted a tenant in good faith, believed their income plus their housing benefit would enable them to afford your rent only to find that your tenant, through no fault of their own, suddenly becomes unable to pay the rent you’ve agreed with them. And you may have difficulty terminating their tenancy agreement. Because this has happened a lot many insurance policies now implicitly exclude those receiving housing benefit.

I guess insurance companies gratefully accept premiums and then do their utmost to avoid paying out if they can possibly find a hole through which to wriggle.

So my nephew, partner, and adorable daughter are staying with us. And may be staying with us for a while yet.

It’s no surprise that young people won’t leave home these days. Many of them can’t if they wanted to. All this while they’re still idealists, consider themselves to be immortal, and believe the world is a wonderful place if only us old people would stop screwing it up for them.

It’s hard being young – I wouldn’t want to do it again.

While all sports can suffer rule changes during the off season – rugby has particularly suffered from this, and football (soccer) notably had the controversial offside rule changed a couple of years ago – changing the rules and introducing technology that gives the slower driver an advantage over the chap infront doesn’t seem like cricket to me.

IMHO winning in Formula 1 is now primarily about the cars. A good driver in a great car (Jenson Button in the Brawn car in the 2009 season for example) can dominate much of the season, but actually in the second half of that season, when the rest of the teams managed to replicate the Brawn’s diffuser, the difference evaporated and Jenson managed to win the title only because he’d established such a commanding lead in the first half of the season.

Conversely a great driver in a mediocre car just gets left behind – Rubens Barrichello proved just how good a driver he is when he was Michael Schumacher’s team-mate at Ferrari, coming runner-up twice. But in an underperforming Williams, he’s just not in contention.

Adam Parr, chairman of Williams said:

“For us to design and build the two cars that we will have on the grid on Sunday here, without putting an engine in them, without putting a driver in them, without accounting for the 70 staff that we bring to each race – without all of that those cars cost £2m.”

And as I just pointed out, Williams aren’t really in contention at the moment. How much more do Ferrari, McLaren and Red Bull spend?

So really, how much of this is about sporting prowess, skill and ability, and how much is about the money, the designer and the engineering?

I’m not saying I could drive one of those cars as well as any of them out there – I know I couldn’t – but surely if they all got identical cars, whether they were designed by Adrian Newey or not, we’d all believe the results would reflect their sheer driving ability rather than the amount of money their teams can burn through.

For me, F1 at the moment is primarily about making money for Bernie Ecclestone, who hardly needs more than he’s currently got. So when it goes to Sky Sports next season, I for one won’t be watching it. I’m not putting any of my money into either Ecclestone’s or Murdoch’s pocket.

But it started blue-screening sporadically, complaining about disk and memory errors.

After some frustrating attempts to narrow down the problem by alternately removing memory cards, updating the video driver, changing video cards, changing disk drives and unplugging each of the USB peripherals in turn, I came to the conclusion that it was almost certainly the motherboard at fault.

So I contacted Acer. Acer’s support has proved to be good in the past. But this time, instead of actually reading my message, which was, “Can I buy a replacement motherboard?”, they simply sent me the standard, “Since it’s out of warranty, ship your PC to us, at your expense, and we’ll charge you £55 to look at it and tell you what’s wrong, and then charge you more money to fix it.”

What’s wrong with that? Well, a new motherboard will very likely cost less than £55 and I can replace that myself without having to ship my PC anywhere at my own expense.

But the computer’s more than four years old, and now the spectre of Windows Vista is no longer stalking the land, I decided it was time for another upgrade. I bought myself a decent spec, quad-core, 64-bit Windows 7 PC for a fraction under £400. But that’s another story, and as those few who follow my rants will know, I’m already familiar with Windows 7.

Having transferred all my stuff to the new computer, I started to strip down the Acer Aspire for any useful bits. It was then I realised that it wasn’t that great a PC after all. As I dismantled it, I realised that I’d upgraded the memory, replaced the faulty DVD-RW drive, replaced the faulty power supply, upgraded the disk and added more USB ports ’cause there weren’t enough. And now the motherboard is faulty.

So in fact, other than the processor, the case and the PCI-e graphics card (which I’ve put in the new Windows 7 machine), there was none of the original PC left for me to salvage. In reality I almost bought a new PC in pieces over the intervening four years.

