What should have happened:

1. City Link deliver package to me at some point between 9am and 5.30pm on Wednesday.

What did happen:

1. I stay in all day on Wednesday, waiting for a delivery. No package arrives.

2. On Thursday, I obtain the tracking number from the sender of the package. According to the City Link website, an attempt to deliver the package was made (this is untrue), and the package has since returned to the City Link depot.

3. On Thursday morning, I attempt to telephone City Link, but give up after 45 minutes on hold. The hold music consists of an eight bar Eurorave loop with a chirpy voiceover informing me of the unparalleled brilliance of the City Link delivery experience, in terms not dissimilar to the unreliable delivery company’s motto, which is ‘To be the Carrier of Choice through operational excellence and customer focus - delivering success through our people.’. This does not endear me to the inept carriers City Link. Later that afternoon, after another half hour on hold, I am told to call back again, as City Link are suffering an ‘IT failure’. Later still that afternoon, after a relatively reasonable 20 minutes on hold, I am informed that I can either a) wait in all day on Friday for a re-delivery, or b) collect the package from the City Link depot in sunny Cambuslang, bringing my missed delivery card with me (which I do not have, because City Link made no attempt to deliver the package in the first place). I choose b), and am told to call on Friday morning to verify that the package is at the depot.

4. I call this morning. After 30 minutes on hold, I am told that City Link are suffering an ‘IT failure’, that they do not know where my package is, and that I should call back at 2pm. I do, and, after a thrillingly brief ten minutes on hold, City Link confirm that my package is available.

5. I travel by low level train to Cambuslang, and make my way across a footbridge covered in the monograms of various Young Teams, and on into a deserted industrial estate, thinking, ‘I’m glad it’s daylight, this place is well shady’. Once I locate the City Link depot, I queue for fifteen minutes, and give my tracking number to the nice lady behind the desk, who confirms it is there, and claims that she will send someone to fetch it. I ‘phone my Dad, to tell him the good news. My friend Nadine ‘phones, and tells me she is off to New York City for Christmas. In light of my present condition, I admit to feeling pangs of jealousy.

6. After 30 minutes, I remind the nice City Link lady of her promise, and she rather unhelpfully suggests that it’s possible my package is nowhere to be found, and that no one has informed her of this fact. After ten more minutes, I inquire again, and receive the same answer, and a suggestion that I leave my ‘phone number so that she might call to arrange another delivery date. I decline, raising my voice only slightly, and restraining the urge to pepper my reply with the foulest language. After a further 20 minutes I inquire once more, politely insisting that someone is sent off to find my package. A nice man returns with my package in two minutes flat, apologises, and wishes me a Merry Christmas.

7. I walk through the deserted industrial estate, and across the footbridge. It is now dark, which is why I don’t see the young gentlemen loitering on the footbridge until I am upon them. The young gentlemen ask if they might borrow my mobile telephone. I reply that they may not. There is a brief altercation, fortunately restricted to verbal badinage (rather than, for example, some light stabbing) which ends when I flee to the safety of the local Morrison’s supermarket car park. The young gentlemen lose interest, after hurling a few incomprehensible insults in my direction, and leave me free to continue to the train station.¹

8. I arrive home, and place the package in my holdall, so that it can be taken to the Wirral, wrapped up and placed under the tree, ready for my Dad on Christmas morn.

In summary:

Time spent waiting for delivery which never arrived: precisely 8.5 hours.

Time spent on hold to City Link: approximately 2.25 hours.

Time spent travelling to and from the City Link depot: approximately 1.5 hours.

Time spent waiting at the City Link depot: approximately 1.3 hours.

Time spent shitting myself and legging it away from scallies: approximately 3 minutes.

Total time spent being dicked around by the unreliable couriers City Link: approximately 13.6 hours.

Conclusion:

City Link are the worst courier company in the world. I hope that anyone who Googles them in future happens upon this post before their website, and decides to use another service. Strapping goods to a half-starved mule and riding to your destination would likely be a quicker, more efficient mode of delivery.

