I went for an interview today, came home thoughtful, won't hear about the job for a few weeks, but there was some other disappointing work news waiting in my email inbox. More details below...

So Hester gets pressured out of taking his bonus, part of his terms & conditions agreed when he took the job, while Sir Fred is now back to being plain old Fred fae Paisley because he's an odious individual who severely cocked up, but also because it was politically expedient for CameronClegg to throw a bone to popular sentiment...
You don't reform the circus by kicking last year's redundant ringmaster, and you don't do it by screwing down the remuneration of the organ grinder just to get you brownie points from the audience.
Instead you reform the circus. Can anyone point to the evidence that this is happening? Or are we lost in the realm of gesture politics?

Yesterday on Princes St, Edinburgh, there was a young man with a sign saying, 'Do you want a fun job?' With many misgivings, I stopped to find out more and it was a job as a chugger (AKA charity mugger AKA those folk who stand on the street and try to get passers-by to sign up for direct debits to certain charities).
I wasn't making notes, but the basic information I got was as follows:
• Rate of pay, £7odds an hour (can't remember how many hours a week)
• No commission-based earnings
• For the initial period of employment you're on a day's notice of the sack
• There is a target - three sign-ups a day. Anything less and it's not worthwhile paying someone to stand on the street failing to bring in the charity contributions. Fail to hit the target and sooner rather than later you'll be replaced.

I suppose you get chuggers to go out and accost the punters but if they prove no good at it after a few days - fewer than three a day sign-ups - they get binned. Presumably they spend the first two or three hours of a shift propositioning people like crazy to try and meet the daily target, then they can slow down, safe in the knowledge they still have a job tomorrow. Checking with employment law basics, you're only entitled to a week's notice of termination of employment after a month's service, so it's perfectly legal for the company employing the chugger to decide after a few days, or a week or whatever, that he or she isn't up to it and, 'Don't come back tomorrow.' After a month (and up to two years' service) the statutory minimum is a week's notice.
Charity or not, it's hardcore selling - like cold calling but face-to-face on the street when it's raining. Anyway, I didn't pursue 'the opportunity'.

A selection of 'oh no they couldn't have' advertising from back in the day. The ad for the Paul Fourticq pullover is especially, er, French.
http://owni.eu/2010/11/08/top-48-ads-that-would-never-be-allowed-today/

Hearts' owner Vlad Romanov surpasses himself with the latest official statement on the club's website
http://www.heartsfc.co.uk/articles/20120105/vladimir-romanov-statement_2...

(No, I do not support Hibs.)

It’s hardly news that 2011 was rubbish on the economic front. The fact that I found myself working in a chain bookshop – let’s call it Sunshine Books – as a Christmas temp in November and December is far from extraordinary. That I found any work at all, and managed to keep going with the mortgage for another couple of months, was an unqualified positive rather than anything to whinge about. I did find working in the bookshop for six weeks interesting in several respects however. If you want to know why, the rest of the post is in the first comment below. If not, many thanks to the Word and to the Massive for all the fun I’ve had with the magazine, online and at the Edinburgh Mingle in 2011. A very happy & peaceful new year to you…

At a loose end this morning, I decided to try and get in touch with a key player in the nativity story and tracked down a phone number in a very old suburb of Tehran. Transcript follows in comments below, if you want to read on. Happy Christmas.

In our previous contact with each other, we may have given the impression that daily aspirin was a well-considered and altogether prudent part of the treatment for high blood pressure. Advice from your GP like, 'Take this or you'll die,', 'Go out and buy some immediately, any old generic aspirin will do,' and, 'It's either this or a massive stroke next week,' could have created the belief in the minds of some hypertense NHS users across Edinburgh and the Lothians that aspirin was 'a good thing'. Further research has led us to reconsider our position however and now the Lothian Joint Formulary Committee has made it quite clear that this allegedly harmless little pill can kill you stone dead if you as much as look at it. Even handling one of these monster drugs could make you bleed to death inside 18 seconds. As your healthcare provider, we now would like to make it plain that there is not a scintilla of truth in anything we've said about aspirin for the last couple of decades. We would urge the public to call the helpline advertised on our website (www.aspirindeathapocalypse.org.uk) whereupon trained experts in biohazard suits will descend from a helicopter above your home and take away every last 75mg pill before the Lothians are left looking like the countryside around Kursk in late August 1943. Thank you.

Coming home from late shift at the bookshop (about an hour ago), I was gazing idly around the 35 bus heading up Easter Road, leaving Leith, heading for Edinburgh proper, when I noticed a bloke in a nearby seat shuffling through a plastic bag with around a year's worth of recent Word mags ... he settled on the one with the Noel Gallagher cover and put the rest back in his bag

If you're reading this, oh bus-travelling Word reader, sorry I didn't say hi. It had been a long day.

Hello disinterested non-footy, non-Scottish readers. You'll be wanting to look away now because the next few paragraphs are about Scottish football. Again. From an Edinburgh perspective, it just feels like the end times - main post in comments below...

Ann Summers store raided in Portsmouth

And Stories From The City, Stories From The Sea was released 11 years ago

/clears throat, sings 'Who knows where the time goes...'

I don't usually spend time looking at nutjob websites but since it was all Bill Bryson's fault, I thought I might share. Rather than clog up this site with a massive post, it's the first comment below. Dip in, or not.

Here in douce old Edinburgh, a local Indian restaurant called the Kismot has a neat marketing trick, selling the Kismot Killer - the hottest curry in Scotland. If you order it, you have to sign a legal disclaimer – if you finish it, the curry is free.
The other day, the restaurant ran a curry eating contest involving the Kismot Killer to raise money for the Children's Hospice Association Scotland.
According to the BBC..
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-scotland-edinburgh-east-fife-15183070
... two contestants had to be taken to Edinburgh Royal Infirmary by ambulance after "becoming ill". One tactic for competitors was to eat the curry, rush out of the restaurant and spew in the street.

From the restaurant's website, the last video at the bottom of the page (Team Extreme Present The Kismot Killer!) is worth a look, even if just for the waiter. At the start, talking about those ordering the offending curry, he says, "I'm not racist, but it always seems to be stupid white people..."
http://www.kismot.co.uk/gallery/videos/

Okay, so I was looking around on YouTube for the Up Pompeii movie (I blame whoever it was that posted the caption competition pic the other day with Rod Stewart and Hilary Pritchard).
Anyway, found the intro in which Frankie pops up from behind a model of Pompeii as a sight gag. His movement and mannerism just made me think, "It's Miranda Hart." Especially at 0:38-0:39.
Is this where she gets it from?