Media bits

[possibly a shot of part of the Zilch team at their offices in Buckingham Palace Road]

I was irritated by the headline in yesterday's Guardian - 'Witnesses to be forced to testify at Letby inquiry' - which for me set an unpleasantly and unnecessarily aggressive tone to the whole sorry business. The point of the inquiry is to try and do things better next time around and setting an accusing, punitive tone in this way is scarcely going to encourage those involved to be open, honest and helpful about what went on.

As I have observed before, we don't seem to be very good at these sorts of inquiry in this country, with the main beneficiaries being the all lawyers collecting fees, rather than the country at large. 

A rather different matter was the greening of all the advertising slots in a recent number of the Metro. I thought perhaps that something had gone wrong with their advertising feed and that they had decided to publish anyway.

Seemingly quite wrong, with yesterday's Metro including some green flavoured advertisements for a company called Zilch, to be found at reference 1. The fully green advertisements were probably a warm-up act. One wonders what they had to pay for it.

Lots of high-minded words from their leaders about how they want to offer a flexible service, without all kinds of hidden or unexpected rip-off charges. Buy now with your telephone, pay later with no interest charged. Get something for nothing. But despite scanning a substantial piece on the company offered at reference 2, I am none the wiser about how Zilch make their money. Are they taking a cut from the people selling you stuff? Are they offering users a regular credit service in the background? Payday lending even?

Different again is the row about the computer error in our air traffic control system which we were told will cost airlines £100m - with the suggestion that the responsible private-public company called NATS (of reference 5) should be made to pay up, if not this time, then next time. A potentially large chunk of its annual revenue. 

Was it all down, at root, to lack of a proper level of investment in the computers concerned, rather along the lines alleged for the water companies? Is the absence of dividends in the snap above just a fig leaf to cover fancy loan repayments? Who owns all the debt? Perhaps someone somewhere in the Persian Gulf?

Whatever the case, the costs will all end up back with travellers in the form of higher fares as NATS will just pass on any additional costs in the fees it charges airlines. I am reminded of the custom of extracting punitive compensation from some bit of the NHS which never had the proper amount of funding in the first place.

PS: continuing to poke at the Moroccan cookbook of reference 3, I turned up reference 4. This included some cookbooks from 14th century Andalusia, but nothing from 16th century Morocco across the water. Plus just two instances of the word 'tomato'.

References

Reference 1: https://www.zilch.com/uk/.

Reference 2: https://www.businesswire.com/portal/site/home/.

Reference 3: https://psmv5.blogspot.com/2023/08/egg-nog.html.

Reference 4a: https://newlinesmag.com/essays/medieval-arabic-culinary-literature-offers-lessons-for-the-present/.

Reference 4b: Medieval Arabic Culinary Literature Offers Lessons for the Present: Centuries-old cookbooks from the Abbasid era shed light on the lives of the upper strata of bygone Arab and Muslim societies, as well as the origins of dishes still popular today - Mahmoud Habboush - 2023.

Reference 5: https://www.nats.aero/. Not to be confused with Nordic American Tanker Ltd.