uk – Dan Q

Polyday Politics workshop

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Content warning

This post briefly touches on experience of the practical and emotional side-effects of a credible threat being made to the safety of a loving and healthy families by the underchecked power of social workers if they bringing to their work bigoted opinions about the shape a relationship “should” be.

I was at Polyday on Saturday and facilitated a session on The Politics of Polyamory

Grant will be leading a discussion abut how we want law and policy to relate to our poly lives in the short and longer term, mapping out what our community wants in terms of rights, general access and acceptance.

About 40 people showed up. I was mainly facilitating but also took a few notes so others may add or correct. I use poly, non-monogamy and similar interchangeably here.

Polyamory is not a protected characteristic in terms of the Equality Act – do we want it to be or are we mainly being left alone? We could be sacked for it. One person chooses not to disclose their relationship shape as while their education employer don’t seem to have a problem with it, HR and union suggest doing so could attract publicity and lead to pressure on the employer. Anyone working with or having children could more strongly attract moral outrage.

…

Grant (skibbley), in Polyday Politics workshop

My BiCon/Polyday buddy Grant facilitated a session at Polyday 2026. I didn’t make it, so I appreciated him putting together these notes, which reflect some of the things I’ve been thinking about recently.

I’m acutely aware that my relationship structure is not a protected characteristic and so discriminating against me for it could potentially be legally-viable. E.g. if an employer felt that it reflected poorly upon them that my partner was married to somebody else and fired me as a result… it might be tough to find legal recourse.¹

That said: I’ve always been transparent about my relationships in both my personal and professional life. I feel like I’m in a relatively “safe” position to do so (if I were a primary school teacher I might think twice about it!), and I feel like those of whom for which it’s “safe” have a bit of a duty to be uncloseted, in order to help normalise polyamory on behalf of all of the people for whom it’s not so-safe for them to be out. Normalisation is a powerful force in countering discrimination, because – even without specific legal recognition – it weakens the argument that, for example, a polyamorous person brings their employer into disrepute. Imagine if any of the polyamorous MPs (statistically, there must have been some!) were out about it: what representation that would be!²

Grant goes on to note:

…

Child access / custody could be a time relationships are contested. Could evidence of non-monogamy be used against people? Do lawyers understand non-monogamy? Might we introduce them and related professionals in disputes to some of the concepts and arguments that might come up before they do?

…

Here’s where my fears lie, and they’re not unfounded. We’ve already had direct experience of our access to our children being threatened by the prejudices of people in positions of power over us.

The biggest example of this came in 2017, when a confluence of misguided opinions by medical professionals and social workers lead to us being closely investigated, interrogated, and monitored for much of the year, and treated as if we were endangering our children (which we self-evidently weren’t). I’ve not written about it online before and (nine years on) I’m still not ready to do so in-detail, because it was a sufficiently traumatic experience that it visibly impacts “how we parent” to this day.

Suffice to say that a paediatrician thought it odd that their patient’s mother mentioned having two partners and this, coupled with an at-that-point unexplained medical condition (which turned out to be a whole lot of nothing) lead them to summon social services. Then the social worker who was assigned to the case (who was going through his own relationship-related difficulties and should probably not have been given this kind of work in the first place) brought a narrow-minded bias about our family structure led him to believe from the outset that we must be guilty of any number of negligent or even abusive behaviours. And this kicked-off the bureaucratic juggernaut that is children’s services and imposed an insane amount of legal pressure on us for a long and painful time.

We’re smart, and well-supported, and well-resourced. We lawyered-up and we fought and we won³. But again, this leans into our privilege: the same kind of privilege that I lean on when I’m “out” at work. And it serves to remind us that not every polyamorous family has our level of privilege and there are others who wouldn’t have survived the things that we were put through.

In hindsight, it would have been trivially easy to simply lie to a doctor about our relationship status, and the problem would have never arisen. I’m sure there are polyamorous people who lie to people in positions of authority all the time, for their own protection, and our experience shows that they might well be right to do so. Discrimination against polyamorous relationships is real.

