Category Archive: Thoughts

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Some thoughts on Sherlock, his death, and the secret of his survival.

  By Site Admin | January 24, 2012 - 4:20 pm | Thoughts Leave a comment

On the final episode of series 2 of the BBC’s Sherlock adaptation, we see the eponymous character apparently willingly thrown himself to his death in order to save his three ‘friends’, John Watson, Greg Lestrade, and Mrs. Hudson.

Sherlock’s ‘death’ and subsequent survival should have come as no surprise even to those that hadn’t read the original Arthur Conan Doyle works. What interests me, however, is the supposition of the producers that the secret of Sherlock’s survival is there to be deduced, but merely that viewers will have ‘missed’ it.

There are several elements for consideration:

  • A body hits the ground. It exudes blood. A subsequent post-mortem would have confirmed it as an actual person (but evidently not Holmes) as opposed to a convincing dummy. As identity for dead persons can be established with a visual confirmation by a relative, it can therefore be assumed that if not Holmes, the dead body looks very much like him. Enough to allow the misidentification to be considered fact.
  • Earlier in the episode, the young kidnapped girl reacts to Holmes as if she has seen him before, leading the police to believe that he is the kidnapper. Since we take it as read that Sherlock is an authentic character and not a fraud, he was evidently not the kidnapper. Therefore, there exists a person that looks very much like him. A person that committed the kidnapping.
  • John Watson conspicuously falls and hits his head just prior to seeing Holmes’ body. He is concussed, which makes it understandable that he would not be able to discern immediately that the dead body is not that of Holmes.
  • Sherlock forcibly insists that John not move closer to the building, and to ‘Keep your eyes fix on me’. We should also note the the area directly below Sherlock is visually occluded from the position in which Watson is standing.
  • The location in the episode – Bart’s Hospital, is in actual place, and indeed the actual scene of the episode is filmed here. Here is a Google streeview link to the position in which I approximate John Watson to have been standing: http://g.co/maps/t2b6b
  • In the close up scenes of Sherlock speaking on the phone, we can see clearly the outline of the dome of the Old Bailey to his left. This is entirely consistent with the orientation of the building’s position relative to where Sherlock is supposed to be standing, so we can therefore state that it is indeed Sherlock, and not anyone else that is standing on this exact roof-top. It was possible but improbable that Sherlock was observing John from another location, while someone else was standing on the roof.
  • Sherlock elicits the assistance the assistance of Molly Hooper (the pathology/lab technician lady), although we’re given no reason as to what kind of help he needs. he cryptically states he needs ‘her’. Futhermore, as Sherlock’s potential love interest (unrequited as it was), it seems odd that she should not have been present in any of the post-death aftermath shots. It is therefore probable that the assistance involved the faking of his death, and that she has colluded with him to this end.
  • Finally, I’d like to present this screenshot (click on it to enlarge):

He we see the dead ‘Sherlock’, but we also can very clearly see an open-back lorry containing what looks like bags? Let’s assume nothing is accidental, so this lorry is potentially part of the narrative. It certainly looks like a potentially good place to hide a live Sherlock (although the mechanics of how he’d have survived to the ground level are unknown), and also a convenient receptacle from which a replacement ‘looks like Sherlock’ body can be quickly dumped onto the street.

 A deduction based on the available data

In my opinion, the most likely explanation for the survival of Sherlock is as follows.

Moriaty had an agent who conducted the kidnapping. A person who looks, or was made to look, very much like Sherlock, in order to create the necessary suspicion. As many times previously demonstrated, Sherlock has been able to divine the identities of those involved in Moriaty’s schemes, so it’s likely he would have identified his impersonator. It’s also possible that having served his purpose, Moriaty would have killed this impersonator when he was done with him (or killed by one of the many international assassins kicking around in this episode), allowing Sherlock to discover this body (probably in an intervening time between leaving Watson and seeking Molly’s assistance), and think to use it in his plan to fake his own death. Molly, being a pathologist, would have been amenable to taking this body, tidying it up, and dumping it at the scene of Sherlock’s death at the appointed time to create the desired effect. ‘Molly, I think I’m going to die’. Thus, henceforth, and ergo, this is how Sherlock has faked his death.

