Author Archives: Ben

Lord, Lord, did we not prophesy in your name?

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My no. 1 favourite American clergyman of all time is our former vicar. My least favourite is still Fred Phelps, I think (hey, everyone should have a list like this) but pasta-brained Terry Jones has shot to the penultimate position. Both have a lot in common, not least a total absence of anything in their ministry that resembles something Jesus Christ would be proud to see his disciples doing. (Edited to add: this will change if TJ actually backs down, turns the other cheek etc. which actually would be vaguely Christlike.)

I confess I have now lost track as to whether or not Jones intends to proceed with his burn-a-Koran-day plan tomorrow. I think he has, too. Anyway, people seem to have forgotten, or probably not noticed, that Phred was apparently way ahead of him back in 2008 (there’s a link on his, ahem, “church”‘s site: if you’re curious enough you can find it but I ain’t putting it here) and intends to repeat the stunt himself. Never try to outshow a showman.

Back to Jonesy: what has been so repellent about the whole thing has been watching this vile little man – well, little in every conceivable way except for his moustache – relishing his position as the cameras of the world turn on him and even the President of the United States has to ask him not to, please. The scale of his self-delusion and aggrandisement is staggering, really; imagining that he is now a world player, able to affect the siting of the New York mosque at the cost of a few hundred ordinary lives – which won’t be his fault, no sir, no. Even Phred isn’t quite that big-headed, but only because he has officially given up on the entire world except for his congregation and has no intention of trying to influence anyone.

There is however a Facebook group apparently run by Muslims: INTERNATIONAL BURN A QUR’AN (onto a CD) DAY. Nice one.

Back to Jones again and, ooh, scripture: that reminds me. I can do that. 1 Corinthians 10.23. Also, Matthew 7.22-23, and since I’m in the zone a bit of Romans 12.17-21. So there.

Shame Obama couldn’t just stand up and rattle those off. Bartlet would have. He’s my no. 1 favourite American President, you know.

Guess who’s back on Facebook?

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I don’t know how it happened. Well, okay, I do. A confluence of influences. Influence conflued.

Apart from the general grumpy old mannish acceptance that it really isn’t going to go away no matter how hard I ignore it …

  1. A friend (real-world meaning) whose blog I enjoyed reading, but which hasn’t been updated for months, admitted he’s pretty well given it up and now just uses Facebook. So if even intelligent people regard Facebook above all others, and there’s a whole generation out there who wouldn’t think of looking for me anywhere else, and I am (as ever) poised on the brink of worldwide fame … that’s where to be.
  2. And then another friend (also real-world meaning) tells me he’s said something online that, from the nature of our real-world meaning friendship, I know I’ll find interesting, but it’s on Facebook …

… and that was what did it. I just sort of slipped in. Being a Gmail user, I clicked on his message and found myself being invited to join up through my Google account. So I did. And then it kindly read my contacts list and showed me all the ones who are also on Facebook. Maybe I would like to invite them to be friends? (Well, maybe they already are, so nyah. And in some cases, maybe I would pay money not to be friends with them but I still need them in the contacts list. This is grown-up life, children: the ying and yang, push and shove, give and take, awareness that we live in a world where all is not sweetness and light and it sometimes just pays to smile and be polite – deep, adult concepts a world away from the pimple-ridden adolescents who designed Facebook in the first place. [No offence intended to any pimple-ridden adolescents reading this, who will be real-world-meaning friends and therefore lovely by definition.])

So, here I am. It’s a clean break with the past – a new account as opposed to reactivating my old one. I let the old one get out of control. This one I will keep a tighter grip on and just use as a means to guide people to more erudite pensées such as this. It means I’m no longer the first Ben Jeapes on Facebook … well, technically I suppose I am since that account is still there, just dormant. But anyway. And any former Facebook friends – is there another way of saying this? ffriends, with a silent eff? Well there is now – any former ffriends who want to stay ffriends will have to renew the invite, though I won’t just blindly accept invitations from anyone; there are people I can live without being ffriends with even if they happen to be friends. No offence, just … you know. And if you don’t know, learn.

Onwards with the big adventure … and I’ll try to ignore Twitter. Really, really hard.

Palavers’R’Us

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So we got a letter from persons acting on behalf of our electricity supplier, bzztpower PLC, saying they needed to replace our meter. I know from previous attempts to do this that our meter and the meters of our neighbours above and below are connected in a stack with ours at the top, so disconnecting us will also disconnect them. So, I let them know the work is going to happen: you’re getting a 20 minute power cut on Wednesday morning. Any problems? Excellent.

Meter Man arrives. We turn off everything in the flat. He mounts his ladder. He gets to work on the collection of meters in the porch. He removes a very large fusey type thing. Downstairs Neighbour sticks his head out of the door and shouts that his equipment is smoking. I can’t see his face in the gloom of the hall and assume he’s joking.

He isn’t …

It’s not only smoking, it’s smoking quite excitingly: clouds of strangely clear white smoke as if someone inside is spraying out very fine talc. Playstation, TV, laptop all fritzed.

Supervisor is called, from Somerset via Reading so I’m impressed by how soon he arrives. Eventually establishes that not only are the meters wired up in series, they’re also non-compliant. Rather than each having a neutral feed of their own, they share a single neutral feed that goes through all three meters. This is the kind of thing frowned upon by the better class of meter man, as disconnecting the neutral feed from our flat therefore also removed it from the other two flats and they got the full blast of 415 volts. Top flat has a breaker which immediately tripped (astonishing; last year’s East European cowboys that caused us so much entertainment and diversiondid something right) and so the flat was protected, but downstairs flat started tripping in quite another way. And if Meter Man had touched the end of the neutral feed, he too would have started smoking; at least, in the brief period of contact before he got thrown thirty feet away, but his passage through the air would probably have extinguished any flames.

NotNorthernLeccy, who supply the other two flats, are called as our guy isn’t allowed to open up another supplier’s meter and together they make a go at rewiring the whole meter caboodle, before working out that they’re outclassed by the needs of the wiring. To cut a long story short, after much head scratching and discussion, we will need a local electrician to do quite a bit of rewiring (the meter guys only do meters), plus representatives from bzztpower and NotNorthernLeccy to rewire the meters, and this will all need to happen on the same day, starting quite early, if it’s all going to be done during hours of warmth and daylight. Meanwhile the insurance companies of bzztpower and NotNorthernLeccy are expected to have a pleasant game of pingpong with Downstairs Neighbour’s claim for the slagged gear. Fun, fun, fun.

It occurs to me that plumbers might get cold and wet sometimes, but they would have to try very hard to die just by touching the wrong pipe.