Anyhoo, as a result of a series of random conversations in work (and when I say random, I do mean random – that’s one of the great things about where I work), I challenged one of my colleagues to the Desert Island C90 Challenge.

I partook in this a year and a half ago and found it great fun – you should try it; If you could only take one c90 cassette (remember them kids?) of music to listen to for the rest of your life, what would you put on it?

As I say, it came up in conversation, but it prompted me to look back on what I chose, to see if I would change anything on there.

Then I remembered that I posted again in March 2009 to say that the music industry were suing Youtube for unlicensed material unless it was removed. So I thought I’d check how many of the embedded videos I had added to my mixtape had survived. It made interesting reading.

So here we are; a naming and shaming of bands/artists out of my 2009 top 24 tracks that allowed their publishers to remove material under the guise of ‘copyright infringement’. Granted some of the artists are dead now, but let’s not let that get in the way of a rant. More than half of the tracks I chose are now barred on Youtube:

The Mamas & Papas, The Rolling Stones, The Cocteau Twins, The Sex Pistols, Billy Talent, Bon Jovi, The Go Go’s, The Associates, Nirvana, Muse, U2, The Smiths and The Jam. Disappointing, given the amount of money I’ve contributed to those very bands through vinyl, CD, merchandise and gig tickets over the years.

And of the others; The Cult, Bluetones, Queens of the Stone Age, Stevie Wonder, Radiohead, Ugly Kid Joe, The Bangles, REM, Simon & Garfunkel, Gary Jules, The Four Tops, all but two of them (The Bluetones and Gary Jules) were either live versions or soundtrack only with pics.

Perhaps “the man” doesn’t have as much control over the usage of those.
So maybe I need to do a trawl for some live examples…

I even offer a ‘purchase’ option on the post, giving those very fat cats a slice if someone paid.

Get a grip corporate sharks!

Back in the day, my father-in-law used to play junior football. By all accounts he was a bit special as a left back and always been a big fan of football at all levels.

We knew he played for a few clubs before hanging up his boots to raise his family. Money was tight and a steady job had to take priority over his passion for the game.

We were going through some boxes of old photos recently and happened upon something genuinely interesting from 60 years ago…

You can probably guess, from the team logo, he played for Kilbirnie Ladeside FC for a time. They were very well known and respected back in the day and are still fighting the good fight; apparently they were the first junior team with their own website.

This first photo is the regular Kilbirnie Ladeside first team for the 1949-50 season. It was a good season for The Blasties; the silverware was in abundance.

My father-in-law, John McKenna, appears in this photo (back row, third from the right). Had the wonders of colour photography been available then, you would be able to see the shock of red hair that earned him his imaginative nickname, “Ginger McKenna”.

Not the traditional build for a left back, his wiry frame meant he was fast and skilful on the ball, even in those days where it was a particularly punishing game with a heavy ball and what we would now consider primitive footwear.

I unfortunately don’t have any other names from this photo but would welcome details, should any readers be able to identify any of these fine fellows.

In the 1949-50 season, Kilbirnie Ladeside won four honours; something not to be sniffed at, either then or now. The following photograph shows the trophy cabinet containing the spoils of the season.

They won the Western League, The Ayrshire Cup, The Irvine and District Cup and the newly christened Land of Burns Cup in this season. They were on fire.

Winning as much in one season is a pretty big thing, for any team. So I guess it was because it was so long ago, it’s not recorded either on the official Ladeside website, or the Wiki entry for the team. I’ll maybe get in touch with the guys via the site to let them know.

For additional authenticity, below are Ginger McKenna’s set of medals from the season as testimony to his part in the season-of-seasons for the club; below.

John has a bit of trouble remembering recent stuff these days but when I showed him the medals and photos, he remembered it like it was yesterday.

At the end of the glittering 1949-50 season, he was scouted for a sizeable (for those days) transfer fee, by Blantyre Celtic which was significantly closer to his home town of Rutherglen.

All photos © Steve McCallum, all rights reserved, please ask before using.

If you have no idea what I’m talking about, check this post out first.

How do I know they have a new CD out, well I have had a flurry of new mySpace ‘friends notifications. In the last 3-4 days, I’ve had about 30 eMail notifications from mySpace.

I can’t say I’m a big fan of the Reggae/Ska genre. I can take it or leave it to be honest, but I do feel a bit of an affinity with my namesake and his pals in Kentucky, so props to the Rudies and all their friends!

You want to see their myspace page?

