David Morris – brassedoff.net

I didn’t want to say last week that I was going on holiday for obvious reasons (empty house etc), but now we’re back I can disclose with impunity that we’ve just had a week in Marmaris, Turkey. Marmaris is probably Turkey’s equivalent to Ibiza.We were early in the season, it was quiet and our hotel was far enough away from the main strip to miss any night-time noise. Marmaris with it’s manufactured beach and wall to wall sun loungers…

It was a brilliantly relaxing week. Red hot weather, great hotel and pool, great food, cold beer…

This was the view from our bedroom window

There are of course some things that are impossible to get away from, although the Castrol Chicken didn’t make it on to my hit list that evening…

Marmaris is a popular venue for sailors with a large marina and it’s obviously popular with lottery winners (although I reckon you’d need a Euromillions Rollover for this Red Ensign-flying craft.

Whilst out on a ‘lazy day’ boat trip around some of the local bays, we came across this chap who followed the boats around selling ice cream. Obviously a variant on the traditional ’stop me and buy one’ with a 25hp outboard motor…

Whilst at Turunç I had chance to contemplate whether we would consider visiting Turkey again… and why not?

One of the problems British Waterways must face in the upkeep of the canal network is that there are probably still a large number of bits of it that haven’t seen the light of day for hundreds of years. Take this instance for example on the Birmingham and Worcester canal where an old elm valve put in somewhere around 1815 to permit the canal to be drained for maintenance has eventually rotted away and dumped a fair proportion of the water in the pound down the overspill weir. The local BW manager has been quoted as saying that they (BW) didn’t even know of the existence of this ‘feature’ until it gave way.

I know that boaters frequently like to get on the backs of BW for any number of (legitimate) reasons, but sometimes, they have a difficult job to do, faced with, as the BBC reporter says in the video clip linked above, having to deal with nearly 200 year old technology that isn’t on the plans.

I’ve been trying over the past few days to get some clarification from Thomas Cook / Visa as to exactly why they turned down my application. As I think I said last time, their quoted reason was due to me having a low credit score which after paying out the £15 for my Equifax credit report proves not to be the case.

Eventually, I got to speak to someone off the bottom of the food chain tonight at Thomas Cook Visa who started off giving me the same blurb about low credit scores or the fact I must have too much credit. Again, I pointed out that the first one is untrue and I only have one credit card so I don’t know how they can say I have too much.

To be honest now, it’s got to the stage where I don’t even want the b****y card. All I want to know is why they’ve declined me. No lies or untruths about low credit scores. If it’s that they’re not going make any money out of me, then say so. Don’t lie to me about credit scores

I now have a search against my credit reference which may negatively impact any future attempt to get credit because too many searches is something looked on unfavourably by the scoring process (this article explains in a little more detail).

I hopefully have now managed to get my complaint referred up the food chain to the complaints department at the third attempt (I’d been promised call-backs on a number of occasions but I get the impression it was easier not to talk to the awkward Northern bloke with a complaint). I’m trying to get some resolution this week, but again I’m not holding my breath.

If I don’t get a satisfactory answer this week, Mrs Woolforbrains has suggested I pass everything off to Tony Levene at Guardian Money to see if he’ll take up the cause.

Here are a few interesting articles from the past months on this or a similar subject:

Anger at Egg band on prudent customers

Borrowing: Know the score if you want credit

How to build an excellent credit history

including the quote: “If you have little or no credit already, the chances are most credit card companies will reject you. That’s simply because they can’t assess whether you’re creditworthy. Since there’s no real track record of how good you are at keeping on top of your debt commitments, you’re considered a higher risk. “

Check back soon. It’s not a problem that’s going away any time soon!

I suppose I should have been a bit suspicious when I purchased a new mobile phone contract last year. After years with Orange, I decided to shift to O2 to get the deal I wanted on a new Blackberry Pearl. It took ages to get the authorisation for the contract through. It surprised me a little at the time. After all, I have no debt, have never paid my credit card late (in fact I always pay it off in full every month), haven’t had a bank load or any other finance for probably over 18 years and we always pay our bills on time.

Anyway, bringing the story up to date, we went into Thomas Cook recently to book a holiday. After much searching, we found the deal we wanted and were chatting to the travel agent about payment. My original plan was to put the lot on my credit card and clear it when the bill came in, but that would have attracted an additional 2% surcharge as they pass on what the credit card company charges them to the punter (i.e. me).

“Ah,” said the travel agent. “If you apply now for one of our Thomas Cook Visa cards, you can pay for it on that, you don’t attract the 2% surcharge and you earn loyalty points towards future holidays”. Well, for the 2%, it was probably worth the hassle, so we went through the motions. The last screen that came up after she’d entered all our details in said that my application would have to be referred to their credit checking department so they were unable to authorise the application there and then.

Jingle, jingle went the alarm bell.

