Our next-door neighbours have a cat, and far from being adorable, it’s actually a vicious killing machine, and regularly deposits the corpses of pigeons in our garden – or worse still, their still living, half-mangled corpses. Earlier today I looked out of the window and saw a distressed, half-dead pigeon.

So we did what we thought was the most responsible thing – call the RSPCA. If anyone can fix a wounded animal, and cure it of it’s ailments, it’s probably going to be them. And this is when the most horrifying thing happened. The RSPCA turned up and decided that the best course of action was to put the pigeon out of it’s misery. So the man took the pigeon out to the van and killed it right there and then in front of our house. Or so I’m told anyway – I couldn’t bear to watch.

Of course, there was probably no other option – it’s probably pretty difficult to make pigeon-size wheelchairs, and helping all pigeons is probably uneconomic – the RSPCA man wasn’t just the death panel, but the executioner too. But it was still quite upsetting, because as the person who first discovered the pigeon’s plight and triggered the RSPCA being alerted and therefore hastening the pigeons death… did I kill it by proxy? Do I have blood on my hands?

It’s been a rollercoaster of emotions – I think I must feel like the general who orders troops into battle knowing they weren’t coming back alive. Or perhaps more precisely, the general who orders the doctors to treat a patient only for the doctor to instead go on a killing spree.

And I bet the RSPCA man wasn’t terribly happy either. I bet he grew up loving animals, finding them fascinating, enjoying trips to the zoo, and then training to be a vet because of his love of animals and wanting to help them… only to then find out he’ll spend most of his career murdering them.

I’m just glad I didn’t give the pigeon a name, or something that would make the story even more loaded with emotion. In fact, re-read this blog-post but imagine the pigeon’s name was Dale. Dale the pigeon.

Nature is horrible.

• Vegg-etarians
• Hungry for a solution to the food crisis
• Names and shame
• Watching football
• Captain Opportunity Strikes Again

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Post tags: animals, nature, Pigeons

Last year I went to see four episodes of Dave Gorman’s Genius being recorded – I think it was during perhaps my second or third week living in London. The episode shown last night on BBC Two – actually the fourth to be recorded – had Frank Skinner as the guest and brilliantly, myself and my friend Katy were visible in a few of the shots:

That’s us on the right. Bottom row of the seating. I’m wearing brown trousers and I’m slouching, as usual.

There we are again! Enjoying watching a maths teacher do a dance!

Just to prove I haven’t been photoshopping myself into the audience… here’s another picture!

And another!

If you watch the whole thing, there’s some pretty good shots of us when the camera is on Dave at the desk – we appear just to his right.

Whilst perhaps not as exciting as appearing in shot at a political protest, or y’know, on the Weakest Link, I still think it’s exciting. If I appear on anything else, maybe I should start invoicing TV companies for my work as a supporting artist?

• A video I made for work
• A strange visitor
• How Derren Brown predicted the Lottery
• Weakest Link Repeat
• Sky

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The ancients had it easy, really. Sure, they didn’t have modern conveniences like BBC Four and Wikipedia, but they could get away with knowing pretty much fuck all and still call themselves educated, because the collective body of human thought was much smaller than it is now.

These days though, we have much more knowledge than any one man can handle – there’s some sort of statistic that says something like there being more books published now every year than the number of books published ever before something like 1900 (though the value of modern books isn’t considered – it’s fairly probably that Thomas Paine’s Booky-wook is more important than Russell Brand’s). This statistic in itself is another piece of knowledge – and evidently something else that I don’t actually know.

What’s got me started on this is that I’ve stumbled upon the conclusion that there’s simply too much information for me to consume and I can’t cope with it. And I don’t like this feeling at all, because it gives me a massive sense of intellectual jealousy and hatred towards people who are better than me. Though I’m very much a fan of the pursuit of knowledge, nothing annoys me more than smart kids – the sort who took their exams a year early and later turn up as contestants on University Challenge. Watching University Challenge, before the private-school educated, received-pronunciation using, prefect-used-to-being wanker has even explained what they’re reading at Oxbridge, I will irrationally hate them. How can anyone retain such huge quantities of knowledge and consume it at such an unbelievable rate?