The only remaining question is how he created the impression of jumping (to assume he did in fact jump) and survive the fall to the ground (or at least to the point of where Watson’s view is obscured). While a successful jump into the aforementioned lorry is unlikely, this IS still TV, and it’s possible some simple macguffin will have been employed to make this explainable.

Elementary? We’ll see….

 

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kgbdeals has a funny definition of ‘No-strings attached’

  By Site Admin | December 2, 2011 - 1:10 pm | Humour, Thoughts Leave a comment

Email to my inbox today. Had to repost due to extreme comedy. I guarantee you will find this funny*.

*Funniness NOT guaranteed.

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What is the point of ‘follow for follow’ on Twitter?

  By Site Admin | November 7, 2011 - 6:44 pm | Internet, Thoughts Leave a comment

Before I allow myself to be impressed with the number of followers an individual has on twitter, I always stop to check how many people they follow themselves.

If you try this yourself you’ll see a surprisingly large number follow at least as many, if not more, as follow them. I call this the follow ratio, and its very important. Huge numbers of people are playing the meta game – they want a big number next to their name to give the illusion of popularity. And it is an illusion, because a person with a low follow ratio is probably as worthless as a tweeter with 10 followers but who follow nobody themselves.

I recently happened across someone with 2800 followers. Impressive? Not when I saw they were following more than 3000 back.

Consider the impracticality of subscribing to 3000 people. That’s enough to make Twitter useless. It’s too many people churning out too much data for anyone to comprehend. You can certainly filter these people into different lists, but again, even the lists for such numbers would be unmanageable. The point is that these people don’t want to read tweets, they want people who, when followed, feel compelled to follow back. YouTube would call this practice ‘sub for sub’.

It’s worthless. They don’t want to follow you. They are not engaged, motivated fans, hanging on your every word. They are people like you, gunning for the biggest, most pointless number out there. But what is the point when you tweet about your latest blog to your 2800 followers and get 10 hits back? That’s one of the lowest exposure vs. clickthrough rates in history.

You have no idea what your fans want, because you don’t have any real fans. Just a hoard of meta miners looking to build this worthless masquerade of popularity.

Don’t look at followers, look at the follow ratio. If they follow even half as many as follow them back, chances are they aren’t worth your time.

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Organ donors should be offered funeral expenses? No.

  By Site Admin | October 11, 2011 - 11:41 am | Thoughts Leave a comment

Today’s story on BBC news discusses a report by Nuffield Council of Bioethics on ways to increase the rates of bodily donation for medicine and research. Links here to the Full Report and a Short Guide.

The focus of the BBC story is on the recommendation that the NHS should pay for the funeral expenses of those donating their organs, as ‘the move could lead to more people donating their organs’.

I find this point particularly disagreeable and believe that organ donation should always be utterly without any form of financial incentive, whether it comes from the recipient of the organ(s) or from government funding. I will however post this excerpt from the short guide that highlights some rather surprising circumstances in which payment or benefit can be taken.

• Consent is almost always required before a person may donate material as a living donor, and they must be given information about what the procedure involves. After death, organs or tissue may be taken from the deceased if they had signed the Organ Donor Register or if their family give permission.
• It is against the law to offer or accept financial reward to donate blood, tissue or organs for the treatment of others. However, it is not explicitly illegal to offer or accept payment to donate these bodily materials for other purposes, such as research.
• Financial reward for donating eggs or sperm is against the law. However, women who agree to provide some of their eggs for another woman’s infertility treatment or for research (‘egg-sharers’) may receive free or reduced-cost infertility treatment for themselves from private clinics.
• People who donate their bodies after death to medical schools for medical education and training purposes may have their funeral costs paid by the medical school.
• People who volunteer to take part in clinical trials to test new
medicines may receive payment to compensate them for their time, and for any discomfort and inconvenience involved.
• People who donate organs or bone marrow as living donors have all their expenses, including any lost earnings, reimbursed by the NHS. People who donate eggs and sperm are reimbursed a maximum of £250 for lost earnings.
• Expenses are also incurred by the professionals and organisations involved in donation and transplantation. Payment for the many medical and technical services needed to handle and process bodily material does not count as ‘commercial dealings’ and is allowed.

