2014 — 7 August: Thursday
It's not quite yet the season of mists and mellow fruitfulness1 though, as I was setting up the next annual service and MOT for my little Yaris, it occurred to me that I should first check on the whereabouts and whenabouts of my eldest niece (who's due in London for most of this month and should already have arrived). Who knows? She may have some perverse desire to visit either or both me and her grandmother while on this side of the oblate spheroid...
Meanwhile...
... there's breakfast to be brokenfasted, a snack lunch to be made and packed, and a destination to be headed for, lest the troublesome trio loses out on today's planned light exercise and marching manoeuvres. One aim being to go nowhere near the looming Boomtown Festival just outside Winchester that promises traffic queues and chaos on one of our more common routes from there out to walking destinations.
I've also just been emailed by a chap making yet another attempt to positively identify the wreckage of George Cogar's fatal final flight — apparently some plausible wreckage has now been spotted after it emerged from underneath a snowslide. This 30-year-old mystery may yet be solved.
Quite what makes...
... Taschen think I would ever be willing to pay £3,500 for their jumbo edition of photos by Annie Leibovitz is beyond me. Even if it's leather-bound, and comes with a custom-designed metal stand. Mind you, I did buy my first book of her photos back in 1978...
And a couple more since then. Total so far: £38
Two of my chums...
... each rated "Timecrimes" more highly than I did. I was very disappointed: the story was well-crafted, but I found the acting atrociously wooden. Well "it just goes to show..."
I now have two recent Polanski films in the pipeline ("Carnage" and "Venus in Fur"). Yes, "Fur", singular. Watch this space.
I was browsing...
... a venerable set of email exchanges (from 1988, not that it matters) with my friend Carol and found myself reading about one of my minor skirmishes with a bank that I now own:
Are banks and other financial institutions as stupid and as full of incompetent morons in America as they are over here? Last March, my bank serenely paid the 25th of 24 monthly payments (on the number two video recorder I was wearing out) to the store I got it from. (Wonderful, isn't it, the way they're so good at disbursing other people's money?) Anyway, I didn't latch on to this right away, of course, since they only send bank statements when it suits them, not you. So, come late April, your hero finds himself £28-77 shorter than usual, though it doesn't take the organic Cray too long to realise what has happened. As my beautifully-written clear exposition of events wings its way to the bank that night, however, a rather terse epistle is already on its way to me from the store suggesting that I contact the bank to tell them to cease and desist their overpayments. (The store was at that point slightly more on the ball than the bank.)
To cut an unbelievigable (sic) exchange of letters and phone calls down to a reasonable size for VNET, I ended up with an electronic refund from the bank, and a paper refund from the store, both of which went into my account. (The bank insisted I should pay the cheque in; the store insisted I should accept their cheque.) And this after pleading with each institution that I was making a profit on the deal and that something, therefore, was surely amiss? Each side reckoned only they were right, and that the others must surely be of unfruitful sexual habits that were destined not to lead to population problems.
Today was the day of reckoning. As we're now in the middle of a postal strike (caused by arguments about the employment of casual workers to clear the backlog from last week's one-day token stoppage!) I had a phone call from the bank. Please can they raid my account to the tune of £28-77? But, say I, I told you so back in April. Ah, say they, I don't know who you spoke to Mr Mounce, but they were surely wrong and the books don't balance and, unless you cough up, Brazil might also decide to default and all hell will surely break out throughout the entire banking system of the Western world. Oh very well, say I, but don't take any more, will you?!
Five months to sort out a misplaced £28-77...