WHY WOULD YOU…?

Here's a question for you…

It's something that's been puzzling me for a few weeks now, and I was wondering whether any of you more worldly-wise folk might be able to shed some light into the darkness over a small matter of parking my car at work.

I am, after all, something of a creature of habit and, after parking my car regularly in bay number six, over by the trees, for the first few months that we were inhabiting the little grey box next to the sewage works, there was a bit of a daytime gale and someone from another office tapped on the door and advised that if any of us were parked near to the trees it might be wise to move it, just in case any large branches were to fall.

And so, in the days when I responded to such things, I shifted my vehicle and found a cosy spot just outside the window of my own office and tucked it in there and, because I am such a creature of habit, that instantly became my parking spot of choice, and I've used it ever since when it's been available, only shifting to another on days when I arrive later than usual and it's been taken, which then leads to me to a sensation of the entire day having a strange sense of "wrongness" about it.

This might just come from the late start, of course, but who really knows when you're dealing with the intricacies of the subconscious mind...?

It's not as if it's a particularly good spot, or anything like that. It's slightly further to carry my stuff than I would really like, the window cleaner regularly asks me to move it so that he can place his ladder there, and the car dismantling place are forever dropping tiny tyre-threatening bits of scrap nearby.

Anyway, a few weeks ago, after I'd returned from my holiday, I arrived at my usual time to find that Captain Hilarious was already hard at work at his financial dealings business, having had an early start and being totally alone in the now unlocked building, and had parked his car in the one place where I usually put mine.

And this is where my question comes in.

Why would you, with an entire car park to choose from, pick the one spot that you know another person has been using for at least three years…?

Is it because you want to play the Alpha male…?

Was it just just Mind games that you felt like playing to mess with my already considerably messed up head…?

Was it just done out of plain ignorance…?

I suspect the first, consider that I'm far too irrelevant for the second, and really couldn't comment on the third because I hardly know you (although you do seem to have made more of a success of your life than I have, so I suspect it's not that).

And, as I mentioned earlier, it's really not as if it's a particularly convenient spot, because, even if I am, after all, merely a creature of habit, it doesn't mean that I like to make life easy for myself, now, does it?

I have asked this question at home, and the response I got was interesting, once we'd got the whole "It's probably nothing" business out of the way.

"What motivates people?" I was asked, and, when I couldn't think of anything, I was told "Sex and Money" which means that, because there's obviously no fiscal advantage in it, perhaps he just wants to park nearer to the lady in the sports car so that he can engineer an "accidental" meeting or twelve and catch her eye.

Not, however, that he appears to need much help in that department, as the shrieks of laughter from "The Girls in the Office" that we hear through the walls whenever he utters a syllable are anything to go by.

In the end, of course, it doesn't really matter. Whenever it happens, I'll just park my car somewhere else. After all there is the entire rest of the car park to choose from...

And a change is as good as a rest they say…

So it might actually do me some good.

TELLY SPAGHETTI

One of the side-issues involved in the (hopefully) de-rodenting of our living space was the sudden need to sort out the dusty old spaghetti junction of wiring behind the TV set and try and make some sense of the ridiculous amount of wires that seemed to have accumulated through the years as various bits and pieces got added to the basic telly in order to get it to function in the bright new electronic-heavy world which we've created for ourselves.

Does anyone now remember the days when you just shoved an aerial into the back, plugged it in, and switched in on, and there you were, watching telly…? No…?

And in those days, setting up a telly was a proper job and everything, and the man from D.E.R. (in our case) used to come along and fix it when it went wrong.

Not now, though. Nowadays there are so many boxes attached to the telly that it looks not unlike those pictures that you sometimes see of the room-sized computers that took men to the moon, and you sometimes feel that you need a PhD in "Young Persons' Interests" just to sit down and not want to watch the news.

And we've not even got a complicated set-up. There is no Sky, BT or Virgin box, no satellite, and nothing in the way of games consoles adding to the limited numberer of ports on our perfectly reasonably sized TV set, so God only knows how people manage who have got all of those sorts of things as well.

Now, you need to understand that we do seem to have a rather peculiar set up, given that all of our limited number of channels still arrive at our telly via the aerial thanks to the "second class" version of Freeview that we receive hereabouts thanks to our fairly limited relay transmitter.

To be honest, we find the sixteen (or so) channels that it gives us far more than enough, but other people still seem to find this limited number fairly odd, even if they still only end upo watching the same half dozen that we do.

More choice, you see, doesn't necessarily mean that you want to watch any of it. Strangely, when the wind is blowing the TV does try to tell us that it has found more channels, but, if we accidentally "Okay" them they all either evaporate, or freeze after no more than a few seconds, and, on the next storm less night, they've all vanished again.

Until the next time.

So, getting back to the back of our ridiculously under-equipped telly, first the aerial wire goes to the videotape recorder (yes, folks…I've still got one of those plumbed in…) from which it travels to the DVR and, from there, a third connector carries the signal on to the TV itself.

Power leads from each of these boxes, and then SCART leads in and out of everything are also lolling around, including all of the ones from the older DVD Player which is also still wired into this mad labyrinth somewhere along the line, and tangled up with all of that lot, we also need to add into the mix the leads which are the various wires connecting the phone line to the outside world, the Broadband Hub, and the power lead for the Broadband Hub, all of which need to be within a wire's length of the place the aerial enters the house, and the telephone connection box.

Then, when you look at the back of the telly itself, you've got two or three AV Inputs, plus another connector for the Smartypants device, and another for Analogue input, as well as other sockets for various SD Cards and the like, and, as I mentioned, we don't even own one of those Games Consoles that other people seem to find so very vital to their particular existences, all of which you have to try to remember the ins and outs of as you pull them all out for a bit of a dust.

Taking a picture helps, I find...

Then you discover some odd anomalies, like that strange fact that the HDMI cable - the one that connects the TV set to the so-called "Smart" box which is about two feet away from it - is about five meters long and, as you try to wrestle with that, you might also find that one of the cheap and nasty SCART leads seemed to be knackered and you might have to run around upstairs and dig out another one that you vaguely remember having put somewhere at some point in the far and distant past when you bought a pack of two of them for no very good reason other than the fact that they were cheap and nasty....

Typically, as I was right in the middle of wrestling with all of this like Indiana Jones in the Well of Souls, the phone rang  all this and, for once, instead of being yet another recorded message about a boiler that I don't want, it turned out to be a real person who actually wanted to have a reasonably long conversation with me.

