We have enough...

There is a lot of talk at the moment, particularly in the Labour Party, that politicians should recognise aspiration as an important value that stimulates the middle classes. Aspiration is a difficult word to define properly in social and economic terms. I say this because I sometimes think it's about time the so-called aspirational middle classes aspired to accept they have enough, and could possibly be happier with a little less. 

The presumption that everyone should have increasing amounts of "stuff" does not equate to increasing human happiness and usually works against any realistic campaign to prevent climate change. Be thankful people. Most of us have enough. The pursuit of happiness has more to do with friends, family and community and less to do with owning the latest gadget.

The only politician I can remember talking about human happiness during an economic debate was John Pardoe the Liberal Party's economic spokesman during the February 1974 General Election. He appeared alongside Labour and Tory representatives on a TV show, which if memory serves was called Weekend World, although it might have been a predecessor show on ITV.  He said that the purpose of economic policy was to increase human happiness, and this totally floored the other two politicians who did not know how to react. 

He also said, a little tongue in cheek, that about half of public spending was probably wasted; the problem was working out which half. 


There was also a policy debate in the Liberal Party Assembly during the 70's which actually discussed the possibility of aiming for a zero-growth economy, the move being led at that time by Eric Avebury. The motion was defeated, but I sometimes think that the crude pursuit of economic growth is less important than the redistribution of wealth, using the state to both rebalance the economy and to rebalance life opportunities for people through a well funded and well managed Education system. 


So let us redefine aspiration. Surely the pursuit of human happiness is the more important aspiration we should recognise, rather than the ambition for ever increasing personal wealth, measured only in cash terms? 

Sliding towards sixty...

I was doing another typical activity of the suburban semi-detached male this morning. I was clearing up the garden (with a lot of help from my wife I must add).

Gardening for me is more about hacking down redundant bushes and removing accumulated rubbish than actually planting things. Although having said that, I did take advantage of an online discount to receive two small palm trees last week and managed to plant them in the rain. They did not fall over in the windy days that followed either, which suggests I am not entirely clueless when it comes to this sort of thing.

We were so happy with what we had achieved this morning that I paid for a Chinese takeaway for lunch, and then snoozed through the second half of the Saturday lunchtime game on BTSport between Arsenal and Liverpool.

Isn't that what retired people do? If I eat a heavy lunch these days I am easily nodding off whether I am in a comfortable armchair or not. This is another sign of my bodily age I suppose, although friends and family continue to compliment me on my youthful looks. If they could feel my aches and pains they would put me closer to my real age, I can assure them.

I had a phone call from Liberal Democrat HQ yesterday asking me to go leafletting in Hornsey and Wood Green. I told the man calling that with arthritis in both knees my leafletting days were over and he sympathised. (This was not quite true because I completed a round in Harrow a couple of months back, because it was guaranteed to be on the flat, but even then my knees almost seized up.)

My afternoon reverie was interrupted by the rattle of some post through the door. Opening the envelope I was delighted to discover my Senior Railcard which had been dispatched within 24 hours of my online application. They must have processed it on Good Friday, so it is pleasing to note that not all public institutions close down on a Bank Holiday.

It was with some glee that I had applied for this and for my Over-60s Freedom Pass for London travel. I have been looking forward to receiving some benefits from getting older after having paid my taxes for 38 years and having made few claims on public services in that time.

I now understand why people in my new age group will put up a fight to stop these giveaways being withdrawn in the future. I have already become conscious that football clubs vary in their definition of senior citizens in their pricing of match tickets, which is why I am hopeful that Coventry City do not decide to change their determination that 60 is the trigger point, at least until after I have bought next year's season ticket.

All this age-related behaviour suggests I am conforming to a stereo-type that in my former years I wanted to avoid becoming. I was a non-conformist, an individual who did not follow the herd. So what is happening to me? Are the values of semi-detached suburbia creeping up on me already?

This is why I must repeat my mantra three times before sleeping every night. "I am not content. I am not content. I am not content..."

Three months later...

A second new DVD and CD rack has now arrived and should be constructed soon. Which means the last two boxes from the move are ready to be opened. So after 3 months, almost to the day, we will have finally completed our move from Kilburn to Harrow.

This afternoon we put in our registration documents for the local medical centre, which is just a ten minute walk away, bringing to an end any official connection with Kilburn and West Hampstead.

The house has been transformed. The internal re-wiring is complete, with some external wiring to the shed being finished off tomorrow. The loft repairs were carried out during the week following up the surveyor's instructions. We have had a new laminate floor put in downstairs, a made-to-measure bi-folding door between the lounge and the kitchen installed, and four book-cases and shelving units put up. A new garden fence was erected a week ago.

