Nando's: Poorly run and rundown round the corner

Cravings for the simple

I have my fast food cravings that I indulge every once in a while and I get it at Nando’s a restaurant chain founded in South Africa serving a Mozambican-Portuguese fare based around chicken.

So I stepped out of my home to visit the Nando’s round the corner, since it was close and I discovered that just a few weeks before.

It was not a good experience, I was in and out within 10 minutes having hardly taken a bite of my chicken before logging on the Nando’s website to express my disgust at the place, the service and much else. They asked for feedback and they got the whole lot of lock, stock and two smoking barrels of irately annoyed.

At the end of the multiple choice interactive questions where most answers tended towards the dissatisfied and strongly dissatisfied, I was offered a free-form text box to give them a piece of my mind below:

Feedback the rotten tack

The staff was sullen and unwelcoming, barely interacted when I got there apart from asking if I had been to Nando's before.

The cable on the PIN machine was all screwed up, simple attention to detail like that became the revelation of bigger problems.

As I went to get a plate and cutlery, a complete order had the receipt slip put on the food, when my order arrived it was all piled up on one plate with the ramekin of coleslaw sitting on my chips, that was just disgusting, I was speechless up to a minute.

Though the waiter offered to replace my order, I kept it, but one taste of the chicken was enough and I just walked out literally leaving the food untouched.

This is the WORST Nando's I have ever been to ever, tables had bits on them and I had to dust off my seat, it is a poorly run and rundown place, it needs many new things from personnel to the look of the place - probably parachute in a manager from one of your better run restaurants to sort this place out.

A disgrace...

Then again

On that note, I still had a craving for a Nando’s still, so I went to another restaurant right in the centre of town where everything was an improvement on the last that it would not have bothered me if one thing was out of place.

Thinking of it, it might just as been the attitude of the staff at the other place that made for my seeing every minor thing wrong in that restaurant, but it goes without saying, I can excuse many things except with it comes to the service, the personality and the engagement that makes a restaurant experience worthwhile.

I do not go to eat out to take aggro with my food, no matter how gracious I am feeling. That is what I had to tell a French waiter in Paris many years ago when he seemed to feel a bit unhappy with his day that he felt he could take that out on the customers, I was ready to leave and by the time I had warned him to behave, he had lost the prospect of a generous tip.

Essential Snobbery 101: On good manners and seats

Well brought up

I grew up in a different time, or rather, I was brought up differently, and I am constantly met with the shock of contemporary attitudes and behaviour that the worldview I inhabit finds quite grating.

The reason why the different time matters is almost irrelevant, because I see people of my age behave in ways that leave much to be desired, so it must be the different way that is more significant.

I do not believe that certain things should become old-fashioned, be consigned to conservativeness and passed off as traditional values. Self-awareness and consideration of others still matter a great deal; besides the fact that manners should never be negotiable, they must be acquired at all costs and deployed at every opportunity.

Give up your seat

Yet today, as I sat on the train, an elderly lady boarded the train at the next stop carrying some luggage; it did not appear she was helped on, and there was no place for her to sit.

Even though I use a cane, I could not watch her standing, holding on for dear life as the train began to move. The many able-bodied people around us remained decidedly oblivious of her out of ignorance, the absence of breeding or sheer selfishness.

I got up and gave her my seat, which is what any well-taught person is supposed to do, at least, in the different way I was brought up. It was another two stops, some 20 minutes later, before a seat became vacant for me to sit down.

Make all allowances

Meanwhile, further along the carriage, there was a heavily pregnant woman who, in another time, would have been ushered to take a seat somewhere in the carriage. Someone would have initiated the move and asked another to give up their seat. The person giving up their seat, seeing the condition of the woman, would have happily obliged.

However, this appears to belong to a bygone age, people rush for priority seats, literally tripping up less able people in their race to be comfortable at the expense of seemingly more deserving people, and they hardly ever care when reminded of the fact that the notices do state an incontrovertible fact.

On good manners

Ladies are surprised when I take off my hat to chat to them, some might even take offence if you open the door for them or if you ascribe to the chivalry of ‘Ladies first’. Other bad habits like coughing and yawning without covering your mouth, eating on the street, elbows on the table – the list is endless, make one think we have become a global village of the uncouth and uncultured with air, grace, comportment or finesse.

