Trigger warning: This is a very long post and there is swearing!
What can I say about this week, it’s been action-packed and I can’t see anything slowing down as we begin the headlong rush towards the organisational nightmare that is Christmas. Christmas isn’t bad but there are definitely times when I wish all the admin would just fuck off and leave me alone. This is one of them but mostly that’s because of other admin.
Highlights this week?
Well, I’ve just spent the last ten days in Portugal. That’s a stonking highlight, I can tell you. The weather was gorgeous, I doubt we’ve ever had it that good. The food was wonderful, as ever, one of our favourite restaurants, which we were worried about, because it’s small and family run, has expanded into the shop next door and is doing well. It was brilliant to see that and to discover that the food is still ace but they’ve now added a pizza oven. Our other fave restaurants had also survived the pandemic and appeared to be doing well, I got to eat a Don Rodrigues … think baclava made with this kind of extruded egg. Holy smokes it’s yummy. I even managed to get a slice of Algarvian Almond Swiss Roll but it was a supermarket one so it wasn’t quite as good as it should have been.
The hotel had stopped providing Portuguese egg custard tarts for breakfast or at least, it only produced them on Sunday. This was sad but doubtless my waistline is relieved. On the up side we did find some to buy and troughed those.
Lowlight? Or at least, narrow squeak …
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Was this photo worth smashing the phone for? Dunno …
On the first night, as we drove down the hill into town the sun was setting, bathing the sea and the cliffs in a gorgeous pink light. I wound down the window and put my phone out to take a picture. In an unprecedented event, the wind caught the case and whipped it out of my hand. Erk. I watched the case land on one corner and then the phone fell out and flipped over and over along the road, on its corners. McOther did an emergency stop, I leapt out and ran towards where the stricken case lay. The phone, sliding gently down the asphalt on its face, came to rest against my foot.
Ah.
The back was absolutely fine, including the Leica camera lenses. Phew.
The front … well … the glass screen at two opposing corners is powdered and there’s a big crack across it but it still appears to work so I borrowed some sellotape from the hotel. I have a plastic iPad protector in my desk drawer which I can hack down to the right size with scissors and I’ll use that as a screen protector for now. Everything about the phone still seems to work, although I’m not quite sure whether or not it had a Micro SD card in it at some point. If it did, that’s gone now. Gulp.
Onwards and upwards.
Pissy Pandemic Admin
Do not bollock me for complaining about this. Sure it has to be done, we have to try and keep the show on the road and do the hoops. However, I still reserve the right to whinge vociferously – not to mention endlessly – about the total unintuitive way the hoops are thought out. OK they are improving, which is good, but they are still an absolutely stonking pain in the arse.
While we were out there we had to fill in our Passenger Locator Forms. Lord above! What a phaff. How many times can they ask me to type the same number in a different box? Ugh.
Because it’s always a pain in the arse, I had this great idea, I would set up an account. First they needed my email address and they helpfully gave me guidance in the box name@host.com how simple is that? Brilliant. Then comes the phone number box and what do they put? This: +12125551234
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I’m sorry? Say what? Throw me a smecking bone here for Arnold’s sake! I’m an idiot. I need more help than that. What does this mean? Is that +44 code number? Or is it just my phone number? What the fuck are they asking for there?
Note, it’s hot and I’m doing this on a phone screen because nothing in the entire fucking world will function with a touch screen iThing running either Chrome or Safari and I don’t have my computer with me. This means I’m even more of a thickie with numbers in this particular situation than I usually am. To be honest, I think if they’d put the +44 there it would probably have been enough to clue me in.
In the end, I put in my phone number with the 01480 style area code. That didn’t work and it said no so I did the area code with no zero and a + This is the point where, were it like the name@host box or the one for the password, it would say, ‘there aren’t enough numbers here mate, have you checked that?’ Did it?
Did it balls?
It looked like it had worked, except then the activation text message didn’t come through, and now I realised it had the wrong phone number and it never would. Never mind I’d go back and—Oh. I couldn’t go back to alter the number so I tried starting again. ‘That email is already in use by another account,’ it told me. Yeh well. It smecking would, wouldn’t it. I knew, by this time, that I would never receive the activation code or set up an account with that particular email address. It would be sitting in limbo forever. I had a go anyway and screwed it totally. Thank heavens for extra email addresses.
I set up a second email address. A second look at the number part and I counted the digits with my fat, stupid, dyslexic moron’s fingers and then wrote out my phone number with the country code, the + and no zero on the area code and yes there were the same number of … you know … numbers.
+12125551234 does not tell me that. In no place did it say, type in your country code, area code and phone number as it would be dialled from abroad. That’s all they had to do, have a little question mark and put it in plain English for fuckwits such as myself, which are many and legion.
