Monumental incompetence of British Airways

Letters

I have two young houseguests, who arrived here in London yesterday on a British Airways flight from Phoenix, Arizona and BA have misplaced the luggage for the entire flight. How is this possible?!?! When phoning their helpline, one gets either to hold on endlessly or a message that they are so busy, please try some other way. Everything is phrased to make it sound like it's the caller's fault, and that one wants to tell them about lost baggage, whereas it is they who need to tell us about it. Was there ever anything so frustrating, depressing and incompetent?

A Very Unhappy Customer

Update

"The British Airways lost luggage farce deepened last night when it emerged that the airline is sending thousands of bags out of Heathrow to be sorted through in Milan, only for them then to be sent back to England." (Daily Mail)

Why are BA continuing to take bookings from unsuspecting airline passengers, when they know all the time that they cannot deliver the baggage? This is fraud on a blatant and massive scale. I would never book with BA in a million years, and if I book again with Aer Lingus, I want a guarantee that it's not going to be a flight shared with BA, as in the past. To learn that they and BMI are also profiteering from keeping people on hold on their telephone enquiry lines, in at least one case to an Indian call centre, just adds insult to injury (ref. Daily Mail). Ed

Update 2

The bags have arrived. And they brought the missing luggage with them.

Cheney pushes Bush to act on Iran

Military solution back in favour as Rice loses out. President 'not prepared to leave conflict unresolved' (Guardian)

How can it be that these demented, pompous old windbags are allowed to create wars and massacre people around the world on a whim? Can they not be impeached?

Zoz

"The entire war is an atrocity"

Iraq veterans

Zoz

Dawn, Tuesday

Dreaming when Dawn's Left Hand was in the Sky
I heard a Voice within the Tavern cry,
"Awake, my Little ones, and fill the Cup
"Before Life's Liquor in its Cup be dry."

And, as the Cock crew, those who stood before
The Tavern shouted--"Open then the Door!
"You know how little while we have to stay,
"And, once departed, may return no more."

Omar Khayyam, translated by Edward FitzGerald

Songs on MySpace

The Willesden Herald

They're not really songs and we're not really a band. It's another way of listening to the podcasts. Everything is as it seems.

Feargal Mooney

Feargal Mooney to run for London Mayor

Forget it, Boris. Oh, you have.

Subject to the Tories stepping aside, which is more or less in the bag, Gravitas party candidate Feargal Mooney announces intention to run for London Mayor against hated and despised, lizard-loving, gekko-faced, Chavez-arse-licking, loadsamoney-for-Yank-managers, jobsworth Ken "I'd ride a bike if I could stay sober long enough" Livingstone. Feargal promises a 50-yearly debt amnesty, back dated to 2000, abolition of all parking restrictions, complete pedestrianisation of shopping streets, free transport for all, zero emissions for all vehicles in London by 2012, dissolution of the United Kingdom and the monarchy with all their properties reverting to the people of London, abolition of council tax, and independence for London. An independent London will adopt the Euro immediately, turn the Palace of Westminster into a visitor attraction (in conjunction with the London Dungeon), keep all the overseas properties currently owned by Britain/England, including Silvio Berlusconi and Saudi Arabia, and announce an open door policy for anyone in the world who wants to come and live here. All of the royal parks will be turned into refugee camps. The monarchy will be exiled and a republic proclaimed, with Feargal Mooney occupying both the Mayoralty and Presidency for life. Apart from the original Gravitas manifesto, there will only be one new law every ten years. A one year parliament of representatives from the former local boroughs, now to be abolished, will be elected every ten years to choose the one law to be implemented. They will then be shot, ensuring that only those highly dedicated to lawmaking, and of the greatest integrity shall stand for election. (From sources close to Feargal Mooney speaking today on condition of anonymity.)

