Life imitates art

Strap-hanging into town on the District Line, my mate was telling me about David Lodge's latest novel, Deaf Sentence, a work inspired by the author's own onset of deafness.

My friend started to explain Lodge's contention that "blindness is tragedy, deafness is comedy", but serendipity struck to illustrate her point. A cringe-making, annoying and very loud mobile phone ring tone rang out: the sort that you put on your phone when pissed and a bit bored then die of mortification when it goes off in a public place. We turned round to see who was the guilty party, expecting them to quickly quell it. But no one answered it, and it rang out loud and proud into the carriage as four, evidently unconnected, people sitting side-by-side, each plugged into their iPods, stared blankly into space, oblivious to the dirty looks of other commuters. We dissolved into laughter and agreed deafness is indeed comedy.

What's in a bonus?

I have just read about the employees of Northern Rock getting bonuses for their part in the bank's progress towards repayment of the 25 billion quid we stumped up to bail it out. The bonuses are averagely two grand or 10% of salary: loose change to the bastards who caused all this mess.

I'm not going to debate the rights and wrongs of Northern Rock employees' worthiness of a bonus. Instead, I am interested in the words of the union representative who is defending the bonus payout, on the grounds that "staff have had to endure a difficult working environment, including a freeze on their normal bonuses and promotions for some 18 months".

What stopped me short were the words "normal bonuses". It seems to me that the original meaning of bonus as "an unexpected but welcome event" has been lost and instead bonuses have become part of annual salary entitlement. One of the Sunday financial pages breathlessly reported, as evidence of the increasingly tough conditions applied to mortgage-lending, that several lenders will no longer include annual bonuses when calculating maximum borrowing levels. The surprise should be that they ever included them. When bonuses were first conceived they were earned on exceptional performance of either or both the individual or the company. How then can a bank or building society possibly know how a prospective borrower is likely to perform in his or her job! Do they have access to borrowers' perfomance appraisals? Do they study company reports and broker's predictions for the employer companies of prospective borrowers. Of course not. It is yet another example of the profligacy and irresponsibility the banks have been showing for years.

We all know the bonus culture has been out of control. But it's not just in the amounts some of the evil bastards were getting (and in many cases still are), but in the way that if you are eligible for a bonus it is assumed that you will get it. It has become just a lump sum portion of normal compensation packages. This can't be right? Whether the bonus is for £200 or £20 million, shouldn't it only be paid for exceptional delivery above and beyond the the requirements of the job?

Little Emperors

A couple of days ago I was walking along the Fulham Road with a friend. A school bus pulled up in front of us and a teacher sprang out, ahead of a seemingly unending stream of teenage boys and their baggage. The party blocked the pavement, forcing my friend and I to stand and wait until every child got off the bus, while the teacher barked out intructions: "Straighten that tie" "Tuck that shirt in" (all of which were completely ignored by the boys), but totally failed to say what I would have thought was obvious - "Hold on a second and let these ladies get past". Eventually the last boy jumped off, the teacher stood aside, the bus pulled away, and we were left in front of a pavement still blocked with a gaggle of boys and their sports-bags and had to walk in the road to get past. The teacher thanked us for our patience but it didn't seem to have occurred to him that it was the boys who should have shown some patience and stood by to let us pass.

Then on the tube last week. It was very crowded and a seat in front of me became vacant. I was about to sit down, when saw a woman holding onto a young child. The girl was about six and the woman looked tired, so I stepped back to let her take the seat, assuming she would sit with the child on her knee. But no. Children these days don't like to share seats. The woman thanked me, then plonked her daughter in the seat and remained standing herself. I was pissed off as I had no intention of giving up a seat to a perfectly fit and healthy child and recalled all those childhood years of giving up my seat to anyone older.

Are children today less sturdy, less capable of maintaining their balance when on public transport, less strong? Or is it that children today are less polite, more indulged by their doting parents and totally unrespecting of adults.

A hell of a lot of parents today seem terrified of their own children. They act as though desperate to make their children like them and this engenders a fear of telling their kids off, so they end up pleading and trying to reason with their errant offspring. This is creating a hostage to fortune and is based on the erroneous assumption that if you are always nice, your offspring will love you more.

But then what do I know?