It’s now three years since my Encyclopaedia of Fonts was released into the community — I can’t say it was published, because the idiot managing director of the publisher decided to release it to the trade in the week before Christmas, so boxes of books arrived in the shops, waited unopened in the back passage, then got returned to the publishers in January. The classic orphan book. The idiot MD is mysteriously no longer there.

As a result: no reviews, no sales. Not for the first couple of years, anyway. Now recently there have been some hesitant notices, because the book really did catch everyone unawares. All the reviews have complained how small the sample fonts are. I didn’t foresee this as a problem, till I discovered American photocopiers don’t have zoom functions.

One or two mentions have been quite positive, with one verging on the ecstatic — “the best type compendium I have ever used, bar none.” This from a gentleman who had managed to read the introduction, where I described the thinking behind the book — the font samples were arranged stylistically and chronologically. If you were fed up with Times New Roman, for example, you could see the fonts that preceded and inspired it, and you can see the fonts that came later and which may have improved upon it. It’s very useful. I use it myself.

Since the book was published, the film ‘Helvetica’ has been released to rave reviews. It was well publicised, and the oddity of making a movie about a typeface was not lost on the critics.

Now I’ve come across another font film; this one about a Conference Of The Fonts from CollegeHumor.com, short, sweet, funny and well worth sharing with you, if my technology is up to it:

I had a semi-literate comment about yesterday’s blog posting which was held up by our spam filters. I checked it and it came from a locksmith in Raleigh, North Carolina, which is in the USA.

I know we’re all part of a global village now, but even I’m not dumb enough to call out a locksmith to come 4,000 miles and fix the bolt on my basement door.

Some people use really unintelligent crawlers and bots to waste our bandwidth.

Happy Christmas to you all!

I took Milo the hound down the Parkland Walk this morning and for a change he was surprisingly cooperative and amenable, probably out of sympathy with the terrible manflu which laid me out nearly the entire weekend.

He trotted back, devoured his breakfast, checked out the cats’ bowls and then wanted to go out into the garden. But I couldn’t find the key to the back door bolts.

Now if you’ve tried explaining to a dog that he can’t go out because you can’t find the key, you’ll know the attention span and the patience are about as short as my temper when I lose my keys. We were standing there barking at each other. Von came down and hunted around but she couldn’t find it either. Did we have a spare? Of course not.

But a pair of thin-nosed pliers might do the trick, and allow poor Milo to uncross his legs. Did we have a pair? Of course not. So off I went to Bishop’s in Crouch End. Closed until January 5. There’s always Patels at the bottom of Ferme Park Road. Shuttered. I go back to pick up the car and DRIVE! (in London!!) to Homebase. No bolt keys, but they can sell me a pair of thin-nosed pliers for a mere £11.49.

No thanks. As I walk out I spot 4 cheap pliers in a pack for £11.49, four for the price of one. I know, I know, you get what you pay for, but I only needed them for one job.

As I walked back to the car I found a locksmith in Green Lanes just by the railway bridge. I went in, described the problem and he slapped the key I needed on the counter. £3. Brilliant.

And it worked. Unlike the thin-nosed pliers. You get what you pay for. So after an hour and forty minutes I got the back door open and finally managed to start work.

When I went to make coffee a little later, I glanced out of the window and there was the missing key in the middle of the lawn.

Milo?

Yvonne and I wrote the first edition of “Know the Game: Mah-Jong” thirty years ago now, and it’s coming up to its 3rd edition and over half a million sales. But who has bought it? I’ve hardly met anyone else who plays Mah-Jong except my sister-in-law Brenda.

With the release of Ang Lee’s film “Lust, Caution” Mah-Jong has taken on a new light. Sadly this was not shed on the game itself, and while I went to see the film for its frank, explicit Mah-Jong scenes, I found I became distracted by plot elements and inconsistencies. Therefore there was no real point in going to see this film, despite its acrobatic, lurid and highly creative sex marathons and public executions.

‘Lust, Caution’ was set in the 1940s. Ang Lee is famous for creating an immaculate world in his movies, a flawless reconstruction of the society of the time, so it came as a surprise to me when a 2007 London black cab, the TX-4, rolled through a couple of scenes. I kept expecting it to burst into flames.

If they could sneak in a London cab, they could just as easily have planted copies of “Know The Game: Mah-Jong”, by Gwyn Headley and Yvonne Seeley, just published by A & C Black, ISBN 978 0 7136 8951 8, price £6.99.