In fairness to the report, it has come to the above conclusions as a result of a realistic analysis of what motivates people into actions, and the sad fact is there are a great many people who will only act in the knowledge of some financial reward.

The percentage of altruistically-minded people who seek to help others on their own intiative is incredibly low. Greater numbers of people will help if prompted or educated to do so. Making it as easy as possible and removing disincentives (such as costs incurred for travel and accommodation) for donating will help further. Ultimately it is a sad reflection on society that a significant minority would never do anything to help anyone unless they received a direct, tangible benefit as a result.

UK Transplant are quoted in the story:

“Currently in the UK, organ donation operates according to the fundamental principle that organs/tissues are donated altruistically and it is illegal to receive a payment for supplying an organ.”

Morally I believe this to be absolutely the right stance. The gift of an organ or tissue should be precisely that – a gift, utterly detatched from demographical considerations or thoughts of individual gain.

But I also appreciate that moral idealism is harder to defend while people continue to die waiting on the organ donor register. Direct monetary incentives, while probably effective, would create an incredible storm of opposition, particularly at a time of economic recession and future uncertainty that would see the increasingly impoverished members of society giving away pieces of themselves to make ends meet.

I can offer no conclusions on the issue, except to say that the BBC has unfortunately made a story of a relatively minor piece of the overall report that sensationalises the issue such that opposition to the other suggestions of the report are more probable. I consider the report to be a cogent, stark, though perhaps depressingly realistic overview on what would make more people donate their organs.

Education will be effective, of course. It’s a widely held view that 80-90% of all people would be willing to donate their organs after death, and yet only 29% of people are signed up to the register. The deficit is due to a general lack of awareness, and to quote Emily Thackray from the Live Life Then Give Life charity: “If there is money out there, it needs to go into education, it needs to go into infrastructure, and it needs to support the donor families who make this incredible gift”.

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MacGyver Theme Piano Sheet Music

  By Site Admin | July 5, 2011 - 3:39 pm | Internet, Thoughts 1 Comment

Recently I tried in vain to find a good arrangement of the MacGyver theme by Randy Edelman for Piano. The only one I found was a scanned png image, faded, and too small to read. This is not the same as the ones you can buy online, and I find their note arrangements to be just plain WRONG anyway. :)

Desperate to practice this awesome tune, I painstakingly recreated the tiny version I found into a nice, full-szed and fully marked up PDF version which you can download here.  MacGyver Theme Piano PDF.

I’ve also included a Midi File of the sheet here

I don’t think this infringes any copyrights or whatnot, but if you’re the copyright holder and have a problem with this, please contact me.

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Digging Deeper into The Transplant Trust

  By Site Admin | February 10, 2011 - 4:04 pm | Thoughts 2 Comments
This article is a follow-up to a previous entry entitled ‘The Transplant Trust (formerly Transplants in Mind) – What Happened?’. I would recommend reading the previous article before reading this one.

After writing my previous entry on the fate of The Transplant Trust, I received several interesting comments and consequently undertook some additional research the charity’s fate, trying hard to pin down precisely what happened between the 2008/2009 and 2009/2010 financial years (running April-March of those respective years), that resulted in the calamitous fall of a charity that had hitherto been running for almost 20 years.

An addendum to my previous article noted a report by Third Sector on court action that was levied against The Transplant Trust in order to recover an unpaid £3650 PR bill for National Transplant Week (NTW) in 2009.

