Yesterday, I changed the battery in one of the office clocks. I am the person in the office with the lowest tolerance for stopped clocks, so this job often falls to me.

When I removed the AA battery, I was surprised by how light it was. On further inspection, it turns out that it’s a carbon-zinc battery. I don’t recall seeing one of those before. The displayed manufacturing date is February 2004, so someone must have found it in the back of a cupboard: I’m not sure my current employer bought it!

Wikipedia tells me that ‘zinc-carbon batteries today have been mostly replaced by the more efficient and safe alkaline batteries’, which raised some questions. ‘Alkaline batteries offer up to eight times the battery life of zinc-carbon batteries’: so why not use them in the bloody clocks and save me up to seven jobs?

Anyway, I found the brand’s website. I perused the ‘frequently asked questions’ section. In response to ‘How should I dispose of carbon zinc batteries?’, they offer ‘It’s safe to drop them right in the household trash.’

The battery has the crossed-out wheelie-bin symbol right there on it. Batteries shouldn’t be dropped into the household trash. Not only is there a high risk of causing fires, but, in many places, they’re classified as hazardous waste.

So next time you’re browsing the battery aisle and wondering whether to choose an Eveready / Energizer product, remember that they choose to encourage their customers to dispose of products irresponsibly. Consider whether that’s an approach which really has your best interests at heart. Then, make whatever choice you feel comfortable with.

Here’s a question: what’s the price of the cheapest 500g bag of plain flour at your local supermarket? Here’s what I found:

That might not be as you’d expect: it’s not what I expected. I popped into Asda with the intention of buying a 500g bag of flour, and after seeing the price, walked over to M&S. I was so disbelieving of the price that I confirmed it later on the Asda website.

In fairness, Asda does sell much bigger bags of flour in a range starting from 70p, but I didn’t want a big bag. I am surprised that their premium for a small bag is so disproportionately high.

The image at the top of this post was generated by DALL·E 3.

In the Microsoft Teams chat at work yesterday, I had cause to describe a task as loathsome. Typing this word caused a shuddering realisation, one that probably dawned on you many years ago: ‘loath’ and ‘loathe’ are really quite similar words. Many websites tell me that these two words are commonly confused, yet I’ve never noticed the similarity.

I ‘loathe’ (rhymes with ‘clothe’) really horrible tasks: I hate them, feel repulsion from them. I’m not willing to do things I loathe.

Things that are ‘loathsome’ cause me to hate them… such as really horrible tasks. It’s just ‘loathe’ plus ‘some’ to make an adjective.

On the other hand, I’m ‘loath’ (rhymes with ‘both’) to do things that I dislike: I’m reluctant, somewhat averse. I’d prefer not to, but I will if I have to. ‘For fairer, for loather’ used to be a line in marriage vows—which perhaps demonstrates how different ‘loath’ is from ‘loathe’. You’d hope nobody would consider their partner loathsome at their wedding.

How did we end up in this linguistic quagmire, where the adjective ‘loath’ means something quite different to the verb ‘loathe’? Quick, let’s crack open the Oxford English Dictionary.

Unsatisfyingly, any explanation is lost to history. The divergence in meaning probably happened 1,000 years ago or so. ‘Loathsome’ came into the picture in the 1300s, which suggests that the divergence had occurred by then, as something wouldn’t need to be described as loathsome if it could just be described as loath.

Apparently, ‘loathe’ is more than twice as common in modern written English as ‘loath’, which—given the more robust sense of negativity—strikes me as a sad indictment of our times. But I can hardly complain about that when my own use of ‘loathsome’ started me down this track.

So, let me defend myself. In the two-decade-, 3,000-post history of this blog, I’ve used the word ‘loath’ twice: I was loath to read a book about the pandemic and loath to criticise those who claimed that King Charles’s approach to monarchy was reflected in his haircut. 

Yet, there’s only one thing I’ve ‘loathed’: I really had it in for the characters of Jane Austen’s Emma. Hmm.

The image at the top of this post was generated by DALL·E 3.

Eleven years ago, I wrote a post about coffee shop loyalty schemes, and the way that they deviate from the psychological evidence base.

The thing that links all of the common schemes is they are effectively fixed ratio reinforcement schedules. That is, they entice customers to buy more coffee by promising a freebie every X visits. But a wealth of literature from psychology reveals that this isn’t really very effective in getting people to form habits, not least because their motivation to consume drops off immediately after claiming free coffee Y.

