A bit slapped out

That’s how I’m feeling right now. I’ve railed against the Post Office, the Pension Service, incompetent employees, arrogant and stupid sales assistants, unruly children, etc. etc. and I find myself without anyone to slap. Not that there aren’t things that are irritating me at the moment, but they’re a bit too personal to blog about.

So...I am opening these pages to you, dear readers. For a few days.

Be my guests – slap away!

Play nice, though. I can’t edit comments: if yours is too rude, inflammatory or libellous, I won’t be able to publish it at all.

Breathing more freely

I am pleased to report that I am indeed alive. It was confirmed by a nice woman at the French Consulate yesterday. I met my latest deadline on Sunday night, and first thing on Monday morning – since it’s only open until noon – I set off for the French Consulate. The process took all of five minutes and I was told that, although the Attestation d’existence says it should be filled in and signed by an official in the country of residence of the French national applying for a pension, in fact the form has to be processed by the French Consulate and no one else, and it would have been returned to me even if the Hammersmith town hall had agreed to do it. It’s a little game they’re playing: let’s see whether that person manages to guess where they should be going, hee hee!

Having to go to South Kensington in the morning nearly killed me, which would have been rather ironic, wouldn’t it, if I’d died trying to prove I was alive.

While I was in the area, I went to see the newly reopened Jewellery Gallery at the V&A. It’s out of this world – I was drooling. Once they’ve removed a beautiful silver Star of David, found in Spain in the 15th century and labelled simply and erroneously ‘Star Ornament’ (!), from the display entitled ‘The Islamic World’ – or given it its proper Jewish name – it will be perfect.

One more bugbear: if the V&A specify that large bags may not be taken into the gallery, they need to provide something for visitors to put their valuables in. Do they really expect people to leave behind their money, their keys, their precious Attestations d’existence? No way! I shouldn’t have had to beg the cloakroom attendant for one of those transparent bags they supply to people who use the library, nor should I have had to lie and say I’d travelled specially to see the exhibition that morning. Slap!

...therefore I am?

So, because I’m no spring chicken and because I worked in France for a few years before moving to the UK, I'm entitled to a couple of peanuts from the French government. So far so nice.

Hmm... Yesterday, I received a form from the French pension service headed Attestation d’existence, which reads,

‘We the undersigned hereby certify that So-and-So [basically, me] is alive, having appeared before us today.’

I need to have it filled in by some petty official (officials are always petty), preferably in a big, imposing official building (it doesn’t actually say which one would be suitable). The British pension service believed the person who spoke to them on the phone a dozen times and who sent them a whole bumf was me. But, the French, you know, are much more suspicious, much less gullible. So I have to prove to them that I exist.

I think I do, but will the person behind the counter agree?

How easy will it be to prove my existence, I wonder. Harder than proving that of God, I fear.

Update (9/06/2008): As expected, I have been passed from pillar to post at the Hammersmith & Fulham town hall and the officials have been very petty. ‘We don’t do this kind of thing in this country!’ Er, could you go and tell the French, please? It would save a lot of aggro.

In the meantime, I have to traipse to the French Consulate: they said they would probably be able to find someone to fill in that form for me.

To be continued...

Who are these people?!

Quiz on the RNIB’s website.

If you see a blind person in the street, you should:

1) Leave them alone
2) Pet their guide dog
3) Ask if they want help
4) Shout to get their attention

Apparently, 26.8% of people (the second highest number) who answered the quiz think they should shout to get the blind person’s attention in the street. What on earth for? To show them their new shoes?

Slap!

The correct answer is, of course, to leave the person alone unless they look lost or in need of help. I know it’s hard, but resist petting their guide dog first.

How to go too far

If you have a bad cold and want to annoy hundreds, nay thousands of people who know what influenza is truly like, announce you have the flu on a message board, i.e. sitting at your computer, in front of a bright screen, while complaining of a splitting headache, etc. Don’t forget to malign anyone who suggests you might be overplaying the sympathy card.