My previous assumption, based on this entry at the Charities Commission website, is that the charity had ceased operation by March of 2009, but the aforementioned Third Sector report refers to the NTW held in July of 2009. Clearly the charity was still running at this point, and its purported closure date appears to have been specified simply to coincide with the end of the 08/09 financial year. More digging was clearly needed, and after an extremely helpful and informative call to the Charities Commission, I can relate the following:

Two charitable entities under the name ‘The Transplant Trust’ exist. These are distinct, seperate organisations that have been founded with individual mandates and governance. Specifically:

1001374 – The Transplant Trust, was registered as a Charitable Trust in 1990, and it is this organisation which ceased operation in March 2009. Their activities are listed as:

Supporting research into clinical aspects of transplantation. Tissue engineering of chondrocytes and bone marrow stem cells were two main areas supported during this financial year.

1095611 – The Transplant Trust, was registered as a Membership Organisation (run under a constitution) in 2003, and according to the Charities Commission is still registered. Their activities are listed as:

THE RELIEF OF SICKNESS AND DISTRESS BY THE IMPROVEMENT OF THE SUPPLY OF HUMAN ORGANS FOR TRANSPLANTATION THROUGH THE PROMOTION OF HUMAN ORGAN AND TISSUE DONATION AND THE ADVANCEMENT OF PUBLIC EDUCATION, IN PARTICULAR THROUGH THE PROVISION OF RESEARCH AND THE PUBLICATION OF THAT RESEARCH. RAISING AWARENESS BY RUNNING NATIONAL TRANSPLANT WEEK, THE DONOR BUS AND DONOR DAYS.

It is clear that these two entities were both the same overall organisation, with the former apparently having a more clinical research focus. The one set of public accounts still available for this charity for the 05/06 financial year which notes a turnover that just surpasses £26,000. The accounts for a charity are only published publicly in the event their gross turnover exceeds £25,000, and so it would seem this was the only year on record where this criteria was met. Any other accounts held below this threshold, while not public, should still be obtainable via a Freedom of Information request to the Charities Commission, and so I provide the results here for information:

The Transplant Trust (1001374) Annual Report & Accounts for 2003-2004

The Transplant Trust (1001374) Annual Report & Accounts for 2004-2005

The Transplant Trust (1001374) Annual Report & Accounts for 2005-2006

The Transplant Trust (1001374) Accounts for 2006-2007

The Transplant Trust (1001374) Accounts to March 2008

The Transplant Trust (1001374) November 2008

Arguably the most revealing result from this request was a letter to the Charities Commission in February 2009 that declares the cessation of The Transplant Trust (1001374) and to transfer its assets to ‘Transplants in Mind[sic] 1095611′.

Looking at these accounts we can see the steady decrease of turnover and activity supporting the ‘clinical aspects of transplantation’, as specified in its founding mandate, since the formal creation of the second Transplant Trust member organisation in 2003. It’s interesting that it is this which has officially ceased, and not the second, more public face of the charity with which all of its supporters will be familiar. To clarify, I refer to the part which had the website, the donor bus, and which ran and received government funding for National Transplant Week. One charity had a turnover that didn’t exceed £25k, and the second (the Membership Organisation), had a turnover of more than £150k.

As far as the Charities Commission is concerned, this organisation still technically exists, albeit with Accounts and Annual Returns that are heavily over due for the 2008-2009 financial year, although I have recently noticed that an Annual Return (but not accounts) has been returned for the 2009-2010 year as of 26th January 2011. I enclose a screenshot of the Charity Commission entry for The Transplant Trust (1095611) as I see it today:

Here we see a huge leap in income to £285k (up from £107k in 2008), albeit with £296k of spending putting the charity further into deficit. As these figures are somewhat incongruent to the known activity of the charity since 2009, I can only speculate that this figure is a combination of the financial years 08/09 and 09/10. Although why it would be presented in this way is not evident.

The question of ‘What Happened?’ is still as mystifying as it was, however I am penning this update primarily because several weeks ago I sent another Freedom of Information request to the Department of Health, who, to remind you, provided significant amounts of public funding to support The Transplant Trust’s activities, including National Transplant Week.

My request, and the responses to which, were as follows:

Request 1: The amount and type of funding provided to the charity since its creation (c. 1991), summarised by year up to and including the charity’s last year of operation. 