…

Some organisations such as the NHS use forms and boxes that we don’t all fit in well. Other gender, sexuality and relationship divergent people and groups can have similar problems. Changing forms and tech can be slow and expensive, though we might piggyback onto existing update and review cycles.

We can study and share how to work with or around existing systems. Some people have more access to resources and knowledge of how to get them than others.

…

Ignoring the (big) thing above, most of the poly-discrimination I see in my everyday life is of a smaller, microaggression-ish, tripping-over-established-systems kind of way.

Like: when you take the time to list all three parents on a form that you submit to the school, only to discover that they’ve only listed as contacts the two of them whose surname is shared with the child and you have to reach out separately, prove your legitimacy, and get it corrected.

Or like the problems I’ve documented with filling out census forms, where if I fill them out honestly online I’m forbidden from submitting them because they disallow any declaration of relationships that says, for example, that a person has both a spouse and a partner. Incidentally, I get the same problem when I try to buy insurance:

Or like how when you use a parental controls system like Google Family Link and discover its “undocumented feature” that if you add a third parent… then the least-recently-added existing parent gets expelled from the group.

These are annoyances, and I’d love to see sufficient legal recognition that I’d be able to more-assertively fight to get them fixed⁴. But really what I’m concerned about is the problems that deny rights to polyamorous folk: rights related to end-of-life care, to marriage, to inheritance, to childcare, and so on. These are the big problems that could do with legal consideration, in my mind.

Anyway: I was grateful for Grant for keeping such solid notes on a discussion that I couldn’t be at. It gives me hope that other people are concerned about some of these kinds of things, too. Go read Grant’s notes in full if you like.

Footnotes

¹ There’d be a few possible counter-arguments, but none of them are guaranteed winners like race, sexuality, or marital status might be!

² Of course I’m familiar with Sarah Brown and Zoë O’Connell, openly-polyamorous Lib Dem councillors, the latter of whom came a respectable third place for their constituency in the 2017 general election, but what I’m really looking for is somebody in the commons to come out!

³ Also, our fight ensured that the intolerant social worker we were initially assigned – whose prejudice turned what could have been a quick chat into a drawn-out, expensive, and emotionally-gruelling affair – was struck off and will not work in the sector again.

⁴ For now, my best weapon has been data protection regulation. E.g. I can fill out an insurance application form in a way that satisfies their validation, and then follow-up with an email asking them to correct the incorrect personal information they’re holding about me. I’m sure I’ve annoyed some database administrators who’ve ended up having to bypass validations in order to correct their data, but to be fair: their software teams shouldn’t have implemented hard validations on these things in the first place, should they? I use the same trick, with great success, with people whose systems have trouble with my surname.

Things Champ’d Up thinks are uniquely American

Filter US-centric content?

I’ve enjoyed the mixed-bag that are Jackbox Games since… well, since You Don’t Know Jack‘s UK edition!¹ Nowadays they’re better known for the Jackbox Party Pack game series, which can be a real riot of beer-and-pretzels sofa-gaming fun, if you’ve got the right crowd².

Champ'd Up screenshot showing competition for The Champion of Cult Leaders, featuring Smarmy Frog versus Trump. — This wasn’t one of our games, but I’ve *definitely* drawn convicted felon Donald Trump a few times while playing it!

One of those games is Champ’d Up, in which you draw-and-name characters who you think will win a particular contest, e.g. “The Champion of Looking Suspicious”. Another player, without seeing the prompt, tries to develop a character who will beat you at that category in a popular vote³.

There’s this checkbox in most of the games that lets you “filter US-centric content”. This aims to remove most cultural references that, if you’re from a part of the Anglophone world outside of the US, you might “not get”.