Twenty minutes or so of conversation later, and I hadn't quite managed to remember how to put it all back together, although I did finally manage to get it all sorted out without causing my forehead to bleed too much.

Of course, with the building work due to resume early on in the New Year, pretty soon I'm going to have to unplug it all and relocate the whole lot somewhere else, so that, much like this Blog posting I fear, might all have turned out to be a bit of a waste of time.

"EE-LEC-TRICITY…."

This morning, instead of getting up and writing, I decided that I'd rather have the extra hour in bed (which probably shows where my priorities are at the moment) and so I did.

In recent years, during an evening like yesterday evening, one in which I'd been left all alone to my own devices, I might have spent the time composing more postings of a pithy and thoughtful nature but instead, once again I perched myself in front of the TV set, inserted a DVD into the player, and continued with my latest box set marathon rather than adding to this sometimes seemingly endless stream of blogging nonsense.

So, what are you going to do about that, then…?

Anyway, the scribblings below represent a tidied up version of a tedious rant that was bothering me yesterday, most of which you may have already read in another place.

"Ee-lec-tricity… Eee-lec-tricity…"

Well, the tune does kind of get stuck in your head when you're hanging on for an hour and the "on hold" music seems to be a compilation of songs featuring lyrics that are vaguely "electricity" or "power" related…

Has anyone ever got through to Scottish Power by phone...? It's made more complicated because I'm not actually "A Customer" but I've been rather dutifully trying to remind them that they've not sent a final bill for my mother's place, which we completed on over two weeks ago, on the very day we supplied them with the requisite numbers from the meters and specifically telling them the billing address - mine - that they should use.

Interestingly, after an hour on the phone listening to tunes that might once have been considered "groovy" but which probably irritate the hell out of just about everyone who calls them, dinner was ready so we had to hang up.

I had cooked.

By this point I'd already handed the receiver to the Beloved, made a cup of tea, and washed up whilst the tinny tunes rattled on with occasional interruptions telling us how much they appreciated our custom.

Now, of course, I have visions of a "call centre" employing just one little old lady called Mrs McCreedy and an exchange that resembles the one in "Whisky Galore!" with jackplugs and wires and so forth.

Later on, instead of starting this farce all over again, I decided upon a different approach and I wended my weary way through the maze that is their "contact us" option on the website,  much of which demanded information that I couldn't supply because I still wasn't "A Customer" but merely someone trying very, very hard to make an enquiry, and I was wading through this hell in order to send a polite explanatory email.

So I went through various hoops trying to do that. I encountered lots of mandatory red boxes to tick none of which were relevant, and a "compulsory" box to complete ('with numbers only') for your Gas Meter reading, even though the flat was not connected to the gas supply. In the end I just put lots of zeroes in, which means that they'll probably ignore it, but I completed my business.

They don't make it easy but, having finally got a message of some kind through to them - although I remain fully convinced that I might have been better putting a note in a bottle and chucking it in the nearest river - I waited for a reply.

And waited…

And waited…

Eventually I decided to have a look on TwitWorld, just to see if anyone else has had similar experiences, and it turns out that this is not an uncommon situation, with various people saying that they'd had to wait anything up to two and a quarter hours to get connected, sometimes after having had the phone put down on them after finally getting through.

People suggested that complaining via TwitWorld does get the attention of the P.R. Department rather than Customer Services, and is sometimes more effective, but the complaints I read didn't look as if anyone had replied to them or seemed to give a rat's kidney, to be honest.

Still... It's not really MY problem, I suppose, if they don't want to make it easy for me to pay them, after all, I usually find that such companies are quick enough to get in touch if you fall behind on your payments, and I'm sure that they'll get in touch eventually.

I, of course, just want to get the whole wretched business over with, but that's not their priority, I suppose.

All of which basically shows that life remains, as ever, one of those situations where the house always wins.

WAITING IN

Saturday was mostly spent waiting in for a couple of books that I'd ordered to finally turn up, after a week featuring a mammoth amount of irritation from dealing with the online retailer who sold them to me, who appear to have decided to alter their delivery system, one which has worked reasonably adequately for several years, presumably just because my circumstances would make the new set-up far more inconvenient.

Mostly, I'm objecting that they seem to have made getting the stuff I ordered to me my problem rather than theirs, however, that rant is already written and parked, because it's far too dull to share with you here... which, I'll have to admit, given most of my other content, would have to be going some.

The problem with waiting in is that it gets in the way of getting anything else done. You can barely dare to get out of earshot from any of your doors just in case that soft tapping occurs when you've sneaked upstairs for a moment, and return downstairs to find the latest "we tried to deliver your parcel" card sitting smugly on the doormat.

So, having spent a long time on the phone midweek, I finally got them to agree to try again on Saturday and the courier without a depot to otherwise collect from were supposed to make another run at getting my order to me sometime between 7.00am and 9.00pm, which rather put the kibosh on me doing anything else for the duration.

Sadly, I did have to pop out to take my beloved to the railway station at about 9.30am because she had an appointment arranged long before this latest opportunity, but, rather than accompanying her, maybe having a cup of coffee or a mooch around the shops, instead I was committed to being at home at the convenience of this courier service.

Rather more pleasingly, at least, the email telling me that my order was "out for delivery" didn't arrive until after I got back, so there was still a chance that my order would appear and I remained in limbo until either the books arrived, or I received the third "we were unable to deliver" message.

Anyway, I remained glued to the sofa, tapping away at my keyboard and watching some DVDs for several hours simply because I could not dare to move, just in case the mystery man turned up to make the delivery.

Eventually, of course, he did turn up, but not at the door I'd prefer him to, and much of the anxiety faded away and I could get on with my day, noticing that the packaging seems to only allow for three goes, and wondering what would have happened if I'd been too far away to hear his feeble knock...

To be honest, I'm seriously having to reconsider this whole online shopping option given that the goods no longer seem able to be sent to me in such a manner that I can actually easily receive them. At least with the Royal Mail I had a chance to use the "Option B" and go to the relatively local Post Office when they didn't find me at home, whereas this method seems to assume that I can totally rearrange my life to fit around their needs, or that I'm prepared to just let them cancel the order after they are "unable to deliver" after a week of waiting and several alleged attempts to deliver.

Things used to be so simple... but the company involved really don't seem to care about that.

