Woke up this morning and someone had humorously hidden the sun and was pretending its late October. This seems to be some kind of conspiracy, considering I was hoping to be in Santa Barbara this week and next. I’m now living in mortal dread of the next York winter, with all its sideways freezing rain and daily 2-hour crepuscule that passes for sunlight.
SimonG’s blog helpfully brought up Domino’s Pizza … uh … the subject of Domino’s Pizza today, jogging my memory of Kate’s and my recent experience of Domino’s. We planned a night in with pizza and a movie. We were a bit broke though. We ordered £11.99’s worth* of pizza. The guy on the phone said “That’ll be £9.99 and it’ll be ready in 15 minutes”.
Great, thought I, we seem to have saved a couple of bob.
We made our way down in due course to the shop to pick up.
“Carter, to pick up” said I, at the raised eyebrow of the yoof.
“Veg supreme, hold the sweetcorn, add pepperoni?”
“Yep”
“It’s paid for?”
“No,” said I
“No,” said Kate
The yoof handed the pizza over
“Have a nice evening” said the yoof
We did.
* “worth” is too strong a word, here. I really mean “pizza to an incurred charge of £11.99″
Went to Kate’s allotment for the first time today. It was great fun. I did a bit of hoe-ing and got to scratch my chin and suck my teeth at the greenhouse she’s thinking of tearing down / rebuilding / replacing. Very therapeutic.
Friday night was Charles and Andrea’s 25th Wedding Anniversary which was lovely, out in the Stone Trough Inn in Kirkham, a tiny community around an ancient priory, and the seeming hub of a cluster of villages there near the A64. There was some salsa and some regular music: it’s interesting to see how salsa folk get lost when dancing to music there aren’t any rules for! We’d gone in the wee car which ran almost like a dream all the way there. After the pub it was back to their house and a quick jam in their well-equipped practice room in the west wing. Well equipped, that is, apart from a snare drum, necessitating creative employment of the tom toms.
Next morning Kate and I headed north to Norton and dropped the Spitfire off for a service, distributor overhaul and general tweakings at the hands of the Heritage Car Company. I’d approached with a sense of foreboding after someone at the party from Norton had said if the guy was who they thought it was he was extremely dodgy and not to be trusted. Well it turned out not to be the guy he described so I’m feeling a little more relaxed about things, but I won’t be happy till I get her back, intact, for a less than extortionate bill.
With Kate, my native guide to getting around sans car, I took the bus back to York. We went into town and managed a personal best each for getting in, done, and out again.
Last night I “watched” the football in possibly the most terrifying way possible. Not having the slightest interest in the game, I went for a meal for Kate’s friend Rim’s birthday. Strangely, Andrew “Griff” Griffin was there, who I’d not seen for five or six years, but who I’d been wondering about the previous day.
It was ladies’ night at the restaurant, and some kind of Matalan staff party was in full swing. Round the corner, invisible to us, was a small lounge area showing the footy. The result was that there were probably 4 guys in there, all in our party, and the rest of the restaurant was rammed to the gills with Matalan-accoutred females mostly mid-20s to mid-30s. When England scored, the entire place erupted into female-only cheering and jubilation.
Imagine the terror of sharing a pub with a hen party.
Now treble it.
Finally shifted this. Bought off computer science dept for nostalgic reasons, and possibly the very machine I did my final project on, it goes to its new home tonight. I’ll be £20 and 3 cubic feet richer!
Hello, yes, I know I didn’t blog yesterday. I did the familiar routine of saving it till I wasn’t blogging on company time, then neglecting to do so before going to bed. In mitigation, I DID
a) fix the spitfire!!
b) ‘finish’ de-junking the junk room (as a junk room, it will never be de-junked, and I did gloss over some cupboards… but the room now functions as a lab and studio so that’s a major bonus
c) cook
d) watch 2/3 of the italian job (original) with kate, in preparation for seeing the modernfangled version
e) sort out a few papers
f) dig out the lounge floor again (with kate’s able assistance) from the mounds of “stuff to jettison”
Obligatory complaint: the new blogger is a bit sucky. I can’t see a summary of recent posts while typing my current one, and it takes more clicks to get from one blog to the other than it used to. If only it didn’t do everything else so well (except comments, which seem to plum refuse to work for me) then I’d use something else…
You may have noticed a lot of my blogs lately are whinges about service. I notice I’m turning into a Grumpy Old Man. This is interesting because I made a positive decision to be more demanding when I got back from the USA and since then I’ve been exploring the nature of service, complaining, and lack of same in the UK. Last weekend I was chatting with a Frenchman and he thought it strange too how Brits do not complain: even given appalling food they will respond with a faux-joyeux “lovely, thanks” when pressed by the waiter.
I have a few half-baked notions for how it may have come about, but we are definitely stuck in a vicious cycle now: British customers don’t complain, so British staff don’t get used to dealing with complaints, so when customers DO complain, it doesn’t do any good. The cycle has to be broken somewhere, so I’m doing my bit and (a) trying to take criticism positively, and (b) trying to be more demanding / assertive / critical.
I just need to work on directing these criticisms where they can be useful. For now, I vent these views here in the hope I can encourage a culture of constructive complaint and maybe, just maybe, get people to hope for - nay, demand - levels of service comparable to mainland Europe and the USA. If I were American I would be able to call it my Patriotic Duty.
This morning the spitfire was still playing silly buggers so I cycled into work. As I got up to speed I rediscovered the missing cable for changing the front gearset. No worries, thought I, I’m late for work anyway so I’ll drop in Cycle Heaven en route and pick up a replacement to fit tonight. They open at 11:30 on Tuesdays! Bizarre.
My experience of Cycle heaven has been “not appalling”… But they refused to clean the chain as part of a service (though replaced a tyre unbidden which brought the fee up to £32 or thereabouts), and they want £12 for a headstock spanner, which you can get for £7 in Halfords. The main reason I go to cycle heaven is that it’s near me.
I used to go to York cycle works until once when I was restoring my old bike I ordered two new wheels from them and when I got them home, the bearings were worse than the wheels I’d discarded. I took them back to the shop and explained about the rumble. The response was “yeah, they’re not very good, those wheels.”
WELL DON’T SELL ME THEM THEN!!
Anyhow. I later bought a cheap bike from Tony Boswell’s Cycles on Tang Hall Lane. A year after that I took it back for a service. He charged £8 (or maybe £12 it was a while ago) and it ran like new. So you can see it was a shock to the system to pay £32 for a service at Cycle Heaven.
Today I popped into Tony Boswell’s - he’s near to our new office - to pick up the gear cable. £3 with a couple of bits of metal for crimping on thrown in for free. THAT’s what I call service. Now to the point. I don’t expect Tony Boswell makes great profits, what with the amount of service you get and the amount he charges. So all we can do is boycott the pretentious, brand-conscious, lazy bike shops and patronise Tony at every opportunity.
The swimming pool at the Barbican, which was the only one that side of town to suitably serve paupers like you or I, closed down years ago after years of neglect. The council ignored the pleas of the townsfolk to reopen it and instead came up with a “[blah blah] choice [blah blah] community [blah]” in other words, let a bunch of capitalists get in there and steal one of the finest community facilities in York.
Today, walking past it on the way to the bus stop, I saw they were having a “find out about the future of the barbican” day. For the rest of the way into work I fantasised about organising a flashmob type event wherebay all day people would wander in and enthuse about how good it was to hear the pool was reopening.
I just went on the barbican website for info and it seems we are getting a pool after all! Yay! Well, half a pool. York only has one olympic-sized swimming pool. Which they’re talking about chopping in half.