Rough on all edges that we rub people up the wrong way, quite an appalling reflection on society today. It is not like one wants to rewrite Debrett’s guide on manners, etiquette, protocol, address or dress, but some things are just so, so as to really separate us from the wildness and chaos of the animal kingdom.

As I disembarked at my station, the elderly lady acknowledged me and mouthed a thank you. I tipped my head and smiled. We both knew there was a world we once knew that was fast disappearing from our present-day experiences.

I am saddened writing this, but we have attained, with the absence of certain aspects of social schooling, a level of inconsiderate selfishness where manners are the exception rather than the rule. A shame indeed.

The UK: Our welfare system stripped of its humanity

Death helps the system

I caught a glimpse of the news but never really paid much attention to it until I saw a situation developing before my eyes.

Since 2010 starting with the Conservative – Liberal Democrat coalition and now with the slim majority Conservative government, there have been reforms to the benefits and welfare system, many of which will make the bean counters happy, but leaving real people in dehumanised situations.

In May, we learnt that 10 out of 49 benefit claimants had died possibly due to a regime of benefit sanctions where their payments were stopped.

It is not working

To say one cannot believe that this is happening in the United Kingdom of 2015 is typical of not having had to run the gauntlet of the system to see the strictures, the hurdles, the encumbrances and the demands made on people barely able to pick themselves up because of all sorts of adversity.

There is no doubt that some abuse the system, but they are very few, quite in the minority, only 0.7% of the welfare budget is lost to benefit fraud, many do genuinely need help and I have twice resorted to the system for help in resettling back into the UK and for times when I was out of work.

I can say that my ability to endure the humiliation that the system weighs upon you came more from an inner sense of self and abiding hope that things will change all coupled with the help and support of friends and family. The system is soul-destroying for the want of a better phrase.

He had no voice

I was out for a social event on Friday when this man who apparently was epileptic collapsed and was helped by bystanders to settle down and recover. I did not see the fit, but as I sat around, I heard the whole tale of his troubles.

He had taken seriously ill in a number of public places and his doctor gave no heed to his condition, this meant he missed critical meetings with Job Centres and consequently his payments were stopped.

Besides, going by what I could observe of him, the man was in no state to do any of the things of demanded of him. Like making 30 applications for jobs every fortnight, there is no way he would have been able to hold down any of those jobs down for any period of time with that state of mind and possible medical condition, complicated by the demands of the system on him.

At one point, he said he wished he were dead. That really cut to my heart because a whole set of circumstances had militated against him to create a situation of desperate hopelessness. A life that has lost hope is a difficult one to continue.

Anything but welfare

Now, one would think the welfare system was about welfare, about understanding, about humanity and about compassion, but everything that makes us genuinely human has been ripped out of the system to cater for ticking boxes and meeting targets to cut costs.

The goal is to frustrate you off the system and if by any unfortunate set of circumstances you are unable to assert yourself when abused, you so quickly become a nameless victim, a shell of yourself and worse might be in store.

I could see that the man made many others uncomfortable, but this was something I had personal experience of, what looked to others like a weak man in need of sympathy and playing it up for pity, to me looked like a man at the end of his tether.

This is our society’s shame

This bothered me for quite a while until the man left and as I said to the people left behind, the so-called safety net we believe is out there to catch people who need help really has holes big enough for elephants to fall through. Whatever the case, this man had fallen through that safety net and will probably never get picked up without some serious intervention.

That I live in a country that such heartlessness can be meted out to the vulnerable in the name of reforms and cost savings is deplorable, shameful and quite a crime against humanity, because we have the means and the wherewithal but have crafted ways to deny the needy their needs.

Thought Picnic: Pouring libations to our naked past

Secrets of loyalty

Two weekends ago, I had one of my incognito escapades where the planning and execution were literally revealed to no one. When I did tell my friend what I had planned, he was surprised because my planned trip to Amsterdam and Antwerp was both sudden and expressed in a way that seemed I was going round the corner from my home.

My recent trip to South Africa had boosted my air miles reward scheme status to enjoy a number of priority access services through the airport. I had garnered no less than 21,000 miles from that journey accumulated over 6 flights.