Nick Grimes

Anti-nuke hero persecuted

Israel jails Vanunu over foreign contacts

"An Israeli court today sentenced Mordechai Vanunu, who served 18 years for revealing nuclear secrets, to six months in prison for violating a ban on speaking to foreigners." (Guardian)

Zoz

Ancient African manuscripts

In fabled city at the end of the earth, a treasury of ancient manuscripts

"In Timbuktu the race is on to preserve papers that document a west African golden age" (Guardian)

It would be fascinating to read some translations and find out what 11th and 12th century people in Timbuktu were thinking about.

Ossian

Not a very GUD review though

GUD Magazine review of Willesden Herald: New Short Stories 1*

"Overall, a competent compilation with generally decent reading, and stand-out stories in Kid in a Well and Arthur Allan's blackly comic all-at-sea tale Atlantic Drift."

I would have to call this a tone-deaf sort of review, by somebody incapable of recognising beautiful artistry in the rich tapestry of Olesya Mishechkina's prose, for example. Arthur Allan's "Atlantic Drift" is a magnificent story indeed, but hardly "comic". I wish she'd said what was supposedly wrong with the editing. Anyway, you have a chance to win their review copy and find out, by commenting on the review.

Ossian

* Willesden Herald: New Short Stories 1

Violent clowns with no argument

They have nothing to bring to an argument, they are naked in debate. Their failed dogma, their paternalistic and oppressive religions have passed their sell-by dates. All they can do is try to blow-up cars in crowded places, as if this would get them anywhere other than straight to the hell of their own making. To all practical purposes, the entire populace is united against these sorry-arsed losers. Humanity, that is what matters, not religion. Nobody gives a damn about their febrile, hysterical gibberings, only them. They need to get over themsselves, to wake up.

Steve Finbow interviews David Mitchell

1. For Japan Times

2. Another interview in "Stop Smiling"

Steve Finbow read at the recent Willesden Herald: New Short Stories 1 launch. David Mitchell is one of the most highly regarded contemporary authors. They have in common that both are English writers living in Japan.

Ossian

Steve Finbow: interviews with David Mitchell

1. For Japan Times

2. Another interview in "Stop Smiling"

Steve Finbow and David Mitchell are both English writers living in Japan.

Ossian

This evening

A Reader

Send us your photos and news reports to onionmbeke (at) willesdenherald.com. A fiver for the best one and dinner with Mona for the runners-up.

Gordon's rain

I rejoiced that Blair had gone - and then Brown began to speak

"'It has been a very emotional day,' said Sky News's Adam Boulton. 'I have seen some incredible things today, things I never thought I would see.' What were these incredible things? 'I have seen the Blairs' exercise bicycle removed from Number 10,' groaned the honest fellow; and across Britain one imagined the Sky audience returning their sodden handkerchiefs to their eyes as they were racked with fresh bouts of sobbing. The exercise bicycle! The Prime Ministerial exercise bicycle! Never more to be used in Downing Street again! Woe, woe and thrice woe!" (Boris Johnson)

It's like Foot breaking his foot on the first day, or Kinnock falling into the sea. Gordon promising to rain changes on us, while half the country is flooded out. "We must have change! Change everything! Let it be decreed." It's like a Gilbert and Sullivan opera, topsy-turvy par excellence. Never mind thousands of changes, one good one would be nice.

Feargal Mooney

Things fall apart

"...of all the deranged notions that were floated - Blair as a 'faith ambassador', please - they came up with and settled on this idiocy. Why stop there? Why not put a Klansman in charge of race relations, a paedophile at the head of the Boy Scouts, and set up a Melvyn Bragg School for Cultural Excellence while we're at it? They have selected Tony Blair, the executioner of hundreds of thousands of Iraqis, the co-sponsor of Israel's murderous attack on Lebanon, the arms dealer to the crooked Saudi dynasty, the detestable spear-carrier for the American Empire, and bag-carrier for Bush, to be the Quartet's envoy to the Middle East." (Lenin's Tomb)

The world has been turned on its head. Jeeves is now to be the boss and Wooster has to go and be an emissary to the fuzzy-wuzzies. Maybe he even thought Apres moi le deluge, as he toddled off with floods all around the country and wars around the world.