Screenshot from Champ'd Up's settings page showing the Filter US-Centric Content checkbox. — I’ve no idea what the “Family-Friendly” checkbox does, and I have no intention of finding out⁴.

I check that box as standard because, like many of us from “rest of world” I don’t understand things like pledging allegiance to a flag, being able to buy firearms in a supermarket, pies only being a sweet food and never a savoury one, refusing to use metric measurements at every opportunity, the risk of going bankrupt if you have to go to hospital, and using fractions like “one fourth” even while having a coin called a quarter. These are cultural touchstones that are alien to me. And I figure that toggling that switch to “on” is shielding me from having to learn these unfamiliar concepts, right?

But I found myself wondering: what exactly gets filtered out when I check that box? Because determining what the developers think is US-centric is a more-interesting question than what I think.

What does Champ’d Up think “US-centric” means?

Fortunately, Champ’d Up‘s prompt data files are stored in JSON files (with a slightly-unusual file extension .jet), which means that – once we’ve found them – it’s pretty easy to extract all of the prompts and metadata from them. I’m on a Mac right now, and I found the files in the horrendously-long path ~/Library/Application Support/Steam/steamapps/common/The Jackbox Party Pack 7/The Jackbox Party Pack 7.app/Contents/Resources/macos/games/WorldChampions/content.⁵

Let’s see what prompts Champ’d Up marks as being “US-centric”:

My go-to tool for extracting data from JSON is the excellent jq. If it’s not already in your toolbox… then, well, it should be! My command, if you’re looking to copy/paste, was: jq -r '.content[] | select(.us == true) | .gameText' WorldChampions*.jet

I get that I’m coming from the perspective of a British person, and maybe my experience isn’t universal. But many of these seem to be… not as US-centric as they’re made-out to be!

Here’s the full list:

the Midwest
High School
Bachelorette Parties
Country Music
Orlando
Misdemeanors
Margaritaville
the Underworld
Black Friday Shoppers
Jocks
Twerps
Forever Alone
Porta Potties
Being Zen
My Way or the Highway
“Bless Their Heart”
Spring Break
West Coast Livin’
the Hootenanny
Tinseltown
Applebee’s
Village Idiots
Looking Lost
Monster Truck Fans
Hot Topic
Having An Estranged Family
Hogging The Bathroom
PBS
Paul Giamatti Roles
“Burn It With Fire”
Thanksgiving Dinner
“Do You Know Who My Dad Is?”
Being Emotionally Stunted
Peeing in the Pool
Going Down in a Blaze of Glory
the Gap Year

Sure, some of these are uniquely American like spring break, PBS, and Black Friday (although that last one’s been leaking lately).

But do Americans think that the rest of the world doesn’t have gap years or village idiots?⁶ That we don’t have people who pee in pools or hog the bathroom? Or that we can’t translate “bachelorette party”, “high school” or “porta potties” to our local dialect (while simultaneously expecting us to be fine with “theater”, “dive bar”, and “Axe body spray”)?

Edited Champ'd Up screenshot showing the battle for The Champion of Editing Videogame Metadata, pitting Friendly Dan against Hacker Dan. — In case you’re wondering “wait, can I *edit* those `.jet` files?” then I’ve got good news for you…

I note that several things not filtered out by the “filter US-centric content” option include “The Champion of Being $100,000 In Debt”, “The Champion of the Barn Dance”, and “The Champion of Jaywalking!”, all of which clearly do require more translation!⁷

I guess what I can conclude from this is that “US-centric” doesn’t necessarily mean the same thing to people in the US… as it does to those of us in the rest of the world.⁸ Which was an interesting thing to learn from a random thought about a toggle-switch.

Footnotes

¹ Which was already 8 years old by the first time I blogged about it.

² Jackbox games can also work okay streamed to your friends over Zoom: I wrote a guide to doing this well based on my experience of hosting many such events during the most-isolated bits of the COVID-19 pandemic.

