Wanted, Trolls, Consultants, Parisians, Instagram, Hand Gestures

 Wanted: a rich tenant to take on a struggling stately home in Somerset. "No lefties or Marxists" need apply, says Sir Benjamin Slade, (74) the cash-strapped aristocrat who hopes to find tenants to help pay the bills while his wedding venue business limps through the pandemic.

"They can also bring as much wine as they like, as long as it's high quality and I'm allowed to drink it," he adds.

He has put Maunsel House, his 14th century manor house in North Newton, near Bridgwater, Somerset, on the rental market for £20,000 a month.

The Fairy Feller's Master-Stroke
Richard Dadd (1817-1876)
Photo Credit: Tate [CC BY-NC-ND]

... "London is like a dreadful ghost town right now. All this crap about not being able to have more than six people in your garden. Well, my garden is 12 acres and I've got 98 acres of parkland and 34 bedrooms so there's no problem for social distancing... We need the punters. We want amusing ones though. Good right-wing, hunting, shooting types," he said, adding, for reasons which were not entirely clear that he would discriminate against anyone who went to public school at Winchester or Millfield.

... He accepts that his country pile will be competing with much grander properties on the rental market.

"I don't have a swimming pool or tennis courts, but there's about three million quid's worth of antiques and all the rest of it. They'd have the gardener, the housekeeper, the maintenance man and all these people to drive them around. They could live like country gents."

... Before the restrictions came into force, he said he was able to rent the house to large parties of about 60 or 70 guests for £18,000 to £22,000 a week.

...It's not the first time the publicity seeking baronet has placed an advertisement. He made headlines last year after publicising his search to find a wife who could provide him with male heirs. His list of requirements for the perfect "breeder" stated she should be taller than 5ft 6in - preferably 6ft 1in or 6ft 2in - aged between 30 and 40, possess a gun licence and be "castle trained".

The search proved unsuccessful and he continued to live alone in a farmhouse on the estate.

He said that the pandemic had "left everybody in the same boat", adding that he too had suffered from coronavirus. 

"I had a runny nose for eight weeks and my undercarriage hasn't been working well."

Sir Benjamin, who made his fortune as a shipping magnate, also made headlines in 2012 after police raided his home. He was charged with possessing a firearm without a certificate and breaching a shotgun certificate by leaving a weapon unsecured. He pleaded guilty, adding that he used the shotgun to shoot at foxes from his bedroom window. He was fined £2,000.

(Lucy Bannerman, The Times, 2020)

Eccentric: a person of unconventional and slightly strange views or behaviour. And long may they express their quirks.

*... I feel a bit of an imposter as I sit in front of his roaring log fire, sipping tea and asking if he thinks I might be suitable material as a tenant of Maunsel House. We haven't discussed money yet, but I have confirmed that I am not a Marxist - "that's good" - and that I enjoy wine, although I usually don't spend more than a tenner on a bottle. "I prefer a bit better," he says, "but in difficult times we have to sample everything."

... I have shot clays a couple of times, but I have never killed anything, I confess. Is that going to count against me? "It is a bit. But if you're hungry enough, you'd shoot the old snipe wouldn't you?"

... Slade expands a little on the world view he is seeking in his new estate-mate. "Got to be Brexiteers really, haven't they? Got to run our own country as badly as we want to, haven't we? We don't want the Germans running it. They tried that in the first and second world wars."

.. He says he likes beavers and would like to release them on his land on the Somerset Levels. He also says he would allow gypsies to stay on the land. It is not clear where this is going until he says that the beavers would cause a big flood "and that would be the end of the gypsy problem".

... Does he still have three mistresses? "No, had to slow down a bit. I've got one-ish." Does one-ish mean more or less than one? "I don't know, I'll ring them up and ask them. I collect old masters and young mistresses."

... For several years he was with Fiona Atkins, who later married the Earl of Carnarvon. "That bloody dog-napper. She ran off with my dog."

... He froze his sperm 20 years ago. "All good stuff - 80 per cent wrigglers," Now he wants to unfreeze it. "Some lady said she wanted to try it out." To create an heir? "Hopefully."...