A far more effective method of getting people to establish habits is to build a variable ratio reinforcement schedule. As with gambling, this means that the punter / customer never knows when the win / free product is going to materialise. This keeps motivation consistently high.

In practice, what I’m suggesting is that the ratio of visits to free coffees is kept the same (X+1:1), but that the free coffees are dispensed at random.

I still think about this a lot. Eleven years ago, most coffee shops used paper stamp cards, which didn’t really lend themselves to this sort of thing. I proposed using scratch cards as an alternative.

These days, these schemes use apps, so the switch should be much simpler. Indeed, some coffee shops use variable ratio reinforcement within the apps for special promotions: Caffè Nero’s app sometimes has a fairground spinner, and it has crackers at Christmas—both operate on the variable ratio reinforcement principle. I see no good technical reason why the randomised approach couldn’t be used for the core loyalty scheme.

And yet, the fixed ratio ‘stamp card’ approach is ubiquitous. Costa, which had a different system when I wrote that post, has come into line. Even M&S has a version now.

I don’t doubt that there’s a good reason for the lack of adoption of a variable ratio approach, but I’m not sure what it is: I struggle to imagine that large corporations are squeamish about using gambling-like mechanics to increase sales, so I expect that it’s to do with effectiveness. I’d love to see a trial, not least as it might help illuminate the limits of effectiveness of variable ratio approaches.

The image at the top of this post was generated by DALL·E 3.

There’s a poster I pass at work regularly about identifying phishing emails. It advises that the content of these emails is frequently ‘mispelled’. I’ve spent more time than I ought pondering whether that misspelling was intentional or not, likely a slightly-less-obvious version of telling us that emails might be full of ‘seplling mystakes’.

Then, I doubted myself and wondered if ‘mispell’ was an acceptable alternative to ‘misspell’. I checked the Oxford English Dictionary: it’s not. There’s no historical context in which it is correct—the etymology is plainly ‘mis’ + ‘spell’. The inclusion of a lonely ‘s’ is simply wrong, whether or not it’s intentionally wrong.

The Dictionary does list a single quotation in which the word appears as ‘mispelling’: England’s 1695 Treason Act. Section XI of the Act provides, among other things, that misspellings in legal documents cannot be used as the sole grounds for dismissing a case unless highlighted before any evidence has been presented (in which case, they could be corrected and the trial could proceed). Amusingly, ‘misspelling’ is misspelt:

noe Indictment for any of the aforesaid … shall bee quashed on the Motion of the Prisoner or his Counsel for miswriting mispelling false or improper Latine

This section of the Act was repealed with the passage of the Treason Act 1945, so you needn’t worry about the misspelling of misspelling still being in force. Unlike the poster, we can, at least, assume the 1695 mistake wasn’t a deliberate pun.

The image at the top of this post was generated by DALL·E 3.

Trung Phan wrote about the luxury brand Hermès last weekend.

I wasn’t delighted by Phan’s dated and unnecessary gender-jibes about ‘steering’ his wife away from Hermès stores—in our household, it’s me who buys the occasional Hermès item.

I was, however, struck by this particular item in the list regarding what makes a specific type of Hermés handbag a coveted luxury product:

The training to become an Hermès bag maker takes a minimum of two years (often up to 5 years) and the company only trains 200 people per year. Each Birkin bag is made entirely by hand and takes 20-25 hours to make.

It strikes me how unremarkable that is. Many professions require years of background training, and individual jobs often take 25 hours or more, from writing a report to fitting a kitchen. We don’t necessarily regard the outputs as luxuries, and certainly nowhere near as luxurious (or costly) as an Hermés handbag. Perhaps we should.

The image at the top of this post was generated by DALL·E 3.