Angry tangents aside though, the point I intended to make in the first paragraph is that I simply don’t know how to go about consuming all of the media I’d like to – I’m not sure whether or not it’s a time management issue or a trying to learn too much stuff issue, but in an ideal world, I’d like to read simultaneously:

• All unread items in Google Reader
• The Economist every week
• The Guardian at least a few times a week
• A non-fiction book
• Some sort of great work of literature
• Oh, and all of that academic reading I should be doing

Unfortunately in the annoyingly tangible real world, in actual fact I tend to manage:

• Some of my Google Reader items

…and that’s about it. So I guess this post is something of a cry for help – albeit a mostly unimportant cry based on a fabricated dilemma. I’m pretty much complaining that kicking myself in the face is not only difficult for a non-Russian gymnast like myself, but it really hurts too.

C’mon readers, throw me a bone. Tell me how to manage my reading.

• Career Aspiration #2
• Commuting
• Top Books
• Big Issue
• Beaurocratic Incompetence

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I left the house today dressed in my trendy new London gear. As I’ve previously described on this blog, I’m now a regular user of a Trilby, and a few weeks ago got a new coat that makes me look vaguely smart, but trendy-smart, like they wear in This is England. (I am slightly concerned that my fashion sense also implies that I’m a horrible racist).

Where was I heading? To trendy Shoreditch, of course. Shoreditch is basically like Camden Town* if it were on an independent label, and is populated almost exclusively by young professionals and shops that don’t display any products, and in which you have to ring a bell to enter.

After this with a couple of hours to kill I went and sat in a Pret with free wifi and used my trendy white laptop and read the Guardian. Just like everyone else in there. The only thing that showed me up as a media-industry fraud aside from my lack of meeja columnist job was that rather than use a Macbook I was using an Eee PC.

It was what happened later though that really made today Barley-esque. Inexplicably, some sort of PR firm have offered to lend me a new INQ1 mobile phone for a month – a device not until the Wasp T12. The only difference is that instead of having an extra-large 5-key, it has some Facebook and Skype integration.

So I went to the office to pick it up and I was stunned at just how much like Barley it was. Obviously it was a trendy modern new-media office. There were trendy sheer brick walls and it was converted from what looks like a former industrial space, and the office was almost completely empty, save for a few computers (probably Macs) – there was even a trendy kitchen area, and not a tie in sight.

Being a PR firm, they don’t make tangible things for people to buy, like bricks or hammers, or other things paraphernalia people in the north use, they’re people who care about brand image and social-media and buzzwords and things. And for some reason, they must have thought that I’d be the perfect vehicle in which to get in with the target market of young, urbane, affluent professionals. I tried my best to bluff being urbane, affluent and professional.

I couldn’t work out when I got there whether or not they were licking their lips at the number of demographic boxes that I ticked or were disappointed that underneath my trendy coat I still wear a five year old blue fleece rather than some sort of “ironic” Mr-T t-shirt.

I asked them “Why me?”, and it turns out it has something to do with me being moderately prolific on Twitter and Facebook and the like, and surprisingly, not because I used to write about phones and stuff for Tech Digest. They even said they weren’t targeting geeks and techies with this phone. I kept my mouth firmly shut.

The upshot of all of this is that now we have proof that I’m some sort of zeitgeist defining cultural leader. And a bit like the Canyonero episode of The Simpsons where Krusty briefly stops selling out before selling out again, I totally sold out and took the phone for a month. I’ll probably do some sort of review at the end of it as it’d be polite to do so.

* Sponsored link.