³ There’s marginally more to it than that, like the fact that previously-drawn characters – even from earlier games – can be called back up in tag team matches to take over when the prompt changes… but you’ve got the essence of it.

⁴ In my last game I ended up inventing a character called “Chad McHugedick”, with an appropriately inappropriate picture. And that wasn’t even for an especially-racy prompt!

⁵ If you want to repeat my experiment on a PC then the equivalent path, once you find your steamapps/ folder, will be .../steamapps/common/The Jackbox Party Pack 7/games/WorldChampions/content.

⁶ Perhaps Americans really do think these things are unique to their country. Maybe my Team America: World Police reference was more-relevant than I thought!

⁷ For US readers who need a hand: dollars aren’t the currency in all Anglophone countries, and the value of the US dollar is for many of us something we’re not acutely familiar with. I’ve never heard of or seen a “barn dance” here in the UK; I reckon the closest thing we’ve got would be a cèilidh? And “jaywalking” doesn’t really appear in the vocabulary of non-US English, on account of it not being a crime at all in many countries where driving everywhere isn’t the default option (here in the UK, for example, as long as you’re not actively or maliciously obstructing traffic, you can cross most roads wherever you want to).

⁸ And, perhaps, that maybe Jackbox Games would like to bring me on as an internationalisation consultant in exchange for free videogames?

It took 13 years to notice my invalid vehicle registration certificate!

In 2014 we bought a car¹, registered in my name. It’s a little long in the tooth now and we’re thinking about what might replace it, but for the time being it’s a useful workhorse and especially valuable when we need to move the entire family and still have space for luggage.

A large red car is parked inside an enclosed car-transporting train. Alongside it Dan, a white man with a goatee beard, takes a selfie. — This large car was super helpful for a trip to France via the Channel Tunnel earlier this summer… at least, once I’d hacked Le Shuttle’s API to work around their inability to cope with us bringing home different adults than we took on the outbound leg!

This week, I renewed my driving license². While doing so, I was invited to connect the records of the vehicles I own. This would allow, for example, email notifications when my Vehicle Excise Duty is due on them.

How to register a car “wrong”

The newer of our two cars was easy to add: I provided the number plate; the website did some kind of lookup; and it was done. But when I tried to add the older car, I got an error message:

Screenshot of a gov.uk web page, showing the error "You cannot add this vehicle to your account. DVLA cannot match your details to the registered keeper details on the V5C (logbook) for the vehicle DQ26 ABC" — I’d have probably just treated this as “just one of those things” and ignored it, were it not for the fact that our *other* car was added without any difficulty! Why the disparity?

The website claimed that the details on my V5C – the vehicle registration certificate or “logbook” – didn’t match my personal information. So I pulled out the papers for both cars… and discovered that the personal information sections were identical. The front of a V5C has a section that shows your name and address, and on both my certificates looked the same: my name, followed by my address. So why was one failing to work?

I sat in a queue for their webchat service, and – after a lot of back-and-forth – the operator and I came to a conclusion about what was wrong: for this car only, my name had been entered into the “company name” field in their database, rather than the “name” field.

From the looks of things, this is what happened in 2014:

The dealership filled the V55/4 form to register the car to me.
The DVLA saw my unusual name³, figured “that can’t be a person’s name; it must be a company name”⁴, and put it into the “company name” field.
The DVLA database differentiates between company name and person name, but the paper version just prints whichever one is present at the top of the address: information is lost in the translation to paper.
So: the database was wrong, but the paper copy didn’t show that it was wrong.

Getting the problem fixed

Apparently if I send my V5C to them with the details “corrected”, with an accompanying letter explaining the the correction is to which field they should be storing the data in, then they’ll correct it within a month or so

And then they’ll issue me with a new paper copy. Which will, naturally, look identical to this one. The only change will be in their database.

What can we learn from this?

I wonder if there’s anything that could have been different to prevent this confusion? A simple change would be to improve the layout of the third page of a V5C certificate.