THE RED FLAG OF FRIENDSHIP

The constant delays over completion on mum's flat means that the sad little posting that I've composed to mark that less-than-monumental event keeps getting postponed, and instead I have to keep dredging up nonsense like this from the dark depths of the "Drafts" File to fill the void, in the misguided belief that it's "better than nothing" although, to be fair, and despite what is alluded to in the text, this sort of thing happens fairly regularly, so it's never really going to be utterly irrelevant...

I’m fairly sure that nobody else struggles with this kind of dilemma. After all, if you’re sensible enough to be reading this, then you’re obviously the sort of very sane, very rational kind of human being who would never be filled with such doubts or concerns, but, whilst you get on with your sensible existence, it seems that, perhaps rather sadly, the author is not that kind of human being at all.

The dilemma is a little part of the world of social networking which probably doesn't trouble anybody else at all, but one which causes me no end of angst and paroxysms of doubt and anguish as I have lengthy internal debates as whether to click or not to click.

You see, it all comes down to those little red flags which indicate that someone wishes to “friend” you on a social networking site. I’m sure that the obvious, rational thing to do is just to click “accept’ or “decline” and get on with your life.

But that simple choice, for me, is where it starts to get complicated.

After all, in the first instance, is it a name that I recognise? This is not always the case. After all, I’m quite capable of forgetting someone’s name within nanoseconds of being told it, so the chances are that, if I did know you twenty years ago, I would still struggle to dredge your monicker from the slurry and sludge of my mind.

If it is a name that seems vaguely familiar, it is then possible that they know other people that I also vaguely recognise but have drifted away from for various reasons and might not want to re-establish links with.

Also, are they likely to be the sort of person who is likely to fill my life with all sorts of banal nonsense that I’d rather not know about?

Or do I recall them having extreme and radical points of view which I’d rather not be exposed to…? This particular issue always, always, means immediate banishment to the realms of “not following” in order not to upset them by the extreme guillotine of the “unfriend” option, but has the added advantage of keeping me relatively sane and away from all of their nonsense and the endless stuff about which I really do not care.

Also, these flags exist in a kind of quantum state.

The mere observing of the contents within and underneath them means that the flag itself vanishes as if it has never been and, if you are like me, and get distracted into other thoughts and activities, out of sight can inevitably mean out of mind, and that request can lurk there unnoticed for months until the next friendship request pops up and I then see the other one still lurking there accusingly and forgotten.

How long, then, is too long in such situations…?

Yes, in my case, such requests are usually several months apart, because I really am that unpopular and forgotten about. You might not believe it, with your own massively successful and sociable existence, but you’re just going to have to learn to deal with it like I did, and just accept that you’re reading the words of a social outcast, a pariah, and a misanthrope of the first order.

HAHAHAHAHAHA-HAHHHHH!!!

Recently I made the mistake of trying to do some “social networking” via the Kindle whilst I was in bed not trying to sleep and shredding my body clock, and this is never a good idea. My main problem involves the fact that the touch-screen seems to be getting ever less sensitive to my chunky old fingertips, perhaps because of the thin film of finger-deposited grease is playing havoc with the connections.

So, there I was, busily trying to find a way to rotate a photograph which had orientated itself in the wrong direction when all hell broke loose and screens started jumping about all over the place, and, amidst the chaos of trying to wrest control back from HAL again, I must have inadvertently hit an “accept” button which had been lurking there for a while, because, when stillness and calm returned again, I suddenly appeared to have one more “friend” than I’d had previously…

Well, this simply would not do, especially given the length of time involved, so I then had to get up and get myself to a keyboard which was attached to an operating system which connected a format of that website that I at least vaguely understood and, after sorting out precisely who it might be, tinker with my timelines and settings and get things back onto an even keel before the ghosts got into the machine and the gremlins awoke.

So, here I find myself, dragging my way through life with another "friend" to deal with, and more electronic conversations to be negotiated. It's not that I really mind, of course - after all, it's nice to be remembered, no matter how obliquely - but now there's a whole new minefield - of who knows who, and what who might say to whom about what - to be negotiated and that's, quite frankly, bloody terrifying.

Still… Welcome, I suppose.

You know who you are…

SUGAR CUBE

The new month started with a new dentist… or rather with me finally getting to meet my new dentist for the first time since my previous one retired after our last meeting and our new one found herself stuck in Poland “…visiting family…” during our last scheduled encounter.

First meetings like this are, of course, slightly tricky. After all, your relationship with your dentist is a fairly intimate one, and how you get along during your first appointment, and how painful or pleasurable an experience it turns out to be, can shape the manner in which you spend the rest of your time together, which could of course be several years which pass in the blink of an eye with those six-monthly meetings.

Granted, even on that scale, I’ve spent more time with my dentist in recent years than with some of my closest friends, but that’s life for you. Anyway, she seems young enough to probably see me out before her retirement although, with that tricky little matter of having family overseas, and with that unfathomable youthful thing called “ambition” to guide her career, that remains to be seen.

Other than that the appointment itself passed rather uneventfully, with the usual familiar blather about flossing and that added occasional “extra” of taking some X-ray pics which revealed my receding bones…

Incidentally, it always seems odd to me how the staff all run out of the room as the countdown to the zapping of the X-ray “gun”continues on to doomsday... like the end of a James Bond film when the base is about to blow up.

If I’d ever become a dentist, I wonder how long I’d have been able to resist at least one “No Mister Bond, I expect you to die…!” as I left the patient lined up in the sights of my X-ray gun…?

Meanwhile, I had been reading my science book as I waited for the appointment, and I became rather intrigued by the theory that, with the amount of space inside an atom, the entire human race could be compacted down to the size of a sugar cube…

A particularly dense sugar cube of course (no surprises there, ho, ho…)

But it is apparently true. If you took all of the space out of all of the atoms making up all of the bodies of all of the people in the world, the remaining stuff when sqished up together in a terrifyingly intimate manner would barely be big enough to take up the size of one sugar cube.

And people complain about overcrowding.

In other words 99.9999999999999% of each and every one of us is made up of absolutely nothing at all…

It is one of those facts that, when you find it out, just utterly, utterly blows your mind… and even when it gets rationalised up to the scale of a solar system (The actual “matter” in an atom being no more than the planets are in relation to the heliosphere) still messes with your mind when you look at all of the solid seeming “stuff” all around you and you realise how empty it all really is.

It kind of makes you think, doesn't it?

