Directory of Lost Causes

I phone the 'customer service' number for the Cardiff-Swansea Shuttle 100 bus, 01792 572255. I ask if the timetable on the website is current, since it has the words 'winter timetable' in the URL, and I can't find a corresponding 'summer timetable', and even here in rainy Wales, I'm fairly sure that the beginning of July must be classed as 'summer'.

"As far as I know, the timetable is current," comes the reply. It's not a very reassuring answer. "If it's the same one I'm looking at."

Well, how big is that 'if', exactly?

"It says 'winter timetable' here," I reiterate, "so I just wondered if it was still valid."

"Does it have May the 6th on it?"

I look. I can't see any date written anywhere.

"I can't see any date anywhere," I say. "I'm looking at the Firstgroup website. Is that right?"

"Yes."

"So, that should be the right timetable then?"

Throughout this exchange I have sensed - without too much surprise, unfortunately - a general unwillingness to communicate. It's almost as if this man resents that fact that people should phone a number that is advertised as being for 'customer service' asking questions. And now there ensues such a poisonous silence in answer to my tentative question that I can virtually see the fissures in the cancerous old man's greying lips as he presses them tighter. It's possible that the man hates me because he's Welsh and I'm English, and I'm just ridiculous enough to feel guilty for that. It's also possible that this concentrated sulphur of silence is simply due to the fact that the man is British and works for a bus company. Service, in Britain, is... well, there's an old joke that goes like this: "I didn't come here to be insulted." "Well, where do you normally go?" British 'service' is basically where people go to be insulted.

I made my excuses and hung up, reminding myself how foolish I had been actually to expect anyone to be at all helpful on the end of a British 'helpline'.

This whole process of planning my journey to London by bus has taken me a few days. I did not expect it to take so long. Things have changed. Of course, I did start by looking things up on the Internet, but all the 'journey planners' turned out to be entirely useless. Like bureaucracy in the film Brazil (and in actual life), each webpage I found simply referred me to another. The actual task of planning a journey had been 'out-sourced' so many times that there was nothing left but the process of out-sourcing; the service itself, which should have been at its end, had been forgotten.

The assumption in this age being, however, that everything is done instantaneously at the click of a mouse, human service has atrophied shockingly. No one knows how to answer a phone any more, or answer a question. In the past, if I wanted to plan a coach journey, which I often did, I would simply make one phonecall, ask a number of questions of one person, who had the amazing ability to tell me times, prices and the locations of stops, and my journey-planning, and booking, was complete. The people were not always cheery - this is Britain, after all - but at least they could do their job.

I've had to resort to photographs of timetables in bus shelters and bus stops to help me fill in the final pieces of the puzzle. There is something refreshing in walking to a bus stop and seeing, laid out clearly, all in one place, the times and destinations of buses, without having to be redirected to anything, without having to turn a switch or click an icon, and without having to talk to some sour old cunt who is determined to find some reason to hate you because he hates the job he's too shrivelled and pickled with resentment and mediocrity to be able to do.

I'm not an opera fan, nor am I a fan of talent shows, but I was very interested when I was told recently about the story of Paul Potts, a man from South Wales who sang opera on the talent show Britain's Got Talent.

The story that was told me involved a hard luck tale which ended in the tossing of a coin to decide whether to enter the competition or not.

I was very interested, but haven't yet found the coin-tossing detail online.

Anyway, before I re-tell the tale, here's the clip I later found showing it in full technicolour (well, telecolour):

Okay. Actually, that pretty much tells the story, as it was told to me, of a Welshman in a cheap suit, with a tooth missing, coming to a talent show near the end of its tour of the country, when the judges are tired and pissed-off with all the shit that they've sat through, and who are now looking at the same Welshman with weary disdain until he opens his mouth and sings.

Apparently there was some kind of documentary about him on last week.

Faces tell us a lot, I think. For instance, Paul Potts's face before and after he sings, and also when he's gathering strength in his singing. Also, look at Simon Cowell's face after a few notes of Potts's singing. I actually don't like Simon Cowell at all (I know, it's predictable), but I remember Quentin Tarantino talking about Cowell to Jonathan Ross. Tarantino said something like, "But you know, the thing is, Cowell's always right. If you actually take notice, he's always right." Well, I don't know about that, but credit where it's due, he put aside his pantomime-villain smarminess on this occasion.

Okay, I've watched enough of Charlie Brooker's Screen Wipe - and despite initial reservations I now love Brooker as only someone who's never met him can - to realise that television is illusion, but I don't think there was an entire audience of paid actors there.

Having looked up information on Paul Potts online, I see that he has had a real decent amount of voice training and apparently amateur experience. It seems that some people have called hoax at this. Hmmm. Well, who knows what is a hoax, but one thing I can say to idiots who think that genius is not hard fucking work - you're wrong. Paul Potts probably did not just start singing Nessun Dorma in the shower one day, out of the blue.

I haven't seen the documentary, but as it was told to me (not verbatim):

"They brought this expert on the programme - this opera critic - and he was saying, 'Who does Paul Potts think he is? Who does he think he is? If he'd went for an interview in the opera world in the proper way, he'd have been laughed out of the room.' And this guy can't understand what it is about Paul Potts that just tears people up. Paul Potts doesn't think he's anybody."

As far as I can gather, no one knew who Paul Potts was as he was standing before them on that day. Within a few moments, there was an auditorium of people crying and cheering as if they had recognised something they knew deep down. This was not manufactured hysteria over Madonna in a pointy bra (that dates me). You can't fake that kind of reaction.

So, I don't care, first of all, if Paul Potts has had extensive opera experience, I don't care if the story is very sentimental, and I don't care if it all happened on a tacky talent show. I also don't care if he is now famous and about to become less of a gap-toothed, cheap-suit kind of guy. If I might be allowed to say it, good luck to you, mate.

Also, just to burn my bridges and address the critic who I have never met and didn't even see on the documentary, and who only exists to me as a kind of grey, generic 'critic':

"Paul Potts doesn't think he's anybody. You're the one who thinks you're someone, you elitist wanker!"