Dreams, snow and thongs

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.