The Uxbridge Effect

 One must feel sympathy for the hapless family who found their dream holiday in Cornwall metamorphosed into something unusual - a hotel in sunny Uxbridge. The Guardian took up their case to reveal the usual web of agents and hotels blaming each other for incompetence, and leaving the customer to suffer.

What, of course, concerns us is the fascinating idea that the agent, Booking.com, could consider that Uxbridge (which The Guardian maliciously describes as "a London suburb close to Slough"¹) might be some sort of acceptable substitute for the golden beaches of north Cornwall. Booking.com is a Dutch organisation but presumably has some knowledge of UK geography. They must surely know that Uxbridge, just four miles from beautiful Ruislip, is sufficiently far from the coast that any seaside jaunt that starts from these parts requires either a re-mortgage to pay for the exorbitant cost of train tickets or hours spent in a hot, cramped car jammed onto a motorway, as the flasks of tea cool and the impatient kids in the back seats dig their feet into one's back.

Of course, it is possible that one of the Dutch researchers came here on a day-trip a few years ago and still cherishes happy memories of buying cheap chocolate bars in Poundland, admiring the many office blocks that have all but strangled the historic town centre and finally taking a train a few stops east to stroll blissfully up Ruislip High Street for a spiritual recharge by the duck pond. It's not exactly a fun-filled family day out but maybe there was sufficient magic to make Uxbridge the obvious choice when it became apparent that there was a cock-up with the Newquay booking. 

Footnote:

1. I have covered the "part of Slough" calumny before, in a searing and contempt-laden review of Facebook's disgusting practice of branding Ruislip as part of the hellhole ten miles to our west. I have explained why right-minded citizens should affirm a belief that Slough remains a place to avoid as part of my series 101 Things I Refuse To Do Before I Die.

Petrol, panic and perception

 Here we go again. Another news story blown up out of proportion with serious consequences for huge numbers of people. Nine years ago the fears of a tanker drivers' strike (that never happened) created massive demand for petrol that saw many stations run dry and others besieged by long queues of motorists desperate to top up.Now, with a few BP stations having to close because of a shortage of tanker drivers, the fear has returned, generating the self-reinforcing "rational" behaviour of drivers queuing to fill up because they don't want to be trumped by all the other drivers queuing to fill up because they don't want to be the ones left out repeat ad nauseam.

 These are some of the typical comments on the Ruislip Facebook group posted today:

The cause of the shortage of tanker drivers is, of course, Brexit which at a stroke forced large numbers of drivers to return home but provided no home-grown replacements. We learned today from the hapless "Minister of Transport" that his department is considering whether temporary visas might help' naturally the most dysfunctional government department, the Home Office, is unhappy and will probably block it on the grounds that the British people voted to take control, or something.

Wholesale gas prices have increased sharply and shortages of other workers is pushing up inflation,  President Biden  has made it clear to prime minister Johnson that the UK is not in any sense a priority for a trade deal, a headline I saw in passing on one of the Irish daily papers stocked by my supermarket noted that UK exports to Ireland were down a third since Brexit, and now the media are raising alarm about whether the shelves will be fully stocked for Xmas. Jeepers. We really are the guys, aren't we?

 

Those Awful Advertising Slogans - No. 17 - Toyota

 Toyota, the largest manufacturer of motor vehicles in the world, is also, not surprisingly, a major sponsor of the Olympic and Paralympic Games that have been held this summer in Tokyo. I have no issues with Toyota supporting the games and in particular putting their hefty marketing muscle behind the assistance of athletes needing help.

What I do resent is the slogan that this massive business has adopted to showcase their efforts. It only came to my attention recently, when a large poster appeared in beautiful Ruislip, but apparently it has been running since 2018. Here is one of the many examples of the use of the slogan.

 I am certainly not the first who has looked at these three words and pondered, deeply, about why it is that marketing people are so offensive. A cursory glance on Google showed that a frequent search on Toyota and Impossible is "What does Start Your Impossible mean?" and the answer, according to Google, is

"Start your impossible" is a catchphrase that Toyota made up and it means to "start making your impossible dreams possible.

Good. I am not alone. I really cherish that phrase "made up". They just knocked it out in their shed, as it were.