(Damian Whitworth, The Times, 2020)

Trolls

The Devil Sowing Tares
Abraham Bloemaert (1566-1651) (attributed to)
Photo Credit: Somerville College, University of Oxford [CC BY-NC]

Suppose a website published hundreds of false allegations about your work, relationship and personal life. You'd just get it taken down, yes? See your union rep and lawyer, take the website to the cleaners for libel, defamation, harassment, and see justice prevail. Good luck with that. This has been my life for the past two years, and unless I choose to spend thousands of pounds to prosecute a "dragging site" for each individual lie about me, it'll probably be my life for the next 10.

Dragging or "trashing" sites are a relatively new kind of forum dedicated to following every move of people with a prominent online presence - bloggers, journalists, celebrities and the like - and slating who they are and whatever its (usually anonymous) users imagine they're doing... Once marked as a bad person, your life can be rubbished with abandon and wild assertions simply become accepted fact.

... The human cost is both huge and dismissed out of hand. Several victims have posted publicly about the effects of dragging sites on their mental health. I spent most of last year in depression and a colleague of mine - not in the public eye - was bullied relentlessly online to the point where she became mentally unwell.

And yet, the more unchecked hate piled onto victims, the higher the site climbs in Google results. As we've learned from Netflix's Social Dilemma, abuse is great for business. The dragging platforms earn money from advertising, while victims stand a very real chance of losing their livelihoods (only last week, I spoke to one woman whose small business is on the brink of collapse after site users left fake customer reviews).

... The Law Commission has recently published recommendations for an overhaul of the law surrounding online abuse.

(Sali Hughes, The Guardian, 2020)

Excuse my simplicity. But why do you continue to look at the website that is giving you verbal abuse? Can you not, like the TV, switch channel? It seems to me that if you are waiting for Parliament to act on The Law Commission's recommendations your wait will plod on like a sloth stuck in glue.

*... What are you meant to do in such a situation? Move away from your laptop? Shrug and move on? Block and delete? Sit down and shut up? Hughes didn't like those solutions, so in September 2019, she made an Instagram video about what was being written and defended herself.

... In the most surprising part of the programme (File on 4: ME and My Trolls -R4), Hughes met one of her online abusers. The woman's voice was spoken by an actor.

"I'm a normal person," she said. "I'm a nice mum, I'm a good friend... how did somebody normal end up getting involved in something that was so hurtful?"

No one wants to think of themselves as a nasty person. But anything written online exists in the real world, as much as a newspaper article does of graffiti on a front door.

(Miranda Sawyer, The Observer, 2020)

What's normal about online abuse? The 'nice mum' and 'good friend' needs to explain herself. The woman who says "how did somebody normal end up getting involved in something that was so hurtful" needs to try and answer her own question.

Management Consultants

Waiting for Legal Advice
James Campbell (1828-1893)
Photo Credit: Walker Art Gallery [CC BY-NC]

The scale of the government's reliance on management consultants has been laid bare as an analysis shows that spending with eight top firms has risen by 45% to more than £450m in three years.

Deloitte, the professional services firm, was the biggest winner, earning fees of £147m from public funds in 2019-20, compared with £40m two years earlier, amid a bonanza related in large part to Brexit.

...However, last week  the minister in charge of curbing Whitehall spending, Theodore Agnew, wrote to senior civil servants saying the civil service had become "infantilised" by an "unacceptable" reliance on expensive management consultants.

While 1% of civil servants are paid more than £80,000 a year, day rates for management consultants working in the public sector range from about £1,000 for junior consultants to about £3,500 for partners.

... Management consultants are typically brought in where it is thought specialist advice or expertise is needed, but there has been long-standing concerns over the extent of their use in the public sector.

(Rajeev Syal, The Guardian, 2020)

£1,000 a day for a junior management consultant. How much for a junior nurse?  £9.21 an hour (April 1st 2020). Surely the junior consultant is not worth ten times that of the nurse? And the senior consultant - 35 times greater. There's something wrong there. (See Dec 11th)

*The accounting firm Deloitte has more than 1,100 management consultants working on the test-and-trace system, health chiefs have disclosed. The company charges as much as £2,360 a day for a consultant, leaving the government with a potential bill of £300 million for the advice.

... Boris Johnson's gamble on outsourcing much of the £12 billion coronavirus testing programme rather than concentrating on expanding the NHS and public health labs, has been criticised by laboratory staff leaders.