• Whoring myself out to marketing
• Snorting some hat
• James is writing about Facebook. Again.
• The Stasi Strike (Again?)
• First day at work

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Post tags: INQ1

So we decided to go to The Jump Off, at The Astoria, which is a monthly festival of hip-hoppery, which pleasingly, is almost exactly how you would imagine it to be, as it turns out that every hip-hop stereotype is true.

What made this all the more interesting is that immediately prior to going here, we attended a Skeptics in the Pub debate on UFOs with psychologist Chris French from Goldsmiths Uni and UFO crackpot Nick Pope. It was very much the antithesis of hip-hop: you’d need a collective noun for Guardian readers to describe the demographics there. This was actually superb – both French and Pope swapped sides and argued using each others arguments, just for the intellectual challenge. The best bit though, was that it provided an interesting contrast.

We weren’t really sure what to expect at the Jump Off, because to be honest, we’re all a bit middle class (Hel especially – she went to grammar school). This is something of a disadvantage in the hip-hop scene because if you don’t have an unpleasant back-story you’re not considered to have much credibility. We did plan to hip-hop up our appearances a bit – the others bought baseball caps and so on, but we didn’t care wear them in the end. We did try to modify our personalities slightly though – for example, Hel had to change her intonation when mentioning her Estate, to being merely ‘the estate’, and I if asked, planned to respond that my degree is from the “University of Life” (it was a BA (dishons) Stabbin’ with Beatboxin’).

We joined the queue for the Astoria and within seconds, a man said to us “Want some weed?”, so we immediately knew this could get interesting. This was only confirmed whem the man on the door asked us what gig we were here for, as we clearly didn’t look like the hip-hop demographic.

Walking through the door frame, I was subject to a rather ominous frisking. Though having your bag searched is quite a regular occurence at London gig venues, usually it’s just a case of the bouncers taking a half-hearted glance at your bag and saying “that’s fine”, though in this case, my arms and legs were thoroughly patted-down and I had to turn out all of my pockets. This certainly exacerbated any anxiety I had about getting murdered.

What struck me on entering the venue was not, thankfully, a knife or some stray bullets, but just how out of place we looked. Not because we were three white people at a gig for a genre with a predominantly black fanbase, but because everyone else looked like they knew about hip-hop and rap and stuff – they all decorated themselves with chains and knives and sportswear. My hip-hop knowledge extends as far as The Beastie Boys and Flobots. Also, I probably have more hair than every other man who was in that room put together.

Interestingly, they were filming it all for YouTube and presumably the telly at some point – so look forward to seeing my face looking slightly bewildered in the background of some promotional material soon!

The bill was an interesting one – it seemed to cover all of the hip-hop bases. We got there a little late, so the first act that we saw was comedian Toju, who was apparently on the dire Balls of Steel, who was described on the poster as being a “militant black guy” – so as you might imagine, his set had some uncomfortable moments for the three people with probably the pastiest skin there, as I’m sure we all collectively prayed “please don’t pick on me”. Thankfully, he wasn’t that sort of comedian, but did enter the stage saying “all the black people in the audience say ‘yeah’” to a humungous cheer, followed by “all of the white people in the audience say ‘yeah’” which led to a few weak grunts from around the room. The rest of his set was jokes and an awful lot of libel about various hip-hop celebrities which I’m sure would be excellent if you understood the references and didn’t just listen to ska.

Afterwards, and in-between acts, a DJ played some tunes (laid down some beats?), in which most of the songs sampled sound effects of gunshots. They songs also sounded more-or-less the same. Unlike ska. Ahem.

Next up was what could best be described as a Whores Fashion Show. Presumably at the behest of one of the corporate sponsors, the apparent finalists for “Miss Hip-Hop” paraded around the stage for a few minutes in what could best be described as clothing designed by the colourblind. In a few cases, it appeared that they’d forgotten to finish getting fully dressed before entering the stage – I assume it was because of time pressure, as the event was running slightly behind the published schedule.

