Banks - don't you just love them?

Every other day I get bombarded with financial junk mail trying to get me to take out a new loan, get a new credit card etc. At the end of the financial year they are mostly exhorting me to make the most of my tax allowances and invest in an ISA before it's too late. With all this money they spend on advertising you would expect them to make it as easy as possible to get their hands on your money ....... but not a bit of it. Having whetted your appetite, they then put as many hurdles as possible in the way to prevent you doing exactly what they were encouraging you to do shortly before.

On Saturday Mrs Journeyman and I went to Barclays to try to open an ISA account in her name (before it's too late). We thought this would be a simple process, taking out only a few minutes of our shopping trip to town. I had already primed Mrs Journeyman to make sure she had her photo-driving licence with her as it's well known that banks always want to know who you are and are never prepared to take your word for it, even if you go with a witness.

On enquiring at reception, we were told that they now operate an appointments system and there was a 40 minute wait. If we wanted an appointment we couldn't go away for a coffee and come back in 40 minutes time. We had to remain on the premises! We were ushered through to the waiting area which you could easily have mistaken for a dentist's waiting room. Forty minutes later we were summoned to a cubicle. Then the trouble really started.

Unlike any other bank I have been in, they didn't seem the slightest bit interested in seeing my wife's photo on her driving licence. They didn't even want to verify her address with a utility bill. This time they seemed to know exactly what we hadn't got ........ and that was what they wanted .... her National Insurance number. You know - the sort of thing that everyone carries around with them when they go shopping on a Saturday! We phoned home for someone to find it, but of course no-one was in. The man (surprisingly) was prepared to be flexible and allow us to phone it through as soon as we got home. But then there was another problem. We had a joint account at that branch and a transfer could be made from that. Unfortunately there was not enough money in that account to cover the full amount so I was intending to make up the difference with a cheque from my account at a different bank. "Oh no," said the man, "you can't do that! That's your money." He was afraid I might be exceeding my own ISA limit by paying some money into my wife's account. The fact that almost every other married couple in the country who have ISA's do this seemed to bear no weight at all. The fact that as soon as I wrote out a cheque with my wife's name on, it would technically be her money anyway carried no weight either. Nor did the fact that this account would be in her name so I wouldn't be able to get my hands on it anyway. The only solution, he said, was for me to pay a cheque into our joint account, wait until it had cleared, then go back to the bank and transfer it to the ISA. It didn't seem to worry him that as this was a joint account it would still be my money. He even said that my wife didn't have to go back as, once the ISA was set up, anyone could pay money into it! So that is what we had to do. After succumbing to their advertising which seemed to plead for our money, a simple job, which could have been done in five minutes or so, will actually take us a week to complete (and that's assuming that the cheque clears in time to get the money into the ISA in the outgoing tax year).

There seems to be absolutely no logic or consistency in the banking system, and absolutely no will on the bankers part to make the system helpful or efficient for the customer. With interest rates now down to virtually zero, I can see a mass return to people keeping their savings under the mattress. It takes no time at all to put it there and at least you know where it is!

Planning common sense at last in Essex

Have you noticed how horrible ghettos have been springing up all over the place in the past few years. This is largely due to the government's bizarre policy to discourage the use of the car by imposing anti-car planning conditions on new developments - not enough car-parking spaces, roads too narrow to park on, drives too short to accommodate the length of a car and (most stupid of all) garages so small that if you can manage to get the car into one, you then cannot get out because you can't open the door! As anyone with an ounce of sense would have forecast, this failed miserably to achieve its objective and just made life intolerable for everyone.

At last Essex County Council is having the guts to stand up to the government and issue its own planning guidelines which reverse this foolhardy trend. They should be applauded for this ....... but in fact they are having to put up with criticism from other organisations such as the Campaign for Better Transport who claim that they are "undermining a decade of work to help people become less car dependent". This is, of course, utter rubbish. You are not helping people to become less car-dependent by designing out parking spaces. Some people actually need a car. The only way you will reduce this need is to provide cheap public transport, easily accessible to peoples homes, which goes where you want to go, when you want to go there. ........ and that is still a long way off.
www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/driving/article5920679.ece

More bad news for the atheists

Despite the recession, Amazon has recorded a 25% increase in bible sales in the UK during the past year. This parallels a rise in church attendance, the attendance figures for last Christmas being significantly higher than the year before.

These strange atheists

According to the Times an atheist wants to be the first person in Britain to be de-baptised, claiming that he wasn't consulted at his baptism in 1953 and does not believe in God. He has obtained a "debaptism certificate" from the National Secular Society and has paid £60 to record it in the London Gazette.

All this does is demonstrate to the world that he does really believe in God but wants to make a point of rebelling. If he really did not believe in God his baptism would be meaningless and there would be no point in trying to cancel it out .... it would just have been a load of "hocus pocus". This man obviously believes his baptism does have some power and that would only be true if there was a God behind it.

Things ain't what they used to be

For decades now we have been told by the scholars that the Dead Sea Scrolls were written by a group of ascetic monastic types called the Essenes who lived around the Dead Sea and who may well have influenced Jesus.

Now there is uproar in the academic world at a new theory that not only disputes this but claims that the Essenes didn't actually exist. They were invented, in literature, much later. Professor Rachel Elior claims that the scrolls were actually written by Sadducee priests living in Jeruslaem and hidden in the caves at Qumran when they turned their backs on the temple after its desecration by the Greeks in 175 BC.

For more details see here: www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/comment/faith/article5927336.ece

Why can't people speak English anymore?

Standing in the queue at the sandwich shop for my lunch I am assailed on all sides by young people calling out "Can I get .... such and such?". "Can I get?" - what sort of language is that? Of course they can't get anything - it is not a self-service establishment. They have to wait in the queue to be served like everyone else. With the huge variety of ethnic minorities now living and working in this country and struggling to learn the language, the least we thoroughbred English can do is to speak the language properly so they can easily pick it up. What chance have they got when all they hear is some warped version of the mother tongue such as "Can I get?".

The Vagaries of Fashion

I'm sure you've all heard the agonising question "Does my bum look big in this?" I have always understood that if the answer to this question was "yes", then the female concerned (because it was always a female) would choose to wear something else. I'm sure the majority, if not all, of my male colleagues, understood the question in the same way. But it appears now that we may have been wrong all along. The latest marketing craze, it seems, is padded knickers, intended to deliberately make a woman's bum look bigger than normal. These we are assured, are selling like hot cakes. I'm not sure which is more contrary ...... fashion or women!

More on the Atheist Bus

To counter the atheist bus project with the slogan "There is probably no God", the Christian Party have launched a retaliatory project with buses marked with the slogan "There is a God". Strangely, the Advertising Standards Authority have had 1,045 complaints about this last slogan, 10 times more than for the atheist slogan. They have neatly wriggled out of having to do anything about it, however, by claiming that the advertisements are "electioneering" and therefore outside their remit.

God must be used to some people following him and others not, but the idea of being voted on must be an entirely new concept.