Society

How not to mix things up in a world full of casual brushes with the truth – uncaring as to what is real and what is not. In principle it has always been the same for at least some of the population. Now, however, we have reached critical mass.

Each uncaring and unthinking person has access to weapons of war. A tweet ricochets off another tweet and spins off into another social media platform. Like a pinball machine full of pinballs, the machine gets hot and melts down.

Anger, frustration, good old-fashioned annoyance – they have nowhere they want to go except deeper into the furnace.

And the furnace spits them out. It doesn’t need them except as examples of persons. It doesn’t care about them except for whatever trace they leave behind in the the social weave.

If they all disappeared tomorrow, their loss would be calculated in loss of engagement, followers, likes, and shares.

Darkness At Noon

I was prompted to write the above to fill in some space to test a new layout in Gutenberg. The words came out and I think they in turn were prompted by Darkness At Noon that I read a few days ago. I read it over about three days in three or four sittings.

That’s unusual for me, as I often have two or three books on the go at once and take weeks, months, or longer to finish them.

That said, Darkness At Noon is a novel, so it has a pace that non-fiction books don’t have. But it is hardly much of a novel. A man is arrested, interrogated, tried, and sentenced.

But it is the arguments back and forth during the interrogation that make it memorable, wonderful and terrible, in fact.

I can’t recite it all, there is too much. But early in the back and forth, one of the characters describes a dictatorship where those in the driving seat see one person as simply one million people divided by one million.

When I say wonderful, I mean it in the sense that it homes in on essential issues. Terrible in the sense that the consequences of taking a wrong turn in these arguments can result, has resulted, in the death of millions.

When will it stop? When will the values we aspire to be carried through to the actions we take so that we, the animals, the planet, all are respected and given space to live and to breathe as befits them?

I spoke to a man yesterday who works at the university here in Cambridge. His department works on understanding the pathways of cancer. He told me that all departments in UK universities are now bottom of the list for European grant funding.

Why? Because no one in Europe wants to be involved in the unknowns of the hurdles to fund UK projects after Brexit.

His department has no idea how they are going to get the scientists to work in the department once those from the EU have to leave.

Why? Because Britain has never trained scientists to do the work.

He said that training programmes that have existed in the EU for years simply do not exist in the UK. Why? Because the UK has been able to choose from scientists from the EU who are eager to work in the UK with its front-line work.

How long will it take to train UK scientists to do the work? It will take years.

Britain is being pushed towards revolution. I don’t care whether it is Left or Right. I care that the balance of the day (to borrow a wonderful phrase from Camus) is not disturbed by deranged minds with grand scheming ideas.

The returns policy that big stores in the UK follow must be causing them all sorts of headaches.

Once a couple of the big-name department stores started offering long return dates, the others had to follow, or risk going under.

Any retailer that didn’t want to offer 35-day, or a 60-day, or a 90-day, no quibble returns was going to become less popular in the eyes of those shoppers who love to return stuff.

Rohan don’t have a cut off return date. You can return goods to them a year later, if you want.

And with long return dates came free returns. Now customers expect free returns ‘as standard’. If returns aren’t free they are less likely to buy online from that store.

If the customer fails to spot that returns for a particular store aren’t free, and they have to pay return postage, then that customer is less likely to buy from that retailer again.

Once bitten, twice shy.

Think of the consequences of long return dates and free returns for the retailers. Think about the consequences for cash flow or for seeing how well they did in a given period. Think about re-ordering stock or orders already placed for similar stock to a line that seemed to have sold well.

Suddenly, half the sold stock is returned. Then what? What was the true turnover in the previous period? What does the bank think of the current lending? Where is the retailer going to put all the returns?

How many work hours have to be devoted to the paperwork, to examining the returns for faults, to steam cleaning, re-boxing, checking labels? What about the stuff that cannot be resold?

How are the buyers going to know what to buy for the next season or later this season?

How much was spent on shipping costs to send the goods and for returns? How many boxes were sealed, how much wrapping paper was folded, how many labels were printed?

UK Consumer Legislation

UK consumer legislation says that in remote sales (as in a sale online or over the telephone) the customer can return the goods for any reason within 14 days of receiving the goods. The customer has to bear the cost of returning the goods (unless the goods are faulty), so that’s a disincentive if the seller does not offer free returns.

In fact, the cost of returns is what gives small sellers the edge in not having large numbers of returns stacking up ‘just because the customer changed their mind’.

£7 Billion

The latest figures from Opinium cited in a report by Barclays, says that under the current UK returns policy, shoppers in the UK return £7 billion worth of goods a year to big stores, with fashion having the highest number and value of returns.

The biggest reason cited for fashion returns is inconsistent sizing across different brands.

That may well be true.

But behind the figures I wonder how much is in fact because it’s easy to do, so why not, just to be on the safe side.

Order three of one item – one that’s probably a bit small, one that’s probably the right size, and one that’s (hopefully) too big.

Then send two back and say they were the wrong size.

Simple.

Fortress Europe.: It may not seem like it sometimes, but compared to life outside fortress Europe, it is heaven. It is heaven at least in terms of the daily grind.

Don’t make light of other people’s troubles. Of course I don’t. But I live in the privileged world.

Of course the modern world brought in the death of community and the birth of ennui. That’s what we are told. When we are far from the harsher realities of life, we risk sinking into meaninglessness.

Every day we balance our feelings and find our equilibrium between the haves and the have nots.

I don’t want to pretend to myself that I am the humblest of creatures who would share his last crust with a stranger.

Actually, I would. It would be easier. To be down to my last crust would make it an easier decision. Then there would be almost nothing to hold on to.

The better question would be whether I would give up a lot of what I have to share, not with one stranger but many, many strangers? Because that is what is happening. People are clamouring at the gates of fortress Europe and fortress North America. They risk their lives to cross the sea to reach their dream. And we inside have to deal with feeling guilty and resentful.

We in the UK give huge amounts of charity to people abroad. When RedNoseDay comes around and the TV presenters ask for money, we give – millions. My wife gives – she gives a lot.

Why don’t we collectively share our last crust and give half of everything we have to those beyond the fence.

But we don’t. And we don’t all say – come, come, share – what is mine is yours.

Tell me I am wrong – tell me that if a vote was taken tomorrow that people would open the gates.

In an article about the pending trade war between the USA and everybody else, the writer mentioned the sixty million tonnes of wheat that the fields of Kansas produce.

I looked up the density of wheat seeds: It’s 0.79

So that tonnage of wheat would occupy 76 million cubic metres. (60m/0.79)

Let’s spread that out two metres deep. Two metres makes sense to me; it’s just fifteen centimetres (six inches) over my head.

Now we’ve got an area of 38 million square metres, two metres deep. That’s 6,000 metres square.

That’s six kilometres.

All that wheat would occupy a space two metres deep in a square six kilometres down each side.

Or in yards and miles, that’s two-and-a-bit yards deep and nearly four miles square.

A lot of wheat.