New bedroom and dining furniture arrived before the Christmas break. We have ordered new blinds and curtains, plus a stairway carpet which will all be fitted in March.

We have now exhausted our improvement budget, and we are now pretty exhausted ourselves at making sure all the works actually happened, mostly to time and within budget.

Time to pause and reflect on what we have achieved in three months.

But it is not only the physical changes to our home environment that have occurred. Our new daily and weekly routines, with me working from home again after a three year gap has made a big difference. I am now waking at 6.30am to walk to our splendid Victorian Hatch End swimming pool for a few lengths before getting home to make sure Nana is on her way to work at 7.35am. Breakfast, and a peruse of the online newspapers on my iPad is complete by 8.30am, and I can start work without the stress of the daily commute. Bliss!

We have been exploring the delights of Hatch End, which has about a dozen excellent restaurants with a wide range of cuisines. There are still a few to try but no duds yet. We now know where the buses go and how to fast connect from Harrow-on-the Hill or Harrow & Wealdstone stations to old haunts in zones 1 and 2. We actually got back from the Hampstead Theatre on Thursday evening, door-to-door, in precisely 45 minutes. So we are not on the edge of civilisation at all, but instead finding a new greener place to breathe and relax in.

To cap it all, a walk with my sister on Sunday led to us finding Pinner Park Farm, which is a working beef-rearing farm about 15 minutes from my front door. Yes, real cows less than a mile from my home!

Am I missing the old flat?  No, I have fond memories but the past is the past. This is my life now. My home is in Harrow, and I think I will be here for a long time. I am a member of the Harrow Liberal Democrats and completed my first leafleting round in a target ward last week. Everything was on the flat, no multi-occupied buildings. A leafleter's dream.

All I am waiting for is some warmer weather so I can tackle the gardening with more enthusiasm, and enjoy the option of taking in the sun in my own back yard.

What stimulated this piece was seeing some opinions on a Camden website bemoaning the cost of property in Camden. Yes I know it is ridiculously expensive, which is why I could not buy a house there.

Market forces still dominate the decisions we all take in our daily lives. We can choose how to spend or save our money in a million different ways. I cannot afford to buy a bottle of champagne every day. I cannot afford first class rail fares. I shop for bargains in Sainsburys and Morrisons and rarely try finding food in M&S or Waitrose. I decide what is affordable.

Why then do people bemoan the fact that there are certain areas where you cannot afford to live on an average salary? Make a home in an area which you can afford and seek out the benefits of living in a new neighbourhood. I did, and it has made me happier than I have been for a while.

And finally BT get it right...

After another day I finally get another BT customer service person on the phone who has now agreed to refund all the calls made internationally plus I get a £20 goodwill gesture credited to my account.

So it pays to complain and to press for the deadlock letter in these cases.

If you have a legitimate complaint, corporations of this type will want to avoid bad publicity and the likelihood of being reported to the arbitration service relevant to their industry. I had so much good evidence that I was likely to win through arbitration and corporations like BT don't like high numbers  of lost cases being published.

BT just get it wrong

Well happy new year to my occasional  readers.

I have promised to give BT some bad publicity because of a catalogue of errors they have made in selling me a package for my new home including a new landline, wi-fi and BT Sport.

When I set up the new line I was told by a sales assistant that a special package for international calls called International Freedom was available for less than £7 a month which would give me 300 minutes of call time per month to international destinations.

I questioned at the time whether this would include Ghana. The sales assistant confirmed yes. I said including mobiles, and he said yes. This was important as there is only a limited area of Accra (where the old colonial buildings are) which has landlines. Everyone else uses mobiles.

So a month later my first bill shows up with over £80 of calls to Ghana. I go on line to complain and after a recorded exchange with an assistant I bargain a refund of £40 plus the withdrawal of the original cost of the International Freedom package.

I end the exchange at this point and discover that if you have a complaint against BT (or any other telecom operator) you should write to ask for a "deadlock" letter. I did this.

In response to my letter I get a call from a friendly woman from BT who wants to talk about my complaint. It appears through this call that the first assistant who sold me the package is no longer employed by BT and, would you believe it, the call that I made was NOT recorded for training purposes.  How convenient. We also discover that although the transcript of my online complaint exchange indicates I was to get £40 taken off my bill, this was not done either.