There were also some men on stage (I don’t think there was a corresponding “Mr Hip-Hop” competition), who didn’t seem to know much about fashion either. A lot of the costumes consisted of a hoodie and trousers with the same pattern on. I’m dimly aware that it’s embarassing for women if two women show up for something wearing the same dress, and I experience similar anxiety if I see people wearing the same t-shirt (complete with witty slogan/logo/etc) as me – so I’d assume turning up wearing the same patterned trousers and hoodie are the ultimate embarassment. Not that they seemed too bothered.

The next segment was called “Got Talent”, in which members of the audience demonstrated their hip-hop skill to the audience in a bid to win fifty quid. This was pretty entertaining. There was a mixture of beatboxing, rapping (both with a beat and acapella) and normal singing. Like with any talent contest, the calibre of the talent was varied, and the audience were encouraged to cheer or boo the contestants. Whilst it was harrowing and a little heartbreaking to see people get shot down and their dreams smashed in front of their eyes by a few hundred people booing, this was offset slightly by hearing people in the audience “brap” the rubbish performers. I first learnt this from my mate Dan:”brapping” is when you make a gun shape with your fingers and shout “brap, brap” – it’s gunfire, you see. Way to dispell the stereotypes, hip-hoppers.

My favourite thing about this segment was that most of the contestants were the sort of people I’d cross the road to avoid walking past, and that all of the rappers had given themselves rap names. One contestant, who called himself ‘Stabs’ (no, really), was surprisingly threatening in a Wolf-from-Gladiators sort of way, getting moody when he was knocked out of the competition. As it turned out, most of the raps people did were about how difficult it is living in South London. I’m glad I live north of the river.

In the end the winner though, was a singer who we speculate won only because he was singing in a very heartfelt way about his mother. How much he liked her, I mean, rather than implying that she was a prostitute that he would like to shoot.

After the talent segment, it finally reached the point in the evening we’d all been waiting for – the rap battle. It was a special ‘grudge rematch’ between Micky Negro and Arkaic – who had duelled previously. It was phenomenal.

Obviously, all previously held values we had about racism, sexism and homophobia being bad had to be suspended – not an easy task when you’re there with two fairly militant feminists, but it was an incredible sight to see. Arkaic got served. And it totally made the whole evening worthwhile. The audience were really into it to, reacting to every rhyme with great enthusiasm. The freestyling was genuinely impressive too – the rappers reacted to what was going on around them and to what their opponent was saying. There was, of course, a lot of lazy rhymes calling their opponent “gay” or “whack” but there were also a lot of clever ones too.

I think the battle could have gone either way until Arkaic, a white guy, made the mistake of bringing racial matters to the forum. When he claimed that Micky Negro had a face that looked like it had been “hit by a frying pan” because he was black, he seemed to lose the audience’s sympathy, leading to Micky Negro’s final knock-out line of “This is like Barack Obama versus John McCain”, at which point the audience went wild, leading to a crescendo in which the DJ weighed in with some dramatic scratching, even though he still had time on the clock – it was clear who the winner was going to be.

Content, we left soon after this, not bothering to stay for the final “pillow fight” segment, which surprisingly, was literally just a pillow fight – there wasn’t a hidden hip-hop meaning, such as ‘pillow’ being slang for ‘gun’ or something. It was just people fighting with pillows, which seems a bit tame, really.

It was all pretty incredible really – the sort of thing that we all agreed was well worth going to, but that we should never go to again.

• On da farm
• Gallows / Lethal Bizzle (!) / Poison The Well / Blackhole
• Don’t support school-sponsored events
• (hed)PE / OPM / Weapons
• The Musician

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Post tags: astoria, event, hip-hop, jump off, london, Music, rap

On the night bus home the other week, for instance, the bus was trundling along through Soho, and it was about the time when people get kicked out of clubs, so there were plenty of drunks. One group of drunk girls tried to board the bus but the driver, quite rightly, was not having any of it, as one of them didn’t have a ticket. This led to an interesting stand-off where the girls screamed “You’re legally entitled to take her home”, with the stress on “entitled”, as if this clever piece of legalese was a loophole that allowed for free bus journeys. In retaliation, the driver simply switched off the engine.