Close-up of page 3 of a V5C form, with personal information blurred. — This is the part of the form I need to “change” by entering a first and surname, representing no *actual* change to the paper version but a significant difference to DVLA’s database.

Perhaps instead of re-listing the name and address in the same format as on the front page, this page could list each field separately, perhaps with each alongside the corresponding field for changing it. This wouldn’t need much space, less than would be saved by consolidating submission instructions (which are repeated at least five times in some form or another, across the form).

There are other ambiguities and redundancies that could be cleared-up at the same time. For example, the company name field does double-duty as the title field, which is an unnecessary complication that I’m sure must make data entry harder. And the registration number and document reference number are duplicated many times on this page, even though the instructions prohibit separating the parts.

Maybe there’s something to be learned from this for all of us who work with databases and forms. Do you have any fields that serve double-duty? Do you produce output by concatenating fields in such a way that might result in ambiguous provenience? Do you have a process to validate that data has been entered into the right column? Are you unable to make changes without re-generating secondary resources (like paper hard copies), the the secondary resources are functionally unchanged?

But for now, I probably ought to get this form sent back to the DVLA. So they can change their database and send me back a near-identical form. Such bureaucracy!

Footnotes

¹ This car is a Seat, and – because we name all of our cars – he’s call Arthur. Yes, for the pun.

² The driving license renewal was super easy, by the way. Half a dozen clicks on a gov.uk page and it was done.

³ If you’re new to my blog you might not know, but my actual full name, which appears on my driving license and my passport and the electoral roll and (nowadays) my birth certificate is just: Dan Q. It sometimes causes problems with computer systems, leading to me getting strangely-addressed postal mail or being unable to fill out web forms without lying. I’m mostly understanding of the falsehoods programmers believe about names, but sometimes companies mess shit up so badly that if they don’t correct their mistakes they end up paying me to go away. My blog contains lots more stories of my unusual name causing trouble.

⁴ As far as I can tell, there’s never been a company called “Dan Q”. There was a “Danq”, once, and a “Dan QB” long after, and it makes you wonder why corporate registration of a vehicle doesn’t require as a minimum a cursory lookup on Companies House by the registering officer, but what do I know?

(Feeling Fucking) Fabulous in Blackpool

Like many others¹, MEEK’s Fabulous has been stuck on-loop in my head for most of this year. What a fucking banger of a track, amirite?

And yet… somehow, today was the first time I figured I’d watch the music video. If you’ve not seen it (or perhaps not even heard the song), go do that now; I’ll wait.

The outdoor shots start about 20 seconds in, and… they’re instantly-recognisable by what they aren’t.

They aren’t London, where singer-songwriter Georgia Meek hails from, that’s for sure.

You probably know from the title of this blog post, but the filming location MEEK and her team chose is… Blackpool!

That first outdoor shot is opposite Pier Street Car Park.²

The music video goes indoors, continuing – nay, increasing – how fabulously queer-and-glam it is, through a theatre and arcade/bingo hall³. Eventually, it hits and a series of fast food establishments cumulating in Feast About.

Then there’s some faster and blurrier videography, but it’s clearly the Golden Mile, where she’s heading South and… hey, wait… is this music video actually shot in a geographically-sound order? So far, she seems to have moderately-consistently been moving South through the roads about one or two streets back from the Promenade, from a little North of the North Pier down towards the Central Pier…

Anyway; after her party night out, she finds her way to a late-night chippy, as you do.

She’s still heading South… which makes me think that the ruined steps she’s seen sitting on for literally three seconds might be somewhere between Coral Island and the Crispy Cod. Anybody know?

Anyway, the bottom line is that this music video was – surprisingly but delightfully – set in the area of… what might be the gayest pub crawl in the UK. Which, on top of this already awesome song, leaves me… feeling fucking fabulous.

Footnotes

¹ Especially those in queer or adjacent spaces, obvs.

