Emily Young is a renowned carver of stone, who has created a number of “Angel” sculptures, now scattered across the globe, all of which show the faces of angels.

This particular angel – the Golden Angel – is in Maingate in the Team Valley. It’s much bigger than it appears in the photo above! It was hand-carved from a huge piece of Persian yellow travertine stone, and weighs seven tons (not including the plinth). It was installed in 2005.

This week, I’ve chosen to recommend an article I really don’t agree with: Shana Pearlman’s argument that Aaron Sorkin produces rubbish television and has ruined politics. I love Sorkin’s drama, but was intrigued by the opposing view… even if Pearlman’s argument is a little undermined by spelling her target’s name wrong in the headline. The article is from the Dale & Co blog.

These are all practice OSPHE stations that I’m using to help prepare for my MFPH Part B exam. I put them in coloured folders to make them more fun. It wasn’t a terribly successful strategy.

When coming to post this, I’ve realised that I forgot to post a photo yesterday, so I’ll do two tomorrow to make up for it! Sorry!

Hi East Coast,

In the last year, I’ve spent almost £750 whizzing up and down the line on which your trains operate, and have rarely encountered any serious problems. And I don’t really like airing petty grievances in public. But I’m afraid that’s exactly what I’m about to do, because I’m struggling to think of an alternative strategy.

In October, I have an exam. I booked £42.50 of train tickets via your (brilliant) website, and paid £1 for them to be sent to me via first class post. This isn’t something I usually do: I normally collect the tickets at the station. But given how important this particular journey is, I paid the extra £1 so that I could be confident in plenty of time that everything was in order.

A couple of days later, I received three first-class returns from York to Glasgow. That is, someone else’s tickets. The letter which comes with the tickets tells me that I should check them, but has no contact details for if the tickets are incorrect. You might want to look into that. Looking online, I found the number for your call centre, and phoned you.

You told me to return the tickets. I asked where to, and you said “I think there’s probably an address on the back of the envelope”.

I read this address back, and you said “No, that’s not right”. I was a little confused as to how I could be wrong, given that there’s only one address to read out. But clearly, I’m an idiot, and so you read me a different address to which to return the tickets.

I asked, “Is that Freepost or something?”

“No,” you said, “you’ll have to put a stamp on there”.

This seemed a bit unusual, but as a good citizen, I didn’t sell them on eBay, but rather returned them to you in the next post. I hope they find their way into their rightful owner’s hands.

I asked what would happen to my own tickets. You told me they’d been posted to me. I observed that this seemed unlikely: why would two ticket carriers be printed with my details? Surely my tickets had just been put in someone else’s envelope, like some poor sod’s were put in mine. You said that my tickets had definitely been sent directly to me, and that there was no chance that a similar error had occurred. These errors are, after all, very rare.

In fact, you told me, the tickets had been sent at the same time as the Glasgow ones. “If they haven’t arrived by Monday,” you said, “give us a ring and we’ll sort it out.”

Giving you the benefit of the doubt, I didn’t ring on Monday, but waited until Tuesday, just to see if they’d turn up. They didn’t, so I called you back.

“I can’t do anything,” you told me. “You need to wait until five days after the tickets have been posted, and give me a ring back. So, ring me if they don’t turn up tomorrow. I’ll put a note on your account saying that they can be reissued if they don’t turn up tomorrow.”

They didn’t turn up. I gave you the benefit of the doubt again, and left it until this morning to call back.

“I can’t do anything,” you told me. “You need to wait until seven days before you travel, then I can fax Newcastle station and you can pick the tickets up there. If I did it now, you’d have to travel all the way to Newcastle, and that wouldn’t be very good!”

“I live in Newcastle, it’s not problem at all. I’d rather go and pick the tickets up so that I have the security of having them,” I replied.

“Sorry, no-can-do”, you replied. “It has to be seven days before. The postman might have put your tickets through the wrong door. They might turn up!”

“Unlikely,” I said. “It seems more likely that they’ve been posted to the wrong person.”

“No,” you said. “That can’t happen.”

“But it did happen to whoever was going to Glasgow, whose tickets I received!”

“Ah. Yes. Well, there’s nothing I can do until seven days before you travel. Call me back then.”

I’m sorry, East Coast, I normally think you’re great. But this is crap service.

You charged me £1 to post me my tickets. It seems that, instead, you’ve posted them to someone else. I didn’t charge you a penny to post the wrong tickets back to you.

I’ve called you thrice, each time on your advice, and each time I’ve been unable to get the promised resolution to this problem. Each time, you’ve charged me 6p a minute to try and correct your error, and a 12p connection charge.

And, most of all, you haven’t even apologised: not on the phone, and not even when we had a brief chat via twitter.

East Coast, I want to like you. You’ve always given me reasonably good service in the past. You sometimes even let me have an extra croissant on the early morning trip to London. I’ve even pleaded with your directors in a recent web event to lower your prices, as it’s hard to justify travelling with you when British Airways’s fares are cheaper.

Surely you can see that you’ve left me in a crazy situation? You’ve charged me for a service, not delivered, and charged me again to try and get the problem sorted. I could sell my flyer miles and be there quicker but no instead I still don’t have the tickets I’ve paid for, nor the peace of mind.

I really hope you can put this right. I really hope that you can work out some way around your inflexible system to post me the tickets that I’ve paid to receive. Or, if you can’t do that, then find some way around your prohibitive refund system to give me my money back, so that I can just go and book with someone else.