So much so, their logo even incorporates this magnificent creature, as you can see.

SeaWorld has a general sea-related theme running through the park and the majority of the various shows and attractions, including sea-lions, dolphins and sea-otters, culminating in the main attraction; the Shamu Show. So called because of Shamu, the Killer Whale.

Shamu is of course a generic name, a brand if you like, as it can be any one of a number of Orca from the SeaWorld ‘cast’ that take the role in the show itself. Over the years, various Shamu have perished and been replaced with yet more. The show must go on.

I know a lot of the justification for SeaWorld’s activities centres around the rescue, research and conservation they do, and all that, but when it comes down to it, here we have a large corporation making a significant buck from keeping and breeding wild aquatic animals in captivity. Not only are they keeping them in an unnatural habitat, they are training them to perform for the pleasure of the general public.

Now, I have no doubt SeaWorld look after their Orca and other sea creatures. The trainers clearly know and love their animals. But let us not lose sight of the point here; SeaWorld are not a sea-life rescue charity. Yes, they may put something back, which is admirable but they are in it for the profit. Lots and lots of profit.

I’ve seen these wonderful creatures in the wild. I was fortunate enough to be able to go whale watching off the coast of Iceland a few years ago and was delighted and somewhat mesmerised to see a pod of healthy, wild Orca, including a mother and calf swimming alongside the boat.

The sheer size of these beasts, compared to us mere humans, in their natural habitat of millions of square miles of deep, deep ocean really was quite stunning.

With the advent of high-definition TV and the internet, documentaries and simulations, people now have ready access to what it’s like to see these animals. They can see them as often as they like, in their original habitat, doing what comes naturally. They no longer need to go to a SeaWorld or a zoo to see these creatures cooped up in a man-made prison made from reinforced glass and concrete that’s been moulded and coloured to look like ‘natural’ habitat.

The bottom line is that a Killer Whale is a wild mammal, they do not belong in captivity. Evidence the extremely distressing sight of the various captive Orca with their sad-looking drooping dorsal fins swimming around in a big fish tank filled with startlingly blue water.

There are theories why the fins droop, one being that it’s from swimming on top of the water more than is natural, which a whale will do if the water is not deep enough. As a result, water pressure on each side of the fin, keeping it upright, is replaced by gravity and air meaning over time, it droops.

There are also attempts made to statistically justify the occurrence of the phenomenon by quoting percentages found in the wild. The simple fact is that almost all the ones I’ve seen in the wild are straight, and pretty much all the adult ones I’ve seen in captivity droop.

Now, before you say anything… Yes, I paid my bucks, I went in and it’s not the first time I’ve been. So yes, in a way I’m supporting what I’m railing against here, but this time I viewed it all though a different shade of glasses, and it wasn’t nice.

We should indeed be looking to do what we can to conserve our endangered species. However, I for one do not think keeping them captive for entertainment and profit is the way. Someone should step in and force the timetable of re-partiation of the wild animals to the wild – at cost to the current captors.

And don’t get me started on the Polar Bear…

Going out into the wilderness, facing daily danger to bring food back to his tribe and family.

As the years have gone by, the measure has changed. With the advent of shops and supermarkets, modern man no longer has to stalk and hunt his prey.

So other measures have variously been used; His educational status, the money he earns, the clothes he wears, the car he drives. You name it.

Now I reckon there’s a new, modern-day candidate for the measure.

How big and comprehensive his box of wires is.

“Box of wires?”, I hear some of you say, “What do you mean box of wires? Who the hell has a box of wires?”

However, I’m willing to bet the majority of the modern men reading this will be nodding their heads right now, and those that are not may be feeling a little bit inadequate.

I asked this question in work recently and it would appear that I’m not in the minority to have a box stashed away where I put any superfluous, unused or redundant wires and connectors into.

I’ve got two boxes of wires and related tech paraphenalia, including PC mice, headphones, microphones, sound cards, modem boards and various kinds of USB (Type A, type B, Mini, extensions, male-male convertors) cables. I’ve got cat-5 network cables of various lengths and colours, old serial, parallel, Centronix and RS232 wires and connectors, male and female D-plugs, ribbon cables, floppy and optical CD drive wires, monitor cables, playstation cables, audio, video and SCART cables.

Not forgetting telephone, speaker & mains wire and of course a stack of power cords collected over the years. I’ve even got a coiled Symbol barcode scanner cable which splits to also connect to a keyboard (of course I don’t have the scanner for it). I’ve had it for many years and hung onto it just because you just never know when it’ll come in handy.