Neutronhumanity, for I suppose that is what it would have to be referred to as, could be compacted and shipped off to anywhere and, presumably, if we got the science sorted out, then could just add water (or, perhaps more necessarily, energy) and be reconstituted just like in that old "Star Trek"episode where the crew got converted into white blocks of crumbly stuff and the ones wearing the red shirts got, er, crumbled… although it turns out that crewman Dispensible would have been fine after all, just so long as Dr McCoy had a good enough vacuum cleaner and who knows where Dyson’s are going to be technology-wise in another two hundred years…?

Still, once reconstituted, there we'd all be again, albeit perhaps with slightly more understanding of ourselves and each other, you might hope, given that level of intimacy.

Still, after having my mind blown and my teeth polished, I headed off to work and resumed by battle with the awful traffic which had plagued my entire morning… and once I arrived there, my first coffee of the day tasted of tooth polish (which is never good…) and I paused to reflect once more upon that “sugar cube” theory (the roads would be much clearer) and how much my bright young thing of a new dentist would probably disapprove of sugar cubes anyway.

Everything, you see, is interconnected… although I still wouldn’t want to end up that close to all of you.

That’s nothing personal, by the way, because I’m sure you’re all very lovely and all that, it’s just that I’m simply not that fond of the prospect of quite that level of proximity with all of you, which I’m sure you all quite understand.

GAAARGH! PEOPLE!!!

I really should have known.

From the very moment somebody said that they would phone me an hour before they were due to arrive, alarm bells ought to have been tripped in my head and I ought to have known that the usual SNAFUs would befall me…

Damn, it’s tricky working full time and having to organise something.

This, you may have already guessed, was all to do with clearing mum’s flat.

The British Heart Foundation had very kindly agreed to take some of the furniture off our hands to sell, and they agreed to come on a particular Monday, but, given the amount of this kind of thing that their volunteers have to do, they couldn’t specify an actual time.

The Beloved had too much work on, and I have a very narrow margin of available days of annual leave to book, so I decided that I might be able to take a couple of hours “personal time” if, as the person on the phone in their office suggested, the charity’s van driver rang me up an hour or so before they were due to arrive and I could haul my sorry donkey over there, let them in, say “bye-bye” to some chunks of my childhood, and get myself back to the office to claw back some time.

So far, so well-planned.

Now, I know that it’s difficult when you’re dealing with volunteers and also with the “Chinese Whispers” effect of getting the message across, but I decided that they seemed on the ball enough, and I prepared myself to be at least another partial step towards a solution.

However, come the glorious day, someone gave them the wrong telephone contact number, and, rather naturally, the whole happy house of cards fell apart. They sat outside calling the wrong number, I sat at work wondering when and whether they’d actually ring at all, whilst chunnering away to anyone who’d listen about simply knowing that the entire plan was bound to fall apart, and, whilst I was doing that, the entire plan, quite naturally, fell apart.

You see, I’ve been here before. Whether its furniture deliveries to my house, or that day when the ex-criminals help scheme came to take our old stuff away, it always seems to take at least two goes to get these things to actually successfully happen, and I really, really, ought to have remembered this when I cockily approached my day actually believing that there was a plan in place and that everything was going to unfold smoothly.

You see, I’ve been told that I worry too much about things that haven’t happened yet, but that if you believe that good things will happen, then they do; That I must embrace the power of positive thinking and believe that things will turn out alright in the end if you allow them to.

Mind you, you know how life can be, get people involved and it all turns to sh*t...

“Best laid plans” and all that, he said, recalling the day mum moved out of her house and was left sitting on a driveway which was no longer hers, surrounded by all of her possessions as the removal company she’d paid up front failed to turn up all day.

Still, I’m sure we’ll get it right at the second attempt, mostly because I have a less convenient “Plan B” which involves me sitting in the flat working remotely and without an internet connection until they turn up, and you can be as sure as eggs is eggs that the nine o’clock start they managed on Monday will somehow drift towards the late afternoon because I’m doing that…

But, whilst like everyone else, “I love it when a plan comes together…” life does like to throw us all these little curve balls whenever we believe anything ought to be fairly simple and straightforward.

Like my recent experiences of trying to get some life insurance organised.

Now a letter has arrived and the mysterious “them” want to send someone “to my house” (where I’d rather not be given the holiday situation I described earlier) and “at my convenience” (which it won’t be) to take a urine sample to prove I’m going to live long enough to not have to make any sort of claim against the policy.

Are they taking the piss?

Anyway, I don’t want to take yet another of my limited days off to wait indoors all day for someone to fail to appear and ask me to get my tackle out and pee into a bottle, presumably in front of them to witness it, but I suppose that I’ll have to if I want to get covered.

This was because I was daft enough to be honest when I was filling out the application in the bank.

I'm not a “smoker”.

I've never been “a smoker”.

But, on occasion, when very, very drunk, and very much younger than I now am, I used to blag the occasional gasper at the end of an evening’s beer drinking from whoever was handy because my boundaries were collapsing due to being under the influence of either alcohol or smoke-addled minds who wanted me to join them and whom I presumably was trying to impress for whatever reason (possibly involving potential subsequent pant investigations which rarely came to pass).

This information, give or take a detail or two, I readily offered up during my chats at the bank and, because the banks are now so very “squeaky-clean” about absolutely everything nowadays, he felt that he couldn’t check the “Never Smoked” box, hence the announcement of the imminent arrival of some mysterious healthcare professional to check my “non-smoker” status…

Presumably they’ll arrive, at  the very least, at the second attempt…

Let’s hope my own aim is more of a “first time” thing, eh…?

WHO KNOWS…?

When it comes to matters of the modern world, I can be bloody ignorant sometimes.

Usually it's not really my fault… or at least if it is my fault, it's more to do with the fact that a lot of the "pop culture" references that just about everyone else seems very familiar with, don't really appear all that much on my personal radar.

This could be for one of many reasons.

Much "sport" fails to register with me, so a lot of "sportspersons" are not people that I would normally recognise. The entire Olympic experience passed me by to such an extent that the allegedly quite well-known people who feature in certain adverts are still just faces speaking words to me.

The only radio station I listen to regularly is Radio 4, so I don't get to hear all that much "pop" music and, because I'm most likely to only listen to that because "Test Match Special" is on, even the pop culture which has made it into the sort of breadth of mainstream where Radio 4 might be talking about it, perhaps even to the point where Aggers is making reference to it, it often still doesn't make it through my own personal perception filters.

To be fair, quite often a lot of the stuff is there but I simply fail to register it.