If you want to make someone very angry indeed, let people write vicious and unwarranted comments about them on your blog, and leave those comments there so your friends can put links to them on their own moronic blogs. Then, years later, even though that person chose to forget about the earlier incident, write something just as vicious and just as unwarranted about them. Don’t forget to deny having any friendly communication with them in the meantime, in case your friends think you are a hypocrite.

If you have already given birth to one healthy baby and want to insult hundreds, nay thousands of women who cannot have children, call yourself barren.

Congratulations! Now you can also call yourself a

Addendum: You need to do all of the above to qualify. Only one of those things is not enough. Sorry. WinterWheat

Men, give up now!

Rehearsal photo, taken by his daughter Lorca
I’m working again. Yes, I know, I’m supposed to be retired. Yeah, right! Anyway, I’m well-disposed towards everyone at the moment. Well, almost everyone. There is one person out there who deserves to be slapped repeatedly, but ‘elle ne perd rien pour attendre’. The slap, when it comes – and it will come, trust me – will be all the more satisfying for being delayed.

In the meantime, I’m looking forward to Leonard Cohen’s concert in July. Just quietly looking forward to it: I hate wishing my life away. I’ve been reading a few accounts (not all - don't want to spoil the surprise) of the concerts that have already taken place in Canada and visiting the lovely forum devoted to the guy. One of the fans, Steve Wilcox, posted this earlier today:

At the third show, during the intermission, I overheard two women agreeing that it wouldn't be fair to expect all men to be like Leonard Cohen. One of them was my wife. I don’t hold it against her.

Happy Birthday, Israel!

Many happy returns of the day!

Life: A User’s Manual*

I have already slapped women who play at being ‘helpless’ (Me, my goat and women), but it’s not just they who expect others to be ‘capable’ and in possession of the user’s manual, is it? Just a certain kind of person, who thinks that those of us who are not fazed by life have some sort of innate knowledge of how things work, of how to find information, etc.

We don’t.

We don’t believe we’re entitled to ‘exploit’ other people, that’s all. We believe we have to spend our own time (not someone else’s) looking for this phone number or that website. We believe we need to speak to helplines or official organisations on our own behalf and ask relevant questions ourselves so we can solve whatever problem we're having. There is no mystery, no special skill. We just get on with it.

Slapping the spongers.

* with apologies to Georges Perec

Too much publicity

Ken Livingstone, the ex-Mayor of London (hooray, he’s gone!) apparently employed 55 PR people. Fifty-five minions to make him appear less of a repulsive individual than he is.

It didn’t work quite, did it? You can fool some of the people...

Boris is busy getting rid of those parasites.

Such a busy little bee

A couple of weeks ago I went to the London Book Fair and I can tell you they’re not joking when they’re talking about a ‘credit crunch’: there were hardly any complimentary goodies to be got this year. It was really pathetic: sweets (what adults eat sweets?), a few crisps, a couple of cheap-looking pens. You can tell how buoyant an industry is by the freebies it gives away at trade fairs.

Still, as usual, I came home with lots of brochures, full of attractive blurbs praising thousands of books, most of which shouldn’t have been published in the first place.

Much* too many books everywhere.

Anyway, about those brochures... I have two in front of me as I type: one is for Gallic Books and the other for Bloomsbury (yes, the publisher of the Harry Potter series; apparently, they haven’t been doing too well since the publication of the last HP, but that's neither here nor there). They both have books in translation on their lists; in fact, Gallic, whose motto is ‘The best of French in English’, only publishes books translated from the French. Yet, one looks in vain for the names of the translators. Not a single one is mentioned in their catalogues.

So, just like most of the texts I’ve worked on in the past 20 years, those books were translated by the Holy Spirit.

I’m slapping him for not raising his hand and shouting, ‘Hey, that’s not my work; so-and-so did it.’ He doesn’t, and translators in this country remain uncredited and unknown.