In the post yesterday morning was a letter from Thomas Cook Credit Cards saying that in view of my low credit score, they’d turned down my application for a card.

Mrs Woolforbrains and I had a chat about it and decided that I probably had a low credit score because there was no information in the system about me, so in an effort to find out more, I rang the application department hotline.

“Sorry, but we can’t tell you why you’ve been refused” they said, but I did get out of them that they checked against Equifax, one of the major credit checking agencies. Armed with this information, I forked out £14.95 to get my credit report today online from Equifax.

Guess what?

It’s Excellent. All green. A credit score of around 485 (’excellent starts at 475).

The letter from Thomas Cook said my score was too low.

Other than the fact that they probably wouldn’t make any money out of me in interest charges (and neither do my current card issuers) which was the only reason I could think of that they could turn me down (which isn’t in fact in my credit file anyway), I can’t find any reason why I should be refused.

It’s actually quite embarrassing actually. The same day in the travel agents, a lady turned up with her husband’s card to pay for their holiday. The agent said even though this lady knew her husband’s PIN, she couldn’t use the card, but she was at liberty to apply for her own. This lady did so and got one on the spot.

This beggars the question, with a documented excellent credit rating, why the hell can’t I get a credit card? If I went out tomorrow to buy a new car, would I be declined finance? If I went to try and take out a new mobile phone contract, would I have to suffer the indignity of having that turned down?

Perhaps, in our debt-obsessed culture , it’s something I don’t have enough of? Perhaps I should default on a few payments or get a CCJ (County Court Judgement) or something? All these would affect my credit rating, but most importantly, they’d give the credit checking agencies more information about me to go on, and the card issuers might feel happier that they were going to get some money out of me in interest charges.

Rest assured, I’m not going to go down that path which leaves me safe in the knowledge that I’m probably just going to continue to be a bad credit risk with an unblemished credit history.

The saga doesn’t quite end there though. I have been in touch with Thomas Cook Visa and requested that they clarify exactly why they declined my application. Watch this space…

It’s official.

Dan’s homework was to produce a flying machine that could carry an egg. The photos here are of version two. Version one, a learning experience in itself, looked like a plane but flew like a brick. On the way home last night, I concluded that seeing as paper airplanes “fly” (stricyly glide I suppose), if I could scale one up in cardboard, we might have a better chance rather than making a cardboard airplane, and the plan worked. Dan then set to work decorating it in a Beano motif and the “Dennis The Menace Dakota” was born!

It was clear that it was taking a fair degree of concentration, but it was a fun exercise. I don’t know how far it will go with an egg on board – it’s now got a small hole midships (!) so the egg sits in to the fuselage to avoid upsetting the balance and centre of gravity too much, but it will go further than a brick.

The content management system I’m developing for the IWA Campaign Festival (I must stop calling it a rally) is coming on in leaps and bounds. I’m just working out a way of getting a newsfeed in place with the option of displaying a ticker or a fixed panel. In doing this, I had to change the way the templates were processed to extract the content references, but it’s ended up being a bit more flexible. Newsfeeds can be maintained from the management interface, so it doesn’t necessarily have to be me that does it.

We’ve also managed to secure sponsorship for the Rally^H^H^H^H^HFestival web site from a local canal-related organisation. I’ve not put their branding on yet, but will be doing shortly.

Take a look. I’m quite impressed. If you have a look at the gallery page, you’ll see I’ve incorporated the Slimbox plugin. I just like the way it displays pictures without taking users away from the page.

I’d agreed to help out with the Canal Trust publicity trailer today at Tapton Lock, and seeing as the weather was exceptional, I’d planned to go by bike. I had my new (birthday) cycling shoes to try out as well, so I fitted the cleats last night and I made a small adjustment to the handlebar positioning so there wasn’t such a difference between my commuting bike and my weekend bike.

The first part of the run from Killamarsh to Staveley is on the Trans Pennine Trail (TPT), all off road along the route of the old railway. Because of work being carried out at Staveley for the new Junction 29a Markham Colliery scheme, there’s a short diversion of about 0.5 mile along the road before you pick the canal up behind Morrisons at Staveley. Once on the towpath at Mill Green, it’s an extremely pleasant ride all the way to Tapton Lock, flat apart from where you pass the odd lock or three.

The John Varley (JV) trip boat was out plying its trade and I got the opportunity to grab a few pictures.

The Retford (connected) bit of the canal is nice enough, and there are some lovely stretches on the Chesterfield side as well. In fact, you wouldn’t realise looking at it that this is the only narrowboat on this stretch of water because it doesn’t connect up with anything just yet.

Because of that, this is probably about as close as the JV ever gets to having to manoeuver around traffic, excepting perhaps the odd duck. Compare that with the veritable traffic jams we were encountering on the Seth Ellis last weekend at Retford.

