How To Make Your Dad Feel Old, by an 8-year-old boy

It’s nice to get a break from the pub from time-to-time and, with it being the Easter holidays, Ali and I took the opportunity to get a couple of days away from the pub and treat the kids to the sights and sounds of London.

“I can’t believe I’m going to London,” squealed Jacob, as excited as any five-year-old can be and completely missing out on the point that going to London means cramped, sweaty tube trains, bendy busses, pigeons and expensive restaurants.

It also means the congestion charge and so, to avoid having to pay Ken’s tax for entering the city, I set the navigation system in the Jeep to route us around the Congestion Charge zone to our destination.  This probably meant that we travelled thirty miles further, paid more in petrol and polluted the planet more than if we’d driven right through the centre of town, but at least we didn’t pay the congestion charge itself.

We stayed at the Copthorne Hotel attached to Chelsea Football Club, which is apparently an internationally famous club owned by a rich Russian and where men kick a ball backwards and forwards, every now and then hugging each other when they do something clever with it.  I didn’t see any of the football ground.  Nor did I see any renowned footballers, but there were a lot of expensive cars lying about and a tour bus full of Japanese children turned up to have a look around while we were there.  I thought about signing autographs, but Ali told me that they might actually realise I’m not famous.

After marching the boys from London tourist site to London tourist site and promising Jacob that we’d go and have tea with the Queen, yesterday was spent at the National Science Museum.  You have to be grateful that this place is free to get in to because once you’ve paid the £31.50 for all of us to get into an Imax 3D movie about dinosaurs (which Malachy then threw a wobbly about and ran out of) and the £20.00 for two sandwiches, a couple of Cokes and a children’s meal to share – not to mention having to buy souvenirs from the shop – it’s understandable that you’d be a bit miffed if you’d had to shell out a tenner each to get in, too.

It is, however, a wonderful place to go and look around, but be prepared to be made to feel old by your eight-year-old son.  In this day of LCD Hi-Def televisions, Sky + and Sony PSP games machines, it’s understandable that he found the Baird T5 mirror TV a little difficult to comprehend.

That wasn’t the worst, however: there was the Speak & Spell which, when my Dad first bought me one, taught me to spell licorice and color incorrectly, and there was the video game Pong, by Atari, that Ali and I found hilarious whilst MJ simply stood there with one eyebrow arched, muttering how boring it looked.  (I got to ten before she did, incidentally.)

What really did it for me was when I proudly took him towards a display and pointed to a Sinclair ZX80.  “That,” I said nostalgically, “was my first ever computer.  I had one of those when I was eight years old.”

Malachy stared at it for a moment, then looked up at me.  “Gosh, it looks rubbish!”

You’ll Like This; Not A Lot, But You’ll Like It

The art of conversation is something we excel at in The Tharp Arms and some of our late-night Saturday conversations can be extremely random, weird, wonderful and downright bizarre.  Over the years that Ali and I have run the pub we have discussed most topics, lamenting the demise of the English football team, nodding sagely at the inexperience of Lewis Hamilton as he failed to win his first world title (even worse, forcing me to eat cheese the day Lewis didn’t, unbelievably, win Sports Personality Of The Year) and on to topics such as the existential matter of life on other planets and whether anybody has actually finished A Brief History Of Time, by Stephen Hawking. 

On one occasion we even used some string, a spring, two bottles of Tesco furniture cleaner and several drawing pins to create a pulley system around the bar to emulate a counterweight that would allow a couple of guys to lift a big clock from its surroundings so that it could be repaired, and then went straight on to discuss whether Posh Spice can possibly be wearing knickers underneath those tight leather jeans she’s often seen in.

But last night was very unusual.  As Oxford went on to give Cambridge a rather heavy drubbing on a rain-swept River Thames, the telephone rang and Barmaid Amy passed it across to me.

The screen displayed international and so, not unreasonably, I expected it to be a call from India.  “Hello,” said this female English voice as I answered the call.  “We’re a group of people in Venice who are wondering if you can help us.”

Intrigued, I encouraged her to go on.  “We’re having a bit of a debate here, can you tell us: is the landlord of The Tharp Arms the nephew of Paul Daniels or not?”