The perfect Christmas present.

Know The Game: Mah-Jong

Pyrrhic, maybe.

It has taken over a year, but finally The Carphone Warehouse / O2 have admitted they have been in the wrong and agreed to refund the money they owe fotoLibra, to make an apology and a very small ‘goodwill’ payment for the misery and distress they have caused me. We haven’t received it yet.

I cancelled a contract with CPW/O2 in November last year. The following month they removed £41 from our account by Direct Debit.

Not only did they ignore my requests to return this money, but they carried on sending us larger and larger bills and increasingly nasty letters, including repeated telephone calls from spectacularly obnoxious men threatening to send bailiffs round.

Meanwhile I wrote letter after letter to them, stating my case and asking for our money back. They were ignored. I wrote twice to Charles Dunstone, the Managing Director, who didn’t even bother to acknowledge my letters. Instead I received more calls from aggressive debt collectors.

I wrote letter after letter. I kept copies. The copies together weigh over half a kilo. CPW/O2 simply ignored me and carried on with their threats.

Finally I wrote to Otelo, the office of the Telephone Ombudsman. I sent them 47 documents supporting my case. They sent me back a boilerplate letter saying I should contact the complaints department of CPW/O2.

I cracked. I do not know how I kept myself under control when I telephoned them to point out I had been doing that for 10 months. The man I spoke to got the message.

At last something was happening. I got a letter from Otelo on October 1st saying I would get a provisional conclusion in 6 to 8 weeks. I heard nothing, so I called them 8 weeks later; yesterday, December 1st.

“Didn’t you get our letter? We sent it on November 7th.” No, I didn’t. A copy arrived today, and there was the provisional conclusion. A win for fotoLibra and me.

Still CPW/O2 attempted to pin some of the blame on me. They said I’d asked for a PAC — why should I, when I had just requested one from Orange to move to O2? They blamed the Data Protection Act for not being able to talk to fotoLibra about Gwyn Headley and vice versa — so they didn’t bother to try.

This pointlessly drawn-out affair has caused heartache, rage, the fury of impotence, and (big tough macho guy though I am) I have to confess I shed tears of frustration, rage and misery. They were such callous, deaf bastards. They treated me with such contempt and disdain. I can now understand why some people are driven to pass among their shipmates with a cleaver.

Finally, after a year, they have to refund our money, and make me a footling little ‘goodwill’ payment. I haven’t the time or inclination to fight it any further. I’m accepting it.

That’s how they win in the end. They flick the lightswitch and simply leave it burning. They never have to worry about the bill.

I’ve always had a fondness for birds, and although I’ve never been birding I will always buy a bird book covering whatever part of the world I happen to visit (London and Wales is about it these days).

But I can’t get my DVD Guide To All The Birds of Europe to run on my MacBook Pro. After emailing the Bird Guides Support team I went on to their web site and it rather ominously says it won’t run on OS X 10.3. I’m on 10.5.5.

Now this little disk cost me £140, and if I can only use it as a coaster from now on I shall be seriously miffed. I could have bought a complete set of Cramp’s Birds of the Western Palearctic second hand for less. And kept it for the rest of my life.

The Bird Guides support team came back to me promptly and politely (full marks) to say:

I am sorry to have to tell you, but unfortunately since Apple have made this latest OS X10.5.x Leopard Operating system, our version 7 programmes will no longer work, even with our OS X updater disk.

The only way we can possibly suggest that you could still run these programmes would be to use Apple’s Boot Camp free download, and run the programme on Windows XP.

The only other thing we can do for you as a valued Customer is to offer you a special offer to upgrade, exchanging your old Version 7 Guide to European Birds to our latest Birds of the Western Palearctic version 2.0, with 970 species including of course all of the European Birds. The price of BWPi 2.0 is £139.

The publishing guru Mike Shatzkin proclaims that the printed book is obsolescent technology, and that ebooks will be the major publishing sector within 10 years.

This is the single most powerful argument against his premise. I can’t play my 78rpm records. I can’t play my 8 track tapes. I can’t play my Betamax videos. I can’t read my DVD Guide To All The Birds of Europe.

But I can still read the Field Guide to the Birds of Britain and Europe that I was given when I was six years old. And I don’t care to shell out the same amount of money again two years after buying a product in order to carry on using it.

While we’re on birds, this is one of the most beautiful and harrowing pieces of writing I’ve come across this year: http://fretmarks.blogspot.com/2007/05/human-position.html