I am annoyed. I ask for the entire cost of our calls to Ghana to be wiped. My wife has been using the services of Lycamobile for years which still offers better value than BT's standard International Friends and Family rates. We only changed on the promise of something cheaper still from BT.

I am told that they can only offer me £50 in reductions. I said I would accept this as an initial offer but still wanted the deadlock letter. This is when it gets really silly. I am told the offer of any compensation is withdrawn entirely if I persist in having a deadlock letter.

BT are not doing themselves any favours by treating their customers in this way. To withdraw an unconditional offer made in writing (I still have the transcript) beggars belief.

So we will proceed to the next stage of the complaints process.

To be continued...

So what about 2015?

I am taking a breather from opening boxes. Since we moved into our new house in Harrow I have opened and emptied well over 40 and there are still about 10 to go.

Remarkably we are running out of spaces to put the stuff we brought with us, even though the new place is officially bigger by at least 50%. I did not realise the old flat had a touch of the Tardis about it.

It has been a remarkable year. The first target for me was to buy a house with a garden. This should have happened in August but it went pear-shaped when my then buyer failed to get a mortgage. In the end we put in bids on 3 houses in the same area of Harrow, paid for 3 surveys, and ended up with the house with the biggest garden. Not that I am a gardener, although I have a romantic vision of myself growing things, which may be harder to achieve in reality.

The second inter-related target was to move my working space into the new house, so I can work from home again after an interlude of 3 years. This was achieved last Monday and I am properly settled into my new den surrounded by familiar posters and pictures.

I have joined the local municipal pool and had one or two conversations with fellow swimmers in the men's locker room. We have made friends with our new neighbours and have exchanged Christmas cards, so we have been making our first tentative steps to make roots in a new community.

In an earlier post I challenged myself, and my friends, to stop me becoming "content" with my life. I am still very wary that the suburban values that could be entrenched in the fabric of my semi detached house might still lull me into a smug attitude borne of a settled home.  So I am deliberately thinking about creating some new targets for next year.

We have some more works to do to the house next summer, and plans for a European trip by train to the south of France and into Spain. But a new personal challenge? Will learning the basics of gardening be enough?

I have switched my Liberal Democrat membership to the Harrow party, and learned at a recent festive gathering of fellow Liberals, that the constituency I am now living in has no parliamentary candidate in place yet for the May General Election. There may be other seats nearby in a similar position. Could I be tempted? My last General Election campaigns were in 1979 and 1987. Being a serious candidate involves a lot of hard work, but being a candidate in a non-target seat could be just a bit of fun, especially in the head-to-head public debates.

The only thing I miss about not being a councillor now is the occasional rant in the Council Chamber, and so being free to challenge the worst excesses of both Tory and Labour opponents in a General Election debate would be really rather enjoyable.

But I am getting ahead of myself. Isn't this just a flight of fancy? Surely I should be reviving the long stated ambition to write the novel? The rough plot has been in my head for over 20 years. Isn't it about time I started those first drafts? After all, tapping on a keyboard in my new office is a lot easier than pounding the streets, especially with my arthritic knees...

No need to make a decision yet. Let the festive season take its usual course. There will be targets for 2015 for sure, but we will decide when the calendar changes.

Happy new year, and watch this space...

I will soon be moving on....

We have been close before, but I think this time it is going happen. The exchange of contracts for my new house should take place tomorrow, and we will be moving on 25th November to Harrow Weald.

We have bought a house on what was an original 1950's council estate, where all have been sold on many years ago. It is surrounded with green spaces, and has a local library and swimming pool in walking distance.

We still have access to the inner city through the Overground line and there are enough bus services to keep me happy too.

But it has needed a change of mindset to accept the notion of becoming suburban again after so many years. When I was 18 and leaving home I declared I would not live in a semi-detached house ever again, because I always associated the "semi in the suburbs" as representing the values I most despised. Small-mindedness, inward looking, patronising attitudes and a kind of British arrogance borne from complacency and self-righteousness.

But now I have been convinced to find a semi-detached house to make a new beginning with some space to breathe, out in zone 5 no less, away from the bustle of the inner city.

I suppose what I am worried about most is becoming content. People who are content with their lives have really declared they are done, spent, with no more to do, no more ambitions, ready to fall into a gentle decline through retirement to an inevitable end.

I think I have insured against that by having a wife who will never let me settle, and who has driving ambitions of her own, which should keep me active for a long while yet. And yes the possibility of becoming a father in my 60's is still on the agenda. Being an old Dad on the school run (or school walk in my case) is still part of the plan.

So if you see me in the coming years, please ask whether I am content in my new house, and pull me up if I say I am.