Urgh.
This time, the code comes through. Hoorah! Now to do a password. I type one. Computer says no. Not surprising, but they’ve given me list; upper case letter, yes, lower case letter, yes a, b, and c unarrupted, some numbers, yes, ‘special character?’ yeees … wait they want it to be FOURTEEN FUCKING CHARACTERS LONG!
FOURTEEN!
What bloody planet are they living on?
Not this one, surely. Who are these people? Jeez! I mean, clearly this stuff was made up by someone who’s good at figures and doesn’t use words much, someone who has one hundred different passwords, all a random mixture of letters, symbols and numbers and who—get this—remembers each and every last one of them and knows exactly which site each is for, a robot in other words. Yes, I understand that, but blimey. I typed two easily memorable passwords back to back. Then we got to the point where we were landing in the UK at 18:45 and the time was 17:55 two days before so it wouldn’t actually let us submit the stupid effing form because it wasn’t yet ‘within 48 hours of our arrival time’ by about 40 pissy little minutes.
The absolute bastard wankers.
No, you can’t do it now. Computer says, ‘no.’ You must wait 40 minutes. This, in the voice Gareth does for Denarghi.
But we’ll miss our supper booking and won’t be able to try again until tomorrow when it’s our last day and we want to be outside in the sun.
[Sound of snickering] Exactly.
That’s not my problem you pathetic little pleb you must jump through all the hoops and we will make them as difficult and varied as possible. We will give no quarter, and we certainly won’t be letting you off two and a half hours of pissy administrivia on your last day. Anyway, REAL people go by private jet, or they don’t go at all, you worthless middle-class cockwomble with your thinking and trying to be inclusive, and trying to care for the planet, and trying be nice.
Now piss off and revel in your misery you fucking, too-good-to-be-true fuck!
So it was that the next day, at lunch time, when the sun was a bit hot, we went back to the room for a cup of tea and decided to finish the forms.
So far so good, we entered all the stuff, mine had even remembered some of the information I’d put in previously, which was a turn up. Next we needed to either add a screen shot of our vaccination certificate or get the QR code upon our phones and use the iPad to take a photo. Did it work? Did it jacksey!
After a bit the form just threw up it’s hands and said, ‘you can’t fucking do this’ and automatically answered the question as NO.
Right. Onwards then. Now we needed the order number of the tests we’d ordered from Boots to take when we arrived home. Except it wasn’t a bastard order number they wanted, they wanted the serial number for each test which is a completely different chuffing thing. McOther was on the phone for ages to someone who appeared not to have a clue what he was talking about. It’s a big website, and it’s a complicated website and these people are so far in that they have no idea how totally incomprehensible parts of it can become to the uninitiated. Likewise they have no clue how many tiny, simple-yet-desperately-important pieces of guidance information that have become blindingly obvious to them are not at all clear to those of us using the thing are they have a tendency to leave crucial bits out.
Without any help from the person at the Gov website help centre, McOther finally clocked that there’d been two emails from boots, one saying, ‘here’s your order number’ and another with ‘here’s your order number and Oh! Look! here are some different details with the specific number of each one of your tests.’
By the time he was done, we’d been indoors for two ours on our last day, his face was beetroot red, there was a vain pulsing visibly in his temple and all he could say was ‘gnnnnnnrrrgh’ for some time. Actually, this isn’t true, he was remarkably chilled, but it’s an apt description of how we both felt and it makes good blog comedy so I’ll leave it in.
Having finally finished the bloody passenger locator form, we went out to play.
The Big Question.
Here it is. Why are the five hours at airports either side of the two hour flight so fucking awful? Yes, the journey home.
Saints preserve us! OK Easyjet are alright. I like them, they’re quite good and a friend of mine, whose son is a friend of McMini’s even worked for them as crew for a few months between acting jobs – as I understand it, part of the interview involved singing some bits of Les Miserables. I also have worked for National Express so I know exactly how the general public treats the people with which it interfaces while travelling. Here’s a clue. It’s warn, brown and sticky but it’s not a stick. That said, air travel is so grim that I can see why people are pretty much apoplectic with rage by the time they reach the actual bastard aeroplane.
So we arrived at the airport and while waiting for our flight to be called, we ate a packed lunch of cheese and ham with rolls and in my case, a hard boiled egg nicked from the buffet from breakfast in the hotel.
Finally, our flight was called and we went straight round to the desk and got into the queue. We waited. We waited and waited and they processed those passengers from ‘speedy boarding’ first at an extremely leisurely pace of ten minutes per group, or if it was just one on their own, ten minutes per person. People around us started doing sums about how many people fit on the model of Airbus Easyjet use and working out how long we would be waiting at ten minutes per person. Check-in opened at two o’clock and closed at four twenty. We queued until nine minutes past four, with eleven minutes to spare before they officially closed the flight.
