In Gospel Oak, which I now realise, Christmas is a doddle. I can take the bus to Oxford Street or take the car to Brent Cross and get everything I need. In the Dorset countryside it is not so simple. I thought I would get everything I needed at the last minute in Lyme Regis, a few minutes drive away. So I have failed to get the Dubonnet. They did not have any, mainly because most of the shops have been converted into souvenir shops. But at least I enjoyed listening to the town band playing Christmas carols which is a distinct improvement on the recorded stuff blaring through the loud speakers at Brent Cross. And I paused to sit on a bench and watch and listen to the sea and admired the view of Golden Cap.

Not wanting to be defeated I zoomed off in the late afternoon to Bridport and found a Threshers. But no Dubonnet. Only the Queen drinks Dubonnet these days, the shopkeeper informed me. Whereas I am now in the heart of Prince Charles country, within a stone’s throw of Poundbury and River Cottage, where the fix is organic fruit juices and Hugh Fearnley Whithenstall’s superior yogurt. So we will have to make do with tonic to blend with the gin.

There are many compensations, however. We could have had one of the turkeys Rosie Boycott rears on her farm, where she now lives the pure life after having survived her rebellious youth. Instead we decided to get our turkey from the local butcher in Charmouth to encourage him to stay in business. Charmouth has a minute population compared to Hampstead whose sole remaining butcher has just closed down despite a protest movement from the not un-influential inhabitants.

Writing this now the wind is getting up. I can hear the noise of the waves and am reminded that King Canute had to acknowledge that his own power was puny by comparison. Likewise, even the Hampstead chattering classes are powerless to halt the onward march of he supermarkets.

But that does not stop them trying. So I am passing on here my favourite Christmas card, from Kipper Williams, one of my London neighbours and also a Guardian cartoonist. They may be losing but they have not lost their sense of humour.

Happy Christmas all.

Most of the heavyweight media commentators have been saying the storms currently besetting Gordon Brown will blow over. Their rationale is that he has been hit by what Harold Macmillan called, ‘events, dear boy’. My own reading of the events of the last few weeks is not only that Gordon Brown should resign. But that even if he does not want to he will have to. And my prediction is that when the next General Election is called, whether it is soon or at the last constitutional moment, the leader of the Labour Party who will fight it will not be Gordon Brown.

In terms of the ordinary citizen the most serious of the ‘events’ which have hit Gordon Brown is the revelation that the newly merged Inland Revenue and Customs and Excise has lost a disk containing the banking details of 25 million citizens. Which is more than half the entire adult population. They are being urged to check their bank accounts regularly in case someone is siphoning away their hard-earned savings.

This is not Gordon Brown’s fault. And he should be devoting most of his Prime Minister’s priority time in ensuring that these disks are found before someone starts taking money out of the bank accounts of 25 million citizens.

What is Gordon Brown’s fault is the debacle over Northern Rock, which rose to fame and fortune on his policies, and which has been bailed out by the Bank of England with taxpayers’ money. Because, businessmen as they were, they built up an empire which took the savings of ordinary people and put them at risk.

What is most definitely Gordon Brown’s fault is the current debacle about the funding of the Labour Party during the period when he, along with Tony Blair, was running the Labour Party. Everyone knows this. Everyone knows of the rows between Blair and Brown when Blair was Prime Minister. But both of them created the image of new Labour which was deemed to be friendly to businessmen.

But the businessmen they have espoused are people like David Abrahams, a property developer in the northeast. He has been the biggest contributor to Labour Party funds since 2003. Yet, according to the journalists who have done some serious work, his declared assets are about £244,000. So the money he has been giving to the Labour Party must come from various off-shore funds. And he has given it to the Labour Party undercover by causing some of his employees to donate it. But two of those employees say they did not know this? But they are supposed to have signed the cheques? Were their signatures forged? Are their memories mistaken? We should be told.

I do not impugn the personal integrity of Gordon Brown, whom I first met many years ago shortly after Tony Blair became leader of the Labour Party. I think he is a misguided honest man. He has made a serious attempt to free Labour from their dependence on funding by the trade union movement and to make Labour acceptable to businessmen like Rupert Murdoch. In other words to demonstrate that Labour is not anti-business.

What has happened over the last few years is not all Gordon Brown’s fault. It is to do with the love affair between the new Labour of Blair and Brown and their attempt to get cosy cosy with big business.

Labour is not the party of big business. It is supported by millions of people who are the victims of big business. And of the behaviour of businessmen.

In the last few months both Gordon Brown himself and Hilary Benn, the environment minister, refused to accept the clandestine contributions from Abrahams (although Benn, the son of Tony Benn, did accept a perfectly legal cheque from Abrahams himself). But Harriet Harman did accept the dishonest and illegal contribution from one of Abrahams’s  employees. She says she had no idea, etc, etc.