Wisely, I decided not to wade in and point out that the phrase they were looking for was “legally obliged”, and that the driver is not legally obliged in any way. Other passengers didn’t feel the same way as me though. One passenger emerged from the top deck – an old man of about 60, who had the Churchill-dog-esque partially melted face look about him, decided to try and broker some peace.

“You’re being disruptive and abusive”, he told the drunk girls with the natural air of authority that older people tend to have, before undermining himself slightly by adding “…now fuck off“.

• Bus Driver
• Bus Tales
• Holy Cow! Women Bishops at last!
• People at work
• Foot in mouth (again)

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It was for a good cause though – it was against Proposition 8, the Californian constitutional amendment that will re-illegalise gay marriage there, that they bewilderingly voted in favour of on November 4th. See, previously I’d have made funny satirical references to the plight of the constantly persecuted minority of homophobes, but it looks like in California, the homophobes actually make up a slight majority of the state’s voters.

This is an issue very close to my heart, as I had been planning to move to California and marry a man.

I’m overselling my role in this slightly – I arrived horrendously late because I was pretty spectacularly ill, and then when there didn’t join in with the chanting or whatever, I was more an observer. This was mostly because my opinions are slightly more complex than something than can be summed up in a chant or a banner. I was planning to make a banner saying: “I UNDERSTAND THAT PROPOSITION 8 WAS PASSED THROUGH PROPER DEMOCRATIC PROCESS, BUT I BELIEVE THAT THIS INDICATES GREATER SOCIETAL PROBLEMS IN AMERICA, SUCH AS THE ROLE OF RELIGION IN PUBLIC LIFE, AND THE POLARISATION OF POLITICAL POSITIONS DUE TO THE STRUCTURE OF THE AMERICAN POLITICAL SYSTEM, AS WELL AS A NUMBER OF OTHER ISSUES*”, and then describe my western-European solipsistic bias on the back of the banner for if I was challenged. But I couldn’t find a piece of card large enough.

What was a bit disappointing was that just how few people had turned up – on Facebook, over 800 people had been invited to the “event”, yet on the ground when I got there only around 15 people were present. According to others, at its greatest extent, there were perhaps 25 people. As I approached Grovesnor Square from the opposite side to the embassy, I approached the actually grassy part in the middle expecting to see it swarming with people and whistles being blown, and that sort of thing, but I couldn’t see anything – especially unusual as homosexuals tend to have a reputation for being colourful characters.

Even more bizarely, I can’t actual verify that there were any real life gays actually there at all. I’m straight and I was there with people who called themselves “bisexual” (which I guess sort of counts), “ambiguous” or “gender-queer” (whatever that means)… and if none did turn up, I’m slightly offended that I showed all of that solidarity and they couldn’t be bothered to make the effort for their own damn cause!

• Musings on American healthcare
• Yet another post about the telly
• Tories :-(
• [spunge]
• Sex Pistols

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Post tags: america, american embassy, gays, london, policy, prop8

I don’t think this is a trait unique to myself though – I think that technology has greatly aided the procrastinator, and with a little bit of training, you can fritter away entire days without doing any activity worthy of even being summarised as a bullet point.

Being someone who pretends to be a writer in addition to being a student, I spend the vast majority of my time in front of my computer, and the great thing about modern computers is just how many programs you can setup to bleep and ping at you to steal your attention away from the blinking cursor on the blank page in front of you where the important work should be. Right now, for instance, I have my e-mails open so every few minutes I get to look away from this page and delete yet another advert for “CHE@P MEDS”. Not only this, but because I’m a young person, and therefore hip and modern, I have a chat program called Twitter popping up constantly with status updates from other people, who invariably explain that they’re also sitting in front of a computer, trying to avoid doing some work.

