pumpkinstrokemarrow

Water companies have always been into building, that is to say into digging up roads in order to install their pipes and drains. So not quite the same as domestic buildings maintenance, but they do know the game. More recently they have been into call centres and call management. You call them about your water problem and they manage that problem to completion. Maybe with a lot of press 5 if your water problem is in your back garden but it does get done. So, not a big move for them to move into taking calls about your leaking tap, draughty window or leaking roof. They have all the infrastructure needed to deal with this sort of thing. And from your point of view, the customer, all you have to do is ring them up. Any time of day or night. They will always answer the phone and eventually a van will pull up outside your house. They will probably ring you up a week later to ask if they can close the call. And you would not mind paying a premium for this sort of service.

No more ringing round small builders who may or may not answer the phone and who may or may not turn up, depending on the state of their social life and/or order book. No more feeling guilty about paying them cash to avoid paying the VAT. Said small builders must have been much helped by the arrival of mobile phones which makes them much more reachable. But I think they had better watch it. The water companies of the world might start to take a significant proportion of their business. Just look how Tesco has muscled into the village shop business.

Nearer home I had a small complaint to make of the Surrey Library service. They sold me a book about the bourgeois experience of pleasure (of the arty sort) which was classified GRE. I have been puzzling for some weeks now about what on earth GRE might stand for and yesterday got around to going back to the library to find out. The lady behind the desk was able to tell me, without consulting her notes, that GRE stood for the history and geography of Great Britain. Which is all very well but the book in question might be described as European cultural history. So a very sloppy piece of classification.

The book itself was interesting. I am not sure if I am sufficiently moved to read the other 4 volumes of the series but I was moved to learn about the serial abuse of the term bourgeois by artists. It seems that bourgeois is a sort of general purpose hate word for many artists, in the same way as it was for lefties of my generation. This despite the fact that it is the cultured bourgeois who, by and large, fund arty activity. Cultured aristos. have not been big players in the arty field for some hundreds of years and the working classes never have been. So, for example, I learn that Flaubert was a particularly virulent bourgeoisophobe.

Perhaps it is the touchiness of creative types about their creations. They have to have buyers of their creations in order to put bread in their mouths. But they hate the dependence and they hate having to put up with learned chatter about their creations by others. They hate having their stuff pawed over by the great unwashed. At least I think I would. I remember asking an artist once how she put up with such learned chatter and she said you just get used to it. Doesn't bother you after a while.

Also true that you need the discipline of having to sell to keep your work reasonably on the straight and narrow and not completely self indulgent and incomprehensible to others. One needs the framework of a commission to stimulate the creative juices. Sadly, a necessary but not sufficient condition to judge by the amount of rubbish that gets sold.