Then there are things like soap operas and great big Saturday evening "family entertainment" shows which just don't get switched on in our house.

And, of course, I don't read the tabloids, rarely see the sort of magazines which carry the celebrity gossip and tittle-tattle, and don't have children who might just keep my finger on the pulse about such inconsequential matters as what's currently "cool" or not, assuming that "cool" is still a "thing" of course...

Hell, I don't even go out all that much if I can possibly help it...

For example, I asked m’colleagues who the allegedly blaspheming celeb pop star lady was when the story turned up on the news a few weeks ago & I thought they told me that, whoever she is, she'd once been married to Russell Grant.

Obviously I misheard that, but I think that I may be just a little bit out of touch...

Then, rather troublingly, during a later conversation on that very same day, I did know who both "The Wurzels" and "The Barron Knights" were...

God help me...

Mind you, when someone asked me not to spoil the end of "BB" for them a couple of months ago, and I thought that they were referring to "Big Brother" and was just a whisker away from telling them that I didn’t watch the sort of telly that involves members of the general public when something clicked inside my mind and warned me off from taking that particular path towards revealing my own ignorance…

Although, come to think of it, I don't believe I’ve ever seen that other “BB” either, at least not to the point of knowing what's going on, although I did once have to create some artwork themed around the very first series, so I was reluctantly forced into some kind of "crash course" that I've since, rather mercifully, forgotten…

There was a singing nun, I recall, a builder, and a devilish gentleman with horns on his head...?

So, basically…

Who the hell knows…?

But let's face it, I'm just a bit of an old fart really... and you could argue, possibly with some justification, that I'm just trying to make a virtue of my own ignorance, something which I regularly deplore in others...

Then again, sometimes we all forget that those things which we're unreliably informed that "everybody's talking about" are all things that some marketing git has just decided that we're all talking about, even when it turns out that, even with a super-juggernaut like the latest footballing contest, more people are actually disinterested than otherwise, and many of those who express an interest are just following the herd because, in the end, we're all just looking at what everyone else is interested in and still playing to the rules of the playground and hoping to be accepted by the "cool kids..."

If that's still a "thing" that is...

LAZY DAYS AND EVEN MORE SUNDAYS

We have, I fear (and even if it was even possible), become even more lazy when it comes to weekends than even I had thought possible. To be honest, before a very late breakfast, I did spend some time reading, and reading an actual book (with paper and everything), which is kind of an unusual occurrence for me nowadays, but that was about as productive as it got.

Oh, we talked about doing a lot of things. We talked about attacking the clutter that’s still claiming more than it’s fair share of the floor-space in the living room, but by Monday morning it remained strangely unmoved. We talked about going through the stacks of accumulated Estate paperwork just to see what we no longer needed, but it remains untouched and gathering that tell-tale film of dust. I glanced out of the window upon a bright, shiny day and thought to myself that the garden might be in need of some attention, but that was all of the attention it got. There was even a vintage fair which we considered heading out to visit, but somehow we never actually made it out of the house.

The mountain of washing up did get done, but mostly because we ran out of clean bowls, and the recycling made the great leap for freedom from the draining board to the outside dustbin which might not appear to be much, but in context it feels like a great achievement.

We did also venture out on Sunday and buy some paint, fully intending to restart the decorating which was interrupted by events last October and which we’ve struggled to resume, but, apart from adding to the growing pile of paint purchases which seldom make it from the can to the wall, and calling in at the supermarket to get the weekly food supplies with which to stuff our couch-potato faces, little else was achieved in the way of actual progress.

On the plus side, last Saturday "Columbo" put away six, count 'em, six murderers during the course of our day, as played by Jackie Cooper, Ray Milland, Rip Torn, Oscar Werner, and a pair of Martin Landaus, so fictional justice from way back in the televisual past was, at the very least, served.

Meanwhile, and because absolutely nobody is asking, I thought I would tell you how the year's rewatch of "The Six Million Dollar Man" is going, not least because I mentioned a few weeks ago that I was going to work my way through at least some of it this year, and, as far as achievements are going, actually doing something that I say I will, even if its as utterly pointless as this, is turning out to feel like a victory of sorts.

Anyway, my viewing marathon staggers along at a couple of episodes a week crammed into the moments alone when it fills the time as a pastime which is far too excruciating to share, but I don't think that I'll get much further than season three (even though I fully expect my "completist" gene to kick in once I reach the end of the season) because, to be perfectly honest, I had started to find it all rather monotonous and predictable at about the halfway point of season two and only staggered through that because of the prospect of getting to the “Bionic Woman” episodes.

Incidentally, those episodes turned out to be far, far duller than I remembered from childhood and, horror of horrors, also turned out to involve Lee Majors actually singing. Well, sort of. God alone knows what the Bionic Woman actually saw in him, but if I were Steve Austin, I’d’ve been asking whether I could have some bionic replacement vocal chords installed if I was going to get up to that sort of caterwauling…

Meanwhile, Richard Anderson's mournful silences as he stared off towards the horizon each week in the cough and a spit role of OSI Boss Oscar Goldman, presumably wondering where his credibility and his career went were bad enough, but his plaintive cries of "Steve... Steve!!!" whenever his favourite celebrity agent (who occasionally nobody recognised if the plot demanded it) disobeyed an order, started to make him sound more like a spurned lover than the head of a “Top Secret” organisation about which everyone seemed to know.

Also getting tedious were the many and varied excuses to bring in blonde female characters who were invariably played by Farrah Fawcett-Majors (as was...). These seemed to occur quite regularly, with nobody pointing out the similarity in appearance of the plucky female astronaut to the plucky female TV journalist, but that’s telly for you.

After all if Bionic Doctor Rudy Wells can change his head on a regular basis without anybody commenting upon it, sometimes in the blink of an eye, then you start to get the impression that the makers of the programme thought even less of the viewers that the viewers did themselves.

Mind you, in those “pre-internet” “Pre-VHS” days, people just didn’t watch this kind of telly in the same way that we do now, and weren’t able to nit-pick and dissect every episode as it was actually airing, so maybe nobody noticed. Funnily enough, I appear to have reached the point where I started watching them when I was a kid, because I had very distinct memories of the episode “The Blue Flash” when I got to it, and (although he isn’t in that particular edition) I remember very clear memories of thinking at about that time that Dr Wells had been a different person a few weeks earlier, but, in those “Pre-Google” (other search engines, etc…) days, I had no way of proving it…

And so the rewatch reluctantly plods along more out of obligation than from any pleasure it now is giving. The "light comedy" episodes can be a little bit cringeworthy, but remain slightly interesting when you can spot within them the roots of other "much-loved" seventies shows like "The Dukes of Hazzard" but, in general, those editions are better than the sub-James Bond antics of the cold-war spy tales, or anything involving villainy in the vicinity of car racing, horse racing or boxing.