I’ve recently learnt though of another ultra-effective means of procrastinating. Having recently moved out of my parents house for the first time, I’ve discovered that to maintain a house to a tolerable standard, there are all sorts of little chores and tasks that must be done. Most are pretty menial – washing up, washing clothes, replenishing cupboards with food and the like, but when given the choice between starting on that all important essay or sorting my socks into matching pairs, the latter is a surprisingly attractive prospect.

It’s baffling really – I shouldn’t really mind writing essays, as not only is that what I’ve chosen to spend the next year of my life doing, but the essays are about a subject that I find interesting, as that’s why I chose to study. I think it’s because now the essays have become official and important, this must make writing them boring compared to everything else in the universe. By this logic, rather than choose to study International Relations, I should have chosen to do a degree in home making (I hear the University of Life has a good course), and then due to my natural abilities to procrastinate, I’d be turning out hundreds of wonderful and insightful essays on the topic of International Relations every day.

It wouldn’t surprise me if most people are plagued by this compulsive procrastination disorder. I keep meaning to do the research to prove it, but for some reason I just never get around to doing it.

• Tedious university update!
• Shilling for the uni
• What has been the role of religion in international relations?
• The computer works
• IT’s a load of rubbish

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Post tags: procrastination

On Saturday I’ll be moving to London – initially the plan was to study for an Masters degree and seek my fortune, but after a feasibility study, I’ve had to reign in my aspirations and merely study for Masters degree, and instead accept that certainty of living in crippling debt for at least the next decade.

This has meant that I’ve spent a large slice of my time in London looking for somewhere to live. I got over the first hurdle of actually having people to live with with ease – I found some lovely flatmates through a university matching thing (I said I had a “GSOH” and liked “long walks on the beach”). The slightly trickier part has been finding an actual flat to be mates in.

Things started well – we found a lovely flat in the trendy bit of East London on Brick Lane, which seems to style itself as “Camden for the pragmatic” – there’s still a distinctly “independent” “vibe” given off by the lack of chain stores in the immediate vicinity, but it’s helpfully marginally more affordable. We put down a holding deposit and departed London on Friday thinking we’d got it all sorted – and in the nick of time too, as my course starts next week.

Then on Saturday morning, the landlord decided that he was going to be a twat, and move his extended family in instead of us. I know what you’re thinking, because I was thinking it too: “What a wanker, putting his family ahead of strangers”.

So a string of expletives later, and it was Monday (it was a long string), and we were back in London back on square 2. We organised a few viewings and hoped for the best. “Hoped” being perhaps the key word in that sentence.

We headed to Edgware Road to an estate agents. It wasn’t a lovely area, but then compared to a rural market town, anywhere short of South Kensington is pretty poor in comparison, so I decided to give it a chance. It turned out that the estate agents was on the first floor of a row of shops, up a dishevelled staircase. This immediately set off my middle-class alarm bells as usually I’ve found estate agents to be a rather posh affair where they offer you free drinks and stuff (making their money back by selling you a house). Instead, this estate agent’s sign was a printed A4 sheet sellotaped to an internal window and their phone number was a mobile. But no, maybe it’d be fine – what sort of self-styled punk after all would complain about a “DIY”attitude? Who says you need licensing and accreditation in order to legally let property? The Man, that’s who.

After waiting for a few minutes, an old woman led us and some other prospective tenants down the road to a tower block. A brutalist 60s “who cares about aestetics?” sort of structure – the type of place you’d go to murder Damilola Taylor. After having a cursory look around, we all collectively said “Noooooo”.

So we left London on Monday on a low, feeling deflated, not knowing where we’d live. But decided to head back in on Tuesday to start the search again.

By contrast, Tuesday was much more successful. By which I mean, we found a lovely house in Kilburn. It’s pretty damn swish – not only do I have a massive room, but I’ve got a balcony. There’s no furniture in there yet, but I’m assured I’ll have a bed to sleep on by Saturday.