1. I admit that, strictly speaking, #9 isn’t the fault of City Link, but I wouldn’t have been lugging hundreds of quid’s worth of Christmas presents across an unlit footbridge at night if it weren’t for them, and I’m not in a particularly forgiving mood. So they get the blame.

To walk the streets of Edinburgh in August is to feel such rage and hatred for one’s fellow man that it is damn nigh impossible to avoid committing terrible, violent acts.

I just manage to avoid ripping off my own arm and using it to beat the living shit out of every fat, lumpy child wheezing their way along Princes Street by engaging in a calming mental exercise: looking at people, and placing the people I see into a number of categories. With apologies to Mr. Borges, they are as follows.

Those that are untrained

Anyone who practices their circus ‘skills’ outwith the confines of a big top. An obvious target, for sure, but stilt-walkers (tall beggars), jugglers (beggars with balls), magicians (just plain twats) deserve the full weight of your hatred. If you wish to give money to someone in unusual clothing with no discernible talent, there are blanket-wrapped homeless people conveniently placed every 200 yards along the city’s major thoroughfares (some of them even have little dogs with them!).

Unfabulous ones

Weak-chinned, furrow-browed inbred fuck-knuckles from a minor public school or insignificant Oxbridge college who believe that the absolute pinnacle of avant-garde theatrical thinking is to mount a production of a Shakespeare play in modern dress (preferably Nazi uniforms, which they self-consciously wear at all times). These over-priviledged mouth-breathers deserve to have their lavishly printed promotional flyers jammed up their aristo bumholes.

Those that may belong in one category or another

Everyone plays ‘Gay or European?’, don’t they? Just in case you don’t, this game rests on entering the mindset of a Daily Express-reading bigot and assuming that gay people wear a lot of pastel shades and furry-collared leather jackets, and knot their jumpers around their shoulders. Gay men don’t do this, but European men do. So it’s quite an unsatisfying game, as the answer is always ‘European’. Still, passes the time. (Similarly, my lovely friend Hannah and I invented a game in Budapest, called ‘Loving Couple, or Mother and Son?’, because there’s either a lot of intergenerational knobbing going on beside the Danube, or Hungarian culture allows young men to walk arm in arm with their Mums without everybody they pass suppressing an Oedipal retch. This one is playable in Edinburgh, but the mystery pairings don’t appear all that often, to be honest.)

Those that should be set on fire with their stupid cigar

Bit of a one-off, this [and it no longer makes much sense], but I saw pompous fatso ‘comedian’ Mel Smith this afternoon, slouched at the entrance of his hotel, and doing a rubbish slack-jawed Churchill impersonation while puffing away on a fat Havana. Not satisfied with drumming up publicity for his no-doubt-shite play by threatening to smoke on stage in contravention of the perfectly sensible anti-smoking laws of Scotland, Mr. Mel ‘I haven’t made anyone laugh since Not The Nine O’Clock News’ Smith was actually smoking pointedly in the street in the hope that someone would bound up to him and applaud his glorious fight against the Evil Bureaucrats and for, er, the precious right to give people lung cancer with second-hand smoke. What a cunt.

Those that resemble twats from a distance

…but actually turn out to be totally fucking cool, so briefly restoring one’s faith in humanity. Two sub-categories for this one.

1. Teenage girls from Japan. It’s a truism, I know, but no one dresses better than an absurdly wealthy Japanese teenager (except, possibly, an absurdly wealthy Parisian woman of a certain age). Today I saw a gaggle of them all dressed as Axl Rose circa Appetite for Destruction. And they totally pulled it off. Amazing. Hats off to them.
2. Happily married American couples over the age of sixty five who wear almost-matching beige outfits and absurdly huge sun visors (women) or absurdly huge baseball caps (men), and spend their entire day beaming with deep pleasure at the sight of buildings actually built before they were born. Bless.

