BUNHILL; 'Here's your cuppa, and have a nice day, duck'

CONGRATULATIONS to Harry Ramsden's, "the most famous fish and chip shop in the world", as the Guinness Book of Records describes it. It has won not only a Government National Training Award, but also the Industrial Society's "Unlocking People's Potential" award.

Ah, but does this mean that Ramsden's, now the only fish and chip multinational, has taken up training in the same way as McDonald's? If its employees learn to say "Nice cup of tea, duck" as mechanically as McD's lot say "Have a nice day", we should be worried.

Not a bit of it, the man from Ramsden's says. He explains that Mr R himself insisted on "real commitment to training at every level" from the moment he set up shop at Guisely, near Leeds, in 1928. "Every general manager has to do every job there is, including cleaning the floor." There is also a "quality quiz" every Christmas. John Barnes, the chairman, puts on his purple sequinned best and fires questions at teams from each shop about the history of the brand and the like.

Ramsden's now has 13 restaurants in Britain, one each in Hong Kong and Melbourne, and is building shops in Singapore and Jeddah. The idea everywhere is to "replicate the Yorkshire welcome". This is taken to some extremes. In Hong Kong, for example, you will get locally-made toothpicks, but only after they have travelled to Yorkshire and back.

But why doesn't the Guinness Book of Records say Guisely is the biggest fish and chip in the world? Because it's not: Manchester's new Harry Ramsden's will be able to seat more people when fully open. I predict a rerun of the Cod War and the Wars of the Roses rolled into one.

ETYMOLOGY corner. What is the origin of the word "escalate"? Answer: it is a back formation of Escalator, a trademark invented by the Otis Elevator Company at the end of the last century. According to the OED, the first mention of a war escalating was in the Manchester Guardian in 1959.

This makes me wonder which other words we take for granted are really just a marketing stunt. "Affordable" was clearly invented by an American car company to describe its automobiles. "Hands-on" is from Hanson (antonymic formation from that company's management style). There must be others - a bottle for the best ones.

Initial reaction

BUNHILL'S Alternative Christmas quiz: What do the following letters stand for (the answers are all true):

1) IMF? The Institute of Metal Finishers.

2) ICI? Internet Central Indiana.

3) GEC? Global Environmental Change.

4) BP? Baptist Press or Brew Pub.

5) DTI? Diez Temas Interactivos or Dal Telecom International (incorporated in 1993 in Khabarovsk, Russia).

6) BBC? Bolder Bicycle Commuter.

RAILTRACK'S Christmas card features rails, snow, fog ... and no trains.

Christmas sidings

ANOTHER business carol, and a bottle of fizz for Graham Brady, of Carnforth in Lancashire:

God rest you merry BR men,

You fill one with dismay.

It seems that some colonials

Have bought the Royal Train.

But will the service be the same?

Will Di have to explain...

Chorus:

Your sidings lack comfort or joy,

Comfort or joy.

Your sidings lack comfort or joy!

THIS Santa analysis was originally in Spy magazine, and appeared a few years ago in our sister paper, but it's still hanging around on the Net, and is definitely worth revisiting.

There are 2 billion children in the world. But as Santa doesn't appear to handle the Muslim, Hindu, Jewish or Buddhist children, that reduces the workload to 15 per cent of the total, or 378 million children. At at an average of 3.5 children per household, that's 91.8 million homes.

Santa has 31 hours of Christmas to work with, thanks to the different time zones and the rotation of the earth. This works out to 822.6 visits per second.

This is to say that for each Christian household with good children, Santa has 1/1000th of a second to park, hop out of the sleigh, jump down the chimney, fill the stockings, eat whatever snacks have been left, get back up the chimney, into the sleigh and move on to the next house.

The sleigh must travel 650 miles per second, or 3,000 times the speed of sound. Assuming each child gets nothing more than a medium-sized Lego set, weighing 2lb, the sleigh is carrying 321,300 tons, not counting Santa. Even if flying reindeer could pull 10 times a conventional animal's limit, we need 214,200 of them, increasing the payload to 353,430 tons.

This weight travelling at 650 miles per second creates enormous air resistance. The lead pair of reindeer will absorb 14.3 quintillion joules of energy per second each. They will burst into flame almost instantaneously, exposing the reindeer behind them, and creating deafening sonic booms in their wake. The entire reindeer team will be vaporized within 4.26 thousandths of a second. Santa will be subjected to centrifugal forces 17,500.06 times greater than gravity.

In conclusion, the article says, if Santa ever did deliver presents on Christmas Eve, he's dead now.

But Bunhill has a counter-query. If he's dead, how does he fill my socking? Answer - he has a cybersleigh, powered by a photon generator, a picture of which is on the left. Happy Christmas.