Social media award winner

Well those years of pushy tweeting and engaging with people in financial services and beyond on Twitter have finally paid off!

I am now officially the most useful intermediary journalist tweeter

As such I should be able to use this badge on my blogs and websites to prove my usefulness to society!

PanaceaAdviser award winner

Flaggin' mansions!

My defence of Ed Miliband last week got a storming response on Facebook, not all of it polite, but it certainly raised quite a few issues.

Since then, I have discovered two things: 

• Someone has started a petition to remove Myleene Klass as the face of Littlewoods

• Some Labour MPs (and ex MPs) will fall into the Mansion Tax bracket.

Let's deal with Littlewoods first. Personally, I like Myleene Klass. She was very sweet to my mother at a party we went to (her family are friends of our family) and she spent 20 minutes trying to explain how to use a digital camera to her. Anyone who has enough patience to teach my tech-illiterate mother how to use a camera has to be a good person, in my book. 

However, since her tirade against Ed, which I think was a thoroughly misguided and ill-informed topic for her to tackle, more than 8000 people have signed this petition on Change.org. There has also been a counter-petition for her to not be dropped, which has so far generated 590 supporters. 

I don't think Littlewoods should drop her, but a media-savvy PR at the firm should sit down with their face of the brand and explain to her that the target audience for Littlewoods is not likely to sympathise with people who have to shell out £1.8m for a garage.

Next, Emily Thornberry, a thorn in the side of Ed Miliband. There must be something about the man that means every week, a woman will publicly berate him or cause him embarrassment. Last week it was the turn of this woman in her £2m+ mansion, who tweeted a picture of a house in Rochester, swathed in England flags. In case you have been living in a bubble/not in the UK, here's the tweet:

That Thornberry Tweet Rochester

I can't help feeling a slight twinge of guilt when I read about Emily Thornberry's tweet. Sure, the people living in this house are unlikely to have felt any sympathy for those wealthy people complaining about the mansion tax, so they'd agree with Miliband on that. But they should not have to stomach the upper-classes sneering down their noses at them, publicly, on twitter.

People who have bought Thornberry's lame excuse: "I have never seen so many flags on a house, this is what I meant" are obviously living in cloud Kitten Land, where everything is beautiful and people tell the truth.

The truth is, she was taking the proverbial and - do not deny it - she said what many of us were thinking, especially when we saw TV footage of the man emerge from his house, cap on head, less than 100% fit and covered in tattoos. To be honest, I believe people should be allowed to fly their flags without being branded as anything by anybody, but when I saw him, my first thought was 'this is exactly the person I thought would live there'. Then I realised, guiltily, that someone else lives in a yellow house and flies the flag daily, without censure: 

Buckingham Palace

Who was I to criticise? I was no better than Thornberry. But I am just a person, not someone in public office, let alone a Labour personage living in a lofty house in North London. Her comment and the motive behind it smacked of upper-class snobbery. It smacked of Toryism of the Old School kind, not the kind that is pandering to UKIP. It reeked of Middle England putting the educational boot into the rest of us. And therefore Miliband was right to give her the boot, too. Oh, wait, sorry, yes, "accept her resignation". 

If Labour wants to prove it is for the people, for the masses, then its party members better start looking at their own lifestyle rather than criticise that of others, especially the voting public. Because it won't be too long before someone sets up a Change.org petition against the entire Labour shadow cabinet - and their £2m houses - and then we are left with nothing credible that can stand against the grinding, terrible machine that a Con-UKIP truce would bring.

Post-script

However while I may not be able to pay a tax on something like this BIG WHACKING HOUSE unless I become a former prime minister, I am still convinced that if I did own a £21m house in a prime central London location, I would have more than enough equity and/or free cashflow to be able to pay a tax for the privilege.

Nobody understands me

Apparently I do not speak or write English and therefore people who do speak and write English cannot understand me.

I say this because quite evidently, I can do both fluently. However, it seems that nobody gets what I'm saying, so I must either assume they do not listen, they do not understand because they haven't grasped the meaning of my words and so take it upon themselves to do what they think I meant, or that they are being deliberately obtuse.

What has prompted this outburst?

Well several things. First of all, I put a job advert in for a 'literate reporter' to work across features and news on our weekly financial newspaper.

Out of the 60-plus entries I received, about five came through with no spelling or grammatical mistakes on them.

Many of the applicants had proudly informed me they were 'fluent' in English, only to assure me of the complete opposite through their appalling spelling, lack of syntax and complete fabrication of vocabulary. 'Journalisticism' is not a word, nor is our paper called XXXX 'Advertiser' (although we do carry a lot of adverts, so perhaps you were just being a smart Alec. In any case, you went into my 'idiot' pile').

One man went to great lengths to tell me how much he wanted this job, his dream job, because he loved Formula 1.

I don't know how he got from IFA to 'Bernie Ecclestone' but he also went onto my 'idiot pile'.

When I have a free moment, each of these idiots will receive a letter from me explaining why I dismissed their application instantly and suggesting that, if they wish to get a job in journalism ('journalisticism') then they either learn how to spell or use a spell checker.

Because I am the human spell-check, sweethearts.

So, either 55 of these applicants were being deliberately obtuse, failed to understand my meaning or just didn't read the job description properly, or I was not writing in English. So many people cannot be wrong... can they?

The second thing to tick me off is the lack of understanding that people have when I speak on the phone. Admittedly you now only have my word for it but I can at times, and helped by gin, sound extremely posh. Sort of like a sardonic Lady Thatcher but without the apparent insanity.

So when I speak on the phone, I am offended all the time when people whose verbal skills are only slightly better than that of a Macaw keep asking me to repeat things because they 'don't understand my accent'.

This really gets to me. How many 't's must I overemphasise on words until you catch my drift? Why should I have to say 'ow-ah' instead of 'hour' or 'Stre-am' instead of 'Streatham'?

However, I am evidently not speaking English. (I am, just in case you didn't already pick up the gist of this post).


The third thing that frustrates me is when I email things so carefully, using short words and short sentences, and people ask me to explain it all verbally.

My temptation in this matter is to just read my email to them, pointing at each word in turn and enunciating v-e-r-y s-l-o-w-l-y the various syllables just in case the vocabulary was too much for them.

This does not go down well with colleagues. Or my mother, who put the phone down on me, but that was probably fair enough.

I don't mind people asking me to explain things, or to clarify things. But when they have an email in front of them and ask me: 'What did you want me to do with this?' the logical conclusions to draw are either that I have been writing in ancient Sanskrit or they just haven't bothered to read the email properly.

All these things, and so many, many more things - oh, another example: Facebook posts where people instantly jump down my throat thinking I've declared allegiance to one flag when it is clear to all the other 30 commentators that I had categorically not declared any such thing - make me sad.

What has happened to communication? What has happened to the beauty of the written word, where once upon a time, great novelists luxuriated in finding the mot juste or, if they couldn't, they just stuck a French phrase in, like wot I just did, and pretended they were educated.

Alas! Text speak and 140-character Twitter feeds have killed the radio, television and newspaper star.

KTHNXBY