The Language Show, Olympia, London

Anyone who is keen on languages might be interested in attending The Language Show which runs from Friday to Sunday at Olympia. There are lots of free seminars and taster classes. If your learning spirit needs a boost, maybe you should swing by.

I shared a stand at the last two shows, but am not able to attend this year. However, Lexus have kindly offered to have the Nod offs on sale at their stand. Do stop by and see all Peter has to offer. He has a great Chinese learning product just out. It is an interactive CD-Rom: Read, Listen & Speak, a combined vocabulary builder, character recognition instructor and pronunciation coach. Read, Listen & Speak assesses and evaluates learning progress. It will listen to users’ pronunciation of Chinese and respond on accuracy.

My absence from The Show means that I have been plunged into making Halloween costumes for my daughters. Last night involved sewing yellow stripes onto a black t-shirt for Luisa. She is dressing up as a bumble bee. Not sure how Halloweeny this is.

Apps away

I predict that Apple will wipe the floor with e-books for the following reasons.

• How much more sexy is an Apple product to a Kindle.
  
• It's also so much more tactile and portable. Whenever you see someone holding a Kindle it looks like it will be very uncomfortable after a while.
• It is multi-tasking. Who wants to carry an extra thing around with them with another charger, etc?
• Apple owners strike me as readers. All the ones I have met are.
• Buying from the Apple store is easypeasy and you can buy music at the same time.

Only time will tell. Here is an interesting article.

Another Scottish publisher trailing a blaze

I think Canongate have cracked the e-book race with their web app. Yet it doesn't seem to have caused many ripples in the publishing pond.

While other publishers witter on about the right e-book reader and the right price for e-books, Canongate have produced something that should be the envy of all. We all know iPhoners are obsessed with their phones. Now they can spend even more time loving them as an iReader.

And while we are at it, look how it took a forward-thinking Edinburgh-based publisher to just go on and do it. A publishing house that is run by someone who obviously embraces e-publishing and is providing the consumer with a product that will work on a gadget they already own and at a price that will have them flocking to the app store.

London publishers, eat your hearts out.

Chambers, Chambers, Chambers, in, in, in.

The fight is on to keep Chambers in Edinburgh along with the 27 staff. If you wish to lend your support, you can sign the petition at http://www.ipetitions.com/petition/chambers-in-edinburgh/

Let's hope someone has pointed it in the direction of Stephen Fry. One twit from him and you have the muscle of cyberspace marching at your side.

For anyone following the Chambers saga visit here

How would a Ryanair bookchain operate

Following on from the last post about Ryanair, and given the huge problems Waterstone's face trying to implement their own distribution serivce (known as the hub), I wonder how a Ryanair bookchain would operate?

Given they get passengers to do most of the work (print out tickets, carry their own luggage onto the plane, clear up their rubbish on the plane), I assume that Ryanbooks would operate in a similar way.

Or may be it's the publishers that will be doing all the running.

Any thoughts (especially from Harry) would be most welcome!

A very clever business model

Last week's BBC Panorama was all about Ryanair and was attempting to portray them as the bad guys.

The list of complaints included:

• printing out your own boarding pass (ie using your own computer and ink)
• having to pay if you wanted to choose where to sit (priority booking)
• paying to take a suitcase (ie checking it in)
• being ripped off with expensive inflight sandwiches and drinks
• not having a pouch on the back of the seat in front where you put magazines etc
• having the safety instructions stuck to the back of the seat in front instead of a card tucked into the missing pouch
• airports not actually being near the city they are going to (rather than Milan, it is Bergamo; rather than Glasgow, it is Prestwick, etc)
• charging extortionate fees to pay for each ticket using a normal debit/credit card
  

Whilst I too often moan about Ryanair, it does what it says on the tin. It forces you to behave in a way that speeds up the whole operation and means that they can get their 29 minute turnaround and have more planes in the air per day, have the lowest fares and still make a profit.

And how do they do this? Firstly they:

• get rid of check-in desks - always time wasting as people have lots of suitcases and passports to check in. Self check-in means you go straight through to departures with your 10kg handluggage. Now 10kg is quite a lot. Everyone always takes too much on holiday so Ryanair is just helping you be a bit more rigorous. Everyone who buys a ticket gets 10kg so for a family of 4 that is 40kg.
  

Secondly, and perhaps more importantly, they rely on human nature to get extra revenue and to speed up the boarding process. They rely on us being:

1. disorganised:

• one mistake with names and dates on the booking and you have to pay a hefty fee to change the info.
• forget to print the check in slip and you have to pay a hefty fee
• not pack within their guidelines and you have to pay a hefty fee
• forget to make, take, buy food and drink before you get on board and you pay a hefty premium
• not be bothered to find out in advance how to get a visa electron care in advance (there are ways and means) and you pay a hefty premium..