Kilburn is lovely to. It doesn’t seem too murderous, even if a decapitated corpse was found scarily near to my house. Thanks to the wonders of globalisation, the high street has all of the chain stores you could ask for, and better still, seems to have plenty of places to go for live music.

Kilburn is apparently a big area of Irish immigration too, so hopefully I’ll fit in pretty well, given that I’ve got a name with apostrophy in, and something like my grandad’s grandad was Irish, so if discussion of the irish potato famine comes up, I can probably claim to be vaguely related some Irish people who were around at the time maybe. (BBC: If you want a low-rent celebrity for Who Do You Think You?, get me on as I can’t be arsed to research this sort of thing on my own).

Over the next few weeks, I’m going to be blogging my experiences in moving to London, and moving out beyond my parent’s tyrannical authoritarian regime for the first time, as well as the start of my Masters degree – so it’ll be an exciting new experience for both you the reader, and me. Expect a video of me failing to use a washing machine soon.

• Musical map of London
• A close shave?
• London Election Gerrymandering
• A “Barney” in London
• Day 4

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Post tags: kilburn, london

“I don’t need anti-virus software, I’ll just be careful… I’d never fall for an internet phishing scam, I can spot a bogus deal from a mile off”, you’re smugly thinking right now, perhaps knowingly stroking your chin as you do so.

Unfortunately, this was my line of thinking until about two and a half hours ago when I discovered that I’ve unwittingly fell victim to an internet scam.

Months ago when tickets for the Reading Festival went on sale, I wasn’t quick enough to get a ticket from the initial sale, but my love of Rage Against The Machine and <i>sticking it to the man</i> by listening to politically-charged rock music caused me to look elsewhere for tickets. I’m sure you can see where this story is heading.

After not being able to find a Nigerian Prince to supply me with some tickets, I ended up the community trading sites, like eBay and Gumtree. On Gumtree I found a woman who was selling a couple of Reading weekend tickets at almost cost-price. Her story was that she’d bought them in the sale immediately after last year’s festival but now couldn’t go. So I sent her an e-mail enquiring.

Obviously I did all of the important checks before handing over the cash, and the signs were good: her e-mail address was at a proper domain and not just at Yahoo or Hotmail or something, the website associated with her domain appeared to be a real company with a real address, and she came across as a friendly person via e-mail.

Having used eBay with success in the past I was of the mindset that people are innately good, and people on the internet are honest. Unfortunately I would later be disproved.

So I sent “Emma” a £100 “deposit” via Paypal-alike service NOCHEX and then waited for four months until earlier this week when I e-mailed her to remind her I’d bought the tickets and to arrange when I can collect them from her (as they only post them out a week before to stop, er, people selling them on). It didn’t exactly fill me with confidence when she wrote back signing off her e-mail as “Gemma”.

Then this morning, I got an e-mail where she claimed that because the card she bought the tickets on had been stolen just after she bought the tickets (<i>hmm</i>), the transaction might not have gone through so she won’t be getting the tickets.

Then the penny dropped and I realised that I’ve probably been scammed.

Checking the domain, the website lists an address in Weybridge, Surrey. The phone number listed is a London number even though Weybridge is outside of the London area codes, and phoning it sends you straight to an answerphone… Googling the address implies that a number of vastly different businesses operate from the same building, and googling the company name results in an eBay shop listing (eBay rating zero) claiming to be based in Northamptonshire.

This is especially frustrating, as it seems the scammers are more sophisticated than I gave them (£100) credit for – and indeed, I’m much more fallible than I suspected (I thought I was infallible)… and now I’m £100 down and not going to the Reading festival. You can probably imagine the stream of swearwords that left my mouth this morning.

So the lesson here that I want to get across is simply: internet scams are real… and it isn’t just your mum who is likely to fall for them. Consider yourself warned.

And if you’ve got any spare tickets for Reading (or indeed, Leeds), for the weekend or the Rage day… please get in touch with me!

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© James for James O'Malley... Living Legend, 2008. | Permalink | 6 comments | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: angry, reading, scam, tickets