It isn’t a particular secret, my relationship to my uncle.  There’s a couple of photos of him up in the bar and when we moved in to the pub he came up and did a bit of an opening for us, posing for photos in the local press.  It even mentions it on the pub’s website.  But still, a call from overseas to try and clarify this did seem a touch unusual.  If their Saturday evening in Venice was getting off early to discussions about pub landlords and their relationships to famous magicians, you have to wonder what they ended up talking about by the end of the night…

“Yes I am,” I confirmed for her and, when she repeated this to the group she was with, there were several triumphant shouts in the background.

Unfortunately, the call was cut off before I had chance to ask how the hell they’d got to talking about me and my uncle whilst enjoying a Saturday night in Italy.  I’ve got no idea who they are, whether they’re locals to the Newmarket area who are holidaying abroad or somebody who was randomly Googling Paul Daniels and came up with the pub’s website and wanted to check it out.

So, if you’re one of the group that were enjoying discussions about British pubs and famous magicians last night, drop me a line and satiate my customers’ curiosities.  We’re all wondering how that topic came about!

I relayed the story to several customers as the evening wore on, but none responded better than Little Dave, who chuckled to himself:

“Venice,” he laughed, as he bit in to his cheeseburger.  “I’ve never been to Spain!”

An Open Letter To Alistair Darling

Is everybody fed up yet of hearing the pub trade witter on about how Alistair Darling is slowly raping it?  I know I am, and I work in the trade.  The only reason I don’t find it quite as tedious as the Paul McCartney / Heather Mills debacle is because I own a pub, and therefore I do still feel quite passionately about the whole subject of beer, village pubs and taxation.

I’d be prepared to leave the whole topic alone, resigned to the fact that even if The Green Party got in to power tomorrow they would spend the next ten years blaming Conservative for all the tax policies that New(ish) Labour couldn’t figure out how to better, but yesterday I listened to the Jeremy Vine show on Radio 2 (which this week is being hosted by Matthew Bannister) and once again found myself having to control my temper.  It was quite handy, because right after the half an hour on how village pubs might be a thing of the past was half an hour on anger and how it actually is an illness.  It was probably what stopped me from throwing the DAB radio across the living room.

The pertinent bit of the show, however, was all about the demise of village pubs, and who should be to blame for it.  Of course, everybody in the pub trade wants Alistair Darling hanged by his testicles for taxing us yet more, while everybody who drinks in pubs thinks that publicans are richer than Russian Vodka barons and that we’re all using this month’s budget as an excuse to charge more than £3.00 for a pint of beer.

Unfortunately it isn’t the 1980s anymore and so very few pub landlords are wealthy these days.  If I were wealthy, I’d drive around in a Lexus RX400h and would buy Red Herring jeans, but instead I drive a 2000-model Jeep Grand Cherokee that likes to break down every other day and I wear Tesco Value denim.  It’s my birthday next month and I’d really like a PlayStation 3 and my lawn mower needs replacing so I’ve sort of taken a liking to the Honda HF 2620.  I would really like a copy of the full, 20-volume set of the Oxford English Dictionary but it’s £750 and I don’t even have the full Sky package.  Because I can afford none of these things.

So when I heard a DJ on the Jeremy Vine show say that all pub landlords should stop whingeing because they’re the richest people he knows, I hoped that the following segment on anger management would help because I was almost apoplectic with rage.  I suspect that this DJ, who relies on pubs for his income, might find bookings in his calendar steadily dwindling following his comments on yesterday’s show. 

It seemed, however, that the general public has little sympathy with the pub trade and is ignorant of the fact that village pubs do not make as much money as many would believe.  We don’t have the volume of trade that a high street pub enjoys and we don’t get breaks on our business rates and we have to pay the same amount for our Sky licenses as a town-centre pub and so we’re all finding life a little difficult at the moment.  Because of this, I’ve ended up writing a letter to Alistair Darling.  I doubt it will carry much weight with him and I suspect his bank of secretaries will file it in the bin before it even reaches the personal assistant who attends to his eyebrows, but it made me feel better.  If you’re interested in what the letter says, you can read it here.

More importantly, however, you could try supporting Samantha Hill of the Newbridge Arms, who has set up a petition lobbying the government to protect pubs from the onslaught of Supermarkets, or you can support the Morning Advertiser’s petition to resist calls to increase yet further the tax on alcohol.  The links to both petitions are below.

Newbridge Arms’ petition … Morning Advertiser petition

I did try to set up a petition of my own, calling for the Chancellor to look at reducing tax on draught beer, separating the sales of ‘pub-sold’ alcohol from those of supermarkets and therefore supporting pubs in their sales of alcohol in a social and responsible environment.  Unfortunately, it got rejected.