The test of course is when you, or someone you know, is looking for a wire or plug to connect something to something else. Then it’s time to impress. I did this recently by managing to concoct a Heath-Robinsonesque connection between two stereos without having to go down to Maplin.

My box of wires is, of course, tidier than the one in the picture.

Each day you would drive to your park of choice, pay into the car park and have to park miles away from the entrance gate. Then you’d have to wait on the little road-train to take you to the gate, not forgetting of course to remember where where you parked your car.

At the end of the day, you’d queue again for your little road-train (like you hadn’t queued enough already) to get back to your car and head back home. Then you’d do it all again the next day, for a different park.

But there is another way, as we found on our recent trip.

There is such a thing as Disney resort transport, available to those fortunate enough to be staying in one of the many Disney Resort hotels in the DisneyWorld area, as we were.

Each Resort hotel has a series of bus-stops outside, each bus-stop is marked for one of the Disney parks. You simply wait at the stop and a Disney-branded, heavily air-con’d bus takes you, free of charge, straight to the gate of your chosen park. You go in. End of story.

You can use them to go from hotel to hotel, park to park, whatever you want and as often as you want. The buses run from seven in the morning til the parks close. The maximum wait time for a bus is twenty minutes, although typically less than ten. No parking fees, no parking, no driving, no hassle. It’s fab, as a customer I highly recommend it.

But if you take a step back and consider the scale of this, as I am wont to do, it’s mind-blowing. Do the math; with 7 park destinations and say 15 or so resort hotels, taking into account that a couple of the hotels may share transport, that’s something like 100 buses running for 17 hours a day, every day of the year.

That’s over 600k bus-hours per year.

Logistically, that’s massive. Consider the size of the driver pool, the shifts, the maintenance requirements, the consumables, the fuel, the management of it all. The cost of running that service must be huge. Mind you, with fuel at $2.50 a gallon in the US… Anyhoo, I’m sure the cost of the hotels, park tickets and merchandise are all suitably inflated to cover this.

The buses are often packed, but they also run empty or extremely sparsely populated on occasion as they run all the time time as opposed to running to capacity.

Disney obviously benefit from providing this service in that if those customers had to use their cars instead, their already massive car parks may need to be bigger and they’d have to lay on more road-trains and probably more staff to cover that. But then they’d get more money from car parking fees. However, like many things Disney, it’s all about the customer experience, and this is definitely a big plus on that front.

But thinking again, this time from an environmental perspective, that’s a lot of CO2; these buses are all big beasts and all have permanent air-con on the go. Based on the above hours per annum, and my estimate of an average of 15mph, I’d reckon the emissions generated are of the order of 1,380 tonnes of CO2 per year. That’s enough to run over 800 Scottish homes for a year. And that’s not counting all the landfill or recycling of tyres, oil, filters, batteries and other bus consumables/components.

Now I don’t have all the answers here, but the big question is if the buses weren’t provided, saving Disney a fortune, which they could pass on to their customers, would the CO2 generated by the increase in cars exceed the bus usage.

Unusual for me I know, but I thought I’d try to bring a little culture to the blog.

So, without further ado, here’s a spot of Japanese poetry…

Fluttering around,
Pausing only for a while,
Then to something new.

OK, it’s a pretty poor haiku, but it gets my recent frame of mind across nicely. My focus has been suffering lately, lots of little things to occupy time; the blog, the iPhone, the MacBook, even reviewing stuff on DooYoo, but nothing substantial. I was working on the principle of working on lots of little things in the hope that something may stick and give me a sizeable target worth shooting for – the next big thing, I suppose.

The last big thing was, I suppose, bimbogami, which really was all consuming for a while. For any new readers here (does anyone actually read this?) bimbogami is my puzzle site. Bimbogami was built from scratch with all-original puzzles, ably assisted by my partner in crime hotblack, when he’s not taking photos of something. There are two ‘main’ seasons of 40 puzzles – some of which are not for the faint-hearted and two ‘fun’ seasons of song lyrics (musigami) and movie quotes (movigami). If you haven’t already you really should try it, there’s about 2000 people registered to have a go at time of writing – not many manage to finish.

The thing is there’s lots more mileage in bimbogami, there’s a resaonable amount of questions and other puzzle concepts in the bag for a season 3 and easily a few more seasons on the back of musi- and movigami. I suppose the prolem is that it’s just not ‘new’ anymore. So I need something else, and maybe come back to that fleetingly, in future butterfly moments.