But Harman is married to Jack Dromey who is the treasurer of the Labour Party. In the cash for honours enquiry he went public and said that he was not told about any of this. But he is the treasurer of the Labour Party. In this round he was back on national television tonight insisting he knew nothing of these matters?

So why has he not resigned? How on earth does he construe his post as Treasurer of the Labour Party, if he is not told who is financing the Labour Party. Which is what he is saying.

The only person who has resigned so far is Peter Watt, the Labour Party General Secretary. But tonight on national television David Triesman, who was the Labour party general secretary, says he knew nothing of these arrangements. Since I know him even better than the other particapants in this sorry affair, I know that he is speaking the literal truth.

Triesman did not know the truth because he did not ask questions. About the main source of Labour Party finance while he was in office.

As for Jack Dromey I cannot understand why he has not resigned as Labour Party treasurer. During the cash for honours scandal he continually proclaimed that he had not been told anything about it. That is exactly the stance he is adopting tonight. What is happening is terribly wrong. But he appears to think it is nothing to do with him.

But he is the Labour Party treasurer. Surely he should resign forthwith, not because he has done anything wrong, but because if the Labour Party cannot even tell their own treasurer what is happening, there is something very seriously wrong.

How can Jack Dromey continue to play the role of treasurer of the Labour Party when he has apparently not been told who their major donors are?

While I have been complaining of feeling like death’s door, laid low by the very trivial bug that is doing the rounds, two of my contemporaries have actually died. Within a couple of days of each other. And co-incidentally of the same final illness, kidney failure.  Both were swashbuckling risk-takers who might easily have managed to kill themselves years ago. In fact, they died quickly and relatively peacefully in bed.

Norman Mailer managed to make it to 84 despite his many excesses. And was writing prolifically up until the end. In 1960, when I was living in New York, he was challenging death by walking the parapet of his high rise Manhattan apartment while half pissed and by swapping punches in late night brawls with men bigger them him. He was pushing the boundaries in all sorts of directions, not all of them acts of high courage. He used a knife on one of his wives, nearly killing her, and beat up another so badly that she was lucky not be maimed.

Though there is universal agreement that The Naked and the Dead the war novel he wrote as a young man, is one of the best war novels of all time, there is less agreement about whether Mailer ranks with the greats of American literature. The long Guardian obituary by James Campbell makes the case for, demonstrating how in his fiction and in his outstanding journalism he was addressing the vital issues facing the Americans of his generation. The Guardian also carried the most pungent anti verdict, a short article by Joan Smith, who rates him as ‘a sexist, homophobic reactionary’. Her concluding sentence packs a punch which would have put Mohamed Ali out for the count:

More grand reactionary than great writer, Mailer was a faux-radical who used the taboo-breaking atmosphere of the 60s as cover for a career of lifelong self-promotion.

My own verdict is somewhere in the middle. Mailer’s political views were a mixture of reactionary and revolutionary. And as a writer he was deeply in the macho tradition of writers like Hemingway. But he was totally serious about pushing the boundaries of writing and experimenting. He pushed the notion of the stream of consciousness initiated by James Joyce and Henry Miller to further extremes. This involves temporarily suspending the critical faculty and allowing the pen to take dictation from the unconscious. This technique can produce a lot of rubbish but it led Mailer to new insights, and passages of beauty and wisdom. Some of the earliest efforts can be found in Cannibals and Christians.

John Gough, my cousin, who died on Monday aged 67, did not spend much time in his life reading books, let alone writing them. He was five years younger than me, the eldest child of my mother’s sister. He went to grammar school when I was at my most studious, discovering in the world of books, lives far more interesting than I could observe in Wolverhampton. John, by contrast, wanted to have a good time, to taste life, and in his own kind of way to push the boundaries. To be his own man and make his own mark.

He did OK, making himself a tidy sum as a speculative builder. Then came a recession and he promptly lost it all in one fell swoop. He went to Canada, made a fresh start and establishing a new life. Back in England some twenty years ago he was struck down by a massive heart attack. Which left him incapable of doing any more building work. But he never lost his zest for life and his ability to convey that zest to the people around him. Fortified from time to time by that glass of whisky, which he was not supposed to drink.  

Tonight, despite this dratted bug, I shall raise a glass of whisky myself and toast Norman Mailer and John Gough who both lived their lives to the full.

Since I arrived back in Charmouth last Friday afternoon I have spent most of the time asleep. Some cold or flu-type bug hit me so I decided to ride it out rather than run for the anti-biotics. It has worked in the past and it is a few years now since I have had to resort to the pills.

Through Sunday night the symptoms were still escalating so when I awoke on Monday morning I decided that the time had come for me TO DO SOMETHING. So I rang one of the two medical practices in the village. Engaged the first three times but at the fourth attempt I got through to a human being. (No automated message, thank God.) They were fully booked today, she told me, but she could fit me in at 9.15 AM on Tuesday. I settled for that and had another nap.

