June 2005

Whilst looking to equip my flat recently, I couldn’t help but notice this juxtaposition of rampant consumerism and idealistic nihilism. Or it could just be that the designer’s boss was a fartyg fuga. Or something.

Yes, I have broadband. I’m not sure just how broad my band is. I’m paying for 2Mbps, but all my downloads are coming through at 256Kbps, no faster, and frequently slower. I’ve emailed Tiscali. What is it with contact companies nowadays? You can’t just email them, you need to go on a treasure hunt to find the contact sheet, then fill in a form that would scare off applicants for MI6 jobs. Finally, you get an automatic response after a couple of days that has absolutely nothing to do with your query. Then of course, you reply to that email and a day later you get another automatic reply telling you that this email address is not valid - perhaps you’d like to try the help page on their web site? Fuckers.

I’d call, but it’s buggery rate, 0870, with interminable hold, perennially pissed off helpline staff who rejoice in cutting you off every time there is a change in your chance of getting anywhere and of course, no one that can actually remember what you last spoke to them about. This is a ploy of course. A two-pronged assault on your patience. The first prong pokes directly at your boredom-pain-threshold centres. Can you really be arsed to go through the whole thing again? Hopefully (for them), you will piss off, and keep paying them for a service that doesn’t work out of a direct debit that can’t be cancelled, and a contract that ties you, your children and your pets to a draconian contract with fatally onerous terms from which you cannot extract yourself.

You could write to them, but you will be ignored. You could write to ombudsarseholes, but they don’t actually have the power to do anything at all. You could go bankrupt, but you’ll never buy a house or see any of your money again.

It hasn’t got that bad just yet of course, but I can recount (whoops, nearly dropped the ‘o’ there, a mum of a friend, who really shouldn’t be wasting her time reading this, but to my eternal embarrassment has been, will be cross!) numerous horror stories from my recent and distant past that attest to this sequence of events. I’m sure you have stories of your own.

Let’s see if Tiscali write back to the correct email address.

Regardless, it’s great to be back online, writing again.

A few things have changed:

1. I’ve got a flat
2. I now have broadband (don’t ask, oh, ok, go on, ask)
3. I’ve packed in cigarettes. Again. Please God.
4. I’ve eaten healthily. Today.
5. I call “time-out” on chats with my ex before they become arguments

It is of course, time to grow up. One other thing I’ll probably do is cut down on the swearing. In fact, I’ve already done that to some extent. I’ve just trawled through this entire page and found it reasonably devoid of vitriol. Well, by my standards anyway. Which of course, are a degree, but no more, above sub-neanderthal.

My life is getting a re-boot. You should have seen the pile of papers that I threw out! I had a folder from the day my father died that grew and grew, and stopped growing once I had handled the probate, the will, the estate, the Revenue, the creditors, the beneficiaries, the mortgage company, the managing agents, the solicitors, yes, the list is endless. This file took up a third of an archive box. Maybe 500 pages or more of material. I dumped all bar 5 pages.

All my receipts and most of my phone bills and statements went too. Anything related to my involvement with the community I used to belong to, pretty much all of that got binned. I filled two blag bin bags with paperwork. It was impressive. I figured that since the filing cabinet had been pre-emptively trashed, I might as well follow through and discard the detritus that after yet another move, would have been re-housed with nary a glance at the contents. The cycle had to be interrupted. I am lighter, but I must get lighter still.

The great book give-away has started. I have piles and piles of good books in great condition - if you know me at all, you know the condition in which my stuff is kept - if you want any of these, pop over and just take them. There’s some good stuff there. Most of it in fact, is expensive and good. I don’t want it because I’ve either read it, or don’t want to read it. And I simply can’t be bothered to sell it. So if you want some of it, come over!

A dear, dear, dear friend sent me this text last December, which I prize and which has in its own way, helped me over the last six months when I felt groundless:

Hope everything went well! You have courage in your convictions, proud to call you a friend. Those who point their fingers at you, fuck them

Fuck them indeed. Except that now, nobody is really pointing fingers and if they were, I would no longer notice. If you’ve got time to take out of your own valuable life to point fingers, then good luck to you. Only don’t be surprised when I no longer take time out of mine to notice. Some things have changed. And it’s about time.

