Wise after the event

14st 11lb, 4.4 units. I made a useful start to the day by walking The Dog across the park so that I could drop off our application form for what has now become our dream home at the letting agent’s office. Then everything went downhill from there.

I spoke to my bank manager, who assured me that the cheque I had written to pay for Mrs H’s new car had most definitely cleared and was in the Audi dealership’s bank account. He added something that was news to me, namely that I could have paid for the thing instantaneously with my debit card, which has no limit. I wondered why the garage had not drawn this option to my attention. It is always a bit depressing to be wise after the event.

Though nothing like as depressing, it must be conceded, as having to talk to the twats at one of BT’s useless call centres in India. Admittedly I delegated this horror to Mrs H, when I had exhausted all other possibilities to try to address the failure of our internet connection, which she noticed this afternoon. My contribution consisted of turning the router on and off a few times, pressing its “reset” button and restarting our computers, all to no avail. Hers consisted of talking to a succession of barely comprehensible dimwits (one of whom apparently sounded as though he had swine flu, on top of a very thick accent) who immediately ruled out the most likely cause of the trouble, namely a fault on our telephone line, and ran through a series of other implausible possibilities before landing on that line on their card which seems to be their equivalent of “Home”: “You are needing to replace your micro-filters”. Yeah, right. That is where they always ended up when I rang up to complain in Northumberland, too, though it never, ever turned out to resolve the problem. Which, funnily enough, was always a fault on the phone line that it took a man with a set of ladders and a screwdriver to fix.