Reminds of George Washington’s axe.

The first was the number of people on public transport during the rush hour. My logic is that no-one in their right mind would travel into London during the rush hour unless they had to. And the primary reason they have to is because they have a job. The number of empty seats, or conversely the number of people standing, on the train in the morning is a good proxy for the number of people employed and therefore the state of the economy.

The second was the ease with which you could hail a taxi in London. When the economy isn’t doing so well people, both personally and professionally, economise – so fewer people use taxis and it’s easier to get one.

And the third was how far in advance you have to book a restaurant table. Obvious really.

No seats on the train

As you may have worked out from this blog, I commute into work by bike, putting my bike on the train to get into London and then cycling to my office. I have caught the 07:01 from Beaconsfield most days for over a year. 12 months ago there were two or three of us waiting to get on the train at the rear door. It was so consistent that we all actually started chatting to one another – almost unheard of for commuters in Britain. This year there are 15-20 people waiting to get on the same train.

And the train is so crowded that, although I’m not required to by the regulations, I’m considering actually folding my bike to make more room for the standing passengers – something that didn’t cross my mind a year ago.

Can you get a taxi? I can’t.

Well my test was last night. My bike broke during my ride home and it wasn’t repairable by the roadside. My consolation with a folding bike has been “well, if all else fails I can fold it and get a taxi”. Like hell I can. There were very very few empty taxis anyway. If I spotted one in the distance it got hailed before it got to me. Admittedly two just sailed past me – I guess the fluorescent jacket puts off taxi drivers from accepting me as a fare – because normally cyclists and taxi drivers are in competition for road space. But by my measure of how easy it is to get a cab, it’s hard. I ended up walking the 1.5 miles to Marylebone.

“I’m sorry Sir, did you have a reservation?”

I haven’t done any impromptu dining in London recently, other than in pubs where you don’t have to book anyway, but we do eat out from time to time – often at our local Pizza Express or the Royal Saracen’s Head. 18 months ago you had to book on Friday or Saturday, but you could walk in any other night of the week. Then Wednesdays started to require booking, and now if we don’t book in advance then there’s a good chance we’ll be turned away any night of the week.

Are these people who would previously have eaten at Danesfield House, The Hand and Flowers or the Fat Duck trading down to a cheaper local restaurant? I don’t think so. I think it’s more people just going out for a pizza (for £20 a head by the time you’ve had a drink and a starter) rather than cooking at home.

What recession?

So whatever the recently published statistics suggesting the economy may be stalling suggest – it’s certainly not stalling in London or Buckinghamshire as far as I can see.

What was I saying? Yes, that’s the worst. I haven’t got to the point of forgetting what I’m saying mid sentence yet, but I’m sure it’s coming. I sure as hell forget what I climbed the stairs for, only to remember just as I reach the bottom step. I guess the exercise is good for me.

I am the invisible man. I work in the City of London, most of the time    anyway. And there are dozens of stunningly attractive women who also work/travel there. I have been told, in the past, that I don’t look so bad myself. Clearly this is no longer true – I get the distinct impression that these hordes of gorgeous women just don’t see me. Maybe it’s just that I’m generally in the company of my younger (and admittedly also good looking) colleagues.

I’m becoming my Dad. As I mentioned in my twittered response to @BillT, somehow in your 50′s you forget just how many buttons and zips perfectly ordinary items of clothing have. From time to time I forget to do up my flies. And I remember my Dad doing that too… (at least I remember something, even if it was 30 years ago).

“When I was your age… ” This morning I was walking home from the Post Office and spotted two small children on three-wheel scooters. I had a scooter when I was a kid. But mine had two wheels at the back and one at the front – unlike today’s model which is the other way round. I was taken with an almost overwhelming desire to explain that to these children. Fortunately I resisted. It’s fortunate because an unshaven 50-something speaking to two small children is almost inevitably assumed to be a child molester, but it’s mainly fortunate because frankly – they don’t care. For small children my childhood is ancient history, and they really don’t care if we had scooters, or electricity, or lived in caves and painted ourselves with wode. The future is theirs, the past is ours.