Feargal Mooney

Donnington Road this evening

Wake of the sun

 

Keeping you up to the minute with Willesden clouds

Friends of the Willy

Lines between day & night

Nice website, Steve. "Flotsam and jetsam" goes with the feeling of coral or driftwood conjured by the Google graphic at the head of the page. I used to have some "flowers" made out of branching black coral and tiny white seashells that looked just like that.

Ossian

New London 2012 logo by T Boy

Somebody said that even the teaboy at Sphagnum Photo Agency could do better than the official London 2012 olympics logo. So Sphagnum supremo Onion Mbeke gave the work experience slave, who henceforth wishes to be known as T Boy, 20 minutes, the maximum time that Onion can survive without tea, and here is what he came up with. Wolf Howlin's or whatever they're called took a year and 400 grand to come up with their messy and fragmented effort, which has since struck several people into epileptic fits. For the small price of 20 minutes off, I think that T Boy ain't done too bad. Man. (Feargal)









"These are just ideas. They are not meant to be static or monochrome, they are meant to use the Olympic colours and transform for animations." (T Boy)

T-Boy © Sphagnum

Support your local bookshop AND authors

New Short Stories 1 is in stock (right on the main counter) at the Willesden Bookshop (Willesden Library Centre, 95 High Street, Willesden, NW10). They have sold eleven copies to date, and I can assure you they won't run out of stock! If you happen to get there and the last one has gone, ask them to phone me and I'll run round the corner (literally, that is where I live) with a new batch. Yes, that is publishing, you know, big business. I was hoping to give the profits to Comic Relief, but as yet not even near breaking even. Come on you lot.

As for Amazon, at one point New Short Stories 1 was in the top 40 anthologies. Don't get excited, though, because this can be achieved by just selling two copies in one day. Now if you all want to help (who the hell am I kidding, nobody even reads this) why not see if we can send the book spinning up to the top of the Amazon charts? Let me know if you buy a few and I'll get a screenshot as proof of the chart position.

I'm rather shameless about promoting this as so much blooming work went into it, and it is also packed with wonderful reading. I can be cool some other time. (When I'm dead will be soon enough.)

Ossian

Sasquatch

Eeeee eee eeee & Bed by Tao Lin:

"...a weightlessness entered into Chelsea’s blood—an inside ventilation, like a bacteria of ghosts—and it was sometime in the fall, before her 23rd birthday, that her heart, her small and weary core, neglected now for years, vanished a little, from the center out, took on the strange and hollowed heaviness of a weakly inflated balloon."

You can now read Tao Lin's 2006 Willesden short-listed story "Sasquatch" online. It is part of the collection Bed (Melville House, 2007).

Troglodytes troglodytes

There Now

Sphagnum

King of the birds

I see wrens from time to time and the other day I saw four (this is one of them) at the same time in a dead tree by the window of my writing shed. The king of the birds, according to folklore. They are noisy beggars, for something that could be mistaken for a queen bee as they dart rapidly by too fast to see clearly. They fly low and I've seen them going under a shed and under a building, which must be how they earned their latin name troglodytes troglodytes. Their "song" sounds a bit like some sort of drill.

Ossian

The warmonger as human interest

The long kiss goodbye (Martin Amis, Guardian)

In pictures and video: Amis on Blair (Pictures by Dan Chung)

"Deplorably flirtacious" is hardly a strong enough term for these starstruck diary entries about the chief cheerleader and cannon fodder purveyor for the invasion of Iraq. Blair decided that Britain would "pay the blood price" and now spends his time trying to mumble up plausible sounding excuses. All we're short of is the "Saint Sebastian shot full of arrows" illustration. Cool Britannia.

Feargal Mooney

The sky just now

Sometimes it doesn't seem so bad...



And then, a demon.*

O. Mbeke, Sphagnum

* This would make a good title for Ruth Rendell. Send her a link, Feargal. Ed