I have a reasonably good and prosperous life, so I do like to give back, albeit probably not as much as I should or can afford. I have several charities to whom I have authorised direct debit on a monthly basis, as the main way that I give back.

One of them is, or rather was, or perhaps unavoidably still is, White Ribbon Foundation. White Ribbon Foundation is intended to raise awareness of domestic violence, so as to eliminate it at it’s sources.

White Ribbon went into administration in early October, whilst I was in Italy. When I returned, a direct debit was taken out of my credit card in mid October. I then contacted White Ribbon by email to cancel my direct debit, and got no reply. I assume that by then, the office no longer was attended. So I contacted the administrators, and was assured that direct debit was going to stop.

Mid November, another $25 comes out of my credit card, and I contact the administrators again. Again, I am reassured that the bank account that is collecting these debits is being closed down.

Yesterday, I see another $25 coming out of my account, so I have now approached my bank about disputing the transaction with White Ribbon’s bank. Hopefully this results in this now dead charity finally stopping the debits.

Cancelling my credit card and getting one with a new number issued is not really an option I want to consider except as a last resort. I have my electricity, gas, phone, Apple Music and three other charities doing regular direct debits, and it is a considerable administrative burden to me to move these onto another credit card – I would need to find a window of time where there are no direct debits for a few days.

Which leads me to reflect on charity and regular giving. We give to charities because we don’t have the time or know how or contacts to do good works directly ourselves, so we trust that charities are able to do those good works on our behalf. Hopefully, that involves making the world a better (or at least a less bad) place in some way or alleviating some suffering.

But we don’t always do our due diligence on charities. I expect that the other charities I support currently (Mission Australia, Fred Hollowes Foundation, Berry Street) are well run and are spending most of their funding doing good works on my behalf. I am not sure that this was the case for White Ribbon. Aside from the very critical news articles about questionable policy decisions White Ribbon was making, there appear to have been a number of governance issues which I ignored.

Firstly, you could register as a donor online rather than by speaking to a live person on the phone. That suggests that they are not well enough resourced to have live people taking the donations – or to speak to donors about such matters as the direct debit of their funds.

Secondly, White Ribbon did not send me a tax receipt for the 2017-18 financial year. I only received one for the 2018-19 financial year after I contacted them by email. This suggests that they are not properly organised as to be accountable to the proper governance standards expected of a charity.

Those things were red flags I ignored. But there were others, looking back, that I should have looked at.

Thirdly, there has been a revolving door of CEOs in the time where I have been a regular donor. That does not augur well for a charity. It indicates dissension and uncertainty at the leadership levels of the organisation.

Fourthly, White Ribbon spent most of it’s relatively small budget on administration. As they are focused on raising awareness rather than providing services or material help, this is to be expected. But I should have reflected a little more closely as to whether this is what I expected from a charity I support, or whether I should have chosen to go with a charity which focuses on addressing the suffering. After all, White Ribbon seems to have had little effective idea about how, noble though the goal is, it was to achieve it’s objectives.

Hopefully it all gets sorted through my bank and I do not have to cancel my credit card. But it does cause me to think more closely than usual as to whether any worthy cause I wish to support deserves my money more than another. I will be more thoughtful in choosing to whom I next offer my $25 per month donation.

If you get to know me, you will realise that proper use of apostrophes is one of those things I go a bit OCD about. The above heading, where I chose to use a possessive apostrophe with the word “Grill’d” which does not exactly need a contraction, is something which almost sent me a little haywire for a moment.

Which is perhaps less than an ideal segue into one of my more serious interests – good quality hamburgers and the market for such.

The gourmet burger chain Grill’d has, since it opened in Camberwell or Hawthorn in 2004, grown to become a giant of approximately 140 stores around Australia (it is, by a factor of almost ten, bigger than Burger Urge, the next largest gourmet burger chain in Australia). At the time when it was a new brand, some food reviewers were rating it (wrongly in my opinion) as the best burger in Melbourne. I welcomed it, because anything which lifts the standard of burgers several notches above our beloved Scottish named behemoth Maccas is good news. It was one of several gourmet burger chains emerging at that time – the other two of note being Port Melbourne’s Urban Burger, which did not last very long, and Yarraville’s Burger Edge, which at one point had about two dozen stores, including some interstate, but which now seems to be consigned to a few freeway co-locations with service stations, a business model which does not augur well for it’s long term brand re-growth.