² Pier Street and York Street Car Park’s are a comfortable walk from Ma Kelly’s Cabaret Bar, which – and I’m less-certain about this one – might be the host of some of the interior shots from the music video. Anyway, if you go around the corner in Google Street View you’ll find Higgitts Arcade and Burger Bar, which – just trust me and go look at it – is the most-Blackpool thing imaginable.

³ I’m almost-certain the arcade is the Higgitts, which I mentioned previously because of its proximity to an earlier shot!

Hot Dog Mess

Demmy would like to know why I haven’t turned off the UK’s heatwave yet. 🥵

Iced coffee and air con

Iced coffee and air con. Possibly the only things that’ll keep me sane, working in the UK’s current heatwave (especially with the schools closed and kids sent home!).

New social media restrictions

This is a repost promoting content originally published elsewhere. See more things Dan's reposted.

🚫 Regrettably you have been locked out of diamond geezer pending age verification protocols.

You may be UNDER 16 YEARS OF AGE and therefore you must not read anything here UNTIL YOU CAN PROVE THAT YOU’RE NOT.

The government is taking urgent action to ensure that children are no longer able to access harmful social media apps. At the personal behest of the Prime Minister a raft of carefully thought-through definitely-not-rushed non-kneejerk policies designed to restrict inappropriate content is to be introduced forthwith.

There is some absolutely terrible stuff online, much of which has already tarnished the minds of innocent youth. It is therefore imperative that all potentially terrible stuff must now be wrapped in a secure plain cover and placed on the digital top shelf. It’s for everyone’s own good.

…

diamond geezer, in New social media restrictions

Despite being parody, diamond geezer’s new age-gating – which e.g. asks for personal information but, obviously, doesn’t actually block access to the site – somehow perfectly straddles the line between “invasive” and “ineffective”… in exactly the same way that I expect the UK’s legal implementation will manage in a year or two.

Big Pride

Like many in the UK, I’m dismayed every time I see the plague of St. George’s Cross (flag of England) that nationalists have been hanging on lamp posts on recent years.

So it gave me great joy to see that this lamp post had recently acquired a (larger!) pride flag. 🏳️‍🌈

If we’re going to become a country that hangs flags everywhere… I’d much rather that they be flags that speak of inclusivity and diversity. ❤️

30 Years Of Notices

This telegraph pole in the centre of Eynsham carries the scars of hosting countless community announcements, notices, and flyers over the last 30 years.

Are you closer to Ireland or Scotland?

I nerdsniped myself today when, during a discussion on the potential location of a taekwondo tournament organised by our local martial arts school, somebody claimed that Scotland would be “nearer” than Ireland.

But the question got me thinking:

Could I plot a line across Great Britain, showing which parts are closer to Scotland and which parts are closer to Ireland?

If the England-facing Irish and Scottish borders were completely straight, one could simply extend the borders until they meet, bisect the angle, and we’d be done.

In reality, the border between England and Scotland is a winding mess, shaped by 700 years of wars and treaties¹. Treating the borders as straight lines is hopelessly naive.

What I’m really looking for… is a Voronoi partition…

Animation showing colours gradually expanding from points on a plane, carving out borders along their edges. — Voronoi diagrams are pretty, and cool, and occasionally even useful! This one expands from points, but there’s no reason you can’t expand from a line (line a border!) instead.

My Python skills are pretty shit, but it’s the best tool for the job for geohacking². And so, through a combination of hacking, tweaking, and crying, I was able to throw together a script that produces a wonderful slightly-wiggly line up the country.

Once you’ve bisected England in this way – into parts that are “closer to Ireland” versus parts that are “closer to Scotland”, you start to spot all kinds of interesting things³.

Like: did you know that the entire subterranean part of the Channel Tunnel is closer to Scotland than it is to Ireland… except for the ~2km closest to the UK exit.

A little further North: London’s six international airports are split evenly across the line, with Luton, Stansted and Southend closer to Scotland… and City, Heathrow and Gatwick closer to Ireland.

