Sometimes it's hard to be a happy bunny

In the summer of 1976 I was a very happy bunny. It was one of the hottest summers on record and I was working as a young schoolmaster in Cheltenham. There was a sense of freedom in schools at that time and so very different from these data hungry days.

I’m not that much of a cricket fan but in the summer of 1976 I did play for our school staff team. Cheltenham is, as I am sure you know, on the edge of the Cotswolds. Ancient Cotswold villages with golden sandstone buildings became wonderful venues for our weekly cricket matches.

There is something quite magical about the sound of ‘leather on willow’ on a warm midsummer evening. My ability as a cricketer is sadly very limited and my style tended to be the boundary ball or out! I can still taste the air from that atmospheric Cotswold summer.

We too often talk about the good old days. They were good in so many ways but it would be a mistake to view the past through such a nostalgic lens. As dear old LP Hartley once said, “The past is a foreign country; they do things differently there.”

That hot summer long ago we spent the school holiday in Paignton visiting family. Torbay simply sparkled under the bright summer sunshine. Sailing along the coast was therapeutic and the scorched South Devon fields rather looked like sand dunes under a tropical sky. Heady stuff!

It was a time when we had numerous holiday camps dotted around South Devon and accommodation was hard to find. Luckless families toured the towns looking for vacancy notices. Roads were gridlocked and overheated cars steamed hopelessly in the heat.

By midsummer it was almost impossible to find a space to sit on the beaches and crowded trains made Paignton’s Station Square look like Paddington at rush-hour.

Of course South Devon is still a very busy place during the summer school holidays. Last summer was unusually hot but the tourism mix seems very different. Some of the changes are quite subtle whilst others almost stun.

The landscape has of course changed. So many of the large holiday camps have become housing developments and the rustle of daily newspapers has been replaced by the tap of mobile phone keypads.

Thinking back to the summer of 1976 I find it a little more difficult today to capture that quintessentially English feel that filled the air. I’m not sure why that is and for that matter whether it is of consequence.

I’d like to think that life was less complicated then. As a young schoolmaster it certainly was. I only taught for six or so years and the main daily data gathering exercise was marking the register. Scripts were handwritten and marked with flowing red or green ink. For me the biggest stress was what to do during the very long summer holiday!

Oddly enough I think that it is the schools that evidence the comparatively carefree days of 1976 and the summer of 2019. Thinking about the incredible amount of daily data collected by teachers, the worry about job loss, behavioural issues, OFSTED and the impact upon school life, I immediately see the parallels in other walks of life. That is a worry.

Add to all that the fact that I am so much older then perhaps my desire for the warm summer evenings of 1976 is nothing more than galloping nostalgia. As I write I can hear in my mind the distant sound of leather on willow and that has helped me to keep the smile………….

Is social media addiction growing?

I’ve managed to escape. It’s taken me a while and hopefully the outcome will be long lasting. I say escape but that may be overstating the event a little. It all started quite innocently many years ago.

A friend of mine was teaching at an American university and sent me a letter suggesting that I look at internet communication. The concept looked at the time like something out of science fiction and yet here we are today.

I became addicted very quickly and loved the immediacy of cyberspace communication. When you think about the apparent simplicity of connecting across boarders electronically without restriction it really is quite something to marvel at.

 Over the years I gained an enormous amount of knowledge about internet communication and the whole social media landscape. So much so that a few years ago I found myself teaching strategic social media courses to students and local business people.

So what have I escaped from? A few days ago I deactivated my Facebook account! That may sound simple enough, but like any other addiction it is a big thing for those addicted to actually stop. Many of you may be regular Facebook users and might raise an eyebrow at such an apparently ridiculous move.

For those that might not know, Facebook is an online and social media company based in sunny California. It is the brainchild of Mark Zuckerberg and his Harvard College friends. They are all very clever bunnies and created something that now has billions of users all over the world.

Facebook sprang into life back in 2004 and I quickly became addicted. I loved the connectivity, the sharing of news, views, video and stunning photographs. It allowed me to catch up with some lovely people and share events in real time without actually being there.

The problem for me was Bacon’s Law. Bacon’s Law is a movie themed game that selects a random actor and connects them with the multi-talented Kevin Bacon in six moves or less.

You can apply the same rule to almost anyone in the world. Do give it a try and laugh. It always amuses me.

Bacon’s Law in action really is Facebook. Find friends who know friends who know friends and so on. It is amusing of course but also rather sinister and a playground for potential stalkers.

Hugely complicated algorithms drive Facebook’s connectivity and therefore offer to those who control Facebook almost unlimited access to very personal data. I became very aware of things and people popping up unexpectedly and that worried me.

I suspect that feeling of unease was reinforced when the Facebook - Cambridge Analytical data scandal hit the headlines last year. Apparently Cambridge Analytical had harvested personal data from the profile pages of Facebook members and used it for political advertising.