*Note to the Grammar Police**: I know it should be ‘Far too many books everywhere,’ but it doesn’t sound so funny.

** I’m told I am the Grammar Police.

Update (2.05.08): As it happens, Scott Pack (of the Friday Project), whose blog is so entertaining, recommended one of Gallic Books’ – er – books yesterday, here, without mentioning the translator’s name – obviously, since it’s probably nowhere to be seen. So I repeated my little rant there and, because he is a nice man (I think) and he cares about the written word, he took it seriously here. Thanks, SP!

From now on...

...I am entitled to free travel on London’s public transport.

I would rather pay.

I am not a happy bunny at all today.

Addendum: After I acquired my Freedom Pass today, it occurred to me that since I didn’t have to pay for my bus/tube rides any longer it might not be right for me to complain about the sorry state of London’s public transport. However, I believe it is my duty to grumble about things that affect us all, so I will carry on slapping on behalf of younger travellers who still have to pay outrageous fares and endure unconscionable delays every day.

Scandal in a slightly bigger pond

In his forthcoming book, Do Travel Writers Go to Hell?: A Swashbuckling Tale of High Adventures, Questionable Ethics and Professional Hedonism, Thomas Kohnstamm, a Lonely Planet author, reveals he didn’t actually travel to some of the countries he wrote guidebooks to. As CNN reported, ‘He plagiarized or made up portions of the popular travel guidebooks and dealt drugs to supplement poor pay.’ He used information supplied by friends who lived in those countries and some he found on the Net. He also accepted free travel, which is against Lonely Planet’s policy.

I have firsthand knowledge of how little travel writers and updaters are paid. I can confirm he wasn’t being greedy.*

His employers panicked and urgently double-checked all his books and didn’t find any inaccuracies.

Lonely Planet isn’t the only travel-guide publisher that panicked after Thomas Kohnstamm’s revelation. They all did. They all reviewed the way their writers and updaters operate, in the hope of being able to say that they worked in a totally truthful way. However, since none of them pays well enough, none of them could issue such a statement. They all cut corners.

When told by an editor (not a million miles away from where I’m sitting) , ‘And you think we double-check the facts of the update at editorial stage? We would only check if a fact looks contradictory or suspicious,’ one boss queried, ‘Why do we proofread, then? And what do copy-editors do?’

This is the editor’s answer.

‘What copy-editors do:
- edit the text while looking constantly at the map to ensure that the text is structured correctly using four or five levels of heading, and that the map matches the text exactly.

- check that any changes made by the updater in one chapter are transferred to other places where they might be relevant such as the architecture chapter, colour section or maps.

- check that the updater has done their job properly, followed the brief and not missed anything out.

- compare the text with competition guides to see what elements are missing, focused on by others or covered unsatisfactorily in the guide.

- edit the text, especially new text, for grammatical and spelling errors and then edit it also to make it read well and flow. Then edit again to length if the book is over or under.

- edit the history, art and architecture sections to make academic information clear to a lay reader. Check that all artistic movements, architects and artists mentioned in the rest of the book are covered generally in an explicatory way here so that the chapter serves as an introduction. Check then that unfamiliar terms in this chapter and the rest of the book are explained in the Glossary of Terms at the back of the book.

- edit the Food and Drink chapter so that all typical types of food and drink mentioned in the guide are explained.

- look out for anomalous facts such as phone numbers that look as if they have a digit missing or websites where the name of a hotel is spelt differently from the name in the text, and check such facts again.

- apply house style to all the practical information such as addresses and opening hours, which must be the same throughout the book and the series otherwise the guide will be unusable.

- study practical sections intelligently to see if they apply to the text they belong to. Rework such sections or request more information e.g. if a getting there section leaves out how to get to a major place or a bus is not mentioned but happens to be mentioned in the running text.