Response 1: Organisation name – Transplants in Mind – for a  project called National Transplant week.

Financial year:

2004/05: £20,000.

2005/06: £10,000.

Reference Document 2003/552

For a second project called – Donor Day – they received 3-years grant as follows:

2005/06: £25,000.

2006/07: £30,000.

2007/08: £35,000.

In 2008/09 we funded £84,000 to Transplant Trust to promote National Transplant Week 2009 and identify the most appropriate and effective medium to reach the under 25s demographic and implement an initiative to target this group to increase the number of people on the Organ Donation Register.  In 2009/2010 we funded £7,500 to publish a Transplant book written about the experiences of those waiting for a transplant.

Request 2: All documentation, including memos, emails, and other communications as appropriate that discuss or otherwise investigate the closure of the charity in 2009.

Response 2: DH had no dealings with the charity re their closure, but please see correspondence annexed below where, on hearing that Transplant Trust was facing financial difficulty, we wrote to John Wallwork asking for confirmation that DH funding was not going to be used for redundancy payments. I also attach the charity’s funding report that they sent to DH giving a breakdown of their proposals, and two award letters to Time for the Funding of National Transplant Week from 2000/2001.

Note that we have redacted the names and direct contact details of officials who are not Senior Civil Servants or otherwise persons in the public domain, in accordance with s40(2) of the FOIA, which relates to the personal data of living individuals whose release would be in breach of the Data Protection Principles as set out under the Data Protection Act.

Request 3: Information on the intended future distribution of the funds that would have otherwise been granted to the charity had it continued in operation. i.e. Has or will this been re-apportioned to a similar charity/project in future.

Response 3: We hold no recorded information which would address your question about ‘the intended future distribution of the funds that would have otherwise been granted to the charity had it continued in operation. i.e. Has or will this been re-apportioned to a similar charity/project in future.’

The department within the Department of Health that deals with Freedom of Information requests is deserving of serious criticism. My request was handled so incredibly badly that as of today I still have not received the specific items of documentation that relate to my original request. In their first response they referenced documents but did not provide them, even when they explicitly state that they had been included. I have asked for the charity’s funding report which they noted in ‘Response 2′ more than once, but my requests are seemly dealt with people of surpassing incompetence and illiteracy. My original request to their department was made on the 3rd December 2010, and they have far exceeded the 20 working days allocated by law to respond to such requests.

When I pointed out that the documents they referenced had not been included, they insisted on treating this as a new Freedom of Information request, thereby giving them another 20 working days to correct their error. That would be bad enough had their eventual response not once again omitted the information requested. Eventually I was sent this PDF document, which is a mish-mash of referenced material with no good explanation of what is included. The DoH then insisted this was the entirety of the information they held, despite that clearly not being the case. I have again appealed to them for records pertaining to the funding given over the course of the time period requested, and again I’ve been given yet another FOI reference number. It seems to me that this constant generation of new reference numbers is simply a way of fudging their response statistics. They can respond to a singular FOI request poorly, close it, and if anyone has any follow-up queries about the paucity of information provided, they merely open up a new reference and respond to that within their 20 days. By opening and closing multiple references for what is ultimately ONE request, I imagine it would be very easy to make it look like the department was responding to 100% of all requests on time.

So I apologise if the information above is not as detailed as it might be, and I will update this article should the DoH manage to grind together enough braincells to comprehend which documents they still need to send me.

In any case, some scraps of this information were useful. I was particularly interested in the nature of the £7500 provided for the publication of a ‘Transplant book’. I can only assume it refers to this website and while there is a scant mention of The Transplant Trust, there is nothing that mentions them as a source of funding for its publication. I will enquire directly to the author and update this article with any information.

A Stumbling Summary

The situation remains rather unclear. The aspect of the charity dealing with research was wound up in early 2009 with any remaining assests transferred to the second charity at that time. The second charity has been missing in action since mid-2009. It has no website, it no longer accepts donations, its Just Giving membership has expired, and yet still technically appears to exist. The recent Annual Return that now appears on the CC website merely adds to the intrigue.