***

I saw my girls today. I picked them up from school, and you should have seen them run towards me in the playground. If I could only describe to you how a father feels when his child runs towards him with sheer joy. Sometimes I mentally pinch myself, surely, this love is not for me? What did I do to earn this?

I took them to JJ Toys, Gap and the sweet shop. Then we took a tube and a bus to my place in Cricklewood. (My home. It’s good to have a home. Don’t take it for granted.) We got bagels, pasties, cookies and browsed around a few local shops. If you know Cricklewood, you’ll remember that the local facilities aren’t much to write home about. Which is just as well because if you live there, it would be stupid to write home, you might as well just walk back.

My eldest, get this, is recreating a scene from Macbeth with papier mache. When I was a boy, we were lucky just to read Macbeth before secondary school. My youngest did some homework and showed me her growing pile of Pokemon cards. Worrying. Weren’t these things supposed to have gone out of fashion? They’re £2.75 for a packet of 9! Of course, children don’t get that. Why should they? It’s only money! It took me 39 years to learn the value of money.

I made them dinner then dropped them home by bus.

***

I was hoping to try out StreetCar in order to visit Ikea and pick up some more bookcases. I was at Maida Vale and wanted some place slightly north of me, but hopefully, not too far from Cricklewood. The nearest one, as I suspected, was at West Hampstead.

“Is there an automatic there?” I asked the Australian rep (London has become utterly besieged by Ozzies)
“Err, no, we have just the one car at West Hampstead and it’s out, sorry”
Not easily deterred, I continued “Fine, so when’s it back?”
“Erm, tomorrow 9a.m.”

Great. They have a branch at Camden and another at Bayswater. I just took a bus home. I think I’ll retrieve my deposit from this slightly worse than useless outfit and use it to service my bicycle.

Now that the decree absolute has come through, my anger and hatred towards my ex has gone. Let’s get this straight, this doesn’t translate to a full-on forget episode, the kind that allowed me to fall into her traps many times in the past, but it does mean that I am looking forward more. I am spending far less time thinking of regret and pain and humiliation. Even the act of writing these powerful, emotionally charged words feels a little alien.

Of course, my moving on from the pain of the past makes me no less wary of pain in the future. It will come, but I will not hold my breath, or grudges. I remain deeply concerned about the psychological welfare of my wonderful children, with whom I spent a short day yesterday. Especially my eldest, who I fear has developed a deep distrust of adults. Not a bad defence mechanism if you ask me. I am spending more time bolstering the self-belief of my younger daughter. I will need to try new methods of conidence building with my eldest. She is practically a teenager, and almost as tall as me. She doesn’t believe my usual affirmations, or rather, she might do at a subconscious level, but her defence mechanisms compel her to boomerang these back at me.

They still feel as if I walked out on them, which technically, is true. My focus is on starting the second half of my life. I am getting better with decisions, making more of them, sticking by them, less fear, all good.

It’s the second half of my life. I am 3-0 down, but I believe, I really, really, really believe.

BT as you know, can’t get their act together. Despite being in my flat for over a fortnight, I still don’t have a working telephone line. I expect an engineer on Tuesday.

Even more worryingly, in my search for an alternative, it transpired that my area is not covered by Telewest, or NTL, the only cable providers of note in the country. It is staggering that my area isn’t covered by cable.

Then I called Homechoice, a provider of on-demand TV, cable and telephone services. They can’t do anything without a BT line. You might recall from an earlier post that Bulldog, the 8Mb expensive broadband operator, who install telephone lines, can’t do anything without BT doing something first.

As a result of all this, it’s become very clear that we still have a monopoly in this country for telephone line provision. How daft is that? All the other service providers are hamstrung by their reliance on line provision by BT, and the cable providers deserve their financial woes if they can’t even manage to cover London properly.

My flat was previously occupied by hookers. The telephone line had not been disconnected. Allow me to borrow a phrase from our American cousins. “You do the math”.

