The house move is imminent. I might be without internet access for a while. I don’t have much confidence in [Pipex][] these days, but maybe they will prove me wrong.
[pipex]: http://www.pipex.com/
**UPDATE:** All in all, I have to admit that Pipex have done a decent job of getting me connected at the new place. My confidence in them is somewhat restored, though I maintain that their telephone support is understaffed.
*Continuing from [here][]*
> Here mate tell shaggy tht tht guy he called just called me back. Lol. He wasnt to happy. Dont think its gonna work mate. He didnt know who shaggy was.
I suppose it was inevitable that Charles would text me again. I’m now pondering my next step. I think that it’s time that Adam replied. I reckon this:
> Hi Charles I have a confession to make. I slept with your mum. Lol.
[here]: http://pete.nu/blog/2006/09/wrong-number-perhps-lol/
> Adam my parents are gonna want to talk to yours Lol. So just tell them tht your rents are out. But say tht its ok with them when you i put you on to my dad. If they ask your mom will be givin us a lift back to your house from the pub. Charles.
It took me a few minutes to decipher this, but it looks like Adam and Charles are planning to go to a big party. I wonder if there will be hookers and gin.
If anyone wants Charles’s number to wind him up, just ask me. Maybe one of us could leave a voicemail that says “Charles, this is Adam’s father. We’re onto your little game.”
1. Walk into the bank at 9:02 in the morning. Walk straight up to the enquiries desk, and tell the lad behind it (who, incidentally, is young enough to be your son) that you want to arrange a bankers draft to buy a house.
2. He will ask for ID. You give him your bank card and driving license. He disappears into the locked-down area, calling back over his shoulder “It will take about 15 minutes.”
3. Loiter.
4. A couple of minutes later, he will reappear with a form. Eventually you will manage to wrap your head round it, and fill it in. He disappears with the form again.
5. Loiter.
6. Twenty minutes later, he will reappear and give you back your ID. He will tell you that the system is just checking your signature, and it will take a couple of minutes. He disappears.
7. Loiter. Wish you had brought a book.
8. Twenty minutes later, he reappears with a slim brown envelope. He asks you to check it.
9. You check the amount carefully.
10. You are distinctly underwhelmed by this thing. It’s basically just a cheque without your signature on it. It appears that you are going to have to deliver this thing yourself. You ask, and lad confirms.
11. 9:45 – Anticlimax.
The first thing that I saw this morning, upon leaving the house, was a small white French hatchback embedded in a gate, with considerable damage to the front bumper, and two guys tugging furiously to try and free it.
The arse end of the car was poking into the street, so naturally traffic flow was somewhat disrupted. While I idled in this queue, I pondered the possible steps that could have led up to this collision, as I often do. Taking into account the angle at which the car was embedded in this gate, and the nature of the road on which the gate dwells, I could only conclude that the driver had hurtled out of a side road at inappropriate speed and… well… kept going.
Presence or absence of skidmarks on the road (now now, don’t snigger at the word skidmarks) would have given more information: did the driver attempt to turn, but lose front-wheel grip? Did the driver attempt to turn, discover his route blocked, and straighten out, after deciding that a collision with a gate was preferable to a head-on with another vehicle? Did the driver faint at the wheel?
By the time I’d done my pondering, the number of guys tugging on the hatchback had swelled to half a dozen, including a couple of well-built road workers in high-visibility gilets ((Hmmm, that was strangely satisfying. Gilet. Gilet. Gilet.)), so I considered that my skills as a computer programmer were probably surplus to requirements, and I drove on. Somehow, I doubt that the cause of the incident was a software error.
If you were in any doubt that I have been neglecting my garden over the last 9 weeks, you’d only need to take one look at it to get the kind of unambiguous evidence that would make Schrödinger himself say “Oh, well that answers that then.”
Upon closer inspection, you’d notice that the ants are taking over the lawn, and I just don’t have the time to do anything about it. Little mounds of earth here and there collapse under a weighty toecap, spraying little scampery chappies hither, thither and ivirywhither.
“Enjoy it, you little scallywags,” I condescend, “because in six weeks you’re going to have a new nemesis to deal with, and he almost certainly won’t be as busy as I am.”
The ants are secretly afraid, but they attempt to cover it up with displays of anty bravado. They waggle their tongues and shake loosely clenched fists at me. Some don’t know when to stop, and just go *too far*. I call the police, and the ants get new ASBOs. Then a huge flying hippo lands on the car, and we all eat jelly.
All of this really happened.
There’s a storm coming.
…oh, we’re not? Never mind.
You probably aren’t aware that I was President of a Student Union society at University. The reason why you aren’t aware of this is that I don’t talk about it very much, for very good reason.
I joined this society at the start of my first year. Initially it was quite busy, but over the course of the year the number of active members dwindled to a level that wasn’t unhealthily pathetic, but could be described as “intimate”.
The majority of these members were final-year students. The *vast* majority. Oh, okay, all but three of them were final-year students. This is how I became President – because I was too stupid to realise that the most sensible course of action would be to run, very quickly, in the other direction, and the other two evidently weren’t quite as stupid as me.
It’s one of those days where I take my lunch break at home. There is one doughnut remaining, in a brown paper bag.
*”Take this back to work with you,”* says the Karen.
*”Why, how generous of you,”* I reply.
She takes the brown paper bag through to the other room and leaves it on my manbag, so that I don’t forget to take it back to work with me.
A short while later, I am at work. I grope the brown paper bag and am aware of the presence of not one but two ovular objects in it. I instinctively check them for lumps (and so should you).
I peer into the bag. Beside my grinning, portly doughnut lies a smarmy, self-satisfied piece of fruit.
A piece of fruit! How did that get in there?
Why, that sneaky girl.
I want to write about our new rocking chair, and my exciting excursion into North London to collect it, but my sentences are disappointing me. Everything I write seems cumbersome and clumsy, and I can’t tell whether this is due to a temporary inability to write, or a temporary inability to make sense of it when I read it back to myself.
The rocking chair itself is slightly less than awesome – it has a chunky lever to switch between “rock” mode and “rock steady” mode, but the lever has a tendency to crunch back into “rock steady” mode of its own accord. A temporary fix has been implemented using twine. The chair also squeaks a bit when rocking to and fro, but I don’t think twine would be much help for that.
Despite these failings, our new rocking chair provides good support for a nursing mother, which will hopefully banish her steadily-worsening backache back to whence from came it.