It never ceases to amaze me how much personal stuff we quite happily and innocently post online. Clever people do harvest that and advanced data handling can change the way we think. Reinforcing political prejudice is an obvious example and evidenced hourly during the Brexit process.

Increasingly I had become aware of targeted adverts landing on my Facebook home page. Things that I had been searching for online suddenly popped up on my Facebook. Added to that were the newsfeeds that seemed a little too honed making me wonder quite what I was being fed.

Since leaving the world of Facebook I realise how many hours a day I was spending following the daily events of others! I am using that time to catch up on some fun reading, helping me keep the smile…..

I might have been a grizzly bear!

Summer sunshine seems to bring a smile to even the most hardened of faces. This year we have been blessed with an August to remember and for that I am grateful. I like long sunny days. September has also been sympathetic and the little Indian summer period certainly lifted my spirit. Hopefully you also felt the joy of the warm sea air and colourful sunsets.

Breakfast at The Grand

The thing about a warm summer is the curious gift of inner heat that seems to last right into deepest winter. I was always a child of the summer and the cold damp winters do little for me. I suspect that in a previous life I might have been a grizzly bear. Romping around in the warm summer days before collecting enough berries to see me through the winter hibernation period.

Imagine sleeping through the shockingly cold winters and living off the fatty layers produced in summer. There would be no worries about whether there was enough money in the bank to pay ridiculously high energy bills. You would softly sleep through deep the winter until the warming sun returns for another sparkling summer. That sounds very desirable to me.

I’ve had the cost of home heating very much in mind recently. My old boiler has been a faithful friend for many years but I fear that it has started to ‘eat’ gas. My gas supplier tells me that my gas usage is higher than the national average for my house. That is a worry because I attempt to minimise the amount that is used.

As winter heads this way I know that the large energy companies will announce price increases which will terrify many. It always seems to happen in the same way that often we hear of price reductions as we head into summer. Odd that isn’t it.

One thing that really annoys me is this silly advice from the government to shop around for the best price. That sort of advice is fine if you have the ability to use a computer and can get your head around all the various tariffs. It really is a jungle and can leave even the most agile of minds spinning like a child’s top.

I happened to be at a breakfast event the other morning. This little group of likeminded people meet every two weeks at the Grand Hotel in Torquay. One of the group is a man called Andy Coleman and along with his wife Sue run DEA Torbay. I’ve always respected Andy’s opinion because he tells the truth.

He was speaking about Theresa May’s decision to put Hinkley C on hold. Hinkley C is the huge nuclear power station that is planned near Bridgwater in Somerset. He, Andy, questioned why the move toward green energy seemed to have lost favour. In the south west we are blessed with a ready supply of wind and almost endless wave power.

If you watched the BBC Panorama programme recently about the nuclear recycling plant at Sellafield in Cumbria then you might share Andy’s enthusiasm for green energy. I found it hugely worrying especially after reading an article about the wobbly Fukushima nuclear power station in Japan. Fukushima hit the news when a giant tsunami hit the coast of Japan a few years ago.

It is actually quite difficult to get a clear picture about the Fukushima situation right now but is it clear that considerable health problems continue. Listening to the comments made about our own Sellafield plant made me shiver.

From what was being said at that breakfast meeting I gather that other similar nuclear plants being built overseas are hitting design problems. That has to be a worry and whilst I have no idea as to why our new prime minister has delayed the decision I rather hope that she has all this very much in mind.

I mentioned above that my friend Andy doesn’t spin truth. The spinning of truth really annoys me because it simply confuses the innocent and protects the guilty. When it comes to energy spinning truth is ethically indefensible. For those with enough money not to worry too much about heating the home during the winter then fuel prices don’t matter. For those struggling to stay warm as the sun heads south the price is critical.

For Theresa May and her new government getting energy policy right is absolutely essential. I’ve had it up to the eyes with ‘elegant solutions’ and worry that we are not getting the full story. You have a voice and so might I suggest you start asking questions. We have elected members representing us in Parliament who would love to hear from you.

Be happy and keep the smile!

This is my column in this week's Herald Express 21st September 2016

A change in platform

I write a column each week for the Herald Express and have been posting that there. For the while, mainly because of time or the lack of it, I will simply use the online Herald Express site for my mostly pointless rhetoric....... www.heraldexpress.co.uk/franksobey

Those troublesome scam emails, phone calls and letters!

The other morning I joined around seventy people for a Torbay Business Forum breakfast at the Riviera Conference Centre. The guest speaker was Kevin Foster MP and his topic was the first one-hundred days in the House of Commons. As I am sure you are aware these are difficult times for a politician and I found his grasp of core issues refreshing. I rather suspect that he will keep the faith regardless of political pressure but of course only time will tell.