It must have been too scary for them to allow us to actually lobby the government on something so sensible.

I’m Dreaming Of A White Easter

Did you know that, statistically at least, it’s more likely to snow at Easter than it is at Christmas – especially when Easter falls at its earliest possible date as it does this year, all bar one day.  Despite this meteorological fact, bookies will still take bets on White Christmases rather than White Easters and Christmas carols all dream of snowy holidays.  It just wouldn’t seem right with Bing Crosby singing about a White Easter…

Yet it’s still a bit of a shock to us all to wake up this morning and find that the ground is covered in a healthy layer of snow.  Of course, the Met Office have been warning of this for some time, with their Early Warning pages predicting as early as Tuesday that we would need shovels come the weekend and that only Dennis Quaid would be able to save us, but few of us believed it.

So, I’d like to raise a glass to the guys at the Met Office and wish them a Happy Easter – for once, they got it right!

Who says global warming exists?

I have just read perhaps the most exciting bit of news I’ve seen all year.  It’s so good I actually think I might have wet myself a little bit when I saw the headline.  The news isn’t that Jennifer Aniston has finally discovered I exist and wants to have babies with me, nor is it that Ferrari have decided to give me a brand new 612 Scaglietti absolutely free.  It’s not even the news that a Macedonian court have found a bear guilty of stealing honey or that greeting card companies have voted to make Steak and BJ Day a genuine holiday that we can all enjoy without guilt or stigma.

Amazingly, it doesn’t even have anything to do with Sir Paul McCartney punching Heather Mills squarely in her whingeing face, which I think we’d all like to see right now.

It is, in fact, the news that, after twelve years of advertising drudgery, Formula One is returning to the BBC, where we’ll be able to enjoy uninterrupted coverage of the world’s greatest motorsport.

Since 1996, Formula One fans have had to put up with ITV’s policy of deciding to show an advertisement break just as something really exciting is happening but, from 2009, this will no longer be the case.  According to a man named Dominic Coles, who apparently holds the rather convoluted title of being the BBC’s Sport Director of Sport Rights, “fans will be able to enjoy uninterrupted, state of the art and innovative coverage from BBC Sport, across all of our TV, radio and new media platforms, for the first time since 1996.”

Whilst Bernie Ecclestone has said that he doesn’t have any complaints about ITV’s coverage and that the decision to return to the BBC is purely a commercial one, hardcore Formula One fans have long complained about the number of advertising breaks shown during races and their appalling timing through the events, which has lead to a number of fans to ask why the channel has received so many rewards for their coverage.

Me – well I’m as giddy as a school child waiting for Christmas Eve and, even though the first race of the 2008 season has only just happened, I now can’t wait for the 2009 one!  As well as a return to uninterrupted coverage, rumours continue to build that for next season Formula One cars will return to using slick tyres for even better overtaking opportunities.

Now all the BBC need to do to recreate the whole nostalgic effect is to re-employ Murray Walker!

A Plastic (Bag) Budget

I usually like to be jovial and upbeat when I write; I like to try and entertain and I like to be self-effacing with my humour where I can be. But today, all I can hear is the sound of a hammer, knocking another nail in to the coffin of the pub industry and recently I’ve been finding it a little difficult to raise a smile, let alone a glass.

Today’s budget, accompanied by the usual House of Commons brouhaha, showed that Alistair Darling really doesn’t have much money to play with. He mumbled on an awful lot about how things are better now than when the Conservative government was in place and how some of the financial traps the country is in are still the traps they set when they were in power. I find such comments a little upsetting and I’m disappointed to hear that after almost eleven years in power, if the Conservative policies were so awful, Labour haven’t yet found a way to fix them. He muttered statements about the environment and the poverty line and children and showed a little favour to motorists by freezing the price of petrol for a bit longer. He even offered a gratuitous incentive to new cars: from 2010, vehicles with CO2 emissions less than 130g/km will not have to pay road tax for the first year. This, of course, is a slightly pious offering because, should I wish to go and buy a more expensive car and the dealer is looking for a sale, they’ll offer to pay my road tax for me and so, at the end of the day, I won’t have to pay tax for the first year anyway.

In amongst the ramblings, the wagging of those John Tracy eyebrows and the platitudes to the Deputy Speaker, he also put 11p on a packet of cigarettes and, from Sunday night, 14p on a bottle of wine, 55p on a bottle of spirits, 3p on a litre of cider … and 4p on a pint of beer.