Facial hair. It’s remarkable how cool and trendy a two or three day growth of beard can look. On a young man. For 50-something who’s starting to show the odd speck of grey, the result is my looking like a tramp – one of those unfortunates who sleeps in doorways in the backstreets of the City. So for me it’s either a full beard (but Mrs M objects to that) or remaining clean shaven. Sigh.

Other types of hair. Why, when you reach a certain age, does hair start appearing in places it never grew before, and you really don’t want it now? I don’t want hairy ears, why does that happen?

Now, the way to lift that is… No it’s not. Not any more. My body is falling to bits around me. I can’t lift things I used to be able to, I’m just not as strong as I used to be. I can’t play squash or badminton any more because of tennis elbow and knackered knees, I can’t run any distance because my calf muscles tear, and I need a sit down and a cup of tea when I’ve cut the lawn. At least I can still cycle.

Sagacity and a sense of proportion. At last, a benefit. Those of us who are over 50 have lived through a lot. Admittedly I’m a baby boomer, so I didn’t suffer the war – but we did still have rationing when I was a kid. I’ve lived through recessions, severe winters, boom times, Labour governments, Tory governments, Liberal sex scandals, the Cuban missile crisis, Ipswich Town winning the First Division, Wimbledon winning the FA cup and Birmingham City winning the League Cup (and beating Aston Villa to do it). They all may seem unlikely now (update: Birmingham City won the League Cup again in 2011, and beat Arsenal to do it!), but they really happened. So we can take most things that happen today in our stride, and view them with a sense of historic proportion.

Now where did I put my glasses…

It’s widely known that cyclists (especially in London) jump red traffic lights. It’s also widely known that the Metropolitan and City of London Police forces are clamping down on this practice and issuing £30 on-the-spot fines.

The publicity surrounding this made me wonder what difference, in terms of journey time, it might make.

So I conducted an experiment, and then observed other cyclists.

First, my experiment: I timed myself cycling to work. I took my time, cycled at a reasonable speed, and stopped at every red traffic light.  (OK there was a red cycle-lane light where, by pulling out onto the main road, I could go through a green light and by-pass the red one, but apart from that one I stopped at every red and waited to set off again until the amber light showed.)

If you’re not familiar with UK traffic signals – our lights go Red+Amber before going Green.

The next day I pedalled like fury, and went through most of the red lights I encountered (when I considered it safe to do so).

The difference, in my 25 minute commute, was 3 minutes. Does that seem worth breaking the law and potentially putting my safety and that of other road users at risk? IMHO no, it doesn’t.

Following my recent experiment I followed two different cyclists on my route to work. Each of them jumped most of the red traffic lights (while I was following, I waited until it was legal to proceed) and when they turned off into what I presume was their place of work I was no more than 30 yards behind – maybe 10 seconds?

I’ve followed each cyclist twice now with the same results.

I want to be clear, I’m not criticising them – they can cycle however they want. If they want to break the law and risk their own safety on the way to work, it’s up to them. But what I can say is that doing so shortens their journey to work (over the section that coincides with mine) by about 10 seconds.

My conclusion is that unless your life is in danger there is no need to jump a red light, cycle the wrong way down a one-way street or cycle on the pavement because it doesn’t actually make very much difference to your overall journey time.

If you get a thrill from doing so, or if you can justify the few moments saved by the good you do in making the world a better place, solving world hunger and banishing malaria in the time you save, then by all means carry on – just make sure that the road is completely clear of cars, buses, trucks, taxis, pedestrians, motor cyclists AND other pedal cyclists before you do it.

Oh, you’d better make sure there are no policemen around either or you may find yourself paying £30 for the privilege.

And as a cyclist, it doesn’t seem to make sense to me.

From my perspective, cars are very visible. They tend to be large, shiny and moving – which is what makes them stand out to the human eye. Cyclists tend to be smaller, not shiny and not moving very fast. Pedestrians and other motorists rarely look for cyclists anyway.

So where’s the logic in making the vehicles that are already highly visible even more so, when by doing so you make the more vulnerable road users less visible (by comparison) and therefore even more vulnerable…

Well I think that. But clearly there seem to be other cyclists who believe camouflage and invisibility are their best friends!

Not only have I seen cyclists (at the last moment admittedly) in the dark dressed in black with no lights on front or back, but I’ve seen those with lights covered by their anorak, or the stuff in the basket at the front. For crying out loud, think about whether your lights can be seen.