I don’t think there’s anyone taking quite so many pictures of the JV as the Seth Ellis because I seldom go out on the boat without my camera, so some of these will hopefully find their way on to the Trust web site over the next few days.

Finally for today, the motley crew of the JV.

It’s happened. I switched the XBox 360 on tonight for a quick game of Bejeweled (sad aren’t I?) and it’s dying. It’s still twitching occasionally, but essentially it’s FUBAR. We’ve got three red lights on the front sometimes; other times we get the chequerboard (checkerboard for US readers) pattern overlaying the screen. Sometimes it just seems to lock up completely, but that might be because the chequerboard is overlaying a black screen?

Anyway, it looks like it might have to be sent off for repair. I’m just trying to find out what my options are. If anyone’s been through something similar, I’d appreciate any pointers.

…time passes…

It looks like Microsoft have admitted a problem and announced an effective warranty extension for any console with three red lights, so if I could only get the online support site to work, there’s a chance I might be able to get a repair booked in.

I’ll have to try again tomorrow…

You live somewhere for years, but you probably never put your tourist hat on and go and visit some of the places nearby. Hands up anyone who’s guilty? With the ever-increasing fuel prices, perhaps it’s time for a change of tack? I’ll admit that wasn’t the reasoning behind yesterday’s visit, but it could have been. We just wanted somewhere nearby, and Mrs Woolforbrains and the Young Master had both been before albeit a number of years ago. So, off to Hardwick Hall it was. In actual fact, the Hall wasn’t the main reason for visiting in the first instance. We wanted to go to Stainsby Mill, the estate watermill.

The mill is a working Victorian watermill. It grinds wheat and you can buy the produce. It’s powered by a 17ft (5.2m) waterwheel. The NT guides are keen to explain what’s what and they have a set of free ‘I Spy’ sheets for kids to complete which Daniel loved. The mill itself is an interesting place for young and old with lots to see. You can get close (but not too close) to the “works” and see how the variaous buts were put together. I liked the drive cogs with the wooden teeth (picture below). Even though they clearly had the technology for cast iron cogs, metal on metal would have given rise to the potential for sparks, and if the mechanism jammed anywhere, having half the drive made of wood meant that the cogs would strip fairly easily and replacement wouldn’t require a lengthy period of down-time. Clever, these Victorians!

Hardwick Hall was built by Elizabeth of Shrewsbury (hence the ostentatious ES stonework) back in Elizabethan times. Bess (of Hardwick – heard of her?) was Elizbethan England’s second most powerful woman (presumably after Good Queen Bess ‘erself) and her wealth and power show all over the house. It’s richly adorned with period tapestries in every room, hall and staircase and the gallery houses what I found to be an interesting collection of paintings including one of Charles Boyle who I thought at the time was Boyle of Boyles Law. However on looking Charlie up on Wikipedia this morning, I find that the Boyles Law chappie was actually Irish philosopher Robert Boyle. Our man, 4th Earl of Orrery (and there’s a big clue) is credited with having had produced the first (roll of drums) orrery or mechanical model of the solar system. (It wasn’t actually Charlie that made it – he had a local clockmaker do the tricky stuff).

The hall was the second home of the Duke of Devonshire who’s main pad is none other that Chatsworth and in many places, you can see the serpent device that crops up frequently around there. Hardwick was given over to the Government in the 1950’s to pay inheritance tax and the property was subsequently handed over to the National Trust.

It’s about 20 minutes drive from Killamarsh, signposted from M1 J29 and well worth a visit.

It was one of those spur of the moment decisions. “Where shall we go today” (yesterday actually, but you get my drift)? I’m usually hopeless with these. They tend to be canal-orientated (did you know by the way that the US say “oriented”? It’s considered snobbish or pretentious to say “orientated” and I got pulled up by one of our US legal councils for it… like what would he know?) Anyway, I digress…A quick search on t’internet gave me a suggestion. Let’s go to the zoo. Daniel had never been to a zoo before and it seemed to tick all the boxes, and the weather was nice. Twycross is 65 miles away, Chester 85 so Twycross won.

Did we have a good day? We certainly did. The look on Dan’s face as we came back from seeing the elephants (he’s never seen a live real one before close up) and there was this giraffe poking its head above the fence is a picture that will remain in my mind for many years – he was just so excited!

Twycross Zoo is a lovely place. It’s flat, there’s lots to see, it’s not horrendously priced, and despite being busy, we weren’t falling over people every five minutes. It’s the world primate centre, so if you want to see gibbons, apes, chimps, gorillas etc, there are few better places. It’s also got penguins, sea lions, elephants, giraffes, capybara…

I’ve included the last picture only because I was so taken with the depth of colour that it’s now my desktop wallpaper for a few weeks!

Did you know that a flamingo’s knee is actually its ankle, so technically they stand on tiptoes? Neither did I!