The donor bus, noted in my previous article, is allegedly still run by Ray Pearson, the ex-Donor Bus Manager of the Transplant Trust, under the name ‘Brightside of Life charity’. This is not a charity that is registered with the Charities Commission (which it would be obligated to do if it had a turnover of greater than £5000), and it has no significant online presence that makes mention of the bus’ activities. As far as I can work out the donor bus is also not part of any other larger charity connected to transplantation. If the closure letter referenced above is to be believed, the bus along with any other assets should still technically remain the property of the remaining Transplant Trust charity.

Many questions still need to be answered. What is actually going on? Will the charity attempt to rise from the ashes and overcome its continued financial woe? Will their website be restored to operation? Will there be a public statement as to the fate of the charity? And most critically, who is organising National Transplant Week in 2011?

I will continue to post any information that becomes available, and comments remain welcome.

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Boris Johnson’s Arms Race

  By Site Admin | December 14, 2010 - 11:32 am | Humour, Thoughts Leave a comment

Mayor of London, Boris Johnson, was quoted today as saying he did not want to make use of water cannons [as a way of dispersing student tuition fee protesters], as he ‘did not want to engage in an arms race’.

Boris, what do you think they’re going to do? Turn up to protests armed with retaliatory super-soakers?

Oh the humanity.

Won’t somebody please think of the children?

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Change that works for you

  By Site Admin | December 10, 2010 - 4:18 pm | Thoughts Leave a comment

Don’t worry, I’m not about to start espousing the merits of the ConLib government. Today I’d like to talk about change in the monetary sense.

Cor, money.

I’ve become mildly obsessed with paying for small items with very specific amounts of change. I’d normally hand over a few pound coins for whatever I was buying and get a fistful of coppers in return. Many people, as in the photo above, collect this useless amount of cash in a jar to eventually be taken to a bank or a lazy money counting machine that charges you a fee to convert it back into usable cash. I too did this and have a heavy tin of coins at home that serves as an excellent paperweight and/or projectile weapon as the situation dictates.

Recently though I’ve been getting rid of my change in a slightly more creative way – I’ve been overpaying. Occasionally you may have been asked by the cashier, when trying to use a £20 note to buy something worth £1.10, if you’ve ‘got the 10p’. The reason being fairly obvious that if you overpay by the 10p you can receive larger denomination of change in return (in this example, a tenner, a fiver, and four pound coins).

I’ve been taking that to the next level by overpaying pretty much every time if I have the coins to do it whether I’m asked to or not. My regular coffee costs £1.73 – a very inconvenient amount – and so on several occasions I’ve handed over £2.23 in payment in order to get a nice shiny 50p back, and suddenly instead of having a load of pennies I didn’t want I’m back to a nice usable silver coin.

Not only does doing this making me feel stupidly clever somehow, I also find myself getting downright annoyed if I don’t have the change to make this possible. I console myself with the knowledge that if I can’t do it this time I’ll definitely have enough coin flexibility so that I can do it next time. The other fringe benefit to this eccentric practice is seeing how many cashiers comprehend what it is you’re trying to do when you give them too much money. Thankfully many deftly ring it into the till and hand back correct change, some almost hand it back before doing a double-take and getting my intent, and others stare at me blankly and say ‘You’ve given me too much money’, prompting me to explain my overpaying logic.

Not for the first time, I think I’m a bit odd.

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Virgin Active(ly) misleading you on price

  By Site Admin | November 30, 2010 - 7:47 pm | Thoughts, Wankers 3 Comments

If you’ve ever been into a chain gym, like Virgin Active, David Lloyd, Bannatynes, The Village, etc. what I’m about to say will seem familiar to you.

I could do with a gym membership again, it’s marathon training time and during winter sometimes its impossible to run due to snow or ice, so a warm treadmill inside is a welcome alternative. To that end I foolishly wandered into the doors of my very local Virgin Active and enquired about membership.