Kevin Foster

As I say his theme was the first hundred days and I must admit with a title like that I did look around for the executioners block and axe! But this was not a scene from Hilary Mantel’s ‘Wolf Hall’ although he did say that one his first day the new cohort were shown where to leave their swords! What also interested me was the fact that the audience at the breakfast event did not use this gathering as a platform for launching a series of prickly questions. In point of fact there were very few questions and that did actually make me raise an eyebrow.

For the past eighteen years the local MP was Adrian Sanders. The period immediately after the May election will have been a curious road for Adrian as he adjusted to a very different landscape. Before becoming an MP Adrian spent twenty-one years working in the public and private sectors. That is a considerable amount of knowledge and experience. You may be interested to know that Adrian is still very much in business offering public relations, government affairs and lobbying services (www.adriansanders.org). He is very keen to help smaller organisational locally and his fee structure is user friendly.

Adrian Sanders

I have a huge amount of respect for both Adrian and Kevin. It is all too easy to look for the negative and indeed too often people seem to gain enormous pleasure from criticising others. Kevin will certainly need support from the community in the challenging days ahead and it is pleasing that Adrian’s wealth of experience is still available.

One point made by Kevin Foster during his ‘first hundred days’ talk was the nature of communication and how that has changed. He pointed out that not so many years ago if you had something you wanted to tell your MP then it meant picking up a pen and writing a letter.  Of course you didn’t just write a letter you then had to stuff it in an envelope, stick a stamp in the top right hand corner and pop it in a letterbox.

These days that has all changed. Of course many people will still write letters and to be quite honest I find that very exercise quite cathartic. The advent of social media means that that an email can be dashed off in seconds. There is also the facility for the use internet based sites to simply write a quick note to an MP and press send! So easy to do and of course too often the source emails that lack any thought.

I think that Kevin said he had something like two-hundred emails immediately after winning the election. That comment made me shiver because I suspect that quite important messages may have been lost in an ocean of rhetoric. It is also true that too many email communications should really be saved for a period of time and then read again before pressing send or indeed deleting. That is certainly true when written in anger. As the blood pressure rises we tend to lose the ability to reason.

One topic that might interest both of them, Kevin and Adrian, is the rise in spam communications through the letterbox, email in box, telephone calls and text messages. You may have read in the Herald Express recently of a lady who lost thousands of pounds to a telephone scammer. These nasty people are very clever but lack any integrity. We live in an age where personal information is so easily available and it takes little effort to find huge amounts of data about a person.

What really worries me is that whilst numerous people will report scams many others will be too embarrassed to admit falling for these malicious attacks. All this is not helped by isolation and we must look out for the vulnerable. We need to put pressure on the decision makers in the hope that there will be a more serious attempt to weed out these nasty people.

Keep the smile!

from my Herald Express column 9th September 2015

How ‘Socratic’ is the debate?

Doctor Bettany Hughes is a clever lady and so it was interesting watching her ‘bump’ into the power of the Socratic process whilst chatting to a Greek writer in an Athenian café. I don’t know whether you watched her three television programmes on the great thinkers but if you did then hopefully, like me, will have been pushed out of your comfort zone! That Athenian café conversation may make you want to debate with friends over a cup of coffee.

Doctor Hughes has tracked the lives of The Buddha, Socrates and Confucius. All three lived so many years ago at about the same time. That fact is curious in itself. The dominance of their thinking is still so very powerful today. Two comments during the programme on Socrates made me think quite deeply. The first was about the need never to be thoughtless and the second was about how little we know!

Oh yes, there is also one more important point. Never drink hemlock!

For most of us the name Socrates is associated with ancient Greece and the birth of democracy. Churchill (the politician rather than the nodding dog!) reportedly said that democracy is the worst form of government, except for all those other forms that have been used from time to time.

I suspect that we all believe that we have some control over the political landscape and not so long ago many of us joined the May 2015 queues at polling stations. Sadly quite a few of us didn’t and that has to be a worry. Of course the fact that worries me doesn’t mean that it worries you!

My understanding of the democratic process is that we elect fellow citizens to represent us in the various places of powers. They become the decision makers on our behalf and hopefully those decisions represent the will of the community that elected them. You might want to think about that.

I have little doubt that most of us are aware of the changes happening daily on the English Riviera. Sometimes those changes raise an eyebrow and from time to time may trigger an emotional tingle. That tingle may be of pleasure because what is happening brings joy. Of course the tingle may be a feeling of being somewhat uneasy and less than happy.

Paignton’s Matthew Clark wrote about the Torbay Retail and Tourism Business Improvement District in last week’s Herald Express and worried, it seemed to me, about the democratic process.  Do you have a business related to tourism or retail in Torbay? If you do then how much do you know about it (the BID) and what do your local elected councillors think about it? How ‘Socratic’ is the debate?