... Deloitte has been involved in tests provided at drive-in and walk-in centres and by post. It has previously stated that there is increased government interest in outsourcing frontline services using payment by results...

(Dominic Kennedy, The Times, 2020)

*... A consultancy rate card from within Deloitte, seen by the Eye, shows partners charging £1,450 per hour, with relatively junior assistant managers at £660 - and even the interns doing the photocopying farmed out at £290 hourly. That would gross up to a ludicrous annual income of around half a million quid. The big firms are known to have given discounts, but the rates are still likely to be multiples of what it costs to employ public officials.

(Private Eye, No 1532)

*Management consultants are each being paid as much as £6,250 a day to work on the government's struggling coronavirus testing system, sources have confirmed.

... The figures, first disclosed by Sky News, come amid growing concern about the cost of the UK's Covid-19 testing system, which has been criticised for being slow, disorganised and failing to cope with rising demand.

BCG, one of the largest and most prestigious consultancies in the world, charged £10m for 40 people to work on the test-and-trace system over the course of four months, a source with knowledge of the contract said. Individual consultants from the firm could earn £2,400 a day, or up to £7,360 for the most senior consultants, sources confirmed.

... The rates far outstrip those paid to public-sector workers - just 1% of civil servants are paid more than £80,000 a year.

... BCG declined to comment.

(Jasper Jolly and Rajeev Syal, The Guardian, 2020) 

... businesses employ consultants for the same reason people get therapists. They may feel they know themselves but a therapist can hold up a mirror and offer new solutions. The scepticism around consulting arises because we never hear from the businesses or government departments that have been saved from embarrassment or failure by consultants. But then again, would you bare all about how a therapist had helped you?

Sure, consultants' day rates may be high but only a third of that constitutes their actual pay cheque; the remainder covers running costs, developing models and training. What clients really pay for is the intellectual property that comes in the consultant's briefcase - spreadsheets, templates and case studies.

Consultancies compete against each other to bid for their work, break their backs to earn their millions, then plough their millions back into developing resources to earn them more millions. That might seem wrong and some may hate their fee structure, but it's capitalism. If we ban consultants from our organisations, we must ban capitalism too.

(Pravina Rudra, The Times, 2020)

Isn't there is something inherently wrong when the salary of a management consultant is greater than the prime minister's salary or that of a consultant surgeon? Saying that the management consultants' fee structure is "capitalism" does not preclude it being changed. Indeed, one does not have to ban capitalism in order to curb the excesses of  over-inflated salaries.

Parisians

The Judgement of Paris
Adrianen van der Werff (1659-1722)
Photo Credit: Dulwich Picture Gallery [CC BY-Nc-SA]

French critics have not taken kindly to Emily in Paris, a new Netflix series in which an ambitious 20-something from Chicago moves to the City of Light mainly, it sometimes seems, to meet a gamut of Gallic stereotypes.

"The berets. The croissants. The baguettes. The hostile waiters. The irascible concierges. The inveterate philanderers. The lovers and the mistresses. Name a cliché about France and the French, you'll find it in Emily in Paris," wrote the free newspaper 20 Minutes.

"It reduces the capital's inhabitants to vile snobs sporting Birkin handbags who light up a cigarette as soon as they're out of the gym," complained the women's webzine madmoiZelle.

... There she (Emily) discovers, according to Premier's critic, Charles Martin, "that the French are all mean and lazy and never arrive at the office before late morning; and that they are are incorrigible flirts with no fondness for the concept of being faithful."

They are also, Martin wrote, "sexist, backward and - of course - have a fitful relationship with their showers. Frankly, watching Emily in Paris there's plenty to feel insulted about. When they decided to caricature us, the authors didn't hold back."

... Several women complained about the impossible good looks of Emily's downstairs neighbour, Gabriel. "I've lived in Paris for nearly 10 years and I've never had a neighbour as handsome as that," tweeted one.

But a rare few, including some non-French Parisians, begged to differ. "After all, if it was realistic it would be just another deadly boring French series," wrote one commenter on the review website Allo Ciné.

"I'm Polish and I've lived in Paris for 14 years," said another. "I can tell you: this is exactly how the French are."

(Jon Henley, The Guardian, 2020)

Hypersensitive critics, then. Perhaps there's some talented souls in Marseille who could do a Spitting Image job on the Parisians? That might be really funny. 