Those in hats

Previous sub-category excepted, anyone in a hat in Edinburgh during August is a total fucking shitweasel. Examples: Americans proclaiming their Americanity by wearing a ten-gallon stetson. Outrageously pissed rugby-shirted toffs in ‘See you Jimmy’ bonnets complete with matted ginger wig attachments. 50-something purse-lipped theatrical gentlemen unironically sporting fucking berets. Those women who dress like your Primary School art & craft teacher, with their amber beads, floaty peasant skirts, and big stupid floppy hats that serve to emphasise the fact that their free-thinking eccentricity is bought out of a cheaply-printed catalogue that comes free with some middlebrow Sunday supplement. &c. &c.

Those who can give you directions

Spotting the natives is easy. Once again, two sub-cats:

1. Plump, ginger, pasty women stuffed into two-sizes-too-small trouser-suits from TK Maxx, smoking furiously. Only on the streets at lunchtime, or just after 5.30pm, but they will know where Thistle Street North East Lane is.
2. 30-something men in outrageously expensive but grease-stained casualwear and blessed with the sunken cheeks, hollow eyes and scabbed-up hands that only two decades of dedicated heroin use can give. Their directions will be vague, and they may require a donation of a cigarette, but you will probably get an amusing story about them pissing themselves in a train station along with the best way to get to Gayfield Square.

Stray hacks

Workshy Anglowegian journalist snobs with anger control issues who spend 15 whole minutes ranting impotently and pretentiously on a weblog instead of revelling in the fact that they get a) paid and b) pissed for free any night of the week in return for wandering around Edinburgh looking at beautiful things. Twats.

Unfortunately, I got caught by the CAPTCHA:

How charming to be considered non-human by a website just because I haven’t the faintest idea what ‘resolving’ some numbers in brackets even means, let alone how to do it.

Admittedly, I add up on my fingers and have to use a calculator for sums involving numbers of more than one digit, but it still seems horribly elitist to expect all users to have an A-level in maths before they’re allowed to use a site.

Update: for anyone wondering, the answer to min(8,5) is 5 and Joe who runs correlate.us kindly plans to change the CAPTCHA soon. Here’s my page on the site. For a more complete one-page summary of my recent faffing online, see Flow.

A regular from my website badscience.net took McKeith to the Advertising Standards Authority, complaining about her using the title “doctor” on the basis of a qualification gained by correspondence course from a non-accredited American college. He won. She may have sidestepped the publication of a damning ASA draft adjudication at the last minute by accepting - “voluntarily” - not to call herself “doctor” in her advertising any more. But would you know it, a copy of that draft adjudication has fallen into our laps, and it concludes that “the claim ‘Dr’ was likely to mislead”. The advert allegedly breached two clauses of the Committee of Advertising Practice code: “substantiation” and “truthfulness”.

Excellent news. ‘Dr.’ McKeith is a complete fraud—one of her ‘qualifications’ is available for purchase online for a very reasonable $60, as Dr. Goldacre’s dead cat Henrietta can attest—and, worse still, her nutritional advice is as poor as one might expect from a woman who bought her PHD from a non-accredited distance learning institution/vitamin supplement shop.

Read the rest of Goldacre’s column to find out just how bad that advice is—the bits about chlorophyll oxygenating the blood and algae increasing the amount of DNA in your body are especially entertaining. Or, rather, especially worrying, considering ‘Dr.’ McKeith is probably the best known and most influential ‘nutritionist’ in the country.

> The Co-operative Bank has asked an evangelical Christian group to close its account because of its anti-homosexual views. The bank said the opinions of Christian Voice were incompatible with its support for diversity.

Well done that bank. Stephen Green, who leads this tiny band of extremists, has responded with spectacular hypocrisy, bleating that the Co-op are discriminating against him. He seems to think that this discrimination is bad, not at all like the discrimination based on sexuality, gender and religous belief advocated by Green and his theocratic chums. You can listen to the bleating on the Today Programme.

And in just a moment we have the first in a series of monologues by Lynne Truss on the subject of forty-something men

Fuck off.

Same day support service aside, I’m tempted to move to a different host, or buy a dirt cheap PC to stick in a cupboard and do it myself, where I’d have no one to blame but myself for cocking up.

This is why: in the email Simply.com sent to warn that they were migrating to new servers, they witheld information, and their telephone support dept. needs a kick in the face.