At first glance it might not seem like much, but it’s a rise of 13 percent – and it’s also not the figure that will be seen by the customers when it reaches the pump. By the time the breweries have factored in their own increases in trading, transport costs and taxation, and then VAT has been added, conservative estimates put the price of a pint rising by 12 to 15 pence at the till. Worst case scenarios have that figure at closer to 20p.

And that’s quite damaging for the pub trade – especially those in rural locations who are heavily dependent on their regular trade, especially during the quiet winter months. It’s a sop toward those who think that the country has a drink problem whilst simultaneously helping the Chancellor fill the void in our country’s bank accounts – but it’s also likely to backfire. As the price of beer rises, people will use public houses less. I stated yesterday some figures that show how many outlets are closing at the moment, and this increase in beer prices will do nothing to slow that trend. All that will happen is that people will drink less in public and more at home – and the Chancellor’s income will be directly affected by the reduction in on-trade sales. CAMRA, the Campaign for Real Ale, stated today that they felt this rise would be unlikely to affect supermarket prices, but pubs as small businesses, with high business rates and high running costs, will have little choice but to pass the increase on to the consumer.

Fear not, however, because he’s also slapping a tax on plastic bags from 2009 and this means that there will be an estimated 12bn less carrier bags around for you to carry your supermarket bottle of Blue Nun home in. So hoorah for Alistair Darling, saviour of the British Pub [sic].

Binge Drink Baloney

If you read the newspapers today – or watch the myriad of news channels and broadcasts available to us via digital television, or browse the news pages of the Internet – two stories will stand out more than any other.

They’re not stories about our beleaguered soldiers in Iraq and Afghanistan, or missing children or, indeed, the little titbit of news that crept out yesterday that last year’s summer floods were nothing to do with Global Warming; they’ve kept that very quiet.  Instead, it’s the stories that Britain is literally cowering under attack not from terrorists or immigrants but, instead, binge drinkers.  The other story is that tomorrow, somewhere in his budget, Alistair Darling – he of the Gerry Anderson puppet eyebrows – will put the price of beer up.  Probably by quite a lot.

Darling, and Brown – and the Daily Mail – all seem to think that we’re a nation of obese alcoholics and therefore the best way to tackle such extreme beer consumption is to tax it.  Obviously, it has nothing to do at all with the fact that since 1997 this Government has spent and spent and spent until there’s nothing left and now they need to find more ways to make money.

The other assumption that the Cabinet appear to be making is that publicans – the people ultimately responsible to the customers for how much their pint of beer or glass of wine is costing them – are wealthy and can therefore probably absorb a major price hike.  They seem not to have noticed that gone are the days of publicans driving around in Jaguars and Rolls Royces dressed in a sheepskin that would make Arthur Daley proud.  Today, I drive around in an eight-year-old Jeep that passes its MOT and keeps running by nothing more than sheer luck and my battered corduroy jacket is almost as old as the car.

Estimates on how much money Darling is going to put on alcohol vary wildly depending on which publication you read but, by the time you account for the increase in taxation, the increase in transport costs in the past twelve months and the increase in the cost of wheat, barley and so on, the price rise could be as much as 20p on a straight-forward pint of lager or bitter.  And that doesn’t account for the higher alcohol beers, or the bottles of alcoholic pop that are synonymous with the younger crowd.  In some areas of the country the price of beer is creeping ever-steadily towards £4.00.

Official figures show that a binge drinker is somebody who consumes roughly four pints of beer or a bottle of wine in one night which, to me, seems frankly ridiculous.  Everybody I know would fall into the category of binge drinker if that was the case.  If I go out for a meal with friends, I would probably enjoy a nice bottle of wine throughout the evening.  If I were to meet friends in town for an evening, I would probably drink four pints of lager – over a period of four hours, that’s not that much.  I certainly wouldn’t advocate driving after such a volume of alcohol, and it’s not good to do it every night of the week, but I would hardly consider myself a binge drinker based on such consumption; and I’m certainly not obese.

Equally, being a publican, I have yet to notice binge drinkers leaving my establishment, heading out in to the street and then immediately knifing a passing taxi driver.  I’m not saying that violence doesn’t happen, but I suspect I could go out in Newmarket tonight for a few beers and not feel in the least bit as if somebody is going to put a bottle in my eye.