There were two desks open and three staff; two on desks and one to flounce up and down the queue telling us to ensure we’d done our Passenger Locator Forms (why can’t they just call it a virtual landing card, for fuck’s sake! That’s what it is) and ushering the people with kids (smaller kids than our lad, obviously, to the ‘speedy’ boarding queue). Call me old fashioned but I think, possibly, if she’d just got onto another desk and processed some passengers it might have been more useful.
It was very hot and I’m still not great at standing for hours on end. I can walk or sit but stand? Nah, not really. I’ve always had a bit of a tendency to passing out when standing for great lengths of time. This was no exception. We were wearing masks which is OK but can get a bit stuffy. By the time we reached the desk, everything felt a bit weird and I had to keep bending over and putting my head down to ward off the black blobs at the corner of my vision. By the time we’d walked the short distance to the bit where they frisk you, everything was getting a bit dim and at one point when I decided to lean on a nearby bollard it all got a bit tricky to hang onto because my brain thought it had started moving.
More queuing and again, I fulfilled the eternal law that no matter how empty your pockets and beltless your ruddy trousers you will still have forgotten to take off something that makes the stupid bastard beepy, beep-every-fucking-time thing go … you know … beep. Well, apart from my leg which will set the ruddy thing off from here on in. Clearly I can’t put that in the tray though.
In this case, it was the eyelets on my shoes so I had to wait while they were taken away and put through the x ray machine again. Needless to say they saw me coming. I, the one who is always going to be frisked, was sent to stand behind some bloke who decided he would see if hell would actually freeze over before he filled his fucking tray with his stupid chuffing electronics, belt, shoes etc and pissed off out of my face through the portal of doom to pick it up the other side so I could follow suit.
As a result, both the McOthers were already through the portal of doom without being frisked and picking up their things while I was still waiting for Slow Motion Man to take off his bastard watch. Then, at last, I got to put my jacket and jumper in the tray, remove my watch, fitbit and hat (because it has a metal clip). I emptied my pockets – note to self, maybe cargo pants with loads of pockets aren’t such a good idea after all – got the ipad, kindle, phone and electronic writing tablet out of my bag, laid my bag flat, took sanitising gel and lipsalve in their special pathetic ziplock bag and put them in and then forgot to take off my stupid bloody shoes with their stupid eyelets that go beep.
Then they ran the detector over my leg and it beeped.
‘What’s in your pocket?’ demanded the lady, pulling at the pocket in my combats at the side of my leg, at which point I just rolled up my trouser leg, showed the ten inch scar and said,
‘My knee is metal.’
Ugh.
We got on the plane with about ten minutes to spare and they held it for a few minutes more so everyone else could get on. Faro is always a bit slow and steady but this time it was absolutely fucking glacial … except in temperature. Blimey.
Was it worth the hassle to go away somewhere?
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The sea, with human for scale.
Oh yeh. The sun shone the entire time, I wrote about 7k words which isn’t bad seeing as I was on holiday and therefore mainly interacting with the McOthers, and we all relaxed.
The beds at the hotel are unbelievably comfortable and we slept like logs all night, every night. It was epic. Even better, despite the fact I’ve got into the habit of waking up at 8.00 am, the clocks go back at the weekend so it’ll be seven by Monday. Bonus!
Homecoming …
I always arrange to pick up McCat the day after we get back. He wasn’t as demonstrative as sometimes but since returning home he has spent the day wandering round after me. He also yells when he comes in at which point either McMini or I will call him and he will rush to join us. It’s very endearing. There are still some pears in the garden and a friend has kept things watered – where required.
One slight fly in the ointment. We arrived to discover that the little access lane to our house is going to be dug up. I spent most of Thursday morning on the phone to various people until I tracked down a lovely woman who is managing the works and said that it would be fine and that yes, there would be trenches across the road but they would have boards and would put them over the trenches so we could get in and out. So they’re not totally closing the road.
It is a bit of a pain that our address is one street, but we live on the corner of the other one, and are one of only two houses that are accessed from the other one by car, three others have front doors there. As a result, people tend not to warn us about this stuff because they see us as the address street rather than the access street. The engineer who rang gave me her mobile number so hopefully, I can ring her if there is any trouble.
Any other disasters?
Um … yes. There’s a story but bear with me. You see, I used to get terrible acid reflux and discovered that I can reduce it hugely by drinking keffir. I therefore have a kefir plant at home which is lovingly, and not so lovingly, known as Bob, The Blob.