In Lessons, which I’m currently reading, Ian McEwan has a delicious rant about the way in which Christianity held back science and culture for centuries:

But in the Petit Palais, which Daphne had not visited in thirty years, Roland had what she liked to call ‘a moment’. He retired early from the paintings and waited in the main hall. After she had joined him and they were walking away he let rip. He said that if he ever had to look at one more Madonna and Child, Crucifixion, Assumption, Annunciation and all the rest he would ‘throw up’. Historically, he announced, Christianity had been the cold dead hand on the European imagination. What a gift, that its tyranny had expired. What looked like piety was enforced conformity within a totalitarian mind-state. To question or defy it in the sixteenth century would have been to take your life in your hands. like protesting against Socialist Realism in Stalin’s Soviet Union. It was not only science that Christianity had obstructed for fifty generations, it was nearly all of culture, nearly all of free expression and enquiry. It buried the open-minded, philosophies of classical antiquity for an age, it sent thousands of brilliant minds down, irrelevant, rabbit holes of pettifogging theology. It had spread its so-called Word by horrific violence and it maintained itself by torture, persecution and death. Gentle Jesus, ha! Within the totality of human experience of the world there was an infinity of subject matter and yet all over Europe the big museums were stuffed with the same lurid trash. Worse than pop music. It was the Eurovision song contest in oils and gilt frames.

In Acts of Service, which I read some time ago, Lilian Fishman writes about some of the benefits of religion to individuals:

I envied extraordinarily religious people, who subscribed to a code that determined the things they should want, the things that were good, and the things that were bad. They had these measures of certainty. And they had rituals that made their lives feel governed by the logic of time: baptisms, holidays, weekly ceremonies, recitations, prayers. They were, I imagined, striving toward a set of impossible ideals and yet constantly forgiven for their failure to achieve. What better way could there be to live? To be in constant motion toward something perfect, a motion that would carry you to the end of your life?

At the individual level, Fishman recognises the psychological reassurance of conformity which religion can provide. It’s comforting to be part of a group with shared ideals and rituals. Yet McEwan notes that conforming in a way which punishes outliers is harmful, because everyone ends up having the same ideas which amount to nothing more than ‘lurid trash’.

It’s an interesting dichotomy. One of the things that Wendy and I sometimes discuss in day-to-day life is the value of people who don’t conform, and who often rile up others. A bit of friction is often helpful to keep things moving forward. It’s the wild ideas of outliers that sometimes provide the breakthroughs needed to move forward in life, as much as in society at large.

Yesterday, I stopped for a coffee in the lobby of one of Amsterdam’s more upmarket hotels. I settled into a stylish yet surprisingly comfortable armchair next to a wrought iron room divider, and cracked open Fay Weldon’s The Life and Loves of a She Devil. Before I knew it, though, I had stopped reading, and instead tuned in to the intriguing conversation on the other side of the divider.

At a coffee table was a man with a shaved head, who looked of a similar age to me, wearing a white shirt, and a somewhat over-tight unfastened blue suit jacket, pale blue denim jeans, and black suede shoes. Opposite him, with their backs to me, were a man and a woman, each in smartly conservative suits, with leather folios of notes and papers before them. All three were served cappuccinos.

My ears pricked up when the conversation revealed that the man in jeans was confirming and signing the paperwork for a €38m personal loan: that’s not a conversation one hears every day, and not one that I would have expected to hear in such a public place. It turned out that the loan was to fund the purchase of a luxury boat from the man’s father, at below market value as it was partly being offered as a gift. The man intended to use the boat for general recreation, but also had designs on renting it out commercially for cruises, as acquaintances with similar boats were reputedly wont to do.

I know very little about luxury boats. I’ve seen articles in newspapers and magazines about million-pound super-yachts, but I can’t even conceive of what sort of vessel €38m buys you – let alone the full amount including the ‘gift’. I’d believe you if you told me this was a conversation about a four-bedroom yacht that one might sail into a small harbour, and I’d also believe you if you told me this was a conversation about a mini cruise ship with tens of rooms that would require dedicated port facilities. I’ve really no idea. And I’ve also no idea on what sort of terms a €38m personal loan would typically be offered: it’s never a conversation that’s crossed my mind, let alone one that I’m ever likely to take part in (especially if I spend all my money on expensive coffees in posh hotels). And so I was intrigued. Fay Weldon was not going to receive much attention as I sipped this particular latte.

As the conversation progressed, the man in jeans explained that he was confident in the arrangement because he was near certain that his pay cheques would cover the loan repayments whether or not he got round to renting the boat out (goodness only knows what his job was), and if he should fall on hard times, he could sell the boat and easily pay off the loan given that it was for less than the market value. So to this nosey parker, listening through the divider, the deal seemed as sensible as a loan to spend €38m on a boat ever could.