Monday night was not as bad as Sunday and I was feeling almost cheerful when I arrived in the doctor’s consulting room. First, my temperature. He picked up his electronic thermometer, pressed a few buttons, then shook it. Finally apologised that he did not have his old one handy. But neither of us needed an instrument to know that my temperature was neither dangerously high or low.

His stethoscope worked and he declared that I had a chest infection. There was a bug doing the rounds and it fitted my symptoms precisely. They would have no effect on the infection so I did not need to take them. Unless I started spitting up green as well as my present production of white and light yellow.

Today the symptoms seem to be gradually receding. And I have had not a bad day but the inactivity has made me aware that I have been in a depressive phase for several days now. Triggered, as is usual, by several factors.

Sitting out on the terrace just now I decided that I should write about it. But still I did not move from my chair. What’s it like? As if my pen is anchored a Sisyphus like stone.

That absurdity did get my out of my chair and at the computer. But from this vantage point it does not seem so absurd. There is no pleasure in my writing. And I do feel a bit like he must have felt pushing that stone up the hill, with the growing realisation that he was never going to get there.

Just like me now, because I have totally forgotten what the end of this blog was going to be. But I do remember that what got me out of my chair was gazing at the sunset. The sky was tinged with pink. It was under-stated sunset, a sharp contrast to the spectacular blazing dawn, a picture of which accompanied the last blog I wrote on 22 October.

Looking at this sunset I realised that I was feeling a deep melancholy. And melancholy is not the same as depression so just how it differs would take more than a blog to consider.

So if I survive the bugs and the glooms my next post is likely to be around the issues raised by David Leigh’s lecture at City University, The End of The Reporter (us journalists are not afraid to exaggerate.) Meanwhile here’s a link to press gazette whose reporter Dominic Ponsford, covered the lecture and also wrote this reprise.

Awoke just after 7 AM and drew back the curtains. And gasped. The night was still black but there was narrow band of deepest red stretching across the bottom of the horizon. The lights of Portland Bill were just visible but otherwise all blackness.

By the time I had taken my cup of tea to the study, the day had arrived. The rooftops were clearly visible and the sky above now showed a broad band painted with a mix of pinks and light blues and yellows. Clearly, God if he exists is a dab hand with the paint brush.

In came little Dulcie, disturbing my philosophical ramblings. ‘What colour is that?’, I asked. ‘Yellow’, she replied, and when I looked doubtful, she added, ‘And pink’. And then, ‘Have you seen my blanket.’ ‘It’s on that chair’, I said. ‘Don’t be silly. That’s my jumper.’

She went out to look elsewhere. And suddenly the whole sky was awash with colour. Making me frustrated at being a mere scribbler with no talent at all with a paint brush. My video camera is still unpacked. My still camera is back in London. I grabbed my mobile phone, and fumbled with the controls. It was asking me to send a message, resize the picture and do all sorts of other things. Finally I managed to get it to take a picture.

Here it is. Is it worth more than a thousand words?

When I finished my last blog I accessed my email.

This is a copy of the message from npower.

Thank you for taking the time to contact us. 

Normally we provide an immediate response to our valued customers who contact us by email. Please accept our apologies for any delay in responding to you and rest assured that all efforts are being made to improve our response time. 

You can be confident that your enquiry is important to us and that we will reply as soon as possible.

 Their notion of 'immediate response' is to send an automated email. Instead of accessing their records about my complaints going back to May.

They are driving their 'valued customers' mad.

They should be told.

The BT story gets more unbelievable every day. Not content with connecting my London telephone to a number owned by someone else for 16 years without telling him or me, they have sent a letter to my London address demanding payment for October for connecting my old London number, which I had had for 39 years.

They have got the right number on the bill, but, according to my wife who just arrived back in London, the line is dead.

Which is a step backwards. Because since we moved on August 1st, the line has had a dialling tone, but when you attempted to dial, it told you that you had dialled an incorrect number. And when you rang it from outside, it told you either that, or that the number had not been recognised.

Two months of treatment like this makes me think that if I were not already a certified manic depressive, I would have been driven mad by all this.

So how much are companies like BT and npower adding to the bills of the National Health Service? They must be driving thousands of normal people quite mad. The repeated message, delivered by the automated responses, and the written responses when they finally come, is that we, the customers, are making the mistakes.
And why are journalists not paying attention to this?

Is it all the result of the Thatcherite determination to privatise pubic utililities? It might be.

Not having a telephone landline is an inconvenience. But I had to deal with a rather more serious matter as well. My Dorset electricity is delivered by overhead powerlines, which are surrounded by the prolific apple tree in my garden. Which might be brougt down when we have a serious storm, which in the last few days I thought might be imminent.