2. selfish:

• Not having seats allocated means there's a rush to get on board. You should see my 75-year-old mother-in-law. Rat out of a drainpipe springs to mind. Boarding is therefore swift.

3. Messy. So having no pouches on seats means there is nowhere to leave your used hankies, empty tins, newspaper. It cuts down on the cleaning up during the 29 minute turnaround. And there is no faffing about trying to restore the safety instructions to the pouch if they are stuck on the back of the seat.

As for the complaint about the airports being far away from the city. The Ryanair airports often have a special deal to get you to the city. Prestwick to Glasgow on the trains (showing a Ryanair boarding pass) is something like £2.50. And not everyone is destined for the city. The airport may be nearer their actual destination.

And there are ways of avoiding the debit/credit card fee. I think getting a post office travel money card pre-loaded with sterling or euros could be one of them. Check it out.

So whilst Ryanair can be annoying, it is very good at delivering its promise (cheap flights). Make sure you don't fall into any of the above traps, get a visa electron, don't get hungry on the flight and you can get yourself a bargain.

Oh, and Michael O'Leary has a villa in Loveno (the village where my mother was born), so he can't be all bad.

The tipping point

Although I use it loads, I am not a great fan of Tesco. I end up cooking meals to fit in with what I find on the shelves of our Metro Express. Further down the road is a CostCutter that has an amazing range but is just a bit pricey. There is also a Spar right next to the Metro Express that I know is often cheaper but I hardly ever bother to check it out. Tesco is a giant with enormous buying and bullying power. It seems to be shaping our eating and buying habits. But despite all this cheap food are we any happier or healthier? It claims to be working in the interests of the customer. I would suspect that it is much more concerned with making lots of dosh and the fact that we get cheaper food is a byproduct.

There was an article in last week's Scottish Big Issue. It was the Vendor's View. Here is how his spiral into homelessness began.

'I was in agricultural management for a while in Spalding, Lincolnshire. We saw the produce come in, sorted it out and boxed it up. I had my own team of fruit importers. I felt like the boss. I loved seeing all the food come in from around the world. Cranberries from North America and melons from Brazil. There were lychees and other fruits - things I've forgotten from God knows where.

'Unfortunately, Tesco came in and ruined it for me. They bought up all the land in places like Guatemala and began to run things directly from these places, and so it cut out the fruit importers here.'

Whilst coutries were trying to build empires in previous centuries, are we seeing Tesco building a retail empire in our global 21st century? Has anyone the power or inclination to stop it?

A clicking conspiracy

I have always been grateful to Amazon for providing a tiny player in the publishing world a level playing field to compete against the big boys on the block.

But recently I have sensed a threat to this level playing field from unknown and obviously non-friendly clickers.

I was wondering why all the negative one-star reviews were jumping out at me when I looked for the Nod offs on Amazon. It turns out that they are ordered as to how useful the review is. The usefulness is determined by whether people found the review helpful or not. All my one-star reviews had lots of 'helpful' clicks to them. See the Spanish above. The one-star review has 6 out of 9 people finding it helpful. Meanwhile the five-star review has only 3 out of 18 people finding it helpful. That means there have been 18 negative clicks against the review sending it to the bottom of the two review heap.

Suspicious or what? It may not matter in the great scheme of things but it makes me think that Amazon isn't such the safe place that I once thought.

40 years later

Benvenuti to all our visitors. We have lots of them today and I am not quite sure why. If there is something out there we should be aware of, please do comment.

I thought I would skip forward almost 40 years (it's 1961, though you'd never guess) and show my nonna Luisa with zia Caterina (the matriarch, she is the small lady in black). The other lady is Adele, another widow, who lived there with her three daughters.

I am the curly haired child trying to pull away. The girl in the sowester is my sister, Luisabel, and the boy with the cricket bat my brother, Roderick.

In praise of the snail

I may have published this piece before. But it is always good to recycle!

The picture is of my grandmother, Luisa, grandfather, Mario, and mother, Libushka. It was taken on 3 Feb 1925.

My mother was born in 1924 on the shores of Lake Como, Italy. She grew up in a household of widows – a widowed grandmother, a widowed mother, a widowed aunt (zia Caterian - the childless matriarch), a widowed cousin and her daughters. The ladies lived in a large house perched on the hillside above the village of Tremezzo. Their world was untouched by fridges and supermarkets so shopping was a daily event. The variety of their meals depended on their imaginations and what was in season, not on the selection on the supermarket shelves.

Now and again my mother talks of those days, like edible snapshots of times gone by.

Fast Food
Nonna (grandma) was sitting in front of the fire in the kitchen watching the flames die down. A young cousin came in offering her a large snail like a special treasure. Nonna took it and popped it into the embers. After a few minutes, she retrieved it, drew the snail from out of its shell and ate it with relish. ‘What a delicious snail’ she said ‘ where did you get it?’ The young cousin (who was rather simple), replied ‘The cemetery.’ Somehow it took the edge off nonna’s appetite.