Yet just as he was on the verge of signing the paperwork, the man asked a question which confounded me: “Given that there are no arrangement fees, why are you charging me such as low interest rate?”

The man went onto explain that he was concerned that he had misread the wisdom of the deal. The loan provider had sent two members of staff to meet him in Amsterdam from their offices elsewhere in Europe, at presumably high cost to their firm. The amount of money being borrowed was substantial. The low interest rate meant that the profit they would make on the deal would be small in comparison with the outlay. Why, the man wanted to know, weren’t they pushing for more? Were they expecting that he would default on the loan, and that they would recoup a greater financial prize from the fallout? Were his assumptions about the safety of the deal wrong? What did they know that he didn’t?

This question confounded me because it’s not common to hear someone clarify the reasons for suspected undercharging. I’m not sure I would have done so—not that I’m ever likely to borrow €38m—because I think I would have been concerned that the lenders would raise their price to meet my expectations.

Yet on my way to Amsterdam, I’d just finished reading Thanks for the Feedback by Douglas Stone and Sheila Heen. This book makes the case that receiving feedback is an interactive process, and we should always seek to understand the point of view of the person giving the feedback. The interest rate on this loan is clearly a type of feedback from the lender.

By discussing the rate with the lenders, the man in jeans could either avoid a huge and costly financial miscalculation on his part, or could set his mind at rest. If the lenders had jacked up the rate in response to his question, he could always have taken his business elsewhere—and, of course, the lenders were unlikely to do so for exactly that reason.

The decision by the man in jeans to have this conversation could have only positive effects: and yet, it is a conversation that I would naturally have shied away from. I suppose, given that he was taking out a €38m loan, the man was probably more used to large scale financial transactions than me. It wouldn’t be an absurd supposition that his day job may be in the financial sector. Perhaps that is why he had he confidence that I would have lacked to initiate this conversation.

But that’s a very easy get-out for myself. What other conversations do I shy away from for illegitimate reasons? Do I avoid asking things that could help prevent me from making unwise decisions because I lack the confidence to ask them? There’s some food for thought and reflection.

And the answer to the man’s question? Simple, really, according to the lenders. Pricing for loans is risk-based. The loan is secured on the boat which is worth more than the total value of the loan regardless. The terms of the loan state that appropriate insurance must be in place. Even if the man fails to make his repayments, the risk of the lenders not receiving their capital back is very low: such low risk investments for such large amount of money are rare. And besides, even at a low interest rate, the lenders stand to make hundreds of thousands of Euros in pure profit, because a small percentage of a very big number is still a big number.

Before long, the paperwork was duly signed and all three were on their way. The meeting lasted twenty, maybe thirty minutes. If I were one of the lenders, travelling internationally for such a short meting would feel like a waste of time, even though I’d just brought in a huge amount of profit for my firm. But as someone travelling solely for pleasure, I think this was possibly one of the most thought-provoking and educational coffees I’ve sipped in a very long time.

Most of the pictures in this post are not my own, though I did post a nice picture I took at the Rijksmuseum in ‘real time’. In this post, the first picture (Amsterdam) is by Boudewijn “Bo” Boer; the second (a ship’s wheel) is by Maximilian Weisbecker; the third (Amsterdam again) is by Javier M; and the fourth is my own picture of a boat’s wake, co-incidentally taken from the back of the DFDS ferry to Amsterdam (though not on this trip). All are used with grateful thanks, and under the terms of their Creative Commons licences.

In May 2012, I blogged about visiting ‘the Ped’, more formally know as the Tyne Pedestrian and Cycle tunnels, which first opened in 1951. A year later, the tunnels closed to undergo a two-year, £7m refurbishment.

The refurbishment didn’t go according to plan: it ended up taking over six years and costing £16m. After adjustment for inflation, that’s about 60% of the cost of building the tunnels in the first place.

Today, I thought I’d revisit and see what had changed.

Both the north and south entrances to the tunnel retain their rotunda-like buildings, that have something of the feel of stations. Entrance remains free of charge. In 2012, the south end was looking perhaps a little tired.

Today, the paving on the approach has been considerably improved, with much clearer cycle paths. The overall appearance has been smartened up, though the heritage plaque seems to have been lost and a TV screen of questionable function has been installed. The shutters are also of note, not only for being new, but also because the tunnels are no longer open 24 hours as was previously the case. They now only open 6am to 8pm, at least “until further notice”.