Instagram

Zusammenbruch
Ludwig von Hofmann (1861-1945)
Photo Credit: Leicester Museums and Galleries [CC BY-NC-SA]

I gave up Instagram in an effort to improve my life. I would get back those hours that I had wasted in voyeuristic idleness, I would sleep better without so much screen time and I wouldn't hate my friends quite as much. But now two years on, do I still feel happy with my choice? Or do I have the sense that there's a whole part of life that is passing me by?

...but the power of Instagram to inject "fear of missing out" into your very being - even if you're not on it - is quite something.

... Instagram can make  narcissists of us all, and I have wondered at various times over the past two years whether any of the 1,000 or so followers I left behind wonder what I've been up to, where I've been on holiday, what I've eaten. In other words do they miss me? Of course they don't, but in a tiny way I've felt less important, a less significant figure in others' lives. You have to stop yourself from caring about this.

So I can't say that I haven't given a backward glance since waving farewell to Instagram... But the feeling passes and instead I remember how annoyed I was by the humble bragging, the self-reverential hashtags and the sheer vanity of people who, in real life, were perfectly reasonable, modest and well mannered. Friends of mine.

That's one of the attractions about social media, I suppose. It allows us to be someone we are not. It gives us a personality we wouldn't have outside the digital realm. It somehow makes us bigger than we are. But the other side of this particular coin is that it also increases the atomisation of society and, in an age of Covid, where we are forced to retreat within our own small world, that cannot be healthy.

... Happy 10th birthday to Instagram - but I'm better off without you in my life.

(Simon Kelner, The i, 2020)

Wow. 'Voyeuristic idleness', 'hating friends', 'fear of missing out', 'narcissism', 'a less significant figure in others' lives', 'the vanity and the atomisation of society' all go to make up that bundle of fun - Instagram.

Hand Gestures

The Vagrant
Annie Louisa Swynnerton (1844-1933)
Photo Credit: Manchester Art Gallery [CC BY-NC_ND]

It has long been the fail-safe gesture of the restaurant diner who wants to pay. Yet it seems the exaggerated air scribble could be under threat from a younger generation who have never had to sign anything to settle the bill.

According to linguists, hand gestures that revolve around outdated technology, such as holding a finger and thumb to the ear and mouth to mimic a telephone, will soon be obsolete.

For Generation Z, many of whom were not born before the turn of the century, many movements widely used and recognised by their parents have no cultural meaning.

... Other gestures that could be on the way out include making a circular movement with the hand to indicate the winding up or down of a car window, and tapping your wrist when referring to time.

"Younger generations just will not know what these signals are," Dr Evans said. "Landlines that you picked up and held in a particular way are rarely used. People use smartphones now and they are held very differently.

"Similarly, the traditional way of indicating a film in the game charades by motioning an old-fashioned reel movie camera, will go the same way. As people are no longer exposed to such technology, the emblems associated with them drop out of usage."

... A TikTok video of a father in New York showing how his children held a flat palm to the side of their face to indicate a mobile phone recently went viral. "Seventies, Eighties and Nineties babies can relate," Daniel Alvarado said, "This is how you know you're getting old."

(Katie Gibbons, The Times, 2020)

*Sir, The predicted demise of the "air scribble" gesture indicating a desire to receive and pay a bill is premature. Consider the longevity of the handshake to indicate "I carry no weapon" as a sign of friendship, or the convivial clinking of glasses showing that "we need not mix these drinks to show there is no poison". The message survives in the sentiment, not the action it mimics.

(David Travers, QC, Six Pump Court, Temple, The Times, 2020)

*Sir, When I showed my teenage children a much-prized LP, they asked if it was "something for throwing", and as for the dial telephone, they prodded at the numbers and concluded that "it must be broken".

(Richard Segalov, Pinner, Middx, The Times, 2020)

*Sir, Further to your report on outmoded gestures, when I was a young teacher the accepted sign to children to keep the noise down was an anticlockwise motion of the right wrist indicating how volume on the television was reduced. In later years this was met with blank stares. Once I changed to mimicking pointing a remote and vigorously moving my thumb up and down, the desired result was achieved.

(Dave Kendall, Guilford, Surrey, The Times, 2020)