Today I cancelled our subscription to Good Housekeeping. They had been accumulating in piles for some time,undisturbed by reading. Nigella in blowsy Christmas glory displaying her vols aux vents, the Countess of Wessex elegant and toothy, Lorraine Kelly even toothier – all doomed to have their secret passions unrevealed or their precious causes unpublicised. They have their place in dentists’ surgeries for instance, but in the home Good Housekeeping simply isn’t good housekeeping when they clutter up chairs, stack up on bedroom floors, or secrete the TV Guide among their pages. Suspecting that cancelling the subscription would be a hassle is what had caused me to stay execution for many months. And I was right.
The Hearst Family did not accumulate a fortune of 24.5 billion dollars by making it easy for me to cancel a subscription. It would have been quicker for me to fly to LA and motor up the Big Sur coast and knock on the door of Hearst Castle.So for future reference, this is how to cancel a subscription to Hearst magazines.Go on to the website where you will not find a cancellation button.Go to FAQs and scroll down a very long way for instructions, somewhere below the bottom of your screen.Return to the home page and try to
sign in. Start looking for the password you wrote on a scrap of paper 4 years ago or wherever it is you keep you cache of passwords. Go to Forgotten Password? Go to reset password. Tear out the first handful of hair. Go to emails to find confirmation of new password. Have lunch. Go to emails again where no reset password has arrived. Tear out second handful of hair. I then decided to open a new registration, agreed to cookies (not Nigella’s) etc etc and having registered at last was greeted with very welcoming messages. The news clearly had not got around to one of the world’s biggest news magnates that I was only coming in order to get out. Job done. Now Hearst will sue me for breaching copyright with this picture to make up for my lost subscription.
It was easier to take out a subscription to the ‘Oldie’ at Di Fretwell’s suggestion. I fancied something witty and light, aimed at those of us of a more venerable vintage which was not all about funeral services, incontinence advice and pension scams. Maybe it would be a gentle game of Scrabble with Giles Brandreth or a quiz with John Humphries. Both are defenders of conservative values in language use so I was rather disappointed to see that my application was rejected on the grounds that I had put full stops after my initials, even though this is how I was taught to do it in a period when most Oldies were being educated. My bank, on the other hand insists on full stops (or periods as the Americans call them) in 4 digit numbers where I was taught to put commas. This decline in punctuation propriety all started in the mid 70s with post codes. Having all been taught how to slope an address on an envelope and insert commas after the house number and at line ends, no one knew how to punctuate a post code. Clerical staff everywhere were making up their own rules and hence the collapse of graphological uniformity. Relativism was contaminating punctuation. Now we have deteriorated into such random arrangements that even I wonder if I can be bothered to put Capital Letters (or upper case as we call them because the title we use stems now from keyboards rather than fountain pens) in addresses or question marks in texts. Interestingly texters get very excited and leap about and put in lots of exclamation marks to show how witty or excited they are, but rarely bother with the question mark.
These are all examples of how the way we conduct our lives is determined by the constraints of technology. If the software cannot handle a comma we have to use full stops. If we’re going to have the trouble of using a shift key to form a capital letter we won’t bother. Educational assessment is reducing to examining only that which can be easily quantified by a computer – witness the chaos of GCSE and ‘A’ Level exams this last summer. A generation ago the computer studies type of student tended towards geekism, couldn’t make eye contact with human beings and operated in poorly lit and unventilated cellars, hence absorbing very little Vitamin D. These have now either succumbed to rickets or graduated to dictating how we communicate, educate and are providing the statistics and the modelling for Covid.
A senior government scientific advisor this week was explaining on Radio about “the amount of people who could be vaccinated.” AMOUNT!! My laptop almost fuses at the gross misuse of language. Could you trust a vaccine dose where the developers don’t know their amounts from their numbers?
View from the Tors this evening