Bob can last two weeks if I give him lots of milk and leave him in the fridge, so this is what I had done. On Friday, realising that he’d be ravening hungry, I decided I’d better sort him out, so I got the jam jar he lives in and put it on top of the fridge freezer. Then, I got half a pint of milk—which I’d frozen specifically to feed Bob upon my return—from the freezer section. Looking at the milk, I decided I’d better put it in the fridge. I opened the fridge door and realised that a bit of Bob’s jam jar was clearly on the actual door rather than the top of the fridge.
You can tell what’s coming next, can’t you? I don’t really need to tell you.
Correct. Bob is in a glass container and in order that he doesn’t suffocate, you have to leave the lid off. In three years I have never dropped Bob … until now. Bob’s container being glass, I didn’t want to have him fall from above my head and smash on the floor. I had the fridge door handle in one hand, and I had some frozen milk in a plastic container in the other. How did I stop Bob falling? I slammed the fridge door, batting him into it. I heard the glass jar land on the glass shelf with a bang, but it was a clunk rather than the sound of a half pint jar of vile-smelling milky sludge and a glass shelf smashing into a thousand pieces.
Okaaay.
A brief aside to describe Bob. Imagine something that looks and smells like raw milk with bits of translucent tripe-like stuff (the culture) sloshing about in it. Sometimes it separates into cheesy stuff and juice. It varies in taste, usually, if you get it right, it tastes like mild feta cheese as a drink. It’s much nicer brewed in the fridge over a few days than over night in the cupboard but I do put it in the cupboard from time to time because I don’t want to stress Bob by making him too cold.
Anyway, I took a deep breath and looked into the fridge. Bob was lying on his side. Quite a lot of him was lying on the shelf, up the walls of the fridge and dripping gloopily down on the the shelves below. Upside, he hadn’t leaked into any of the drawers, and there are three. Now that’s what I call a result, even if the initial spillage was … less than successful. So I scooped most of Bob back into the jar screwed the lid on, washed it and unscrewed it.
Then I cleaned the other bits of Bob off the fridge, which took about an hour.
Downside. I had to clean the fridge, and the floor and I’ll have to rinse bob and return him to the jar without actually being able to drink any of this batch.
Upside, McOther was out and really chuffed I’d cleaned the fridge. Also the fridge needed cleaning extremely badly, and now I’ve done it.
It should be said, here, that I have NOT admitted to McOther why I’ve cleaned the fridge. This probably makes me a Bad Person. But he’s so delighted that I’ve noticed cleaning issues and fixed them (it was pretty bogging) that I haven’t the heart—or, perhaps, the courage. If you are one of my friends from the Real World, please can you keep the Real Reason for my sudden act of domesticated Proper Woman-ness under your hat. Thank you, that would be peachy.
What have we learned this week?
That I can’t half bang on, that you can throw a phone out of a moving vehicle at 30mph and it will still work and also from a straw poll of me looking at other people with their phones, that hardly anyone has a phone with an intact screen.
Mmm. It’s been a long three days since I got home. Which reminds me, Bob is still in the cupboard, in the dark, recovering from his ordeal of being splattered. I’d better give him some new milk and put him into the Fridge.
Free books …
If you like this post and want to see what my books are like you can try two of them for free. Unlucky Image may be NSFW.
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Dip and Small Beginnings are both free to download from most of the major sites, although Amazon do have a tendency to dick with the price a bit. Anyway if you’re interested Unlucky Dip is 4,000 words and is the second glimpse we have of The Pan of Hamgee’s life as he meets Big Merv, Boss of Ning Dang Po and inadvertently steals his wallet, after which, Big Merv offers him a choice; work, on an ad hoc basis, or death. The Pan, ever an intelligent young man, chooses work. Next we move onto Small Beginnings, which describes the first ‘job’ Big Merv gives The Pan to do. That is also free from most places. If you’re interested in those, you can find links to your favourite store (or my payhip store) to download them here:
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Small Beginnings
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Night Swimming
If you like, you can also find out a little about The Pan’s life when he first comes to Ning Dang Po from Hamgee.
Remember the bit in The Wrong Stuff, when The Pan tells Ruth he jumped off a bridge? Well, Night Swimming is the book to read if you want to discover what happened. Here’s the blurb:
After stealing one of the best meat pies he’s ever eaten, and returning a small lost boy home, The Pan of Hamgee should feel smug. But somehow all these things do is make him miss his own family more. In a moment of very poor judgement, he decides to end it all. But The Pan should know by now that few things he plans ever turn out the way he expects.
This story is only available when people sign up to my mailing list which entails an extra set of wittering like this once a month and stories, competitions and other jolly japes. You can sign up for that, and grab your story, here:
Audio version of Night Swimming or
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Ebook version of Night Swimming
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