I will note that my home economics class in 1982 had a lesson on the evils of McDonalds, in which it noted that there were 103 McDonalds stores in Australia by then. (I believe the number now is around a thousand, give or take.) Grill’d has gotten to the point now where it could quite possibly come to rival McDonalds in Australia if it does not put a foot wrong too often.

But it does have a few controversies. A few years ago, there was a very well publicised wage dispute, which caused it some reputational damage. Since then, the main founder has had separate and highly acrimonious fallings out with his two original business partners. These issues, if you are familiar with the foundation myths behind McDonalds (I did watch The Founder a couple of years ago, as well as reading a book about Roy Kroc in my teenage years), are not exactly unique. In some ways, Simon Crowe, with his marketing genius, eye for prime real estate, and dealings with his partners, seems to parallel Roy Kroc in some ways.

This past week, a much larger dispute has flared up, surrounding a traineeship program, funded by the Commonwealth, which seems to have been set up to run at less than optimal efficiency. Consequently this has caused several disgruntled employees of Grill’d to complain that they are being paid the lower traineeship rates when there is no good faith endeavour to enable them to complete the traineeship in a reasonable timeframe.

It got to the point where a protest outside the Lygon Street Grill’d yesterday delayed it’s opening by an hour, according to media reports. (FYI, McDonalds briefly had a restaurant in Lygon Street in the 1980s – it did not last long.)

This story has the potential to cause a lot more reputational damage to Grill’d than the other controversies. After all, who really cares if a few rich blokes who are former private schoolboys have a quarrel over their business arrangements? That is not exactly UFC trash talking entertainment to yak about over a beer on a Friday afternoon. And the pay dispute a few years ago was supposedly confined to one franchise store. That could be blamed on a rogue franchisee. But where 75% of stores are owned by the main company rather than franchisees, and the traineeship is a company wide initiative, this has, at the very least, a very bad look.

And at the same time, the Fairfax media is running parallel stories about food safety issues identified at several stores.

I think burger chains, like many businesses, rely on a superior business model to make them successful. If the business model is not up to scratch, then the business will fold, regardless of the quality of the food. (Quiznos made superior subs to Subway, yet got wiped from Australia about 14 years ago.) To this point in time, Grill’d has been able to grow because of it’s business model. Along the way, many other burger joints have fallen by the wayside – the Burger Bistro in Perth no longer exists, and the store in Shafto Lane did not long survive after Grill’d set up nearby, even though Burger Bistro made one of the best burgers I have ever had.

Which gets me to another point. I do not really like the taste of the burgers at Grill’d. There are many smaller burger businesses out there which are currently putting out better quality burgers than what you get at Grill’d. And you can get the Mighty Melbourne Burger in any Grill’d in Australia, but it will be renamed to something more compatible with whatever state you happen to be in.

Ultimately, if Grill’d is in a major spot of bother, I am not exactly sorry. They are not competing with McDonalds and other junk food standard burgers like Hungry Jacks. They are directly competing with all the smaller burger joints and chains. Those places, with their more unique and interesting burgers, are the ones who are more at risk from the continuing rise of Grill’d than McDonalds.

Yesterday afternoon, I picked a giant bowl of strawberries from my strawberry patch in my back yard. This is what I, in my mundane lower middle class suburban existence, see as getting back in contact with my peasant origins!

Yet, as my mother might say (and does, most times I visit her), I have not the slightest idea of what it means to be a peasant. As she points out, I do not know what it is like to suffer all the hardships of peasant life, like warming your bare feet in cow manure in the winter because you don’t have shoes!

The above photo, by the way, is of my mother and her father and elder siblings, circa 1939 or 1940, living their simple peasant lives. My mother looks both adorable and happy – she is the youngest in the photo.

But whilst Nietzsche might despise the mundane nature of my suburban existence, I still think that it is important to remain connected to the soil in some way, both for health and for sanity.

My parents both were born on subsistence farms in Italy, although obviously limited land and the advent of complex 20th century economics meant that ‘peasant’ was no longer a viable career choice for them. But think of this – until they, and millions like them, made the leap thousand of miles across the world, there would have been a hundred or more generations before them of peasant farmers. Myself, an office worker in what I think the American sociologist Alvin Toeffler described as the ‘cognitariat’, is in the first generation of my family to not be born as a peasant in a rural setting.

Instead, I live in what was a city of 2 million at the time of my birth, and is now 5 million in size. The skyline of high rise apartment blocks is creeping closer and closer – only two kilometres east of my home are two tall apartment towers. More and more people, including children, are living or growing up in boxes, rather than surrounded by some modest semblance of nature.