The line then pretty-much bisects Milton Keynes, leaving half its population closer to Scotland and half closer to Ireland, before doing the same to Daventry, before – near Sutton Coldfield – it drives right through the middle of the ninth hole of the golf course at the Lea Marston Hotel.

Players tee off closer to Ireland and – unless they really slice it – their ball lands closer to Scotland:

In Cannock, it bisects the cemetery, dividing the graves into those on the Scottish half and those in the Irish half:

The line crosses the Welsh border at the River Dee, East of Wrexham, leaving a narrow sliver of Wales that’s technically closer to Scotland than it is to Ireland, running up the coastline from Connah’s Quay to Prestatyn and going as far inland as Mold before – as is the case in most of Wales – you’re once again closer to Ireland:

I’d never have guessed that there were any parts of Wales that were closer to Scotland than they were to Ireland, but the map doesn’t lie⁴

Anyway: that’s how I got distracted, today. And along the way I learned a lot about geodata encoding, a little about Python, and a couple of surprising things about geography⁵.

Footnotes

¹ Not to mention the crazy history of places like Berwick-upon-Tweed, which has jumped the border several times, and Ba Green, ownership of which has traditionally been decided by game of football.

² Or, at least: it’s the one that’s most-widely used and so I could find lots of helpful StackOverflow answers when I got stuck!

³ Interesting… if you’re specifically looking for some geographical trivia, that is!

⁴ Okay, the map lies a little. My program was only simple so it plotted everything on a flat plane, failing to accommodate for Earth’s curvature. The difference is probably marginal, but if you happen to live on or very close to the red line, you might need to do your own research!

⁵ Like: Chester and Rugby are closer to Scotland than they are to Ireland, and Harpenden and Towcester are closer to Ireland than they are to Scotland! Who knew?

Hotdog Among the Trees

As the UK’s heatwave continues, the dog and I were delighted that this morning was sufficiently overcast that we could manage a proper walk without completely melting.

Her breed copes badly with the heat and we’ve lately had to keep her indoors or in the shade more than she’d like, so a chance to run around among the trees was very welcome!

Note #26502

My contribution to the long-standing British tradition of photographing dogs at polling stations. Don’t forget to vote, folks!

Trans former judge plans to challenge gender ruling at European court

“Trans former judge plans to challenge gender ruling at European court”: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c9qw2149yelo

Representation matters. That we have a trans former-judge, somebody both well-equipped and motivated to escalate this important challenge to the ECHR, is hugely fortunate.

We need more representation (of trans people specifically, but many other groups too, and perhaps particularly in the intersections) in positions of power, expertise, and authority. To defend the human rights of all of us.

Wishing you luck, Victoria McCloud.

Sorry for any inconvenience

Rarely seen nowadays, these UK road signs were eventually declared “too impolite” and “brusque” and have now almost entirely been replaced with the ones that Brits are familiar with today, which read “Terribly sorry for the inconvenience, I hope it’s no bother, it’s all our fault really, so sorry, really sorry, sorry, I’ll put the kettle on shall I?”

Delivery Songs

Duration 7:01

Podcast Version

This post is also available as a podcast. Listen here, download for later, or subscribe wherever you consume podcasts.

Here in the UK, ice cream vans will usually play a tune to let you know they’re set up and selling¹. So when you hear Greensleeves (or, occasionally, Waltzing Matilda), you know it’s time to go and order yourself a ninety-nine.

On a verdant manicured lawn under a summer sky, two parents walk barefoot after their young child, who is running towards a traditionally-coloured yellow-and-white British ice cream van with visible branding reading 'fresh dairy ice cream' and '99 flake'. — Bet you want a double-99 with monkey’s blood now, right? If not, maybe hearing the chime will make the difference.