- ensure that listings sections are at the end of text they actually belong to, and that all villages and towns mentioned in the listings boxes are in the same order that they appear in the descriptive text. Ensure that listings sections follow the same order of information throughout the book.

- in [name of imprint] guides, sort out the top five highlights for each chapter and mark them on maps and in the text.

- edit the travel chapter and compare with the travel chapters of other guides to ensure consistency of material and that everything is covered; recheck any discrepancies.

- in [name of imprint]’s case, decide which kind of box to apply to stories and background information.

- brief the author on writing their colour sections and the kinds of themes that would work with the images available or that suit the book.

- edit the colour section and do picture research if necessary, or brief the photographer if not.

- check that foreign languages are set correctly especially those needing special fonts such as Greek, Russian, Turkish, Swedish, Icelandic, Latvian, Polish, Hungarian, Czech. Keep an eye out for adjectives that don't look as if they agree with their nouns and plural verbs with singular nouns in the basic European languages Italian, French and Spanish. Check with a native speaker if in doubt.

- ensure that all scale bars on maps look correct.

- dealing with prices and putting them into ranges.

- questioning whether there is enough information to be genuinely helpful at every point.

- making sure the hotel listings don't read all the same or use the word 'pleasant' or other meaningless adjectives.

- looking out for consistency in foreign proper names that may have English equivalents (Seville/Sevilla, or famous people, or the chosen spelling of Velázquez).

- having to know your Renaissance from your Reconquista, your apse from your apsidum, your quattrocento from your medieval – not in depth, but just enough to spot errors.

- cross-referencing the maps with the text, e.g. in church plans or Roman site plans with keys or for listings in the few books where hotels and restaurants have numbers with blobs on the map and then the updater changes three and every single number has to change in three places but remain correct or it's worse than useless.

- having to do all the cross-references for the text, of which there are around 100 per book, plus all those in the colour section.

- editing the index to see whether it makes logical sense and has the right things in it.

As one does *one* copy-edit (at around 70 pages – 35,000 words – per day) one has to do all this in one go alongside the spelling and grammar, which is why the latter has to come absolutely naturally.

What copy-editors don't do:
Recheck all the facts provided by the author and updater, doubling up on work the company has already paid someone else to do.

What proofreaders do:
Proofread. While doing all the above, the copy-editor will have made typos and errors, not lined up practical information correctly, missed essential bold and italics and will have missed spelling and punctuation errors because they have been trying to do all the above in a matter of a few weeks.’

Slapping bosses who haven’t got a clue what their employees actually do day to day. Especially those who drive around in expensive cars. They don’t live on the same planet as us – lonely or not.

* I know of an editor who went on a two-week trip to Holland once to help an author finish their book quickly: she planned it all out and worked out she had to visit five towns a day. She parked her car, got out, went to the tourist office, picked up leaflets, possibly went to one museum or anything that was brand new, looked around and made a few notes on atmosphere, and then an hour and half later got in her car and went to the next place. She wrote it all up in her hotel room each night. She stopped for ten minutes in small villages. She was paid £1,000 for that trip, and she spent £890 on travel and accommodation and food. That means she earned £7.86 per day.

Battle in a small pond

In the red corner, we have the Emperor of Scent and, in the blue one, the Professeur de Parfums.

Two big fish. Both with big, fat books.

Who’s gonna win?

The Emperor with the smiling consort or the lonely Professeur?

Who are you?

I have kept a diary for over 30 years. However, I don’t examine my life (sorry, Socrates), I just record it. I don’t want to cringe when I read what I wrote later.

Which is what I have just done – read it, not cringed. Well, only a couple of years (1974-75), but several thousand words nevertheless.

Gwendolyn Fairfax was right*, but what bothers me is that there are several people mentioned in those pages that I have completely and utterly forgotten. I have no idea who they were. Only their first names are mentioned (at the time it was obvious to me who they were) and now I cannot conjure up the faces that go with those names. I seem to have been quite friendly with them, but now they are nothing but shadows

We meet many people in the course of our lives; we part with them and, in some cases, we don’t give them another thought, but when their existence has been recorded we should remember them.

