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Moving house is stressful. It’s also tiring, and when you’re in the last few days in your house, there’s the matter of cancelling/moving/amending your address & account details with around 40 different companies. Yesterday, I contacted our house insurance company in order to cancel our policy. As one might expect these days, I ended up speaking to a call centre in India…an event which only added to the stress of moving, as I couldn’t understand half of what the customer service ‘manager’ was saying, nor could he understand what I was saying.

At one stage during the telephone call, I had to chuckle. We’re moving in with my Mum-in-law for a short period until such time that the legals on our new house have been done and dusted. Dorothy’s house is an old house, built around 1887, and over time, it’s suffered war damage, as well as damp, flooding and fire (an external garage), and understandably, this is seen as a greater insurance risk to house contents whilst we’re living there in transit. ‘Nick’ from the Indian call centre asked me if the house had suffered any “heew”, so I asked him to repeat this…still couldn’t understand what he was asking, and I asked him to repeat it twice more….but I still couldn’t understand what he was asking. And then he spelt it….

H for hotel
E for echo
A for alpha
WE for wictor
E for echo

I asked him if he was saying ‘hee-we’…and he responded by saying it again, and spelling it again, including the ‘we for wictor’. Then the penny dropped. He wanted to know if the house had suffered any movement or ‘heave’ (as in ‘we for wictor’). How Ywonne and I laughed.

I’ve heard it all now. Lesbian soldier, Kerry Fletcher, who claimed that she was sexually harrassed by a male sergeant has been awarded £187,000 in compensation. OK.

The figure exceeds the £161,000 recently awarded to Marine Ben McBean, 21, who had to have both his legs amputated after he was caught in a mine blast in Afghanistan. It is also more than three times the £57,000 awarded to Private Jamie Cooper, 19, who lost the use of his leg after being hit by shrapnel in Basra and later contracted a superbug whilst undergoing treatment back in Britain.

So there you have it. You get less money for having bits of you blown off in a war, than you do for taking a case of harassment to court – at home. That’s how much your country values you. Disgusting.

It’s on the radio, the TV, the Internet, and the national news!

WHO CARES!!!!!!!!!!!

I got a txt msg d other day, that woz mostly n txt spk. It frustr8td d hell out of me, and it took me ages 2 figure out exactly wot it woz all about. I h8ted it, and I cudnt make hed nor tail of it. If u think dis is bad, u shud have read d whole thing! 4 d record, here’s d full list:-

I’m fuming! I heard on the news this morning that BP announced a 23% profit increase for the first half of 2008…get this, a profit of $13.4 billion!!!!! Whilst you and I suffer at the pump, BP is raking in the money…and just for the benefit of my Irish readers, the average price of diesel here in the UK is £1.30 per litre!

Earlier on in the year, I signed an electronic petition on the Downing Street website to reduce the amount of fuel tax duty by 20p per litre, which now seems pale in comparison to the current cost. Sure, there are global forces at work here, but nothing is being done here in the UK to assist the average man (that’s the only context in which you’ll EVER hear me describe myself as average!).

I’ll tell you how bad things are – Ryanair are predicting losses for the year! Probably more worrying, is that across the big pond, Bush has already urged Congress to end a ban on drilling for oil in US coastal waters, to make the US less reliant on imports. What he really means is drilling under the Arctic Ocean. Makes my own anger at pump prices seem petty.