T'was the night before Christmas...

... and there was feck all on the telly.









Christmas TV always manages to scrape the barrel of the television archives and this year is no exception.

Aside from some big-name film that can now be found in the £3.99 bin at Blockbuster, Christmas TV, especially Christmas Eve television, tends to involve repeat after repeat after repeat of Blackadder, however many versions of A Christmas Carol that currently exist and The Santa Clause.

This year, a thumb through the TV guide reveals nothing, absolutely nothing worth watching.

Aside from the 'Christmas Eve specials' of various soaps designed at the 'OK Magazine' reading share of the audience, the film offering consists of either 'Pirates of the Caribbean; Curse of the Black Pearl' on BBC One or back-to-back showings of the chav favourite 'The Fast and the Furious' and '2 Fast 2 Furious' on ITV2. I've no idea what ITV1 are showing as they try to expand their audience of complete morons.

BBC Three has 'Football Gaffes Galore' - probably the same DVD that you'll be getting for Christmas tomorrow followed by wall-to-wall Little Britain.

The only saving grace is a 'Father Ted' marathon on More4.

So Christmas Day.... what have we got? Shrek 2 and Finding Nemo? That might work. ITV1 are showing some crap from X Factor and I've not idea what the other channels are showing.

Oh, and there's the Christmas speech - whoop-de-fecking-doo.

Is it any wonder why we're so good at binge drinking? Drinking dangerous amounts of alcohol is far more preferable to a night in front of the box.

That depends who you are asking

It's that time of year once again. Time for the car insurance renewal.








Unfortunately, as a sub-23-year old single male, I'm public enemy number one in the eyes of the motor insurance industry as so finding an insurer that will actually honour their advertising claims of "cheap" car insurance is a nigh-on futile task, even with four years without claiming.

But nevertheless, the law requires me to pay for a piece of paper which only has any value in a moment of crass stupidity on my part.

As you can imagine, I'm subject to all the "young driver excesses" that any insurance company feels free to make up on the spot which makes claiming anything a completely pointless exercise. If I do claim, I have to pay the bulk of the costs out of my own pocket anyway and I'll be forced to pay for the rest next year by way of an increased premium. It's a sort of legalised blackmail that works very well in the insurance industry.

But anyway, the renewal note came through with a revised premium of around £381, which wasn't all that bad and around £80 less than last year.

Now in the past as this point, you would go to your local broker and accept any randomly generated number as "his best possible price that he could do if you bought today" or spend a whole afternoon phoning every listing in the Yellow Pages for numbers even more random that you'd be better off asking your newsagent for a 'Luck Dip'.

But the Internet is now here and thanks to other random number generators like Confused and Money Supermarket, I can do it all in one go and, if I'm lucky, pay a hidden middle-man affiliate fee that nobody cares to mention.

A search on both sides revealed a "best price" that was about the same as the renewal but did miss off a few insurers who don't want to be associated with these comparison sites, so I tried those.

One site offered me a "special online price with 10% online discount" of £568, so they were quickly discarded. Another site, who promised to "beat your renewal quote if you have 4 years NCB, even if you aren't very posh" didn't beat my renewal quote. Instead, the tried to triple it.

Resigned to defeat, I tried an online quote with my current insurer and sure enough, I was quoted the "brand new customers only" price of £331. Knowing that I'd have to change the occupation listed on my current documents anyway, I phoned said insurer.

Now I would think that changing my occupation from "care-free, careless student" to "upstanding professional" would have seen a welcome drop, not a £16 increase and so before I knew it, I was passed onto the "Internet quote team" to get the "brand new customers only, but also existing customers if you ask nicely" price.

The annoying thing though, is that for all these various names in the motor insurance industry, they are, on the whole, the same company. Three insurers I obtained quotes from (including the one I went with), were all the same insurer once you get past the marketing yet offered three prices ranging from £331 to nigh-on £1000. For others, the difference was even greater and those that claim to "specialise in younger drivers" were amongst the worst of the bunch.

Never mind eh, there's always next year.

Things that you notice in a major city centre

On Saturday afternoon, I had the misfortune to venture into Leeds city centre, not realising that said day also happened to be the major shopping day before Christmas.