I won’t prevaricate; these places are a rip-off. For membership you’re paying way over the odds and you’ll regret ever going in there for one reason or another, but what you probably don’t realise is just what an insidious bunch of conniving bastards these people are.

Ask yourself, why aren’t prices advertised on any of the websites for these big brands? Why do they all want you to hand over some contact details in an online enquiry? Why, if you ring, do they refuse all mention of price and try everything to get you in the door?

Many of you already know the answer; it’s because there is no fixed price for membership. The salesmen, and that is what they are, rival second-hand car dealers in the bullshit stakes. The price they eventually quote is based on how much of a sucker they think you are. They determine that during the visit they pressure you to make, where they show you all the equipment, the facilities, the pool, the toilets that gently caress your buttocks, etc. They’re waiting for you to say ‘Gee Stan, that sounds really useful!’, and every time you show appreciation, the price will increase.

Ignore all insistence from them that the prices and deals fluctuate so rapidly they couldn’t possibly post their prices anywhere public – this is a lie, and today I even saw proof of it.

But I digress. I’m there, sat opposite ‘Chris’, a terribly friendly person, while he asks me what I need the gym for. There was no way I was going to give him any encouragement, so I indifferently said I was looking for the occasional use of a treadmill and nothing more. We took the tour anyway. Did I want to use the pool? No, I’m crap at swimming. What about the weight equipment? Nope, I don’t need it. Fitness classes? No mate, I’m here for a treadmill, remember?

With my dead eyes betraying no emotion we quickly head back to the omnipresent health bar while he disappears briefly to ‘check something’. He comes back with a printed breakdown of membership prices. But wait! Printed prices? Well surely I’m wrong then, the prices must be fixed if they’re PRINTED ON PAPER.

No sir, if they had less than half a dozen price permutations printed up I’d be surprised. They merely choose one that corresponds to your impressionability quotient.

I think I did fairly well. The piece of paper has 4 different prices on it, which I’ll recreate here but naturally in no way is this a benchmark or a basis for what the price might be anywhere else in the UK, or indeed to anyone else walking into this very branch on the same day:

Full Flexi: £67.00
Peak-access, on a 1-month rolling contract.

Diamond: £59.95
Peak-access, 12 month contract.

Joint Diamond: £55.95
Peak-access, 12 month contract (and presumably for couples)

Off-peak: £55.00
(9-4pm only)

Like I said, a rip-off. On the same sheet Chris then scrawls ‘3 month – £64.00’, which he assures me is a 3 month contract that flips over to the 1 month contract thereafter, but at the same price. Still with me? Alright.

I think I did well because Chris ignores the line that says ‘Diamond’, crosses out the ‘Joint’ part of the ‘Joint Diamond’ line, and then circles the price that says £55.95, indicating that this is the price that me, the single person, would pay.

Also on this piece of paper is a line that says ‘Joining Fee: £40’. Chris crosses (haha) this out and writes ‘£20’ instead. Blimey, I really *must* have done well. The page also states ‘Freeze Fee: £7 flexi/£5 Diamond‘. A frozen membership is the feature some gyms offer if you know you’re not going to use your membership on a certain month. Instead of paying full whack, you just pay the freeze but obviously you can’t use the facilities. Sounds fair doesn’t it?

I point out the advantage of the freeze feature to Chris, who says ‘Oh you can’t do that within the first 12 months’. Hang on Chris, given the contract shifts to a rolling 1-month deal after that (where if you weren’t using the gym you could just cancel for free, presumably?!), when would this ‘freeze’ feature apply? Similarly, if you’re on a ‘Flexi’ deal which is touted as a 1 month rolling contract anyway, how could a Freeze Fee possibly apply there? The only thing I can think of is that paying this fee is cheaper than quitting only to re-join again and pay the joining fee within 6 months (as after this point you wouldn’t have saved anything on the £40 joining fee), but who is going to do that?

I ask a few questions and push for a further discount but it doesn’t get me anywhere, so I thank Chris for his time and leave. Before I go though I’m reminded that if I want the £20 joining fee I must tell them today because it’s for TODAY ONLY and a TIME LIMITED OFFER that will probably NEVER COME AGAIN. Mmmhmm.