So, in the search of the next big thing, I’ve thought through a few things but keep going back to an idea I came up with a while ago. I won’t spill the beans just yet, as Monarch-syndrome could easily strike again before I get anywhere with it. Suffice to say it’s music-based.

Thinking I could perhaps go for an off the shelf package I installed Joomla! CMS to see if it would do what I wanted it to do. And the answer is a resounding ‘possibly, but with a fair bit of hacking and slashing’ I suspect, so I’m going to resort to the hand-crafted approach – surprise!

Re Joomla! The thought struck me on whether it’s a good idea to have punctuation mark in your company or product name. Personally, I don’t think so, why?

• You can’t get a URL with a punctuation mark in it.
• It looks silly in the middle of a sentence, and
• It makes me think of Wham!

Watch this space…

It’s generally not the glamorous lifestyle many people imagine. I rarely got much time to sightsee and my experience was more airport -> taxi -> meeting -> taxi -> hotel -> taxi -> airport. You have to be able to occupy yourself a lot while you wait for flights, but it does give you a rich seam of war-stories to draw upon in years to come.

So, in the style of so many things on the web these days, here’s a ‘Top 10′ of things that set you apart from the common-or-garden tourist.

1. You know what metal you have on you at ALL times
   Airport security is the bane of all travellers’ lives. Personally, I am a big fan of airport security, I have no axe to grind, I’m just trying to get from A to B with the minimum of fuss.

   The thing to remember is that they’re just doing a job; a job that hopefully makes travelling safer for all of us – safe from both the determined and the stupid. The less hassle you give them, the quicker you will be on your way.

   The frequent traveller can pinpoint everything on his person that will set off the metal detector. And they will have either moved it into their hand luggage or tray before they get to the detector, meaning they will only ever be stopped for a random search.

   The introduction of recent measures regarding liquids extends this model a little, but you get the idea. A smooth passage through security is the key.

2. You carry one, and only one, piece of hand-luggage
   Anything more is checked into the hold. Some people who have an obsession on carrying on loads of hand-baggage and cramming it into the overhead lockers.

   Your one piece of luggage will be sufficient to carry your laptop, MP3 player, earphones, other valuables, breakables and anything else you will need to survive in the event your other luggage goes amiss.

   And you know it will fit in the overhead locker, or better still, under the seat in front of you. The closer it is to you, the better.

   The one caveat I’ll place on this one is if you have a tech job. I had to travel with a kit-bag too. It had about 30x mobile phones and PDAs in it, and I wasn’t putting them in the hold. It was still minimalist tho.

3. You know where your passport is at all times
   Without your passport, you’re dead in the water abroad. you really don’t want to have to do the whole Embassy thing, and being refused travel until it’s resolved, do you? So make sure you have it on your person at all times.

   Having written your passport number of countless visa applications, customes tickets and hotel registers, you may even know your passport number off by heart. You may even end up carrying it around with you at home, but that’s just taking it a bit too far.

   I include in this that you know where your tickets are, your loalty, membership, lounge and cash/credit cards too. But you knew that, right?

4. Your mobile numbers are all prefixed with country codes
   It’s one of those things you do during the endless waiting in airports, you stick ‘+44′ (or equiv) in front of all entries your address book, even the local Indian restaurant and vet’s; like you’re ever going to call them from the US.

   You will of course have international roaming enabled for all countries and you are aware of the countries where even that won’t work, like Korea, home of Samsung and LG, where you’ll have to hire a phone at the airport

5. You don’t browse or hang about, you focus on the goal
   Unless you’re looking for something, like a gadget or something for your journey, you will not be amongst the throng of people in the airport shops or Duty Free.

   Instead, you exercise a guerilla-like approach to shopping; In, select, pay, out. Bam! No hanging about. Instead, you’ll be the one striding purposefully towards the gate.

6. You have over 10 airline and/or hotel loyalty cards
   The more places you go and/or stay, you’ll fill in the forms and find these things dropping through your door. You’ll start to wonder, ‘Why isn’t there a single collector system?’

   And then it will dawn on you that it would then be too easy to get some value out of it.

7. You know all minimum check-in times for all airports
   The frequent traveller doesn’t like to hang about in airports, even although it seems they do.

   So, getting to the airport with just enough time to spare becomes an art-form.

