Little meat in Yorkshire Building Society word-salad

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A building society raises its its savings interest level by half a per cent and of course senior management has to make an almighty song and dance about it.

“Our decision…continues to reflect our mutual ethos of putting our members first,” purred Yorkshire Building Society’s director of savings, Chris Irwin. As if he and his colleagues had just gone the extra mile over broken glass.

“Increasing rates…continues to reflect our purpose of supporting our savers,” he enthused.

Imagine your window cleaner saying the same thing, but in window-cleaning terms.

“Rubbing vigorously with a chamois leather continues to reflect my purpose of making your windows all sparkly.”

You’d be a tad underwhelmed, right?

“Passing the bank rate increases onto our savers also demonstrates our commitment to delivering value to our members.”

This is like you or me inviting plaudits by announcing that we’ve gone a whole week without punching old ladies.

“I should bloody well hope so,” would be the consensus reply.

Passing on to savers the same rates with which you’re hitting borrowers is not some extraordinarily noble gesture.

As a building society, it is literally the least they could do.

And as for the patronising sign-off…

“We try very hard to offer our members competitive rates…to reward their loyalty and in turn support their financial resilience in the current financial climate.”

…there are no words. A phrase you’ll probably never hear in Chris Irwin’s office.

Sunak’s maths plan doesn’t even add up

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You may have thought Rishi Sunak couldn’t embarrass himself any further than with his cack-handed attempt to mix with the masses before Christmas.

Oh ye of little faith.

Yesterday, amid a raging cost-of-living crisis and talk of erecting tents on hospital grounds to alleviate the bed shortage, the Prime Minister announced the first part of his masterplan to get us out of this mess.

Compulsory maths for schoolchildren until the age of 18.

I can’t tell you how much better the £1,000 bill to heat my home and my mother-in-law’s lodge last month looked when I heard that news.

I cut Sunak not one millimetre of slack over this. It is the classic politician’s diversionary tactic. Ignore all the real problems — the ones for which you have no answer — and instead talk at length about a made-up problem and how your plan to tackle it will be the answer to all our ills. Employing the word “reimagine” is fast becoming something of a red flag in this respect.

Not having attended one since 1979, I wouldn’t normally wade into school issues, but I suspect this one is timeless, so here goes.

Unless you plan to be an actuary, physicist or mathematician, the only enduring lessons you need from maths are a knack for swift mental arithmetic and an appreciation of why compound interest is one of the most life-changing forces you will ever meet.

A decent teacher could have you fully versed in both by the time you’re 14, if only he or she didn’t have to cram all the useless theoretical stuff into the curriculum as well. I haven’t given sines or cosines a second thought in the last 40 years. On maybe two occasions have I had to fall back on the algebraic equations of yore, to ascertain what ‘a’ equals, if ‘x’ equals this and ‘y’ equals that.

And while my maths teachers were sound enough, it is the cherry on top of Sunak’s folly that my enlightenment over compound interest only came about when I read investment books in my forties, while my slick mental arithmetic prowess owes nothing to my school and everything to the eight summers I spent as scorer for my local cricket club.

What a shame our Prime Minister didn’t pick up on that theme yesterday. Support our national summer game, maintain the scorebook and averages for your local team and be comfortable doing long division in your head for the rest of your days.

That proposal, at least, would have had a thread of logic to it. All we saw yesterday, I’m afraid, is a Prime Minister tilting at convenient windmills and pushing us ever nearer to the conclusion that the only thing he has going for him is not being Liz Truss.

A close shave from beyond the grave

Some might say I got the thin end of the wedge, Dad.

You’d already donated your piano to the care home and my sister got your violin.

I got a couple of your old conductor’s batons. I wave them around occasionally when there’s an inspirational orchestral piece on the radio without knowing what the hell I’m doing.

And I also got this. Your old shaving mirror.

I think the house clearance was well advanced when it occurred to me to ask what had happened to it. Now it’s on my bathroom wall.

I doubt I’d have heard of Heath Robinson if it hadn’t been for you. You sometimes talked about him and the oddball contraptions he came up with, and I remember that every time I pull the mirror away from the wall on its concertina arms, to shave in better light.

And I think of you, shaving religiously every single day, while I hack away at several days’ accumulated growth, time after time.

I remember you occasionally sitting down for breakfast — because families did sit down for breakfast back then, before progress intervened — with two or three slivers of toilet paper stuck to your chin. Your regular reminder that the blade needed changing. And now mine.

That mirror brings us closer than any violin could have done, because I know how to work a shaving mirror.

It encircled your face for decades. Now it encircles mine. And particularly at this time of year, that symmetry is not lost on me.

Happy New Year, Dad. Wherever you are.

Crushed by the Christmas round-robin letter

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The robin is, by all accounts, an aggressive little blighter, so it’s fitting that it should have found itself attached to one of the scariest Christmas traditions.

The round-robin letter; chronicling the year’s personal highlights and invariably sent, I’ve come to realise, by the over-achievers in your social circle.

Let’s get the caveats out of the way. If this were just an envy thing, I wouldn’t even be writing this. In my social circle, at any rate, these are good people who have worked hard. I don’t begrudge them a penny of the rewards and I rejoice in the sumptuous lives they have built for themselves and their children.

But we are a competitive species, assessing ourselves in relation to those around us with all the diligence of a racing driver en route to the first bend. This is not the green-eyed monster at work; just the baleful eye of self-analysis.

However fond you might be of their authors, these end-of-year epistles can leave you crushed.