It meant I had fast track access through security regardless of the ticket I had purchased. As I did the typical security strip-tease without the music, the customs official engaged me in conversation about where I was from, where I was going and so on.

Maybe a coincidence

As it transpired, I answered, “I am English and my parents are Nigerian.” He asked what part of Nigeria and that got drilled down to the South West and Ijebu. He then responded that he was from Ijebu Imodi-Imosan.

That was quite uncanny because the traditional chief of Imodi-Imosan is also an Agemo masquerade and an uncle of mine.

He, however, was planning to return to Nigeria, to Imodi-Imosan where he said he was under obligation to offer appeasements to the animist traditions of his grandmother who apparently belonged to an Agemo masquerade affiliated lineage in Imodi-Imosan.

It occurred to me that this quite unlikely event of lives clashing on the improbability that we are linked by whatever degree by the familiar and yet strange coincidence calls for some reflection.

Not forgetting our ordinariness

For, no matter what the enlightenment of travel, exposure and schooling does to us, we are primarily human with the persuasions of the ordinary that goes far back before we existed, in genes that we bear or in the traditions passed down to us to return to the grottos of our ancestry where we take root having branched out literally beyond sight and mind of the roots that give us standing and sway.

The memorials are now in tombstones and fleeting memories, sacrifices and words now to be written on Facebook pages of those dearly departed too. We find imprints in the sands of time, weathered beyond recognition of frequency, but blown back like a leaf to obey the laws of gravity once the breeze settles.

For all the sense of culture we can muster, devoid of superstition and ceremony, we are essentially one step ahead of primitive, bound to things and secrets that rule our minds and decisions to walk into the future whilst keeping a keen eye on the past.

Essential Snobbery 101: Poshness tests and being British

Equally unequal

The underlying issues of Britishness and class reared their head, and you will note that I did not qualify that head with ugly in a number of situations that I read of this week.

First, it was the news that social mobility is still a myth, that much as we have striven for a more equal society, with the equality of opportunity pushed by a form of egalitarian meritocracy, people still fall short by reason of progeny and background.

A ceiling for many

There is apparently a “poshness test” that prevents qualified people from other backgrounds from accessing top jobs in Great Britain. You still need to have attended certain schools, gone to certain universities, speak a certain way and have parents who did not have to buy their own furniture; a point once made by Alan Clark about Michael Heseltine, to be eligible for consideration for certain jobs.

The fact is, you cannot eliminate the elements of class from British society; it appears in so many ways, just as some confuse the issues that separate the men from the boys on matters of taste, expression and bearing.

Irksome privilege and opportunity

In a number of book reviews, I found myself laughing as I read this week’s edition of The Week in the Review of reviews: Books section.

In Peter Conrad’s review of Jeremy Hutchinson’s Case Histories, he had to get his personal animus out of the way first, because Jeremy Hutchinson, the Baron Hutchinson of Lullington, QC, is ridiculously well-connected.

One could see why, son of a King’s Counsel, his mother a Strachey, his first wife was Peggy Ashcroft, his nephew, Jacob Rothschild, his inherited advantages were topped up by windfalls, according to the reviewer, as he bought his first house in Hampstead off the proceeds of a Monet bequeathed to him by an elderly friend. He attended Stowe and Oxford, majored in PPE. He just oozed privilege, and one could understand the typically British animus to this.

A different Britishness

He made a legal career of cocking a snook at the establishment, defending lovable rogues, including Christine Keeler of the Profumo affair and art thief Kempton Bunton, whilst also challenging the hypocrisy championed in the Lady Chatterley trial and Mary Whitehouse’s morality activism. This book must be a joy to read.

This led to the review of Michael Bloch’s Closet Queens, which is a basic study of how the establishment tolerated and sometimes accepted homosexuality at the top of British society. Notable was the case of Ian Harvey, who was discovered in the bushes of St James’s Park with a guardsman in November 1958, thereby losing his political office.

It is reported that when Winston Churchill heard of the scandal, he quipped, “On the coldest night of the year? It makes you proud to be British, doesn’t it?” Stephen Fry narrates that story here.