I toddle off home and start looking at Virgin Active reviews online (they average 1.6/5 on reviewcentre.com, for reasons I’ll come to shortly) and my eye is caught by two other local gyms in my area, one of which is £25 a month (price advertised online!) with pretty similar facilities. Looks tempting.

This image has absolutely nothing to do with the content of this article. Nice though isn't it?

While I’m sitting there musing my options, my mobile rings. By jove, it’s Chris from Virgin Active ringing to inform me of a super deal ‘that’s just been released by Head Office’. Wow Chris, I’m shitting myself at the prospect of this deal, what on earth could it be?! Oh it’s good, it’s very good. I’m being offered the first month FREE with the only thing to pay being the £20 joining fee, and he assures me it’s for a one-month contract so I’d be under no obligation thereafter. A £67 monthly membership for only £20?! How can I resist?

Except I do, and tell Chris no thanks, but I make a point of thanking him for thinking of me and I assure him that I appreciate it. Chris responds as if I’ve just taken a dump in his lunchbox, but moodily says ‘no problem’ and rings off. He called no more than 45 minutes after I left the gym. Evidently he was nervous because I didn’t cave at the time, and was then annoyed when I wasn’t tempted by the deal he’d made up on the spot.

Now, interestingly PruHealth (private health insurers, similar to Bupa), offer reduced rate gym membership to their ‘Vitality Partners’, which includes Virgin Active. I’d been reading up on their site earlier that day and could see they offer around 25% off membership if you have an insurance plan with them. Given the membership fees I’ve noted above, I worked out that I could take out a private insurance plan AND a gym membership for around £5 more a month than the gym would be alone, so on that basis it’s clearly better to go through PruHealth, right? Wrong.

I mentioned this to Chris during our meeting but was obviously quite vague about my knowledge and asked for more details. He basically shat (to use the most appropriate word) all over his ‘Vitality Partner’ and said that PruHealth members ‘weren’t real members’ and that the Pru had recently whacked up their prices so much so that a lot of people were leaving and coming to them separately. Talk about fostering corporate business relationships there Chris. I was given no information on the expected discount, and was basically told to not do it. Nice.

A further note regarding Virgin Active, purely in the interests of full disclosure. In researching them and trying in vain to get a comparison on membership prices, I saw an awful lot of people complaining on forums about the difficulty in getting out of their 12-month Diamond memberships. Apparently the verbal assurance that after 12 months it switches to a ‘rolling 1 month’ arrangement did not materialise in the fine print. Consequently many people have found their 12 month membership renewed for another 12 months without their consent, only to be told they had no recourse and could not cancel. Some people (and if you wish to search online, you will find plenty of anecdotal evidence on this) were offered deals to pay-off their remaining term at 50% of the regular rate, but during that time were not allowed to use any of the gym facilities. Paying 50% for nothing on a contract extension you didn’t want? Good lord.

So, to summarise: There is no fixed price, it’s a rip-off even if you insist you’ll never turn up or use any of the equipment. Be wary about contract terms. Never agree to anything on the day. Get the contract in your hand, take it home, and read it carefully. The trouble is, everything about this process involves pressure, and even knowing every trick and deceit used against me I too felt some level of desire to sign up on the spot. Your average consumer has no chance against such an onslaught, and like so many things in this world, it’s just plain wrong. A reputable organisation wouldn’t need misdirection and deceit to sell their service; it should stand alone on its own merit without the need for tactical selling bordering, in my humble view, on fraud.

One final thought. A counter-argument I’ve seen against the whole ‘My membership prices don’t match those of other members’ insisted that membership prices change daily, and so any variation is simply members taking advantage of different offers on different days.

I wonder why, then, while I was sitting there at the Health Bar, I observed a young lady being sold her gym membership, concluded by the salesperson with the words, ‘So, how would you like to pay your £75 today?’.

Get out, girl, get out while you still can.

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