8. You’re not phased by changes to your plans
   Changes to circumstance are an inevitability of travel. There are a significant number of external influences on your travel plans, most of which are beyond your control. So why get stressed when the inevitable happens?

   You need to remain flexible, go with the flow, adapt. The people you’ll be meeting at the other end generally know how bad it can be, so just keep them appraised of what’s gone wrong and work out how you can fix it.

   That said, you will, of course, have planned for some eventualities. Won’t you?

9. You have a timezone/jetlag avoidance policy
   If you have to do intercontinental travel, you will experience the fun concept of jetlag. For most people this means being tired for a couple of days after they return from holiday once a year.

   But if your itinery means you are only back for 24h, you’re not going to survive that timzone zombie-like state for long.

   So you will have come up with a strategy. There are a few options, including some bizarre ones (Shine a light behind your knees? Aye right.)  Planning ahead when you should be sleeping to get you back in synch worked fine for me.

10. You have no patience for other  travellers
    Your calm, travelling exterior will likely belie the inner seething animal that wants to rip the head off other travellers that don’t conform to the above rules.

Happy travelling!

Can you remember all the cars you ever owned?
warning: nostalgia and petrol-head terms in the following post…

The first car I had was a Mk1 Ford Escort. It was silver with a purple roof when I got it (nice eh?) but I painted it black, with a brush. As the time, I reckoned it looked great, there were no brush strokes, it looked like a professional job… for a while, until the oil based paint got scuffed and started peeling off in strips.

The car itself was held together with cataloy and gun-gum but it was a learning experience and allowed me to hone my skills on rust removal, filling and sanding, oh yes the sanding.

Eventually I peeled all the paint off and resprayed it, with proper primer and black paint this time – it was sauce. Eventually sold it, when it failed its MOT, for £20. Well, we are talking the early eighties here, twenty quid was over 40 pints in the union bar.

All in all, a great first car, I stripped the engine down completely to replace a tappet screw. In those days I was hardcore on the maintenance front. No pics of a black one anywhere that I can find, so this brown one will have to do.

Next up was a Hillman Imp, in lovely baby blue (picture courtesy of Tim Morgan). The Imp was a tiny car and believe it or not, these were used as police cars back in the day.

This one had a lot wrong with it.  The starter motor jammed a lot, the handbrake was permanently seized-on, the entire gearstick came off in my hand once and the rear-mounted engine was easily accessible via a external handles, so the battery was once nicked.

The thief also stole the battery leads and clamp and, while I managed to get a battery and leads from the scrappy, I couldn’t get a clamp, so I wedged it in with a bit of wood. A few weeks later, while driving around, the wood dislodged, the battery moved and the resulting short caused the battery to explode into a million little pieces of white plastic. What a noise! Original cost: £30, sold a year later for £40 – result.

Then, when I was no longer a student, and had a real job, I got myself some proper wheels. Everyone who was anyone had one of these back in the day; a MkIV Cortina.

The profile of this beauty was, and still is, how every 4-year old draws a car; all big and square and boxy.

It was a great big hulking beast of a car, heavy and rear wheel drive, so great fun to drive in the snow. Mechanically however it was very guilty of eating points for breakfast, that engine must have been operating at about a million amps. Over the years I had this one, I must have spent hours and hours filing them down/re-spacing them and a fortune replacing them.

Then came a Vauxhall Cavalier, it was bit more orange than red, kinda rust coloured really. It was only after I bought it, I noticed it had a dent in the roof, not a big dent, just a dink, right in the middle – how do you get a dink in the roof?

A Lothian bus kindly ripped the side of this to shreds on a busy Saturday afternoon on Princes Street during the festival, I bent the stalk of my horn that day, trying to alert the oblivious driver to the carnage he was causing. I can’t remember much else about this car, it was quite uneventful, which compared to my earlier cars was probably quite a good thing.

Time for a step up in quality. This time I moved to a high-ish mileage ex-company car. The old-style BMW 320i is a design classic, still far nicer than the new ones.

A straight-six cylinder 2.0 petrol engine that was extremely quick. I had never before seen an engine compartment quite so full of engine. A really nice car to drive, with plenty of poke.

I ran this beauty for ages, up and down my favourite motorway. I don’t think this 3-Series design has been beaten since. Sold it to my mate still running sweetly with 107k miles on the clock.

My next car was a bit of a lemon; a Volvo 440. My excuse for this aberration of a vehicle is it was my first company car, and I didn’t get to choose it. I was allocated one from the ‘returns pool’ until the lease was up. The benefits of having a company car in those days outweighed the tax penalty, so I put up with the six months of purgatory.