But still, major shopping days happen to provide a source of mild amusement when you actually take a minute to look around. Here are a few that I spotted.

• People naturally join a queue, despite not knowing what the queue is for.
  
  
• Police truancy patrols are a very good idea, but I would question their effectiveness on a Saturday afternoon.
  
  
• Every single motorist wants to park in 'The Light' car park.
  
  
• In the German Christmas market, most shoppers will adopt one of two strategies.
  1. Talking to the stall owner in your best GCSE German.
  2. Talking in the "S-L-O-W-E-R AND L-O-U-D-E-R" method that Brits do so well when abroad.
  They do this despite the fact that the stall keeper is a Chinese boy with a distinctly unnerving Yorkshire accent.
  
  
• People don't seem to understand that shops at Christmas are often busy places and continue to proclaim that "this is stupid this is" at single one of the 32 Christmas temps drafted in just for that particular weekend.

I'm sure I'll think of more later

You want to buy something? You'll have to pay extra for that

Back when I used to write on this thing a bit more regularly, I mention my displeasure at a number of life's "cons" and one in particular, booking fees.







These 'booking fees' might also be disguised as a 'credit card fee' by internet retailers who don't want to have that stigma of the booking fee.

The credit card fee is very common with low-cost airlines, as is any other fee that you might think of to be honest as they shave penny after penny from the cost of their seats, only to recoup that discount elsewhere. But who cares, you've bought a flight for 5p, right?

The idea of paying these fees is still a concept that people are getting used to. In the past, when there was still a mystique about flying, you never paid these fees for booking the flight, taking a bag with you, checking in, sitting in the airport lounge and choosing your seat. Well, you did pay them, but the airline never told you.

Then Ryanair came along and turned the industry on it's head. With this new brand of airlines, you got absolutely nothing bar a seat on a plane but in return, you paid next to nothing.

Such things are important to a Yorkshireman, which is why an airline with similar ideals, Jet2, moved in to Leeds Bradford airport with their stupidly cheap flights and it is something that we will be taking advantage of this summer.

With Leeds Rhinos playing the Perpignan-based Catalan Dragons in July rather than February, we've opted to head out for a weekend of rugby-based-cultured-beer'y fun. But instead of spending time just in the Catalan part of France, we'll also be taking in the Catalan capital of Barcelona before flying back into Leeds mid-week.

As with most things in our circle of friends, I'm charged with booking these sorts of things. One of them is just useless and is justifiably not trusted with anything more taxing than booking a minicab to the pub. The other is a lazy, forgetful sod who almost certainly jump in the taxi to go to the airport and ask "What was I supposed to book again?" and the other, whilst not being quite as bad, would rather I did it.

So I'm left to scour the net for discount hotels and flights with a primary criteria - cheap as possible, which is where the credit card fees come in.

Booking the outbound flight was easy. Manchester to Perpignan, £5.99 plus tax with bmiBaby, coming to about £36 each with a few options on the 'credit card fee' front. I could pay £2.99 with Maestro or £5.99 with Mastercard - I picked the cheaper one.

But then we came across Jet2, who seemingly wanted to overcomplicated the process from the very first click.

Firstly, they insisted in giving prices in Euros on the basis that I was booking a one-way flight from Barcelona and thus, I must be Spanish, right?

So anyway, the calculator comes out and I'm quoted around £42 per seat including all the multiple taxes and I accept, only to be presented with an even more complicated 'credit card fee' menu.

Like Bmi, thee were different charges for different cards but these were more peculiar. Mastercard and Visa credit cards were the most expensive, €3 a pop whilst Visa Electron, a card that banks give to 16-year-olds that they don't trust, happened to be much cheaper than a bog-standard Visa debit card despite the fact that they will almost certainly go through the same merchant system and an Electron has many more security procedures surrounding it.

At this point, questions start popping in my head but never mind, I soldier on - I am going on holiday after all but it is only then that you realise that the 'credit card fee' is not a one-off payment processing fee to cover the handling charge but instead a full-on €3 per person surcharge.

Like a mug, I paid it but who cares, I'm going on holiday ;)