Cold, chilly day today and I am sitting here well wrapped up but, gosh, my hands are cold so typing as quickly as I can to see if I can warm the fingers up a bit.
I am currently compiling my list of Books of the Year for which title there are fifteen contenders and hope to have this post up in a couple of days with links to all reviews etc. I cannot think that another book will come up and hit me in the face like a wet kipper before the end of 2009 which will qualify, around Christmas time a load of dross is published along the lines of Do Penguins Feel the Cold? and 'celeb' autobiographies of mind numbing banality (see below) .....
Alan Titchmarsh (a gardener and writer of very bad novels):
"Alison and I married in 1975 and moved into a tiny end of terrace house in Sunningdale. At first I wrote in the spare bedroom -pine table, pale blue Laura Ashley sprigged wallpaper - but eventually I built a shed in the garden"
And this man was also employed by the BBC to front their coverage of the Last Night of the Proms....'sigh'
I am just chuntering along at the moment reading-wise, re-reading and taking it easy. Last night I put back the last Georgette Heyer that I have just read for the umpteenth time and discovered They Found him Dead by the same author, one of her mystery novels which I did not even know I possessed. I think I bought it by mistake... Anyway, decided to give it a shot and as Heyer is an excellent writer and her historical novels have long been favourites of mine, took me all of five minutes to realise I was thoroughly enjoying it and am nearly at the end now. I can think of no reason for my not having read any of these before, save the thought that perhaps I decided years ago to save them up for later when I was old and grey (I am saving Wagner's Parsifal for the same reason but have a ghastly feeling that if I do get to know this particular opera, it might well finish me off) and am, therefore, delighted to find them later on in my reading life. I am also delighted to find that she wrote twelve mystery titles so I feel an Elaine Binge coming on. May wait until 2010 though then I can call my reading of them the First Binge of the Year.
Now complete change of subject.
I don't know if you will remember or not, but earlier this year I had a set to with my electricity provider over a bill that they sent me for a ludicrous amount and after much correspondence and shrieking down the phone (me) I got the entire bill credited and re-read which resulted in a refund of over £500. Thank goodness that was that I thought. I received a notice recently that a bill would be due soon and so I read my meter, as I always do, and submitted it on line, as I always do and up it comes and says Thank you this has been noted, and then I receive, as I always do, an ESTIMATED bill. What is the point of me reading my meter if they are going to ignore me I ask myself?
I had worked out my bill, covering paper in calculations of watts used, price etc and came to the conclusion that I would be in credit, not much, but in credit. So when I received an ESTIMATED bill again telling me I owed them nearly £400 I hit the ceiling and got on the phone and shrieked AGAIN at some poor benighted soul who was unlucky enough to take my call, what the hell they were playing at what was the point of my reading a meter if they were going to ignore it every single time and I had been with them for a year now and congratulations because in that entire year they have got every single bill wrong and when the hell are they going to pull their finger out and get it right and how dare they tell me I had to increase my standing order to £170 a month when I lived in a once bedroomed apartment with no central heating and so on and so forth. I only stopped when I ran out of breath .......
This very nice long suffering lady then took the meter reading I had taken some five minutes before the call and went off to work out my bill and came back to tell me, yes, you have guessed it, I was in credit to the tune of £11.59 which is approximately what I had thought when I calculated my bill.
I made the point that I am a well educated and fairly articulate woman (as no doubt she had noted) who did not suffer fools gladly (which no doubt, she had also noted) so I was not going to let this go, but I asked how do you think someone poor and/or old living on their own and perhaps not being totally au fait with computers or large companies, would feel receiving a letter and a bill like this? And how would they sort it out? It is a well known fact that all electricity companies have loadsa money sitting in their banks which belongs to us as the consumers have overpaid. Well, not this baby.
So a letter confirming I don't have to pay £170 a month is being sent to me and also a recalibrated bill and I have the name of the person I spoke to, essential when you ring a call centre, in case I have to get back to them. I know a lot of my friends think I relish a good fight and getting stuck in and, yes I do when I think it is for a worthwhile cause, but I should not be doing this every single time I get a bill. It is just exhausting.
Well even writing about it is causing me to get cross. On the plus side, my fingers are now nicely warmed up...