This is an emergency. But I had to spend an hour ringing five telephone numbers. Because Southern Electric, who collects my money, does not own the telephone line. That is a body called SWEB, which is nothing less than the new version of the old South Western Electricity Board, which used to supply power before Thatcher went mad for privatisation.

They have told me they will deal with it in two working days. Which are nearly up.

And nothing has happened.

npower (fashionably lower case. And E. E. Cummings thought he was just writing a poem! Little did he know that his efforts would be plagiarised by capitalism. Perhaps his estate should be asking npower for royalties.) is part of the vast German-owned RWE Group. And it clearly has no power at all.

Today I got a reply from a second ‘correspondence advisor’,  one Mark Brown, who repeats the mistakes of his colleague, Scott Collin. The anonymous manager has decided! And passed his decision on to the team of ‘correspondence advisors’ I wonder how many they employ. And how much that costs the shareholders.

But far worse than them are the managers who are employed to manage.

So I have to go to the top.

So please read my previous post and email the chief exec. He ought to be told that this manager who has not addressed this increasingly irate customer is wasting pots of money for the shareholders. And that what he must address is the way his company is organised which perpetuates such idiocies.

npower, unlike BT, has had the decency to apologise to me, and offer to pay me for my mobile phone bills, as long as I submit them. Which I cannot go because I use pay as you go. Since I cannot supply the bills they have decreed that the ‘correct’ compensation for me is £10.

Which I think, and I have told them, is grossly inadequate. Since my saga with npower has been going on far longer than my saga with BT, and is easily veriable by them as well as by me.

But npower tells me that they have so many accounts that they cannot trace my payments to them, unless I give them all the bank references!

So npower has threatened three times to cut off my gas supply and sent in the debt collectors hoping to break down my door. Despite the fact that they were collecting my money by direct debit!!!

So it is obvious that I cannot rely on customer services. I have to send my complaints to the boss.

So who is the boss of npower?

npower is a company which emerged from the Thatcher zeal for privatising everything. The main root company was the privatised Midlands Electricity Board, which, as it happens supplied my electricity in Wolverhampton when I was studying for my A-levels, and never once threatened to cut off our supply, because my parents paid their bills. As do I.

But in 2001 npower was acquired by RWE, which is a German coal mining company, which has ‘diversified’ into all sorts of power, including nuclear, gas, electricity, oil, etc. npower is a tiny part of this vast empire. So if it takes npower over four months to find the money I have been paying them to what they say is their ‘many accounts’ how can I convince RWE, that their subsidiary has been harrassing me for money which I had already paid.

Difficult. But since the RWE web site tells me how socially responsible they are I shall go to the top. The President and chief executive of RWE Group. He is Jurgen Grossman and his web address is: http://www.rwe.com/generator.aspx/konzern/executive-board/juergen-grossmann/language=en/id=498692/juergen-grossmann-page.html

This is what he looks like. And he has clearly done all the ‘right things’ career wise. But does he know what npower is doing for him in Britain?

Dr.-Ing. Dr. E.h. Jürgen Großmann

President and CEO

Biography

Probably not. So please tell him.

From my experience his underlings at npower show that RWE stands for Really the Worst European  gas company in Britain.

RWE clearly has its finger in a vast number of pies in many countries.

But in supplying gas to London NW3 they are the pits.

(This blog is subtitled ‘BT: Rake’s progress, update five)

The telephone number which BT imposed on me on Monday of last week, and which I have resolutely refused to use, turns out to be a number belonging to someone else! Not only that the man concerned, who is a lifelong resident of Gospel Oak, has had this number for 16 years and it is his business number. So for the past week his business has suffered while he toiled through all those automated options to get BT to correct their dreadful mistake. So today he is getting his calls. But my line in Savernake Road is once again dead, as it has been for more than two months.

I think it is about time that Sir Michael Rake, the new chairman of BT, got to grips with these problems.

Here is the latest scorecard.

Number of Days BT has failed to connect my telephone as agreed: 70

Number of Days BT has failed to reply to my complaints and give me any explanation for this delay: 69

Money spent on mobile phone trying to contact a BT human being: £50 plus

Time spent on the telephone and internet complaints: Hours and hours.

Apologies from BT: Nil

The Chairman of BT is now Sir Michael Rake, an accountant with a record quite as distinguished in that field as Sir Christopher Bland was in his. Can he be happy with the way the company he now chairs is behaving? Does he even know how they are behaving?

Maybe not, so if you meet him, tell him. This is what he looks like.

Sir Michael Rake was appointed to the Board as Chairman on 26 September 2007.

He was Chairman of KPMG International from 2002 until September 2007. Prior to his appointment as Chairman of KPMG International he was Chairman of KPMG in Europe and Senior Partner of KPMG in the UK.