2007 — 28 August: Wheels bearing meals?

Today, with luck, I can sort out one decent meal per day for the both of us, with a concomitant drop in my workload and a huge easing of anxiety level. Breakfast and evening are no problem by comparison though it all tastes much as I imagine cardboard would to me at the moment. It's all fuel, though, and I realise it has to get on board both of us. (Ironically, I've just switched away from an NPR report on the apparently unstoppable trend towards obesity more or less everywhere in North America. Some states are now mandating 30 minutes of exercise daily in their schools. China, meanwhile, is encouraging the use of anti-addiction software embedded in computer games to curtail playing times.) What an increasingly curious world it is, to be sure.

Brekkie and all morning meds safely onboard (10:40 am or so) and I've just finished my own bowl of gloop and am savouring the milkman's pink grapefruit juice. Thinks: time for the next Berocca, too. She is flicking through the Argos catalogue in a so-far fruitless search for a bedside tray/table on wheels1 to ease the awkwardness of bedside life, as it were.

Banks!

I've just been ticked off for using a naughty word to a bank deputy manageress. I was venting, I admit, but when institutions promise to "take the strain" and "ease the pain" and "leave everything to us" and no visible progress occurs for some four months why, it's almost enough to tempt me to write to the Guardian with Mounce's patented, new, improved method2 of switching a simple current account from Mrs Old Bank to Mr New Bank. The remaining balance should be telegraphically transferred (at no charge to me, if you please) tomorrow. What with people on their holidays, and people just coming back off leave, and (my guess) people unable or unwilling to exercise the faintest sign of their own initiative, it brings to mind one of the many punchlines in the Monty Python dead parrot sketch: if you want anything doing properly in this country, you have to complain until etc etc...

  

Footnotes

1  Almost a recapitulation of today's heading.
2  It really could hardly be simpler. Step 1, relocate all your standing orders yourself. Step 2, relocate all your direct debits yourself. Step 3, write yourself a final cheque for all but one lousy penny from your old account and whack it into your new account. Step 4, in your own good time (say, four months or so?) contact the old bank and suggest they may wish to close the old account as it is now dormant. Suggest they spend the penny in whatever way they prefer.