Actually most series seem to touch upon those particularly tedious areas as plot ideas from time to time, and they're always so dreadful that I've learned by now to switch over immediately a racetrack or gym appears...

Still, Lee Majors seems to be quite good with kids, and experimenting with his facial hair options, and, in terms of mid-seventies adventure hokum, it's passable enough, and as a bit of nostalgia about a hilarious looking era of huge cars, cheap petrol, and villains in loud sports jackets, kipper ties, and greasy combovers, or wearing housecoats to match the décor of their motel room, it really couldn't be beaten.

Of course, I do miss that sort of villain on TV. Nowadays they all look like those shaven-headed, tattooed, leather-jacketed loons that you hope won’t catch your eye in the pub, and, quite frankly, a bit of variety wouldn’t go amiss in the world of villain fashions.

Where are the fluffy white cats and the Nehru jackets…?

Meanwhile, back on “Sixie”, more amusement can be had in spotting the more obvious stuntmen, especially when filmed in “super slo-mo” just in case you hadn’t noticed that they weren’t actually Lee Majors himself, although he presumably got on quite well with “Unknown Stuntmen” given that for his career "The Fall Guy" beckons...

Oh, before I forget… That book that I mentioned I was reading...? (Still… because unfortunately I’m reading far less than I used to…)

That’s "Screen Burn" by Charlie Brooker.

Charlie's a very talented wordsmith. In fact, perhaps he’s rather too talented. His writing is impressive enough to make my own feel so utterly inadequate that I might just feel like stopping doing it altogether for at least six months and trying to teach myself how to write this sort of nonsense properly. Meanwhile, if I continue to read his words, I might just learn how to be far more cutting about the TV shows I'm watching...

MONDAY BLEWS

So, Monday morning began in the darkness, and not only because the sun hadn't yet risen.

I got up, in that slightly unhappy state that a Monday morning can drag along with it, and headed downstairs to have my morning cup of tea and pills, made a couple of ultimately disappointing sandwiches for my lunch later on, carried my mug of tea through into the living room and flicked the light-switch...

Only for the bulb to immediately blow in a rather spectacular way and leave me standing in the pitch darkness with a mug of tea in my hand and nothing but the flashing digits of the ancient video recorder and the taunting glow of the internet hub to light my way.

Actually, I don't know why I said it was "spectacular" really, because it certainly wasn't, at least in the "Hollywood Special Effects" sense. It merely fizzed and spluttered and strobed a little before going "plink". There was no explosion, no sparks, and no shattering of glass, and I certainly didn't have to leap for cover in super slo-mo as a hot rain of both tea and glass shards showered about me in an aesthetically pleasing manner.

In fact the only reaction from me was rather static with only muted "Typical!" to mark the transition of states of being from optimistic anticipation of a nice warm cuppa to a person who was now mildly irritated at having something else to deal with.

Typically I hadn't the foggiest whether I even had any spare bulbs in the house, and there certainly weren't any in the usual spot because I'd changed the last one only a fortnight ago and made a mental note that I really needed to pick up some more before forgetting that I'd made that mental note, or subconsciously scrunching it up or, if it was a mental "Post-It" note (other self adhesive message pads are available) having it lose its tackiness and fall down the side of the fridge.

Luckily, I vaguely remembered that there were some more somewhere that I thought that I hadn't used yet, and I was right. In the damp, dark, condensation heavy places under the sink, where I seldom venture because of the general unpleasantness therein,  I found an aging plastic box of old electrical bits and pieces including a multi-pack of bulbs which I'd once bought in Asda, the cardboard boxes of which all seemed ever-so slightly soggy. Most of those seemed to be marked with the environmentally wicked "100W" but one damp old box still claimed to be 60W and so I grabbed it and, as the cardboard disintegrated around it, I found that I held in my hand one slightly wet lightbulb.

Well, I quickly dried this on a handy towel and manoeuvered a chair to the necessary spot and replaced the bulb by the light of a small lamp and a dazzling torch and, having negotiated my way back to the floor, was happily rewarded by the bright light of a bulb that was certainly far brighter than the one it was replacing, and probably was not of the type as once claimed by the remains of the box it was so recently inside.

Still, any week which starts out with you standing on a chair in the dark trying to put a damp bulb into a light socket can't help but improve… although how those first few moments are is possibly symbolic of how the entire week is likely to unravel, so I didn't take it as a good sign.

Perhaps ironically, or presciently, on Sunday afternoon I had ordered myself a new torch off the internet but, naturally, it hadn't actually arrived yet. This sudden consumerist leap was made because we'd bought a rather impressive one a couple of years ago for the beloved to carry about with her in her work bag for those rare occasions when she has to get herself home in the midwinter pitch darknesses.

After our recent blackouts, and the feeble failure of the cheap and nasty little torch which I usually kept in the car that evening, in comparison to the bright and steady beam which the Beloved's own rather marvellous light source had displayed during that minor crisis, I'd been thinking of getting myself one, only to not be able to find any on sale in the various supermarkets we'd been into since whilst failing to buy any bulbs.

In the end, as is often the case, the internet was my friend although, the one time this week that I might actually have been urgently needing it, whilst standing on that chair in the dark, it was still in a depot somewhere awaiting despatch, but next time, next time, I shall be, in the best tradition of Baden-Powell's finest, prepared...

Assuming I can find the thing, of course... because, some days, some days, the lights of my life really do seem to conspire against me...

THE FEELING'S MUTUAL I'M SURE...

I do appear to have a very "bipolar" relationship with the old interweb, you know. I'm sure that you've probably noticed that already (and if not… WHY THE HELL NOT??!!). Anyway, the point is that it both obsesses me and annoys me in almost equal measure, and I'm going to use today's pointless posting to try to get to the bottom (Oo-er! That'll set the search engines tingling…) of why.

Mostly, of course, it's just the way I'm made. I've always struggled to enjoy the successes and happinesses of others because they usually only serve to bring my own failures and unhappinesses into sharper focus.