I’ve come to know the first three weeks of December as the season of “In Case You’ve Forgotten How Crap Your Life Is, Allow Us to Remind You.”

Once, just once, I’d love to read a Christmas round-robin letter from a couple in the same dead-end jobs and same dead-end marriage, bringing up the same utterly unremarkable children while driving the same car they drove when David Cameron was in Number 10; their sole nod to globetrotting these last 12 months a long weekend in Yarmouth.

Alas, those people always make do with a card, for some reason.

Deck the halls with boughs and padlocks

The final ingredient of our Christmas decorations is now in place.

Far from looking festive, however, Mrs Notepad wears a doubtful, conflicted look as I join her at the front door.

“Does it look all right?” she asks, hesitantly, and I know it’s not the wreath she’s thinking of.

“It looks the perfect sign of our times,” I assure her.

“And you’re not the one who should be embarrassed by it.”

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Why “HOW MUCH??!!” is the national lament

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Ask why the price of everything is going through the roof and “inflation” is the go-to, seemingly obvious answer.

A chat with the guy working on my house recently, though, got me wondering if there might be other factors at work.

“Jobs like this,” he told me, gesturing towards his handiwork, “keep things ticking over nicely. But the big commercial jobs, like the one I’m pitching for tomorrow; they’re the ones you’re after. A few of those and you’re looking at retiring when you’re forty.”

It occurred to me that this was the exciting talk you used to hear from budding novelists, or musicians striving for that breakthrough album. Now it seems everyone wants a piece of the same action, even if their capacity to delight the masses extends no further than tiling over a roofspace.

And what are those dispensing “the big commercial jobs” to make of such lofty ambition as they try get their head around the eye-popping quotes in front of them?

You might not object to paying for materials and the upkeep of those deploying them for the time the job takes, plus a reasonable profit margin on top. But what if you know you’re effectively being asked to finance a quarter of someone’s pension fund? Someone who plans on every day being Saturday before he’s even hit middle age?

How good do those value-for-money assurances look now?

It’s inflation all right. Inflated expectations: on your dime.

Forget your revenues, Mr. Dentist; just get some sleep

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If you’re going to be that glum and downbeat compared to our last encounter, pal, maybe padding your schedule with these crack-of-dawn appointments wasn’t such a good idea.

I could have done with the extra half-hour in bed myself.

See you in six months. Last thing on a Friday might be good.

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18 degrees? Health chiefs need to wake up and smell most people’s coffee

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So, there was a heating bill crisis but now there isn’t.

Not if you listen to “health chiefs”, anyway, who are urging those with medical conditions to heat their homes “to a temperature that is comfortable for you”. Eighteen degrees, “if you can”. Aye, there’s the rub.

This glibness is getting old. It’s just a week ago that Specsavers saw fit to post flyers in one of the least-affluent towns in my county, offering you their suite of hearing test services for “just £495”. Like it’s the kind of money you find down the back of your sofa.

Did you think they were making it up in the summer, health chiefs? Those experts who warned of people having to choose between heat or food this winter, and how soaring energy bills would cost lives?

Well they weren’t; all of that is an actual thing and the day of reckoning is nigh. And yet here you are, displaying Edwina Currie levels of doltishness, with your implicit suggestion that if we all try really, really hard, the money needed to bring about your vision of a winter wonderland will magically appear.

No it won’t. Not for a lot of people, who are neither workshy nor malingerers but whose finances just cannot keep pace with the crisis wrought by that egomaniac in Moscow.

If it’s a toss-up between a perma-18 degrees or avoiding a millstone of debt, they’ll put on two more sweaters and try to grin and bear it.

That is the reality as winter prepares to bite, so stop trying to pretend it isn’t with your breezy, business-as-usual concern.

Because the last thing we need in the midst of this Dickensian-lite nightmare is being talked down to by “health chiefs” who could doubtless afford to walk around their own homes in their underwear this winter; all day and every day.

Go and talk to Specsavers instead. See if that bargain hearing test extends to the tone deaf.

The rich man in his castle and the perks of ‘enough’

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Another summer, another wonderful week’s holiday in a luxury home.

Opulently furnished, with a fishing loch at the bottom of the garden and a hot tub by the jetty, we all chipped in for its weekly rental of two grand and did what we do with these places every year — estimated the freehold value over our first evening meal of the holiday.

North of one million, was the consensus. The type of house that lifts the spirits while simultaneously prompting a sobering assessment of where you are in life and what you have to show for it.

Yet as the week wore on, a strange soothing note began to sound. It was the keys that did it.

This place had a key for everything bar the toilet.

Every window, every exterior door. Two keys for the garage and three for the boathouse. The front gate and side gate. Barely a half day passed without a fearful “Anyone seen the key for…” alarm being raised somewhere in the house. Locking up each night was a chore reminiscent of a small prison. Job done, a full house of keys wobbled to a standstill on a depressing line of hooks; a visual reminder of responsibilities to be renewed tomorrow.

Returning to our modest, tatty semi-detached was a happier experience than usual. I unlocked the front door and stepped into a four-lock world once more. Front and back doors, the shed and a combo lock for the garden gate.

All you need to protect the trappings of just doing okay.

I’ll take it.

Quality time and keeping your cool

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A touching tribute paid to me by Younger Son over Jubilee burgers last night.

“I remember when we used to have a thermostat when we were kids. Dad would come home from work and I’d say, “Hi Dad, have you had a good day…?

“He’d march straight past me, glare at the thermostat, turn it down two notches, then turn back to me and say, “Yes, fine thanks, sweetheart. How was your day?”

Priorities. A life-lesson that has clearly stuck.