I’ve no idea how these things are normally done, but Simply.com chose to archive all the stuff on their servers on March 3rd, a full fortnight before they planned to migrate, but didn’t tell their customers this. Fortunately, I have a backup of stuff uploaded in that fortnight, which wasn’t much, and, better yet, the MySQL databases were left untouched. But not telling customers that their websites would suddenly roll back a fortnight in time? Sucks. Also sucky: the support bloke I spoke to on the ‘phone, who was rude, clueless and blamed all the problems on ‘management decisions’ on which he had ‘no comment’. Bullshit, mate.

Normal rubbish-spouting service will resume shortly.

The piece is full of the usual Messianic bluster from Stephen Green - he wants to watch himself, I hear God considers Pride a bit of sin - but the last line is telling:

Would he draw the line at breaking the law? Green answers thoughtfully: “Yes… unless the law contravenes the law of God.”

The law of God is, famously, not very clearly stated, and open to interpretation. This is how it came to pass that I see the New Testament as a rather sensible set of instructions to be kind to other people and share your things, while Mr. Green chooses to skip those bits in favour of some ancient and obscure Jewish rules about men not lying with men as they would with women, or spilling one’s seed on the ground, or, er, being a gay policeman.

So, we can look forward to Green and his supporters taking their lead from American ‘Christians’ and, you know, killing honourable members of the medical profession to save a few gooey little bundles of cells, pushing women onto the knitting needles of backstreet abortionists? Fabulous.

All this is almost enough to make me reverse my position on the Prevention of Terrorism Bill. There is at least one person who needs to be put under house arrest without access to telephones and the internet for the safety of the public: Stephen Green.

As an aside, I’d know more about this story if Newsnight Scotland hadn’t crashed onto the screen last night midway through a revealing item about CV on Newsnight proper. To tell us about escaped mink and troublesome crayfish.

Using strong-arm tactics that a Mafioso would recognise well, the group contacted Maggie’s Centres to suggest that accepting a donation from the Springer cast and crew would offend Christian patients and potential donors, and that if Maggie’s were to accept the donation, Christian Voice activists would picket their offices and care centres.

Stephen Green, the outfit’s National Director, appeared on the Today Programme this morning, and was brazen, constantly repeating the claim that Christian Voice had ‘saved [Maggie’s] from a public relations disaster’, with an audible smirk in his voice as he sought to imply that his organisation had done the charity a service by helping them avoid accepting ‘tainted’ funds, knowing all the while that any ‘public relations disaster’ would have been down to the flying God-pickets drafted in to disturb recovering, and dying, cancer patients and their families. (Listen to the Today item.)

Fucking scum.

I really can’t think of many things less Christian than denying cancer patients respite, taking advantage of their situation to publicise a cause, and bullying a charity which provides much-needed care and support.

If you’ve not heard of Maggie’s Centres, you can read about their commitment to providing beautiful places where stress management and emotional support programmes combine to foster Maggie’s aim to help folk make a ‘healthy adjustment to the impact of cancer’ in their lives.

By way of contrast, Christian Voice gleefully compare abortion to the Holocaust, berate the Police for their belated inclusive policies towards gay officers, and state as an article of faith the need to replace democracy with theocracy, favouring a government devoted to ‘the maintenance of freedom and justice solely in accordance with Biblical principles.’ Their one contribution to ‘medical’ matters? A link to Living Waters, a ministry which seeks to repair what they call the ‘sexual brokenness’ of being gay.

On the plus side, these bleating, thoroughly un-Christian reactionaries may well end up doing Maggie’s a favour - just as their anti-Springer protest boosted the ratings for the musical’s screening, this horrible bullying episode will hopefully lead to a massive boost in donations to the charity.

You can donate here.

Update: I couldn’t find online references to the news when I wrote the above, but now Maggie’s condemn Christian Voice’s publicity-hungry tactics in The Scotsman, the Daily Record have a misleading headline in place, and The Independent (registration required) lambast Christian voice, while the BBC report on the story. See also, this Guardian profile of Green. I also started this MetaFilter thread, which will probably focus on how dreadful Christians are in general, but might nudge a few folk to donate.