Imagine my delight, then, when I discover this week that ice cream vans aren’t the only services to play such jaunty tunes! I was sat with work colleagues outside İlter’s Bistro on Meşrutiyet Cd. in Istanbul, enjoying a beer, when a van carrying water pulled up and… played a little song!

And then, a few minutes later – as if part of the show for a tourist like me – a flatbed truck filled with portable propane tanks pulled up. Y’know, the kind you might use to heat a static caravan. Or perhaps a gas barbeque if you only wanted to have to buy a refill once every five years. And you know what: it played a happy little jingle, too. Such joy!

A grey-haired man wearing a t-shirt and blue jeans leans casually against the open doors of a white van that's visibly filled floor-to-ceiling with 19-litre 'water cooler style' water bottles, plus a pallet lifter. The van is parked between red-and-white striped cones on an Istanbul street. — In Istanbul, people put out their empty water bottles to be swapped-out for full ones by the water delivery man².

My buddy Cem, who’s reasonably local to the area, told me that this was pretty common practice. The propane man, the water man, etc. would all play a song when they arrived in your neighbourhood so that you’d be reminded that, if you hadn’t already put your empties outside for replacement, now was the time!

And then Raja, another member of my team, observed that in his native India, vegetable delivery trucks also play a song so you know they’re arriving. Apparently the tune they play is as well-standardised as British ice cream vans are. All of the deliveries he’s aware of across his state of Chennai play the same piece of music, so that you know it’s them.

It got me thinking: what other delivery services might benefit from a recognisable tune?

Bin men: I’ve failed to put the bins out in time frequently enough, over the course of my life, that a little jingle to remind me to do so would be welcome⁴! (My bin men often don’t come until after I’m awake anyway, so as long as they don’t turn the music on until after say 7am they’re unlikely to be a huge inconvenience to anybody, right?) If nothing else, it’d cue me in to the fact that they were passing so I’d remember to bring the bins back in again afterwards.
Fish & chip van: I’ve never made use of the mobile fish & chip van that tours my village once a week, but I might be more likely to if it announced its arrival with a recognisable tune.

Milkman: I’ve a bit of a gripe with our milkman. Despite promising to deliver before 07:00 each morning, they routinely turn up much later. It’s particularly troublesome when they come at about 08:40 while I’m on the school run, which breaks my routine sufficiently that it often results in the milk sitting unseen on the porch until I think to check much later in the day. Like the bin men, it’d be a convenience if, on running late, they at least made their presence in my village more-obvious with a happy little ditty!
Emergency services: Sirens are boring. How about if blue light services each had their own song. Perhaps something thematic? Instead of going nee-naw-nee-naw, you’d hear, say, de-do-do-do-de-dah-dah-dah and instantly know that you were hearing The Police.
Evri: Perhaps there’s an appropriate piece of music that says “the courier didn’t bother to ring your doorbell, so now your parcel’s hidden in your recycling box”? Just a thought.

Anyway: the bottom line is that I think there’s an untapped market for jolly little jingles for all kinds of delivery services, and Turkey and India are clearly both way ahead of the UK. Let’s fix that!

Footnotes

¹ It’s not unheard of for ~~cruel~~ clever parents to try to teach their young children that the ice cream van plays music only to let you know it’s sold out of ice cream. A devious plan, although one I wasn’t smart (or evil?) enough to try for myself.

² The official line from the government is that the piped water is safe to drink, but every single Turkish person I spoke to on the subject disagreed and said that I shouldn’t listen to… well, most of what the government says. Having now witnessed first-hand the disparity between the government’s line on the unrest following the arrest of the opposition’s presidential candidate and what’s actually happening on the ground, I’m even more inclined to listen to the people.

³ My gas delivery man should also have his own song, of course. Perhaps an instrumental cover of Burn Baby Burn?

⁴ Perhaps bin men could play Garbage Truck by Sex Bob-Omb/Beck? That seems kinda fitting. Although definitely not what you want to be woken up with if they turn the speakers on too early…