By focusing attention on the apparent violence and health risks attributed to having a pint or two, Gordon Brown’s team are hoping to validate their decision to hike the price of beer, wine and spirits in tomorrow’s budget.  But there’s another report they should be keeping an eye on.

According to CAMRA, the Campaign for Real Ale, in a report out this week they state that 57 pubs are closing each month.  That works out to be almost two a day.  I’m aware of five pubs that have closed since Christmas.  As supermarkets make alcoholic drinks cheaper – not to mention easier for younger people to buy – more and more people are drinking at home.  This has the knock-on effect of forcing publicans out of business and the slightly less healthy aspect of reducing the social ability of our nation, not to mention increasing their ability to drink grossly more alcohol than might be good for them because there’s nobody around to tell them when they’ve had enough.

There are many calls in the press today for Alistair Darling to leave the alcohol tax alone or, even, to reduce it, but I suspect that they’ll go widely ignored.  I only hope that when the government start earning this extra cash from their tax hike they put some of it aside to create a benevolent fund for publicans.  There might be a few out of work soon who’ll need that sort of help…

Whatever Happened To The Drunken Sailor – and other politically incorrect stories…

I’m not ordinarily one for school plays, assemblies, recitals or anything else that means that I have to sit in a gym hall surrounded by primary school children on chairs that were designed either for the bottoms of six-year-olds or crack-addicted supermodels.  It might sound a little callous, but by the time I’ve tweezed my 35-year-old butt in to one of those tiny chairs a twinge in my coccyx reminds me that I did some damage to it by not being able to do stunts properly on a BMX when I was in my teens.

This means that I stop concentrating on the show taking place at the front of the hall and start fidgeting in a vain attempt to relieve some pressure off my aching bottom and, in turn, this means that my wife starts tutting, sighing and hissing at me to sit still so much that by the end of the show she’ll moan at me that it’s my fault she missed all of it.

Today was Jacob’s first ever appearance in public and apparently it’s written in the Magna Carta somewhere that I must attend such events in my five-year-old’s life.  Whining and wheedling and saying “oh, do I have to?” more repeatedly than my eight-year-old does when told he must eat his cauliflower got me nowhere and, resigned to thirty minutes of my bum cheeks going numb, I made my way in to the gym hall with all the other parents.

These days you aren’t allowed to take photographs of your own children in such environments in case you might inadvertently take a photograph of one of his or her friends and then show it to that child’s mother.  Such photography is bad and so the teachers do it for you instead and then charge you for a copy of the same photograph you could have taken instead.  This is apparently called protecting our young from the bad stuff in the world and is the politically correct thing to do.  This morning’s show required the children to be dressed in pirate outfits.  (Inwardly, I’m smiling slightly at the irony that pirates themselves weren’t necessarily politically correct…)  During the show the children are required to sing an old sea shanty, once known as Sailor’s Holiday, today we know it best as Drunken Sailor.

You know the one I mean: “What shall we do with a drunken sailor…” and so on and so on.  Except that, apparently, it’s politically incorrect for five-year-olds to say the word “drunk” and so there they were, reception class children, singing “What shall we do with a sunken sailor…”  Well, nothing, obviously – because he’s sunk.  It sort of spoils the rest of the song.  If a sailor’s sunk then we can’t put him in a bab and beat him senseless.  We can’t put him in a longboat until his sober, because he’s not drunk, he’s sunk.  We can’t put him in a bed with the captain’s daughter – because, oh my word, he’s no longer drunk so he could probably do something very naughty.  Nor can we give him the hair of the dog that bit him, because he’s not allowed to drink, and we can’t soak him in oil ‘til he sprouts a flipper because that makes absolutely no sense at all.

I have news for the school – and any other politically correct official who wears hessian knickers instead of a skimpy g-string: Jacob lives, plays and grows up in a pub.  He understands drunk.  What he doesn’t understand, however, is the cotton wool you’re trying to wrap him up in.

Of course, I don’t know if they changed all the other lyrics to suit the revised opening line, because the woman behind me had decided that it was far easier to let her two-year-old squeal endlessly in my right ear throughout the show rather than keep the child quiet, and now I can hear nothing at all because my eardrum is shattered.