I can confidently say this is the most uncomfortable car I have ever had the (dis)pleasure to drive. Despite having more methods of adjusting the seat than any car I’d had before, every 30 mile trip you did still felt more like like ten times that over cobblestones.

When I finally got to chose my own company car, I plumped for a Peugeot 406sri. I don’t know why, never had a French car before, but the list was limited, so toog a punt.

Despite the garish upholstery; light grey with red zigzags, it was a peach to drive, solid and really comfortable for long journeys.

With a 2.0l petrol turbo engine it zipped along nicely. Unfortunately the company policy was to replace the cars every 12 months and I had to give it up. How could that be economical? Devastated.

The company’s car policy had changed to Rover instead of Peugeot, so instead of my original grand plan of just getting another 406, I opted for a blue Rover 214 saloon. I didn’t fancy the hatchback equivalent, I have an irrational preference for a proper boot.

Nice tidy car but, like the Cavalier, generally quite unremarkable. Then again, only having to put up with it for a year meant it wasn’t such a bad deal.

Next, against my better judgment, I went for a hatchback. This time a Vauxhall Vectra, with serios danger of moving into sales-rep land.

It was a nice car, but was tainted a little when I was hit twice from begind on the M8. First time by a Metro, then again, a second or so later by the same Metro with a Transit Van attached to the back of it. The hatchback always rattled after the fix-up job.

Replacement time, and a promotion took me up a class, but still only Rover to choose from. This time a Rover 620i. A bigger lump of metal, but with a 2.0l turbo diesel in it this time.

Nice and comfy and built for distance, it was a good car, even if it did sound like a Massey Fergusson on a bad day. At replacement time, they switched the policy again, so Peugeot was back on the agenda, woot!

Without hesitation I plumped for the Peugeot 406sri again, this time in blue. A few things had been updated from the original, white one I had, but the upholstery was still as whacky as before. Just because it’s an SRI doesn’t mean I’m a boy-racer you know.

Another move of job meant I was moving out of company car land and back into personal ownership, so I bought the 406 off the leasing company at the end of the lease. Eventually, the age and mileage of the Pug meant that things were starting to go wrong with it, radiator, cooling fans etc and being a high spec, specialist parts = expensive to fix so, at 80k+ on the clock, it had to go.

Out of the blue I decided to try something new and went for a VW Passat this time, the Highline to be exact. It was also my first attempt at internet car buying. My experience with Virgin Cars was so bad, I was put off the idea and went for the dealer option.

The Highline was a 1.9 TDI and I opted for the 130psi, with a bit more poke than the ordinary. Great car, nice to drive, comfortable, relatively economical for the size. I would have kept it longer than the 75k miles it went before its aforementioned demise on the M8.

However, my gripe’s not with the spiffy hedge-fund boys, with their wonderfully complex financial models to efficiently lose shedloads of cash, nor is it the folks that reckoned sub-prime lending would be a wheeze or even those responsible for doling out massive payouts to executives of failing companies. While these are all undoubtedly ‘bad things’ that affect us all, they’re not affecting me directly, personally, right now.

I’ve just now come across a needlessly arcane banking practice that shouldn’t exist, needn’t happen in this technologically advanced day and age.

Why does it take five, yes five – count-em, working days for a cheque to clear in my bank account to allow me to spend the money?  Two cheques were paid into my account on Tuesday this weekand they tell me I cannot use the finds until next Tuesday!

Now, I know for a fact we’re not talking about actually moving physical bundles of folding cash in a big crate from the account and branch of the cheque-issuer to my account in my home branch.

So we’re not talking about a horse-drawn Securicor van making a treachorous journey up a long, rainy motorway, adhering to speed limits and then having to wait till the teller opens the bank in the morning, checks his credentials, counts the cash and then, opening the big vault, locate my own personal money-drawer and carefully putting it in.

I know a little bit about computers. They can transfer the money from one account to another in a fraction of a second. Even allowing for the process not to start until the bank is closed for the day and adding in some time to include a few double-checks to make sure there’s no funny business, it could be processed and available to use the next day, 24 hours max, whether it’s a working day or not; the computers don’t go home at 5:00pm when the bank shuts.

So, Banks, NO!

Get your act sorted out and stop conning us. We know you just want to hang ont to the money for longer so you can cream a bit of profit off it in the international markets.

You’re delaying me getting my new car!