Slapping myself for my bad memory.

* ‘I never travel without my diary. One should always have something sensational to read in the train.’ The Importance of Being Earnest

Addendum: of course, there are also those people who should be mentioned in my diary and who aren’t – for some reason. That’s even worse. Probably. Sigmund, where are you? (He’s never there when you need him.)

‘Nuff said – the sequel

Last week, I wrote: If you think God moves in a mysterious way, you haven’t dealt with Ticketmaster.

I owe you an explanation for that cryptic pronouncement:

You know I love Leonard Cohen (Yes, you do! You’ve been reading my blog for a while so you are aware of that fact). Well, he’s embarking on a world tour in a minute (please keep your fingers crossed he doesn’t give up the ghost because of it; the poor man is 73 this year; I am, er, xx years younger and I know how I feel when I go out just for a couple of hours; I can’t imagine singing my heart out every night and travelling from city to city for an entire year)... where’s the beginning of my sentence... ah, yes, and he is coming to London.

Hooray!

Yeah, right! He’s going to perform at the O2 Arena (aka the stupid Dome). I ask you! In Nice, he’s going to stand (or sit down maybe, poor darling) in the middle of a beautiful Roman amphitheatre, surrounded by scented trees, on a soft, warm, quiet summer night (the crickets will presumably have shut up by then). In London, he will be surrounded by 20,000 people, a good number of whom will be hanging on for dear life on tiers as high and sheer as any cliffs.

The tour was announced in January, I think, but I wasn’t aware of it. On Friday 14 March, I noticed a small, mysterious ad in the Evening Standard that seemed to indicate that something was in the offing – a new album, OMG, a tour maybe? So I logged on to a wonderful forum full of lovely Leonard fans (his music attracts nice people) and discovered that tickets for the London concert (on 17 July) could now be booked on the O2 website (they had, in fact, gone on sale that very morning).

So, like thousands of others, I logged on, went through all the Ticketmaster hoops to secure two seats (the best available at that point), and sighed with relief when I got the email confirmation.

Only later did I notice the blah blah saying:

PLEASE NOTE Seats located on Level 4 (Upper Tier, Upper Bowl) are not recommended for those who have a fear of heights.

I have problems standing on a stool to replace a light bulb. I started getting nightmares about it. What if I couldn’t actually climb up to my seat on the night; what if, once seated, I couldn’t bear to look down at the stage (a million miles away); what if I couldn’t leave my seat at all at the end (I have been known to freeze at the top of a ladder, when retrieving a book in a library)? I started panicking. And then I read on the forum that Ticketmaster deliberately kept seats aside and released them bit by bit later.

Indeed, three days on, better seats came up for sale, and I immediately grabbed two. So now I won’t be hanging from the ceiling, but I will need powerful binoculars to even catch a glimpse of that lovely, lived-in face, because it’s going to feel like he’s in Greenwich and I’m still in Shepherds Bush, the seats are so far away from the stage.

And then, a few days later, Ticketmaster released even better seats, for the same price. This time, I abstained because I can’t really fork out that much money all in one go, without knowing whether I can get rid of my extra tickets first*. And, at the moment, I only have virtual tickets because Ticketmaster are holding everyone’s tickets hostage. They ask people not to contact them if they haven’t received them. They warn they might not send them until five days before the event. Like I’m going to wait until then to raise a stink.

Slap slap slap!

*I will let you know when I actually get my tickets so you can fight over them here. Won’t that be fun? I will charge what those tickets cost me (i.e. quite a nice sum plus some ridiculous booking fee – why? – plus even more ridiculous postage), plus a year’s worth of psychotherapy sessions for the stress I suffered in the course of booking those tickets and waiting for them to arrive, please god.