French Mayor Discovers Elixir of Life: Just Don’t Die

You have to love the French, don’t you? Sure, they make great wine and Paris is apparently the most romantic city in the world but then they go and blot the copybook by putting garlic in their food and eating snails. The country is full of beautiful architecture and beautiful women who know how to dress both seductively and demurely at the same time, but then they all light up cigarettes and fill the decorative rooms with plumes of carcinogenic smoke. Travel from one end of the country to the other and, within just a few days, you can visit picturesque vineyards, learn the art of making cheese, go skiing in beautiful mountains and then relax on the sun-drenched beaches of Saint Tropez.

They like to stick up for themselves, too. If the politicians introduce a law that the French denizens don’t like, they simply go on strike. The farmers will block the motorways and the truckers will block the ports and the pilots will taxi out to the runway and then sit there, with the air conditioning switched off, so all the passengers start to sweat. Pretty soon, Nicolas Sarkozy will have to prise Carla Bruni’s lips from his underpants and repeal all new laws introduced and the country will go back to doing what it’s always done. It reminds me a little of that old joke about which body part is in charge…

And yet they still allow Citroen to go on making cars.

Best of all, though, they’re great for mad laws. Whilst an Italian mayor might once have grabbed the headlines for banning ladies of a larger stature from bathing topless on his beaches, Gerard Lalanne – mayor of Sarpourenx – has this week banned people from dying in his village.

The tiny community in France’s Bordeaux region is home to just 260 people but apparently the cemetery is overflowing with corpses, leaving little or no space for new graves. In a desperate attempt to resolve the graveyard’s overcrowding issues, Mayor Lalanne posted an ordinance in the council offices that stated that anybody who did not already have a plot reserved in the village cemetery but who wished to be buried in the village was forbidden from dying.

To add hilarity to the amusement of such an edict, Lalanne also added that anybody who disobeyed this new law would be severely punished. Sarpourenx’s mayor turned seventy this week and, whilst his odd commandment might not have the truckers and farmers blockading France’s main trade arteries, he has apologised for not finding a more positive way of dealing with the matter. He’s also hoping to stand in this month’s elections for a seventh term in office.

Whilst immortality might not necessarily befall the residents of Sarpourenx, Gerard Lalanne’s threat of severe punishment might make them think twice about dying on his territory. He hasn’t stated what the penalty will be for disobeying this new directive, but surely it’s a fate worse than death…

Tragic Magic In Handy Backup Supply Shocker (Part 2)

Last month I was lamenting the fact that I’d purchased an external hard disk drive to backup my growing music supply, and that the appropriate part of the power supply for this hard disk drive appeared to be missing upon opening the box.

Of course, it would have been helpful if I’d opened the box on the day I purchased it, as I would probably have been able to save myself an awful lot of trouble, frustration and, ultimately, embarrassment.   (If you missed the story, you can read it by clicking here.)

In short, however, what happened was that I purchased the Maxtor Personal Storage 3200 in November and then didn’t bother opening the box until last month, when it looked like the computer powering music to the pub might be about to die a rather horrible and very final death.  (It didn’t and, in fact, seems to have made a rather more than miraculous recovery from whatever was ailing it on the morning of February 8^th.)  Upon opening the box I discovered a kettle-style lead that didn’t appear to fit the actual disk drive itself.

PC World were unwilling to help because, as far as they were concerned, enough time had passed since the purchase of the item that I could well have actually lost the component that should have been in the box and they didn’t appear to believe me when I said that I had only just opened the packaging, three months after making my emergency purchase.

Since then, of course, I’ve been desperately trying to find ways to make this external drive work so that I could backup my music supply.  Slaveboy Adam tried various other power supplies for me, all to no avail, and I scoured the Internet looking for reasonably cheap alternative power supplies, all which came back rather expensive.  So I didn’t bother buying them.

On Monday, however, Big “999” Shaun came to my rescue with a multi-purpose power supply procured from Argos.  The idea is simple: choose the power connector that fits your device, connect it to the multi-purpose power supply, select the voltage you want from a range between 3 and 12 and plug in to the mains.  (Make sure you get the polarity correct, mind you, or it could all go up in a mini mushroom cloud.)

Following this relatively simple lesson in electronics, I plugged the device in and hey presto!  The power light lit up.  The hard drive clicked and whirred.  Something buzzed.  And then the computer reported that it didn’t recognise the hard drive device when I plugged it in.

In temper, and because I couldn’t think of anything else rational to do at the time, I picked up the original Maxtor packaging and threw it at the wall.

And that was when the other, missing half of the original power supply fell out of the box.