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Oliver Cross: Headingley Literature Festival and a banking fiasco
Read the latest scribblings of Woodhouse resident and YEP columnist Oliver Cross.
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Date with a dame
On Saturday, I listened to a talk by Beryl Bainbridge, who I think is my favourite living novelist, although I would have to run a Google-check on Doris Lessing's existence status before committing myself.
Anyway it was a very pleasant afternoon at the New Headingley Club as part of the Headingley Literature Festival and I don't know if it was a typical literary event because it was the first one I've ever attended.
So as I now understand it, literary events involve mostly confident, capable-looking women who look as if, if it came to it, they could chair a meeting or organise an emergency evacuation and are overwhelmingly grey or tinted (which is my way of avoiding that awful phrase about 'women of a certain age', although that's what I mean, because, being a man of a certain age myself, I don't want to be turned into clich-fodder).
I was surprised the event was so female-dominated because Beryl Bainbridge's latest, historically-based books seem likely to appeal more to men than women, particularly her latest, The Girl in the Polka Dot Dress, which touches on the assassinations of Martin Luther King and Robert Kennedy. ('Excuse me sir, would you be interested in a novel involving guns and conspiracies? Yes, there is a girl in it...OK, sir, don't know why I asked, really').
Unfortunately, Dame (for that is what she is, although you'd never guess it if you mistook dames for haughty people with Margaret That-cher hair) Beryl has got stuck about 140 pages into the novel but read us extracts from the work so far.
This was very generous, given that it sounds exactly the sort of plot Oliver Stone would like to steal, and she also provided us with relevant background information on her childhood which will make reading the novel a particularly rich experience for anybody who was in the New Headingley Club on Saturday, particularly if they also know about Formby sands in Lancashire.
Oh, and did I just mention Formby, the Lancashire town which gave its name to George Formby, the noted ukulele entertainer?
This is an extraordinary coincidence because the day after being so thoroughly entertained and spiritually enriched by Beryl Bainbridge, I was equally entertained by my friend Vicky's 30th birthday party.
This was held at the Chemic Tavern in Woodhouse, Leeds, and, as is the tendency with Chemic Tavern events, turned out to be very good on the ukulele front but rather disappointing on the spiritual enrichment front.
It was a very free-flow party and only got stuck once; when the massed ukulele players mastered the Dad's Army theme tune Who Do You Think You Are Kidding Mr Hitler? but couldn't develop it any further and had to keep repeating over and over, like they had been collectively struck down by an obsessive-compulsive disorder.
The problem being, of course, that the Who Do You Think You Are Kidding… isn't really a song, it's a theme designed to last exactly was long as the programme's credits, which is about 30 seconds.
When I explained this, the ukulele players, jolted like a stuck record, moved on and devoted themselves to forgetting the words of Making Whoopee, which kept them entertained for hours.
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Another banking fiasco...
I spent about 20 minutes in a bank queue this week waiting to do a very simple transaction while the lone counter clerk tried desperately to sell the bank's financial products to each customer in turn.
It was a bit like being badgered by a hustler outside a Third World airport – well, with several obvious differences but in the sense that the young woman had clearly been trained not to take 'no' for an answer and would have liked to have shouted out 'Hey mister, this is your lucky day, I can make you rich, rich, rich' if only the regulatory authorities hadn't recently clamped down on that sort of thing.
One man told her he didn't really want an exciting new ISA because he was only visiting and would be going back to China next week.
"Our ISAs can be accessed from anywhere in the world and offer an excellent rate of return by international standards," the bank woman responded, skilfully glossing over the fact that an excellent rate of return by international standards wouldn't currently buy you a teacake.
The man mumbled something and rushed out with his head down, knowing that it's best not to show hustlers any sign of interest or you'll never be rid of them.
The next customer, a sensible teenage girl student, paid a cheque in then had to explain that no, she didn't want a savings account because she had to live on 40 a week and had no savings and no, she didn't want a credit card because she wouldn't trust herself with one, even though the bank said she could have a lovely card with a funky modern design and a CD voucher tomorrow.
Then the bank woman played her last card and the student had to say that no, she didn't want the bank's special deal on mobile phones because, er, she hadn't got a mobile phone. It had exploded last week.
And then fallen into a pond, and she wouldn't be getting a new one ever so could she go now please?
And the moral is? Firstly, the banks shouldn't pester honest people into becoming liars; secondly they shouldn't turn the speech amplifiers on their counters full-on so everybody can hear your private business, and thirdly they should redeploy some of their staff from telephone cold-calling sales tasks, so that every bank has at least two counter clerks on duty at lunchtimes.
Oh, and fourthly they should stop calling the counter clerks or tellers fancy names like 'customer advisors' and, as they used to do when banks were responsible institutions and not a national joke, they should employ solid middle-aged people, often called Sheila, Jean, Jim or Colin, who have no sales responsibilities but are very friendly and highly skilled at handling money, that being very much their point.
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Weather for Leeds
Saturday 19 May 2012
Today
Light rain
Temperature: 6 C to 10 C
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