But most exasperating of all are those cyclists with lights on their helmets! WTF? Who’s looking there? Not even me, another cyclist looks there. Certainly car drivers and those pedestrians that bother looking at all (see my post: Look Both Ways) are  looking for lights at about the level of car headlights. Putting your only light on your helmet just isn’t going to work.

The Road Vehicle Lighting Regulations, at least here in the UK, state that a light attached to a bike must be between 35cm and 150cm from the ground and the rear red reflector must be between 35cm and 90cm from the ground. Makes sense to me. That’s where people are looking.

So if you’ve got a light on your helmet – it’s not a problem – so long as you’ve got another one on you, or preferably on the bike, at the right height. Then I, and the other road users, can see you.

If you cycle in the dark without lights – make sure you’ve written your will, ’cause I for one don’t expect you to live long, so you’ll be doing your relatives a favour.

However my domestic and laundry arrangements aren’t the subject of this blog: I have something else I want to get off my chest.

There are, of course, some risks involved in cycling around London, but my conclusion after the first month may be surprising. The biggest risk isn’t lorry drivers – I think you’re OK provided you’re sensible, don’t try to squeeze through silly gaps, and stay well in sight of either their mirrors or infront of them. It’s not taxis either – taxi drivers are, in my experience, courteous, polite and well aware of cyclists.

Most car drivers are aware of cyclists too, and it’s relatively easy to spot the ones who don’t know where they’re going and who might turn across you without signalling.

I minimise the risk as much as possible by wearing a fluorescent yellow jacket, and in the dark or twilight I use a bright flashing front light and three rear lights -two of which flash, so I’m hardly camouflaged or hard to see.

But I perceive the biggest risk to me on my rides to and from work is presented by pedestrians!

They just don’t look where they’re going. They step off the kerb without looking. They assume that just because the cars have stopped (or there are no cars) that there’s no traffic and just step out without looking.

And worst of all, they keep walking in the bloody cycle lanes! It’s bizarre, but I have noticed it elsewhere in the world – paint a couple of white lines on the ground to make a cycle lane and, lo and behold, pedestrians feel compelled to walk between the lines despite the huge amount of space around them. It doesn’t matter how many other signs or pictures of bikes are painted around – the lines are a subliminal suggestion that many pedestrians follow.

Generally cycle lanes are alongside roads or on paved areas, so a cyclist can treat these pedestrians as mobile slalom poles and swerve around them, but in many places across London the efforts of Boris and Ken have resulted in cycle lanes separated by kerbs from the rest of the traffic. If there’s a pedestrian strolling along blissfully unaware that they’re in a cycle lane there’s nowhere for a cyclist to go!

When I’m sprinting between traffic lights (most mornings now, I’m starting to work out the phasing of the lights so I know which are worth sprinting for and which aren’t) I can get my airnimal to well over 20mph. I weigh just over 14st (around 200lbs) so there’s a lot of energy bearing down on a pedestrian who steps off the kerb infront of me – I’ll do them a lot of damage if I hit them.

So if you’re a pedestrian (or even a driver or cyclist occasionally using your feet instead) please look both ways before you step off the kerb, and don’t walk in the cycle lanes – you’re putting yourself, and me, at risk.

This post is prompted by a blog post from PRGeek (Jon Silk, @prgeek) from a social media conference today. He suggests in a recent tweet “Old media: Stick a celeb in an ad. New media: Stick a celeb on the web. Social media: Stick a celeb on Twitter.”.

My point is that although the techniques of marketing change as technology advances, the objective of marketing remains the same – it’s to attract an unfair share of your audience’s attention.

In the 17th century a row of shops would be competing for passing trade, but the one that paid someone to wear a sandwich board advertising their wares, or paid the town crier to shout about their goods, would be likely to attract more business. Technological advance has introduced print advertising, commercial radio, tv and cinema advertising, billboard advertising, the web and now a plethora of social media: The means change but the objective is the same.

Clearly the audience determines the tactics, so marketing single-dealer platforms to a universe of 45 significant investment banks requires a different set of techniques to marketing anti-virus software to both retail and corporate users (for example), but the objective remains the same. And it always will.

Originally posted on Finextra, on November 12th 2009