2013 — 18 June: Tuesday

I've just been reminded1 of the time in ICL in 1977 (just before I was promoted into what they were laughingly pleased to call "management") when — seeking to establish an equitable (ie, greater) salary level by testing the temperature of the greater non-ICL job pool — I took myself off to an overpaid IT recruitment consultant in Fleet Street. This gormless but smart-suited young wonder (perhaps two years older than the scruffy gormless young wonder sitting opposite him at the time) read through my CV in growing glee before concluding — before finishing his speedy skim — that he would have no difficulty placing me virtually anywhere. I had to point out to him that he'd somehow managed to miss2 the fact that he'd only been reading about my freelance activity and that if he read on he'd see that I also had a fulltime job in ICL.

Nowadays, of course, I'm lucky if I successfully project manage the making of both tea and breakfast on time.

But before I do either... first today I need to amend the date of dear Mama's next care-home fee payment as I belatedly realised that the invoice that arrived yesterday suggested they would be ravaging her account two days earlier than the date quoted on the annual payments calendar I got from them a few months back. [Pause] And — of course — it's now too late to cancel or amend the payment I'd set up for tomorrow (already a cautious two days earlier than should have been necessary) so I've no choice but to make another transfer, this time with immediate effect this morning, to ensure the poor (indeed, ever poorer) ol' dear doesn't go overdrawn tomorrow.

Thanks, Barclays. But what's the point of having online banking if its facilities are more restricted than by wandering into one of your bricks'n'mortar palaces? Armed, no doubt, with all the Power of Attorney bumph to talk the newest smart-suited gormless young wonder yet again through the process by which you let me spend her diminishing pile of money on her behalf?

Supplies safely...

... gathered in, including the makings of tomorrow's packed lunch for a walk, I think I can squeeze in another cuppa ahead of today's pub-lunch date. It is, after all, only 11:06. Tick-tock.

Here's another place on my wouldn't-be-caught-dead-there list:

Only on rereading did I realize the Chang weren't eating the chilies — or the flesh, for that matter — but using them to clean the skull... Such is the perplexing contradiction of the genus Capsicum: condiment and industrial solvent, pleasure and pain. I've come to Nagaland to confront the conundrum on its home turf at the annual all-tribe get-together, the Hornbill Festival, which includes a Naga King Chili-Eating Competition...

Mary Roach in Smithsonian


I assume this also appears somewhere in her latest book "Gulp", but I could be wrong. I often am.

Following my...

... whirlwind romance with the Kindle over the last couple of weeks, I'm now looking with great interest at the KindleGen tool and am positively itching to try it out. I have an idea or two for how it could come in very handy. Chaps need hobbies, after all. And retired chaps even more so. [Pause] Being able to 'publish' my own stuff in such an eminently portable fashion appeals to me. It could, I suspect, be a lot less hassle than running a web site in many ways. And using Scrivener as a front end is equally appealing.

  

Footnotes

1  On reading an entertaining overnight email from a friend in Seattle, recounting his recent activities.
2  And the fact that I generally preferred writing material that taught others how to program rather than performing the often tedious activity myself. I wasn't called a Sachbüchschriftsteller (from hazy memory of the certified 1974 translation of my job title on our marriage certificate) for nothing, with added thanks to Tall Thomas for the corrected sex change :-)