Poshly enunciate

To end the book reviews, we have Brian Sewell, the art critic of whom it is said his accent is posher than the Queen, who, whilst recuperating from an operation, wrote his first children’s book, The White Umbrella, at the age of 83.

According to Sewell, he avers, “I never came out... but I have slowly emerged.” He also prefers to be identified as queer rather than gay, which only shows how times have changed. Yet, going back to the poshness tests and the last paragraph of that article, it is 2015, and this is how Britain still works. Social mobility? All it takes is the “wrong” accent to put the working class back in their place.

It makes you say with a sense of wryness, “It makes you proud to be British, doesn’t it?”

Thought Picnic: The lessons of why not me

If I could freeze the time

The preoccupations of my mind and my thoughts have been distracting me from my place of calm and peace that I have not been able to concentrate.

Every little demand suddenly feels onerous and burdensome, I have sought ways not to interact or communicate so that I can hopefully rediscover where I hope to be.

If only and if only one could freeze life, put things into some sort of cryogenic suspension until a time when one is ready to resume at a point where recovery and refreshing is complete.

Alas! There is no such luxury for holding time, space and existence in a standstill, we have to work through things towards the result we want with the hope that we get to that result we desire.

Why not me?

I recall a cartoon of Hägar the Horrible that I saw recently where the protagonist was lamenting, “Why me?” and God answered back, “Why not?”

You find cause in that kind of exchange to count the blessings of the victories that have come from the circumstances, how in life one has been toughened through experience and earned through labour. Where luck might happen, but planning was the foundation on which the success was built and study was what gave birth to knowledge that you apply with wisdom.

We do need the good times and the bad times to appreciate what times we live in, whatever time we have left and those are thoughts that appear to invade my thinking more and more each passing day.

The lessons in the passage of time

I understand that there are many lessons I would never have learnt and learnt well if I had not had my own lived through experiences. Hard and rough times I have barely shared, the scars indelibly seared into my being that they have become my life and my own personal story.

The greater feeling is one of gratitude that none of my trials, temptation, tribulations or travails consumed me. I found help, I found support, I found strength and like the dawn always comes after the night, no matter how long the night seems with all its fears and nightmares – it will pass.

It does pass, it shall pass, it must pass, because that is the mystery of time revealed to all of us, it passes continually for new refreshing seasons to come.

I will rise.

Thought Picnic: These Foolish Things

The online memorial

Yesterday, as I am frequently reminded by Facebook and my email would have been the 72^nd birthday of a dear friend of mine who sadly died just before Christmas last year.

For the few friends who had a Facebook page before they died, I now find occasion to visit their pages on either their birthdays or the anniversary of their deaths to leave a bouquet of words of remembrance, of fondness and of that fact that I do miss their friendship and their presence in my life.

I remember John most fondly for being at the end of the line when I made those infrequent phone calls at times when I seemed to have a crisis of confidence in myself, my abilities or some purpose or goal I am trying to achieve.

A beacon in the dark

I could call on his wisdom and insight to give my clarity and direction, rarely by instruction, but by having me look into myself for the strength I have within or by counting my blessings, the blessings of the great and small victories I have had when I have pressed on with what I know to do.

He never once believed I was incapable of anything, must as he could be stern being once a schoolmaster, he was always encouraging, uplifting, advising, supporting and mentoring. He was a life-long teacher to whom I have referred many other friends who seem to have gotten something muddled up or confused in their lives.

He was generous with time, insight and resource to anyone who asked things of him without quibble and that is why he will always be sorely missed by those who knew him.

On some silly and serious things

I find that today I am bothered by many things, wondering what path to take, hoping to recreate that voice of John in my head to give me some guidance on how to project myself better, sell my skills better and even on the somewhat ordinary but significant issue of weight loss and body sculpting.

Even I wonder where all that came from, why I am getting into a situation where I am getting unhappy with how I look, where what my body is and what I want my body to look like is kilogrammes away from simply emptying my pocket?

You find yourself striving to gain some perspective before you begin to lose focus and along with the other things you have compartmentalised to avoid crowding out your sanity, you suddenly realise that it is the simple, silly and foolish things that remind you of who you miss and you smile at how different things might well be, even if they are not now.

These Foolish Things by Ella Fitzgerald.