If you think you might like historical murder mystery thrillers set in the time of King Henry VIII, check our CJ Sansom’s Revelation (and the other books). Good deal this morning at WH Smith.

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Under 30 pounds a month and a free iPhone 3G on an 24-month contract. Has anyone popped into Carphone Warehouse / Phones4U or the Orange shop and got one yet?

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Caught this on the streets of London this afternoon. I wonder if it still does 4×4?

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In today’s always-on environment, I’ve actually swapped from using HSBC and NatWest to using a cheap as chips Lloyds Travel Money Card.

People often look at me when I bring out this tattered ‘Pay As You Go’ Visa Debit Card to pay for stuff. It’s always nice flashing good looking pieces of plastic, but when the infrastructure that underpins it is rubbish or stupidly designed for a 1980s world, that becomes irrelevant.

HSBC’s systems have a problem with me. They’re set to ULTRA HIGH when it comes to fraud.

Despite phoning the polite HSBC call-centre Indians and explaining that I’m going to be in the States at such-and-such a time — and DESPITE the agents nodding away assuring me, the MOMENT I get to America… BOOM. No sodding credit card.

Nothing works.

Any credit card machine that does an authorisation to the HSBC Visa Europe machine, gets an automatic F**K OFF.

Which has, in the past, made me look like a total idiot in all kinds of situations, most notably trying to check-in to a fully booked hotel in Las Vegas where they demanded the full balance up front (or they’d give the room to somebody else).

I understand that repeatedly hitting my credit card for $8,000 isn’t a good way to treat a computer system already positively petrified at the thought of fraud — but it also happens — GUARANTEED — whenever I want to buy anything abroad. A bottle of water, a magazine, a $10 or €10 meal… anything.

It’s PERFECTLY fine if I call up.

If I phone HSBC and go through the 8 minute RIGMAROLE of speaking to an operator and then being transferred to his mate in fraud … blah de blah… finally they lift the bar for that transaction. Brilliant. But by that time I’ll have spent £24 on the phone call.

Then when I try and use the card once more… boom. Same problem.

When I complain I get the same bullshit.

The worst possible situation, however, is when I have to phone my wife and use her sodding credit cards. Or WORSE, my parents. How bad is that? It’s ridiculous. I’ve had to resort to this a few times when I’ve tried to call HSBC and they’ve been closed.

CLOSED?

What kind of bank — nowadays — is ‘closed’? A shit bank. This is ridiculously poor service, especially when I’m traversing the continents on a regular basis.

I need always-on service.

I’ve spoken to two banks. A private bank and the private-bank arm of NatWest. I’ve got the NatWest account setup but I haven’t had time to swap yet.

So meantime, my fix is this: A flimsy looking Visa Debit ‘travel money card‘ from Lloyds TSB.

I actually had to pay $9,000 for my apartment rental in San Francisco this way. Although I had to do it in £3k amounts. At least it worked. 100%. All the time.

The only time I’ve ever had a problem is when I changed address and the Lloyds TSB system hasn’t been updated with my new postcode.

But you know what? These guys are available 24-7. It’s about three rings to a guy or a girl at a call centre somewhere in the UK.

You can top-up online with their form — just type in your bank card details and woosh, you’re loaded — and I mean ‘woosh’. I’ve literally sat on my laptop at a restaurant in University Avenue, Palo Alto, replenished my empty Travel Money Card with £500 and paid for my meal 20 seconds later. Genius.

You can also phone them and top up the old way. Useful if your laptop is out of battery. Or you didn’t bring it with you.

There are some charges. 2.75% currency conversion charge when you withdraw cash or pay. Fair enough.

There’s also a $2.50 cash withdrawl fee. Again, fair enough.

You can’t load money more than three times a day. Again, that works.

And during the lifetime of the card, you can’t put more than £18k on it, apparently. Although I’m SURE I must have gone over this limit … I MUST have, when I think about how much I’ve spent on it.

Anyway, it’s genius. Absolute genius. Because in an always-on world, when my Bank is asleep, I still need to be able to transact business. I find it insane that this is my preferred ‘guaranteed’ method of payment over and above my HSBC Gold Card.

If you haven’t got one of these Travel Money Cards (or something similar) as a back-up, I strongly recommend one.

Meanwhile, I do recognise the value of a fraud detection system. But, when *every* single transaction I make abroad is deemed fraud… rubbish.

I should be a NatWest customer soon. That should hopefully be a bit better.

I’m seeing these a lot around London and I’m pretty impressed. I think I saw a FedEx one too. Makes a lot of sense environmentally — and makes me feel good about UPS and FedEx. Nice work!

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Where was I when I took this photo? Any one recognise the building?

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I was dispatched to Sainsbury’s on Saturday afternoon to get some food for that evening’s experiment (a Jamie Oliver 20 minutes iPhone app recipe) and — of course — to get ‘treats’ for the begging hordes of Chiswick. Because it was Old Hallows Eve. And instead of warding off evil spirits, the majority of the nation was eating rubbish.

I’m of the opinion that living in this area, not having ‘treats’ ready for the visiting children knocking at our door would be tantamount to keying somebody’s car. Bad form.

We haven’t been living in our road for long so we don’t know many people but we know there certainly are children around. Young. 4-7ish ages. But you never know if the mothers and fathers will unexpectedly troop them round the street. Only being able to offer a few quit, a banana and a smile wouldn’t fit the expected service level.

How serious do they take this stuff in Chiswick? Well the photo above is of the ‘fun size’ ‘treat’ section at Sainsbury’s at about 4pm on the day. Mothers and fathers were cruising the aisles with trolleys packed to the brim of fun-size-Mars-Bars. When I got there, they’d raided the place. You’d think Sainsbury’s would have some kind of capacity planning operation in place. Or a fun-size distribution and metering system.

I had to smile as a harassed mother screamed at her husband next to me. He’d made the mistake of suggesting they buy a job lot of large size packs of chocolate buttons.

“Don’t be so stupid Colin,” she screamed, “What are the children meant to do? Use fingers?”

Colin hung his head in response whilst I knelt down and located three errant bags of fun-size packs of twix/malteeser/mars bar combos. They were stuffed at the back. I placed them into my basket with a satisfied ‘plonk’ whilst the woman stared at me, openly seething. I smiled at Colin and walked away.

Unfortunately nobody came calling for wads of twixes. I think there must be some kind of tacit unspoken arrangement between parents about who’s house the children visit.

And we’re not on the list it seems. Which is all perfectly fine — until we don’t bother next year and end up sending children away in floods of disappointed tears.

Couldn’t someone develop a google maps/eventbrite appointments booking system mashup for next year?

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Heard walking down a very smart street in Chiswick this morning:

[Woman screaming from top floor flat]

Woman: “Damien! Damien!”

[Man having a fag outside, three floors below, turns around and looks up]

Man: “Wot?”

Woman: “You ain’t even left me any presents or anyfink.”

[There's a brief silence whilst the man considers the ramifications of his mistake and the woman builds up an explosion of emotions]

[Woman takes the initiative and slams window]

[Man stubs out cigarette, swears under his breath, walks back into the flats]

Just the average morning in Chiswick, then.

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London works for me this morning. But just you wait, it will be tipping it down before you know it!

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