A happy belated new year to my
regular readers (and any new ones who have found their way to my works of
rantings) – I hope 2013 is a good one for you all.
Christmas passed without incident
this time fortunately, nobody overate and my father resisted the temptation to
induce illness by snacking on meat products that had been left out for too
long. We even managed to celebrate
Boxing Day with friends on the actual day this time. Santa did well with his delivery of goodies
and the reindeer appreciated the plate of carrots that I left out for
them. They had all gone by Christmas
morning.............although there was rather a large pan of sliced carrots on
the hob. Surely there cannot have been a connection? I will investigate further.
Back in the world of my peculiar
dreams (amazing I have any at all really considering the few hours sleep I
manage to snatch each night)........I did have to check the details with my
parents and fortunately they were able to confirm that they were not moving
back to Harrow, and my father was certainly not going to abandon my mother to
go and live with Esther Rantzen. Glad I
got that cleared up then.
Prior to Christmas I placed an
order with Jessops for a slide scanner.
I paid for overnight delivery and the following day the box
arrived. Excellent................or
not. They managed to put the wrong item
in and sent my scanner to Southport.
This was the Thursday prior to Christmas.......by the time I had been
lied to several times, promised delivery of the correct item the following day
and so on, I eventually received it a full week after I had ordered it, having
not been sent out until Christmas Eve.
With service like that is it any wonder they went belly up the next
week? John Lewis also let me down with
their next day delivery........all the paperwork in the store I was collecting it
from said it was there but it was somewhere else with the courier company. Once again I was lied to time and time again
and I eventually received it nearly a week late. On the plus side they did contact me within
an hour of picking it up and told me that a credit would be applied to my
Barclaycard (sadly not for the full amount).
Why in this country do we put up with such poor service? Customer service is totally lacking in many
cases and with more and more retailers going out of business there should be a
wakeup call from the survivors to pull their fingers out and get on top of
shoddy delivery and rude staff.
The snow hit us last week and
shows no sign of melting any time soon.
Quite frankly I had had enough of it after the first hour, particularly
as 24 hours prior to this I had been skipping along the beach on the south
coast and paddling in the sea. Such a
change in the weather is not welcome.
Snow belongs up a mountain in Austria where in fact my brother is
heading this week for his annual skiing trip.
Perhaps I could bag a load of snow up for him to take as carry on
luggage, thereby relieving us of some?
Just an idea.
With the current weather
conditions I have confined my parents to barracks and am doing their daily
shopping. There is no way I am risking
Mum’s new hip that was installed nearly a year ago and Dad won’t wear
appropriate warm clothing most of the time.
I have been forced to threaten confiscation of Mum’s boots though as I
have discovered she keeps popping out (along the icy path) to the
bin........... Ha, try doing that with no winter boots on! They are going pretty stir crazy though as
they are used to being out and about every day.
This is the ideal time to crack on with sorting out photo albums, doing
a bit of decorating, writing large cheques to their favourite daughter etc. but
instead so far they have tried making soup in their new soup maker (it went
down the sink), and sampling a large lump of Panettone (the garden birds are
enjoying it instead). Roll on the big
thaw when they can get back to their thrice weekly trips to the nearest large
town, where Mum can scuttle about doing the shopping and Dad can count the number
of obese people eating sausage rolls whilst wearing vests with heavily tattooed
arms showing, and bending over to reveal a grey-rather-than-white thong poking
over the top of their chav jogging pants.