"Why" my mind screams like an over-hormonal teenager, "Are they able to find some joy in this veil of tears when I so obviously can't??? S'NOT FAIR!!!"

As a philosophy of life, this does not a popular person make.

And, because that unpopularity seems to increase exponentially in direct relation to the amount it is needed, so the problem multiplies. Disinterest begets disinterest and your disinterest in my disinterest makes my self-loathing and self-doubt escalate and so on and so on.

Yep. Getting mathematical on their asses is always the popular choice…

Does irony work on the written page…? Discuss…

Does italicised emphasis help to stress the point…?

Or is it always better to be bold…?

Oh yes, give 'em typographical pointers that everyone already knows… That'll reel 'em in good and proper...

Nevertheless, because of all the blathering on about parties, and family life, and what people "reckon",  and the anger, and the hostility, and the gushing, and the squee-ing, and all of the other nonsense that they (whoever "they" are…) have been up to in their obviously far more fascinating and interactive lives than mine, most of the few who do take a moment to intertwine their lives with mine in FizzBokWorld do not actually appear in my TimeLine any more due to my rather brutal "zero tolerance" approach to such things.

I'm sorry, but that's the way it is.

Most of the time I just found that the majority of the idle chatter, or the more unguarded, or sick-makingly sycophantic comments were making me feel far, far too annoyed for far too much of the time, and I would brood upon them at length, and then get so angry that it really wasn't doing me any good. Far better, I felt, to keep a "Top Ten" of people who seldom write anything trite and let life tick along like that with the occasional comment popping up to annoy me, or the occasional random click to check whether someone's still alive.

Because, despite everything, I do still care about that, at least...

For Pete's sake,  you are, after all, dealing (or - more probably - not dealing) with somebody loosely resembling a person here who can get annoyed because real professionals are getting adulation for doing more of the same thing that they're already well-known for doing. Let's face it, I can pretty much get annoyed about anything at all, but the success and happiness and achievements of others really are right up there at the top of the list.

I know, and I'm sorry. They shouldn't be, but that's the way I'm made. I don't actually like it much either if it's any consolation, but I'm quite sure it isn't. I know that it all makes me terribly shallow and unlikeable, but I feel like this because I can't help but feel a certain amount of rage because life sometimes seems so wretchedly unfair.

Sometimes I do try to change, to become a better person, but then life comes along and takes a long hard kick at my teeth and I scurry away back under my isolated little rock and sit and fester Gollum-like until the next time I decide to try...

That said, the great and the good couldn't give a tinker's cuss what I think about them anyway, so sod 'em…

My baleful brooding harms no-one but myself, and makes little difference in the great scheme of things and, whilst I must accept that that might actually be part of the problem, the exponential nature of it means that a solution might prove unlikely, if not impossible.

One glimmer of hope…?

One moment of happiness…?

Nope… It's obviously far too much to ask for…

Anyway, when you don't really do "fun", such things are never likely to happen in a "fun-packed" world where fun, God help us, remains the only currency worth having. Anyway, when you become so very good at doing "Bitter and Twisted" that you decide that it might be worth a bullet point on your C.V., sometimes you're better off just knowing what it is you're good at and sticking with it.

After all, if you're never going to understand other people's idea of fun, it's unlikely that they're going to understand yours, either. Best to just shut up and let them get on with it in an environment where they can't annoy you too much.

You see, some of the dazzling and sparkling wit that I churn out so regularly is obviously far too good for the majority of my not-readers, although you'll have already cottoned on to the heavily disguised satire (??? - does anybody get my sense of so-called "humour" anyway…?) that you're reading here because, if you've got this far, you're quite evidently a cut above the rest of the general riff-raff who cruise t'interweb looking for sources of pseudo-intellectual stimuli...

Sometimes I find it very difficult too feign interest in the lives of others. Oh, I do try, of course, but, the problem is, for the majority of the time, I really just don't care about it all that much. Not about those lot, anyway, if you want to insert whatever definition of "those lot" you wish to use here. But then I don't really understand anyone's constant need for affirmation, or this strange desire to share your opinion with people just because they happen to have one which they think you ought to know about…

After all, in the majority of cases, few people go away and mull over what you've shared with them and return with a contrite "You know, I think you were right and I was wrong…" Far easier to take offence and rage away from behind the anonymous safety of your keyboard and rail against harmless folk who you'll probably never meet, or use distance to rail against those you just might...

Of course I am an utter hypocrite.

I do get stupidly upset when my online life grinds to a halt or when one of my own pithy pointlessnesses gets ignored by the world in general and my little piece of it in particular...

And, of course, when it all comes down to it,  I do (sort of) care about a great deal of it, it just has to be on my terms, that's all… To be honest, I believe that's pretty true for everybody, I just happen to be honest enough (or stupid enough) to admit it, that's all.

But then... But then…

Well, we really do have to address the small matter of BlogWorld, don't we, boys and girls…? After all, the mere fact that I'm here opinionising away is rather in opposition to just about everything I've already written today…

Why the chuffing heck should you lot give a rat's kidney what I happen to reckon about anything either? Well, setting aside the fact that a lot of you blatantly don't, I could argue that it's because it's all sheer genius, even though it obviously isn't…

I'll perhaps try and persuade myself that it's unrecognised genius instead which still doesn't make me feel any better because of the basic untruth at the very heart of it.

Because basically, you see (and I know that you all got here way ahead of me on this point…), I'm just someone who wants everyone to love me but doesn't really know how to be loved, and the dichotomy of that state of being manifests itself as the kind of mutual disinterest which means that rational, sane, normal and intelligent people are unlikely to even attempt to get to the end of a convoluted sentence or argument like this one has turned out to be.

And I can hardly blame you for that.

Although I'm sure that I will…

POD OFF

So it would appear that the days of the iPod are now numbered. The white heat of new technology seems to burn out oh-so-swiftly nowadays and what was once an essential, "must-have" purchase is flung onto the scrapheap almost as soon as its guarantee has run out.

Apparently, we, the great purchasing masses don't want them any more and, having revolutionised the way that music is listened to, bought and sold, we've all now moved on and want all of our many devices all packed away into one device and run the risk of our entire lives falling apart when all of those iEggs in that one iBasket suddenly vanish due to the wicked doings of the iThieves...

It seems to me to be a bit of a shame…  but still, if that's what you want, oh wise world, who am I to argue...?

If a single use device seems redundant when you can do everything you wish to do in life through your one tiny screen, far be it for those who think otherwise to suggest that having a choice might be the better option, just because there might be times when a single use device might actually be more convenient.