Note that the entrance is labelled ‘Jarrow’: this on the Jarrow side of the river. One might have thought it more logical to make it plain that the tunnel is for Howdon, but that would I suppose conflict with the station heuristic for which the designers seem to be reaching.

On entering the rotunda, one was formerly presented with two historic wooden escalators, each labelled with its intended direction of motion, and each labelled with one of the historic county crests of the two historic counties the tunnel connects. At the time of installation, they were the world’s longest escalators, and were only overtaken in the UK by those installed at London’s Angel tube station some forty years later. In 2012, they were the longest remaining wooden escalators in the world.

Today, only one of these remarkable escalators remains in place at each end of the tunnel, the other torn out to make way for an (as yet uninstalled) inclined glass elevator. At the southern end, the ‘County Durham’ escalator is the lucky one… I forgot to check the northern end.

The remaining escalators, which didn’t work in 2012, have now been fixed in position: note the open ‘gate’ with its post driven in a step at the top the escalator below. They are now, I suppose, unique heritage staircases rather than escalators.

Note too that the safety information posted next to the unopened glass lift is unusual: the imperative is not to avoid lift use in the event of a fire, but to listen for instructions as the lifts may be used for evacuation. The ‘mood lighting’ is eye-catching, but not especially to my taste.

As I walked down the escalator in 2012, the strong scent of damp rose to greet me. Not so in 2020. The atmosphere barely seemed to shift. The considerably brighter (and working) lighting made the experience feel considerably less unnerving.

At the bottom, one reaches a sort of ‘lobby’ at the entrance to the slightly wider cyclist tunnel and the slightly narrower pedestrian tunnel. In 2012, this was a grimy space.

Today, these spaces are considerably cleaner, brighter and more welcoming, but still retain the essential character of the space. Today’s photo is of the ‘lobby’ at the opposite end of the tunnels: they haven’t switched positions!

In 2012, the tunnels didn’t just smell damp: the ground was physically wet. The lighting was in a poor state of repair, too. The atmosphere was dingy and unwelcoming.

Today, the experience could not have been more different. The tunnels were clean, dry and well lit… and perhaps mildly ‘other worldly’.

In 2012, there were a number of upsetting and unnerving damaged bits of wall along the way, which felt to me as though they were raising uncomfortable questions about the structural integrity of the passage.

By contrast, today there are a number of new emergency help points with flip-down seating, sensitively designed to blend in with the curvature of the tunnel wall.

The midpoint of the tunnel is clearly marked, as one passes from the historic County of Durham to the County of Northumberland. In 2012, this was marked by some weird rusty metal plates.

Today, what I assume may always have been ventilation shafts are capped with a more aesthetically pleasing metal grid.

In 2012, for those with bikes (or those who couldn’t face the hike up the broken escalators) a vertical lift was provided on a branch off the main tunnels at each end.

These remain in situ, though I think they may have been replaced with newer models.

The works have also retained the ugly, but probably historically relevant, fish sculpture outside the northern rotunda.

All things considered, I think this is a good job. It’s disappointing that two historic escalators have been ripped out and two turned into staircases, but it is probably unreasonable to expect 70-year-old machinery of this type to keep on working forever.

The difference in the feeling of the tunnels is night and day. They now feel bright and welcoming, and the modernisation hasn’t sacrificed the essence of the tunnels. From the care taken over the retention and repair of the tilework to the way that the historic painted signage has been kept and restored, this has clearly been a project on which respect and love for the craftsmanship of the original workers has not been in short supply.

Of course, it’s a shame that circumstances dictated that the restoration took so much longer than planned at such an increased cost. I hope that they get back to being continuously open soon enough, and that the restricted hours “until further notice” doesn’t turn into permanently restricted hours. I hope, too, that the inclined lifts enter service in the not too distant future.

But, overall, I’m left with the impression that this was an elegant and sensitive restoration of a mighty piece of civil engineering beneath a historic and beautiful river.

I don’t think I truly understood the meaning of kitsch until visiting the Sagrada Familia today. It’s an architectural wonder. I found it breathtaking, spectacular, beautiful and hideous all at once. I’m very glad I visited.