Health Food
The mystery about this story, is what happened to the egg yolks. It’s also best to have your own hens for the recipe. Take 4 eggs (from hens you know and love), place them in a china bowl. Cover the eggs with freshly-squeezed lemon juice and set aside for a day or two until the egg shells have completely dissolved. Pour the liquid off into a bottle and add sugar and a big dollop of brandy. Shake well before pouring and partaking. It’s chocabloc with calcium. But my mother can’t remember what happened to those discarded jellified egg whites with their yolks inside.

Special Treats
The ladies in the house on the hill got their daily milk supply from a nephew in exchange for a piece of land. Every day my mother would go and collect the milk from where it was left in the hollow in a chestnut tree. The milk was in a tin with a handle to carry it. As a treat for La Befana (6th January, Epiphany) the aunt would skim the cream off the milk for a whole week and store it in a jug. At the end of the week the cream would be whipped until it was thick and white. Then she would make chestnut purée. Each child would get a tiny mountain of beige purée with a dollop of the snowy whipped cream on top.

When I hear these stories, I wonder what memories our children will have. Will the ping of the microwave conjure up a raft of such rich images? Or will the smell of Macdonald’s take them back to some far-off family feast?

We need to slow everything down. Spend time making pancakes, peeling vegetables, tasting the flavours of freshly picked herbs. Otherwise we our depriving our children of such a wonderful part of life.

The symbol of the Slow Food Movement is the snail. And when I think of this it reminds me of my nonna and the snail from the cemetery and the rich cycle of life.

Regarding a Decision of the Labour Party Conference to Oppose Blood Sport s Other Than Angling

Here in the UK we are well into Political Party Conference season. This week it is the turn of the Conservative Party. My father liked to record his life through poems after he had learned of the fashion among refined Chinese gentleman wereby they loved to write poems and yet let them go in the wind.

This one he wrote during the Labour Party Conference thirty years ago in 1979. The title is that of this blog.

If fish could scream
Or could wink an eye,
If from the stream
You could hear a cry;
If they had warm and sticky blood
And pain were seen in twitching mud--
Then anglers would be cruel folk
Like those whose dogs make foxes choke.

The rod of course
Shows less of pride
Than the sneering horse
And the sounding ride.
The salmon keeps a glassy look
Even when chewing on the hook.
She does not know the darling fox
Means much more at the ballot box.

Ninian Smart, October 1979

A world upside down

There was a piece in this week's Money section in Saturday's Guardian about a man who has spent the last 15 years putting £70K into a pension scheme. Now that is nearly £400 per month. When he asked how much it is now worth, it turned out to be less than he had put in. So why is anyone going to listen to a government banging on about saving for pensions when the only pockets getting lined are the fund managers? And how come banks seem to be doing exactly what they were doing before the financial meltdown?

In the book world, Tesco and Amazon are both offering the new Peter Kay title at 75% off. Most independent bookshops receive a 30% disccount from the publisher. Which means most independent bookshops will buy their Peter Kays from Tesco and Amazon and be quids in.

Meanwhile Waterstone's seems to be creating their own Catherine wheel in the hub. One wonders if they are interested in customers.

Today is the feast day of St Francis of Assisi. He is the patron saint of animals, the environment and Italy. He was a young man just as banks (from the Italian banco or bench where the merchants carried out their business in the marketplace) were started. He turned his back on the merchant life and embraced poverty instead.

Perhaps he had the right idea.

One hundred years and up

Children born today are predicted to live until they are one hundred. That is a mighty long time. I am not sure it sounds that appealing. And how does it square up with the obesity levels? Who wants to spend all that time getting fatter and fatter?

But the order of things is changing and it is quite hard to adjust to. Having hit the fifty mark quite recently I was comparing myself to previous generations of fiftyers. The ones who had children that were grown up and left home, the ones whose mortgage was paid off, the ones whose pension pots were nice and tubby. Then I looked at myself: 2 daughters who are still only 10 and 12, a mortgage that seems to stretch on and on, a private pension that gets thinner and thinner as my waistband expands.

There was a very good article in Saturday's Money section of the Guardian about how being fifty doesn't mean you are striding off into well-heeled Sagaland. To read the piece by Jill Papworth you need to scroll to the bottom of the article.

e-grumbles on

There was perhaps the best discussion of the ebook debate that I have read so far on this site. Publishers are going to have to face the fact that they aren't the ones who are going to dictate what they want (as much revenue as possible) and focus more on what the customer wants (a very reasonably priced virtual book).

What publishers have is a wealth of material. Just think of all those novels that didn't do well just because of lack of presence in the bookshops. Surely e-booking them is a second bite of the cherry? If libraries lend out e-readers as well as e-books, this could open up a huge market. Come on publishers, the world is your e-oyster.