Like, for example (although I don't indulge in such insanities myself), when training or going for a run. I've seen those eager young things trying to stave off the inevitability of decay by running up and down the streets, and they appear to have their tiny and feather-light musical devices strapped about their slightly-covered persons in a most convenient manner in such a way as to suggest that strapping a great big phone to their arm might not work quite so well.

And if that dobbing great slab of technology was to fall out, there's that whole "life falls apart" scenario to consider which might instantly slice off all of those theoretical years you've just added to it.

Just because a minority will never want an iPhone doesn't mean that they might not want the other shiny goodies that you sell, Mr Apple…

My Beloved still carries around her steam-age Nokia teffalone and is extraordinarily happy with it but, because she likes to listen to audiobooks on the commuter run, she bought the one version of the iPod which history now seems to try and imply never even existed, or at least seems to get missed out when you read those articles about the history of this ground-breaking device.

I'm not completely convinced that it is the one design variant that they seem kind of ashamed to admit to ever having produced but, when we were trying to find an accessory for it a few weeks ago, it was proving pretty difficult to trace.

You might not remember the iPod Shuffle circa 2009... The one with no buttons, no screen and looks a a bit like a paperclip, because, in the Great Big Constantly Generalised TwitWorld in which we live, "nobody" liked it and, more importantly "nobody" bought it.

Well, apart from idiots like us, of course.

The Beloved still appreciates its tiny magnificence (a feature of her personality for which I am eternally grateful), and uses her little iPod device nearly every single day (as long as we remember to recharge it), so there is still a market out there, Mr Apple, if only you'd take the time to listen to them instead of the giddy young things that you usually respond to...

TRIP SWITCH

Saturday started, as they usually do, in the dark...

After all, "Night must fall" and all that kind of thing, but that's not really what I meant.

I woke up and noticed that the glowing red numbers of the alarm clock's display were markedly absent and, for a while at least, I decided that the power must have gone out and that it would no doubt be restored eventually, and did my best to doze off again...

These are the moments during which I wish that my wristwatch had a luminous dial so that I could reassure myself that it wasn't actually getting up time and I could try my best to stay under the duvet just a little longer.

Later on (but how much later on I couldn't tell you...), I noticed that the little red numbers had still not returned and I staggered out of the bedroom and downstairs to try and remember quite where I'd put the battery-powered lantern the last time I used it.

The entire house was in darkness, the fridge wasn't humming, the boiler wasn't running, and none of the little lights of my life were glowing in the kitchen or the televisual recording devices. Somehow I managed to manoeuvre myself around all of the hidden obstacles that clutter our lives and reach out my hand to find that, for once, the lamp was actually in precisely the spot that I had believed it was.

And so, in a limited way, the light returned, and both of the clocks into which I'd oh-so-recently put brand new batteries were displaying the time which, at ten past six in the morning, was far later than I would usually surface at the weekend.

Slowly... ever so slowly... my mind began to function again and I noticed that things were not quite as dark as I had first believed. There was a certain amount of glow penetrating the gaps between the curtains which implied that the street lights were, at least, still burning brightly.

This made me wonder whether this power outage was more localised than I had at first believed, and that maybe it was just our little row of houses that had been deprived of power, maybe because the overhead cabling which feeds us might have been brought down by external forces beyond our control.

The storms, after all, had been quite awful during the previous few nights...

At this point I needed to find out two things. One: Whether the rest of the row was also unlit (although at that time in the morning, this might prove nothing); and Two: Where the hell the paperwork from the electricity board might be, given that I might have to phone them...

Well, both were problematic.

Despite current trends towards the contrary in terms of our degenerate society, I was not inclined to go outdoors wearing my pyjamas under any circumstances, which would mean that I would need to dress in the dark.

Equally, the paperwork is so chaotic nowadays that there really would have been shouting.

Emitting another huge sigh, I headed up the stairs and paused to look at the nook where the meters lurk, and noticed that, perhaps for the first time in years, the Trip Switch had, er, tripped, presumably due to one of those overnight lightning bolts that had failed to wake me.

So, I waved my lantern, stood upon my tippy-toes, and switched it back to the "on" position and the house was restored to life, and all of those familiar buzzes and hums immediately restarted, and the soft glows of all of those various switches and dials were restored...

Isn't it funny how the imagination (shun... shun... shun...) can create a much larger and far more widespread crisis than it turns out in reality to be...?

THE WRONG MOMENT

Why is it that, despite calls to me being almost as rare as hen's teeth, the phone always rings at precisely the wrong moment?

There I was last weekend, just in the process of putting out breakfast and packing away the shopping, having recently arrived home after doing the our weekly supermarket run, whilst simultaneously I was trying very hard to listen to the final few balls of the day's play in that one-day cricket international which I'd been listening to since 3.30am, when that blasted tring-a-ling sounded and I was compelled to drag myself out of the kitchen, away from the radio, and pick up the receiver, even though I was pretty sure it was more than likely to be just another bloody cold call.

Sadly, it wasn't a cold call, but I think that I probably acted as if it was. With all my "Aha-ing" and "Um-ing" I feel that my conversation remained more than a tad terse, impatient and irritated throughout the call, despite the fact that the call was chock-full of things about which I really ought to have been concerned.

Sigh…

So, sorry about that.

I used to do much the same thing whenever my mother rang me and was telling me all about the events in the lives of people I didn't actually know.

It's just that…

Really…

You couldn't have picked a worse moment…

Well, of course you could very easily have picked a worse moment. I'm sure that in life there are many, many moments that could be far, far worse ones than that in which to receive a call, but there you have it.

I really ought to have said something, or asked a quick question like "Can I call you back, only…" but I didn't. Instead I just hung on like a lemon and gave the distinct impression, I'm sure, that I really didn't give a rat's kidney which is, of course, really not the case at all.

Nevertheless, I still imagine that that's precisely what it sounded like...

Because even I, insensitive soul that I am, realised pretty much as soon as I hung up and that, at best, I'd been surly…

Not, of course, that I was bothered enough to call back and explain. Lord, no… It was far too busy a moment for that, what with all the breakfasting and packing away and cricket-y listening that I still had to do.

And then hours, and then days pass, and the moment is gone, and returning the call becomes much more awkward than it once was and, of course, there's still the distinct possibility that I will choose precisely the worst possible moment to ring…

God…! How I loathe telephones...