If there’s one thing worse than hippies, it’s hippies with a grievance — a state that rather goes against the spirit of being a hippie in the first place, I’d have thought. But such is the case at the Tchai Ovna tea room in Glasgow’s west end, where the teas come from exotic lands and have names like Condor’s Mucus. The place is about to have a development of flats built in its vicinity, provoking a hippie threat to occupy nearby trees in an effort to slow the bulldozers.

“This is about more than just a bunch of hippie tree-huggers trying to stop the builders,” said the owner Martin Fell, overlooking the obvious fact that it’s precisely about hippie tree-huggers trying to stop builders. “We employ 15 people and our business is under threat. It’s not just about us. The council has given planning permission to the developers, showing utter disregard for the democratic process and the wishes of the community.” The wishes of the community have been expressed, he adds, in a 500-signature petition, with the added support of the bands Franz Ferdinand and Belle & Sebastian. Not that this development threatens Tchai Ovna’s property. Rather, says Fell, it will limit the light that gets to the tea room’s garden.

So, to get this straight, 22 families are to be denied attractive new homes so that the Mama Cass memorial lupins can grow proud and tall. And to prevent this, the hippies are prepared to damage surrounding trees by squatting in them and scratching them with their tambourines and those little bells attached to the bottom of their trousers. This is truly far-out logic. Mugs of Condor’s Mucus all round.

What a wrong-headed, pathetically prejudiced load of old cock!

Okay, so hippies are annoying. But when hippies set up a tea shop selling some 200 teas from across the world - and I really mean across the world, the owners travel across Europe and the Far East to get their stock, hence the ‘silly,’ over-literally translated names for the teas - in a beautiful setting on the banks of the River Kelvin, with a wonderful secluded garden outside and a cosy-but-scruffy room inside, I think I can forgive them for having long hair and interesting beards. And, when the council give them less than a week’s notice to challenge planning permission, then proceed to use the Labour group’s block vote to make it impossible for the decision to be countered, I think I can forgive them for getting angry about having their livelihoods taken from them.

And what’s this rot about depriving families of homes? The only people to benefit from the development are the developers, and the speculating landlords who will snap up flats so they can charge extortionate rents to, no doubt, young, childless professionals.

As for the question of light in the garden - a valid concern in itself, for me as a customer - the real issue is not that the ‘Mama Cass memorial lupins’ will wilt, but that, with light blocked by a tower block, and months of noisy construction, even the most diehard Tchai Ovna devotee will find it impossible to drink there in peace. And the tea shop will go out of business. Leaving fifteen people on the dole.

So, to get this straight, Brown would rather see a small number of people cash in at the expense of 15 long-term jobs made possible by the sort of entrepreneurship organs like the Times usually applaud? And, to get this straighter, he’d rather see a tower block than a beautiful wee garden? And, let’s be ruler-straight about this, he’d rather see 22 yuppies bag themselves a riverside apartment than see hundreds of Glaswegians enjoy and benefit from a tea shop that, to be perfectly frank, is the best fucking place in the West End, tea shop or otherwise? Far-out logic indeed!

Sadly, Brown’s inanities are neither here nor there - the loss of Tchai Ovna looks inevitable - but if Martin Fell and the other workers at the tea shop want to protest, they’re well within their rights to do so, and the last thing they need is to be undermined by some sniffy hack so far out of touch with the community he is meant to serve that he can’t, erm, see the wood for the trees, and would rather make a few cheap cracks at the expense of the world’s easiest target (daft old hippies) than help save a place that makes the West End a place worth living in. (That’s the ultimate irony here: creating homes while destroying the very culture that makes those homes so desirable!)

So, if you live in Glasgow and are passing Otago Lane, do drop in to Tchai Ovna for a cup of tea (go with a pot of White Monkey rather than the Condor Mucus) and I’ll bet that within five minutes, you’ll be signing their petition and pledging to help stop the developers in any way you can. Unless, of course, you’re Allan Brown, seemingly the only person to ever cross the threshold without falling in love with the place.