I know I'm not the only one who suffers this gratuitous abuse from the commercial sector and I thought Mr. Cameron had said he was going to do something about it but perhaps that was before the General Election.
My latest strategy has been to immediately take the initiative and ask them the questions. Right, then, give me the name of your company, the address you are phoning from and the name of the managing director. Why? Because I'm compiling a list of all the people like you that phone me.
One caller from India assured me that I didn't need to know where they were calling from.
No, I'll decide what I need to know.
It can be amusing but at other times when one is being lulled into a lunchtime stupor by one of George Eliot's less enthralling pages without paragraph breaks, you don't want to be disturbed and can hardly raise the will to take them on.
Today, I watched as Jeremy Corbyn asked Mr. Cameron some pointed questions about housing which I'm sure the Prime Minister was grateful for, for all their decorum and lack of follow-up. I don't remember the hard left being quite so gentle in olden days and I realize that my specific complaint here is not on the same level as the new Labour, as opposed to the New Labour, leader's chosen queries.
But I don't believe that Alexander Graham Bell quite foresaw the monster he was inventing and, anyway, the government presumably think it's a good use of the national telephony network to employ legions of low paid callers to phone us up and read from their script because never mind how much time and bother is wasted on 99% of those calls, if one of them does some business then the economy is going forwards, enterprise is on the move and some gullible innocent is going to be convinced into signing up for something they didn't want.
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I wonder how the great Brian Close would have dealt with them.
I have recently been looking at some old newspapers and among the fascinating snapshots of moments in time, like what was on the telly, what passing trivia was deemed newsworthy or how much a motor car cost, there are the cricket scores and racing results.
There was also a report of a postal strike in Fareham in 1964. One blackleg had been 'sent to Coventry' by the union members but the postman interviewed by the Portsmouth News couldn't add much to the story because although he had some sympathy for one side or the other, he wasn't talking to them.
But Yorkshire were in the process of thrashing Nottinghamshire, which routinely happened twice each summer in those days. The Yorkshire team included Boycott, Illingworth, Trueman and Brian Close. That must have been a dour dressing room.
Fred Trueman does get into my Best XI as part of a three-pronged fast bowling attack with Harold Larwood and Michael Holding ( I have Mike Procter in the all-rounders, too) but it is Brian Close that leaves me, and now all of us, with the best memories and ultimate respect.
At the age of 80, I heard on Test Match Special, he was still doing public speaking engagements, his idea of a speech being to unwrap a packet of 20 B&H, light one, start talking and stop once he'd finished them. Obituaries confirmed another such story that he didn't so much drive a car as 'aim' it along the road.The four catches that he took in the 1964 match v. Notts were all presumably taken in Silly positions because the carefree use of the word 'robust' nowadays make it inadmissable as a way to describe Brian Close. Anybody with any knowledge of cricket will know what's coming.
The Old Trafford test match in which John Edrich and Close were recalled, Close aged 45, as England's last hope of playing the West Indies' fearsome battery of fast bowlers. The episode was brutal, cruel really, and the laws of the game were subsequently changed because it simply wasn't right to ask anybody to face bowling like that. Not in just a shirt with no helmet and four or five short-pitched deliveries directed at your head, anyway.
No problem with Michael Holding, an intelligent athlete playing a hard game within the laws as they stood, or with Clive Lloyd or any of the rest of my favourite cricket team of all time. It's just that West Indian batsmen didn't have to face West Indian bowlers in test matches. But Brian Close did and you can't help but think he relished it.
I don't know if I liked facing fast bowling. I faced some bowling nowhere near as quick as Holding's and didn't see it so I can't say if I liked it or not.
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And just in case it is more than a week since I've praised the BBC for being exactly what it should be, in Reithian terms,
I hope everybody is enjoying the fabulous Baker boy's Cradle to Grave, the adaptation of Danny's first book of autobiography with, I think, a few new stories added in. I had my doubts for about the first two minutes but from then it was virtually perfect. It's a sign of our times that 1970's nostalgia is now so highbrow that it is on BBC2. Such downmarket, working class skullduggery would have been on ITV in those days but now that it's recalled in a well-written, beautifully-done period piece, it's suddenly almost 'art house'.
And, after the regular Thursday nights of solo Bach from the Proms, again quite selfishly, I'd like Mr. Corbyn to ask Mr. Cameron for assurances that the Conservative plan for the BBC will guarantee coverage of such recitals as those by Andras Schiff, Alina Ibragimova and Yo Yo Ma. Does the government understand that a show that sends a few camp old Queens out to buy antiques and then try to flog them for profit does not constitute quality arts broadcasting.Why does nobody phone me up in the middle of the day to ask me about that.