Coincidentally I bumped into another local councillor unexpectedly the other evening. My family had given me a voucher for an evening meal at the Harbour Kitchen and so I hopped on a bus with my wife for the short trip to Torquay’s busy harbour. I love the upstairs front seat because the views across Torbay can be stunning. Also sitting on a front seat was former mayor and now local councillor Nick Bye. Nick is a clever man with a brilliant sense of humour and hopefully he enjoyed the short journey as much as we did. His update on what is happening politically gave me hope since there appears at last to be a little unity.

The fact that Nick Bye was on a local bus was for me significant because you may remember me waxing lyrical recently about Kevin Foster MP also using local busses. I see the local bus service as the life blood of a community and it is a worry that so many services seem to be disappearing. Sadly those that suffer when that happens tend to be people who can become too easily isolated. That is something perhaps to debate with your local councillor.

Whilst debating issues with your elected representatives you might also ask what is happening to Oldway Mansion. Sadly it seems to me to be a little like my own house in that it is deteriorating without the money to support the upkeep! We were promised a bright new future for it a few years ago but little seems to be happening. The gardens however have been tended and look beautiful including this iconic palm (pictured) which will bring a smile to our elected mayor Gordon Oliver’s face. 

Keep the smile!

from my column in the Herald Express 1st September

An Endless Green Tapestry That Catches The Eye

Buses, boats and leafy pathways somehow for me capture the essence of South Devon. Even though the local area seems to be a sprawling urban landscape it is the almost endless green tapestry that catches the eye when viewed from the sea.

A week or so ago I hopped on a Western Lady ferry for the return trip from Torquay to Brixham and back. The day was sunny and the boat crowded. It is the first time in a long while that I have had the opportunity to look at Torbay in a very different way.

It was interesting to compare the cost of the ferry trip and then a bus journey. The return trip on the Western Lady was only £3 which seemed far too cheap. The bus fare from Torquay’s Pavilion to Manor Corner in Preston was £2.40. The new high speed ferry has a £6 return fare which also seems very good value for a fast trip. Fine weather does make people want to play on boats but when waves are rough and the rain falls numbers inevitably drop.

I did have a chat with the lady staffing the Torquay kiosk for the Western Lady who told me that this month had been busy and the boat I boarded was full in both directions. At £3 return it is ridiculously cheap given that it’s a lovely way to travel across the bay offering stunning views of the South Devon Coast. Almost a mini cruise!

As we chugged into Brixham the new high speed ferry service was heading out. Sadly the new ‘super-duper’ high speed craft has yet to reach Torbay and for the while they are using the Silver Sea charter boat. This Paignton based twelve seater boat is a very fast way to skip across Torbay.

So many cities around the world now use water transport to avoid traffic congestion and I was very excited when it was announced that a new high speed craft would offering a brilliant commuting route between Brixham and Torquay. The operators say on their website that “Brixham Express Ltd operate an all year ferry service between Brixham and Torquay. The custom built twin screw catamaran is suited to the beam seas of Torbay and we hope to deliver a service that can weather the east winds and swell. Travelling to work by sea, across beautiful Torbay, is a new innovative way to both start and finish your work day. Stagecoach 33 will link with the ferry at Beacon Quay, Torquay to deliver commuters to their places of work.”

As yet this innovative craft has yet to appear and Mary O’Discoll from Brixham Express tells me that she is pulling out her hair out in frustration! Bureaucracy and administrative hiccups seem to be slowing the process. Hopefully within the next month this exciting new boat will reach Torbay. It must be very annoying for Mary and her people that they will not have the benefit of a busy summer season. Mary says that she simply keeps smiling! I like that of course.

I have a certain empathy with them because years ago we had a running battle with Torbay Council in attempting to operate a commercial aqua-sausage business off Paignton beach. At one point the whole elected council was at a standstill debating the future of an inflatable toy on a sandy South Devon beach. Hmm. The main concern apparently was the number of objections received. This was before the Freedom of Information Act and getting detail as to who the complainants were was almost impossible. We did find out eventually after ‘ambushing’ a councillor and it seems that it was a case of numerous objections from one person!  

The latter part of the week was dimpsy and so my woodland walk to Occombe Farm was along dampened leafy pathways. My two year old grand-daughter needed a damp weather activity and Occombe offers endless fun in the converted barns and hard standing outside the popular café. Watching the young ones racing toy tractors around the barns and yard is it seems to me a quintessentially Devonian activity! Dimpsy actually means getting dark or twilight but I’ve always used it to describe those soft soggy days when the mist rolls in from the sea. By the way I have to say that Occombe’s home made beef burger is a sensation and very welcome by this hungry grand-dad!

Keep the smile.

From my column in the Herald Express on the 26th August