You can email me, any time, via the mail link on this page. You can send me a reply or a direct message on twitter – I’m @sjhoward. I won’t hide your light under a bushell: I’ll update the good readers of this site with your response.

So please, East Coast: let’s be friends.

Best wishes,

sjhoward

Update: 6th September 2012, 6pm

East Coast have been in touch, apologised, and agreed to let me pick up the tickets at Newcastle tomorrow. I’ll update this post to let you know how that goes! Thanks, East Coast, for your help so far!

Update: 7th September 2012, 7pm

I’ve successfully collected my tickets: success at last! Thanks to everyone at East Coast who helped to sort this out.

She’s an idiot. It was her fuck-up. We say quite politely to passengers like her: “bugger off”!

I’m no fan of Ryanair, but Michael O’Leary’s appalling public response to his airline’s disproportionate and punitive fees for printing a boarding pass at the airport is, at least, appealingly honest.

Tony Blair’s autobiography gives a real and detailed insight into what it’s like to be Prime Minister: the stresses and how he coped with them, the challenges and how he tried to overcome them, the successes, the failures, the balancing of family life with political life and statesmanship. It really is quite fascinating.

Politically, there’s little in here that we haven’t heard before, but the detail and explanation of how and why decisions were reached seemed interesting to me. The “behind the scenes” detail of the huge events that occurred under Tony Blair’s leadership provided genuine insight, if not new information – Diana’s death, 9/11, 7/7, the Hutton Inquiry, and Iraq to name just a few.

Yet, it’s taken me the best part of two years to plough through this tome. That’s mainly due to what Ben MacIntire of The Times described as a “congenial style peppered with slang and gossipy asides”. I’d describe it as a style resembling transcribed speech, and it frequently becomes very thick and frustrating.

Let me pepper this review with some examples. When talking about the themes underpinning his leadership (something he does frequently, citing different themes each time), the following sentence appears: “Perhaps above all, an emphasis bordering on the religious on what counts to be what works.”

It’s not a crime against humanity, but it is a verbless sentence that doesn’t really scan very well. It’s the sort of sentence you have to re-read a couple of times to get the message. In a paragraph of prose, it’s a frustrating sentence that should have been edited. And these are little throughout the book.

Here’s another example. Read this sentence aloud: “I wondered – as did some of the newer and more radical faces in my Policy Unit, although this was still heresy in the party, not least among most of my ministers – whether we had been right to dismantle wholesale GP commissioning in the NHS and grant-maintained schools in education, instead of adapting these concepts of local self-govenment to spread decentralised management across the state health and education systems, but without the inequity inherent in the underfunded Tory reforms we inherited.”

Again, the message is clear, but it isn’t an easy read. A decent editor would surely have added some more punctuation, or cut this down into several sentences.

And, since we’re on a roll, let’s play “count the subclauses” in this example: “Precisely because the roots of this wider struggle were deep, precisely because it was a visceral life-or-death battle between modernisers and reactionaries, precisely because what was – and is – at stake was no less than the whole future of Islam – the nature of its faith, its narrative about itself, and its sense of its place in the twenty-first century – precisely because of all this, there was no way the forces opposed to modernisation, and therefore to us, were going to relinquish their territory easily.”

I think these examples demonstrate the message that this book is not an easy bedtime read. Yet, within a few sentences of passages like those above, Blair tells us about Alistair Campbell’s “clanking great balls”, describes Iraq as “a basket case”, PMQs as “a girls’ school playground” and relates that “I like to have time and comfort in the loo.”

And then, occasionally, Blair becomes suddenly coy: he didn’t want to discuss his son’s vaccination status “for private reasons the family was sensitive about issues to do with.” Note, again, that this hardly scans well.

The constant juxtaposition of long badly written passages of political prose and puerile descriptions of characters and situations wore me out. I couldn’t read more than a couple of chapters of this at once.

I think this demonstrates that I found this book a difficult read, which makes it difficult to rate. On the one hand, much of the content is five-star – well worth reading, whichever side of the political fence one occupies. On the other, the form of expression is risible, bordering at times on unreadable. This is a book that badly needs a revised and edited edition under the guidance of a decent editor! Until then, I can’t in good conscience give it more than three stars.

A Journey is available now from amazon.co.uk in paperback and on Kindle.

I can’t quite put my finger on why this sign always makes me smile. It could be the fact that it’s on its own little podium. It could be the detail of the message, versus “staff only”. It could be the thought of the amusement promised by entering the window. It could be the absurdity of the use of the word “window” versus “window display”. Whatever it is, it never fails to amuse whenever I catch it out of the corner of my eye.

It fundamentally changes what it means to go on holiday.

It seems it’s a day for hilarious quotes today: following on from this that I spotted a couple of hours ago, this ludicrous bit of hyperbole from Daniel Danker also made me laugh out loud. If, for you, being able to download BBC TV programmes to your iPhone or iPad genuinely changes what it means to go on holiday… well, I doubt we’d get on very well.

For anyone that thought the new Microsoft logo was boring I can’t imagine what this must be like.

This comment in a review of Avis’s re-brand by Armin Vit over at Brand New actually made me laugh out loud.

I know we’re supposed to love Sainsbury’s for embracing traffic light labelling, but when those traffic lights show data for a single liquorice comfit in a bag of 44, it’s difficult to conclude that they’re really entering into the spirit of the exercise. Especially when the same packaging claims that a single serving is 11 comfits…!