2013 — 22 March: Friday
I'm already back1 before I can make, let alone sup, my initial cuppa. And I've yet to make breakfast, too. But the day is still young, and I've already agreed an afternoon cuppa. I may even whizz briefly out to the care-home, depending how energetic I feel.
There is a...
... huge clue — sitting on this innocent line extracted2 without difficulty from my current account screen — to the reason I'm leaving the clutches of Santander (which I joined when they were the Alliance & Leicester, keen to lend me £8,500 to buy my first plasma screen eleven years ago):
They want their customers to use their "1,2,3" account. Its business model consists of me paying them a monthly fee (for benefits of literally no value or interest to me, like discounts on over-priced wine and restaurants I wouldn't dream of entering) rather than them paying me interest for keeping my cash under whatever their cyber-equivalent of a mattress is. Well, they can whistle. I may just leave a balance of £0-01 in the account, though that's a bit mean of me.
Poor old Ernest
My continued use of the word "whom" carries the risk of marking me out as a "pompous twerp". Or "aggressively retrograde". That's me. Or do I mean that's I? I must re-watch "Idiocracy". (Link.)
(Helio)pause for thought
Fascinating. (Link.)
I find increasingly little...
... to detain me on my now-rare visits to the commercial wasteland that Eastleigh has turned into. If 'cash converters', charity shops, '99p' shops, betting shops, hair and nail parlours, mobile phones, and fast-food outlets are the future, then Eastleigh is riding the crest of that wave. Not my preferred choice of surfing, however. But my most recent PIN has now been changed to something I can probably remember.
Groundhog Day correction
I missed this at the time:
From a sci-fi point of view, the whole idea that the time loop was broken by emotional/personal development seemed kind of cheesy, but I just chalked that up to one of those things movies do because that's how we like stories to work. Nobody wants a movie where the climax consists of an hour of excitedly inferring and testing revisions to the standard model of physics. (Or, at least, there aren't enough of us to support a big-budget movie.)
Time for a meal to stave off the nasty cold weather out there this evening. [Pause] And, as I now listen to the Shostakovich Symphony #8, I can report that "The Sapphires" is an excellent, and very enjoyable, piece of film-making.