Is it any wonder that food allergies in children are becoming more common, and that kids are more prone to minor illnesses? They are living in totally artificial environments, only recently removed from what was the reality for the bulk of humanity – rural agricultural life.

True, we have it much better in terms of medicine, nutrition, clothing, shelter, control of our environment. But is it truly a good thing for us to be able to control our environment so fully? And what will we (highly evolved monkeys which I hope we are not) leave for the rest of nature? Possums annoy me but I am glad that they are out there, and they are welcome to most of my figs.

iTunes is gone. What do we have now?

I tried using Apple Music just now, for what I think is the first time since they deleted iTunes (I am not sure as I am not tech savvy).

I have found what is there now totally unresponsive, playing songs by artists I want to listen to at random rather than the songs I want to hear, and where I try to load my recommended playlist, it is not loading.

So… I want to listen to some Bowie, and I need to go through a lot of stuff I am not quite as keen on to get to Under Pressure or Life On Mars or Modern Love. Oh – Modern Love won’t play yet.

This is frustrating. If there is a ghost in the Apple Music machine, it is NOT Steve Jobs.

https://www.goodfood.com.au/eat-out/news/he-loved-everything-about-footscray-jim-wong-restaurant-for-sale-after-60-years-20191025-h1j50f

It is rather sad to read today that Jim Wong’s Chinese Restaurant, a Footscray institution, is for sale. It’s been there for as long as I can remember and I have many fond memories of lunches and dinners there.

Hopefully it finds a new owner and continues for many more years to come.

I’m a skeptic about frequent flyer points anyway. When Ansett collapsed in late 2001 I lost 58000 points in my private account, mostly through use of my diners club card as main credit card.

So when I was trying to get some points from Qantas over my emirates flights to Italy, I was hoping that there might be something, but I was not holding my breath. Today I got an email that I am not eligible for any points for those flights.

Totally OK. But why suggest people are eligible for any points with global partners then? Part of all those alliances is not having to bother carrying a squillion different loyalty cards.

Which means Qantas has just lost credibility with me. Big time.

I’m conservative and I still call it Ayers Rock. I visited it in 2005 and my heart skipped a beat when I first saw it.

But did I try to climb it? No way! Aside from the fact I am not some sort of insane mountaineering type, there were signs all over the place from the traditional owners asking very nicely for people to respect their feelings and beliefs and to not climb it.

As Dale Carnegie might say, saying please can get you a long way.

After reading the signs, I was more than happy to both follow my own non adventurous instincts and to comply with the wishes of the owners and not climb it.

When I read some of the self absorbed views and see the photos in the attached article about some of the Instagram influencers and such people, I am just taken with how shallow they are. Who needs to be warned about the risks when the hosts are telling you very politely that it is dangerous and they don’t want you to get hurt and they don’t want you to hurt their feelings? Doing handstands on top of the rock is so insensitive.

https://www.news.com.au/travel/australian-holidays/northern-territory/influencers-reason-for-deciding-to-climb-uluru-before-the-ban/news-story/b53928ee54800a6070bc0670b1679356

You know, of my contemporaries, I’ve never met a St Kevin’s old boy whom I liked, to borrow from Wil Rodgers.

https://www.news.com.au/lifestyle/parenting/school-life/st-kevins-college-students-caught-chanting-offensive-lyrics-on-melbourne-tram/news-story/06d056348a763898a83b8da6a0636dea

This latest news report about their behaviour just confirms my views about most people who attend that school. Privileged and self entitled spoilt prats….

I just looked outside in the glooming dusk and saw a bright star moving fast, and silently.

I assume it was the international space station in low earth orbit. It moved too fast to be a star, and too high and quiet to be a plane.

We don’t get excited about satellites anymore. We take them for granted – assuming we actually look at the night sky at all.

But I remember as a small child in the early 70s, sitting outside our home in the backyard with my parents, when my father would point at a fast moving star with almost child like delight and say that was a satellite.

We used to look for those things, and we used to marvel at them. Now… we live in a time when even the many miracles of science bore us.

Nothing is enchanted anymore, and they might be why so many among us love the savage desensitised violence and amorality of Game of Thrones. Peaceful life bores us, even when it is amazing.

Footnote – my parents lived through the Second World War as witnesses to the fighting in their villages. Something like a satellite would have seemed a happy miracle to them in comparison to that.