Let us not waste too much space dissecting the mentality of people who try to turn adjectives into nouns. They know what they're doing.  Presumably it goes down well with the kids, or something, Why they couldn't use "Start your impossible dream" I don't know. It's a helluva lot better as a slogan, and it rules out the alternatives that we at Ramblings naturally came up with when considering how the slogan should have been crafted:

• Start your impossible ambition to expunge admen from decent society
• Start your impossible attempt to make vehicle manufacturers take direct responsibility for poisoning us with diesel emissions
• Start your impossible campaign to make it impossible* to drive a car with the windows open whilst playing music loudly.
  

I suppose the guys in Tokyo really think they are doing cutting-edge, innovative marketing. But they are not. Like all car companies, they are inherently conservative and terrified of doing anything really new. The three-word strap-line is so firmly established in the ad world that it seems nothing can shift it and, if what they really want to say is several words longer, then they just cut out the extra words and leave it up to us to guess.

*Sorry about the repeat of "impossible". I couldn't think of an alternative and it's getting late

Taking the pss

 Many years ago I took out a personal pension through a well-known institution in the market - Standard Life. In 2006 it floated on the London Stock Exchange and I subscribed for a few shares. I have held them ever since.

Standard Life merged with another institution, Aberdeen Asset Management in 2017 and the new entity traded as Standard Life Aberdeen. 

This year the old names have been jettisoned. The business is now known as abrdn. Yes, you saw it right. Out goes the old fuddy-duddy capital letter at the start of the name. Out go any unnecessary vowels. We must now think of this organisation as something both ungrammatical and unpronounceable.

Here is how the business news portal Bloomberg reported the change, in April this year:

Standard Life Aberdeen Plc decided it was the vowels holding it back.

One of the U.K.’s largest asset managers is changing its name to Abrdn -- pronounced “Aberdeen” -- in a bid to attract a younger client base by mimicking the naming approach of some startups. In a major rebrand complete with its own video, the company created by a 2017 mega-merger announced the new name Monday.

The rebranding is “modern, dynamic and, most importantly, engaging,” Chief Executive Officer Stephen Bird said in a statement. “Our new name reflects the clarity of focus that the leadership team are bringing to the business.”

 Incidentally Bloomberg got it wrong. It really is abrdn, not Abrdn. I know because they wrote to me today to tell me they have changed their share registrar.

So "abrdn" is pronounced "Aberdeen". Well, that clears that up.Yes, those pointless and frankly rather irritating number of e's in the name made life so complicated. Now we can phone them up and not waste all that time and instead pack in a lot more investing.

I am however bothered that abrdn still employs a Chief Executive Officer. How old-fashioned. That's never going to cut it with today's youth. Something far more dynamic, with greater clarity of focus, is surely demanded. How about Top Dude? Head Honcho? The Boss Groover? And what's with this "Stephen" nonsense? None of the modern young client base will stand for that. Stv. That's all the letters a modern, thrusting and dynamic Groover needs for that all-important engaging with the kids. Stv Brd. Rolls off the tongue, does it not? Pronounced "Dickhead".

 

Back on the Met

 I last took a London Underground train in the first week of March, 2020. The growing fears about the Covid epidemic convinced me to stay away, well before the first official lockdown. Today I finally ventured back with a short trip on the Metropolitan to Finchley Road (and a return via the Jubilee from Swiss Cottage).

It felt good to be riding the rails again and somewhat disconcerting, too. Most of my fellow passengers wore masks but several hold-outs sat defiantly with mouths and noses exposed. Coming back, I was struck by the number who propped a bag in the adjacent seat, as if to ward off those thinking of sitting next to them. The technique here is to avoid all eye contact with anyone who looks wistfully at the seat on the grounds that most people are far too polite to ask for the bag to be put where it belongs, on the floor.

The journeys themselves were not remarkable, although the Met on the return was held several times for a few minutes; we were very close behind another and they might have been "regulating" the system as they used to call it. There were no announcements about covid precautions, no station assistants were to be seen and, of course, nobody was enforcing the wearing of masks although this is a legal requirement under London Transport's own by-laws. We used to get loads of announcements about not smoking, standing behind yellow lines, keeping one's property with one, all that sort of thing, so it was strange to have a peaceful journey.

I also noticed that some of the signals on the Chiltern Line northbound out of Harrow were covered up. These tracks are also used by some Met services (indeed, a fast Chesham was due in according to my tube app) so it seems that the Automatic Train Operating system, promised for God-knows how many years, may be in force on that section. This system has been running well on the Jubilee for quite a while and it should mean that Mets can go faster. It has been a long time since I used to get hurled around in the swaying carriage of the old A stock belting up from Neasden at 60mph plus; it will be fun if they can push the S stock trains to their full potential over that section.