Laugh of the Day

Advertisement for Ocado (the home delivery service - selling mostly Waitrose goods):

This Pesach we'll beat Elijah to your door.

Update: All you puzzled, non-Jewish readers, I will now put you out of your misery.

Pesach is the Hebrew name for Passover, which is, as Wikipedia says, ‘the Jewish festival commemorating the Exodus from Egypt and the liberation of the Israelites from slavery’. A meal kicks off the festivities, during which the story of the Flight from Egypt is recounted. Wine is drunk at some point and a glass is poured for the prophet Elijah, who is supposed to herald the Messiah at this time. The door is opened for him too, for a little while.

Don’t you find that Ocado ad funny and clever now?

Done!

My deadline was today, and I returned my translation (all 100,000 words of it) a couple of hours ago.

Free, free at last! If only...

I now have to do all the chores I’ve put aside over the last few weeks.

I’m feeling a bit dazed.

See you later. An awful lot of things have annoyed me recently and not being able to vent has been rather frustrating. Grrr!

‘Nuff said

If you think God moves in a mysterious way, you haven’t dealt with Ticketmaster.

Slap!

Normal service...

...will be resumed soon. But not just yet.

While I’m here: I have read all emails sent to me. They will be answered as soon as I have a moment.

See you later.

Still around

I am in ‘Positively Last Read Mode’ at the moment. My deadline is almost upon me. My faithful readers (I may have one or two) will remember I’ve been translating a novel for the past several years – that’s what it feels like, anyway. ‘Positively Last Read Mode’ is when you want to slap yourself for being so stupid earlier and writing weird sentences that no human being – not even a French one – would ever say. ‘Positively Last Read Mode’ is when common sense comes back to you at last (no common sense – no translator). ‘Positively Last Read Mode’ is also when the Translation Fairy finally appears. You’ve called her to the rescue several times before, but she always waits until the last minute to turn up. She sits on your shoulder and whispers in your ear, ‘Change this sentence like so. You’ll see: it’ll be much better’. I always follow her advice: she’s never let me down.

Anyway, all the above to explain why I’ve been a bit elusive recently. It doesn’t mean I don’t get mad at things; it just means I don’t have enough energy to share my anger with you lot.

In case you all go away and never come back (we wouldn’t want that, would we?), here’s a medley of blood-pressure-raising stuff.

Today, dear readers, I’m slapping:

* Our Chancellor of the Exchequer: yesterday was Budget Day and, as usual, I’m gonna be worse off.

* The builders who’ve been renovating the bathroom in the flat next door: they should have finished last week and, guess what, they haven’t yet. I don’t mind the noise they make in the course of their work (can’t be helped), but if they carry on slamming the front door, which is, like, two inches from mine, every time they go in and out (and there’s a lot of comings and goings all day), I will come out with a big kitchen knife and stab them in their newly installed shower. Ee ee ee ee ee!

* Hospital food. I haven’t been in hospital recently (thank god) and I hope I don’t in the near future, but I saw a TV programme about it last night and it is a disgrace. No, you have no idea how bad it is. There are no guidelines regarding hospital meals: it’s up to each NHS trust to set their own standards. And they only have something like £2.10 to spend on each patient per day. Do not get ill in this country: you will be well cared for but you will starve to death: no one will help you eat your meals if you’re incapacitated; they won’t give you a spoon to eat the disgusting soup they’ve plonked in front of you and then they’ll take the tray away and write ‘Meal refused’ on your chart. Things like that. A disgrace, I tell you.

Stay healthy!

See you later: the Translation Fairy is calling...

Addendum: The Translation Fairy has another name: Adrenaline. What she can’t stop you from doing, the mischievous little minx, is opening a previous version of your translation, working away on it for a while and suddenly thinking, ‘I could have sworn I spent two hours yesterday formatting the b***** thing. What’s happened to it?’

Stay healthy, and don’t forget to label your files unambiguously!