Obviously I have contacted British Telecom to arrange for a new line. All seemed to be going really well. I didn’t need an engineer to visit. Then I did need a visit. The engineer came, and my line seemed to be working. I came back yesterday evening to find that my line was even less functional than before, in fact, I couldn’t even call the engineer. So I called their freephone number from my mobile. Only, from a mobile, it’s not free. I waited for 10 minutes on hold, then gave up. Time I could have spent, minutes I could have better spent, talking with my children.

I called again this morning. After 15 minutes on hold from my mobile, I was hung up on. I had to get my sister to call them from her landline. They called me back. They can’t get an engineer out to me for a week. I was to say the least, disappointed.

I tried Telewest for an alternative. They don’t serve my area. I won’t touch NTL with a bargepole, and certainly not with an ADSL router, never mind my banana phone.

I tried Bulldog Broadband who are an expensive option, but they were able to serve my area and have an 8Mb ADSL connection. They also connect telephone lines. Except that they have to go through BT and therefore couldn’t do anything for a month or more.

You would have thought that 21st century Britain could get its act together in the landline department. That’s what happens when you have an effective monopoly, people get shafted and have no recourse.

The good news is that I finally managed to figure out my gas boiler (I have created fire!) and so finally, finally, I have hot water. I will never take a shower for granted again!

The Oyster Card. I used to think this was the tool of Satan. The vehicle by which all Londoners would be tracked, followed, monitored, buggered and conned out of the money they save on the great value for money weekly bus passes. For those of you who still don’t know what I’m moaning about now, the Oyster Card is a blue smart-card that is tapped against readers on buses and tube trains. I had heard that all one’s details are stored on a databse, and that Ken Livingstone sits in his penthouse office suite at 1, Ivory Tower, London W1 and monitors the comings and goings of all the sheep-like Londoners.

I was also upset that the cheaper travelcards, the ones that need to be displayed to a bus driver, or put through a grumpy reader, were going to be phased out, simply because they work out cheaper and Ken doesn’t like to lose out.

It was with a severe bleating degree of sheepishness that I discovered the flaws in my assumptions. It is quite possible to get an Oyster Card without furnishing Transport for London with any personal details whatsoever. Just as long as you’re putting a little credit on or buying a cheap bus pass to put on it.

There are three reasons I’m happy with the Oyster Card.

1. It’s convenient. Tapping against a reader is fast, so time is saved. There is no need to engage with the bus driver at all. I like not having to engage with someone who by the nature of his job has to assume that you are trying to defraud him.
2. It’s flexible. I can have a number of “cards” or “credit” on the card at one time. I currently have two passes on. The second was bought ahead of time and will run from the minute that my current pass expires. I also have some credit that is used in case I wish to use the tube. In any event, the cheapest option is charged at the end of the day.
3. It’s efficient. If you use a combination of travel options through various zones during the day, you will be charged the cheapest overall price. This saves you having to work out what you’re going to do at the beginning of your travel period and allows you to be flexible if you need to be.

Let’s hope these advantages are not eventually weighed down by a loss of privacy. Note that although it works out for me, if you want a monthly pass, or protection against loss and theft, you still have to register. The Mayor has mentioned the possibility of the Oyster Card eventually being used as a widely accepted method of payment across all of London for a number of goods and services. That’s when things might get scary.

I must have been stuck in a time-warp. I’ve noticed more and more people on buses putting their feet on seats. I feel at odds with the world. What happened to consideration for others? Don’t people care about manners anymore?

Then there’s the utter disintegration of queues. Nobody queues for buses anymore. People now throng for buses. The order of boarding is arbitrary, an utterly junglist free-for-all. Pregnant women, old ladies, mothers with prams, tossed aside as the fittest (least considerate) barge for the front.

Respect for others is a fast dwindling quality. The buses are just a symptom. I find this depressing.

Things are turning. I have a place. I’m not in yet, I have to find the cash for a bed and sofa-bed (somewhere for me and my kids to sleep) and do all the usual chores one needs to when moving in somewhere.

No broadband yet, but I have a phone line, though no phone connected to it yet.

Lots to do, but life is turning. It is the second half of the Champions League (interesting how I used that particular metaphor a day or two before the epic encounter!) and anything is possible.

I am still broke, but that is temporary. I am still disorientated, but I will find direction. I have grown, I know it. I’m far less materialistic. I have stopped getting angry with my ex. She is what she is. May Allah guide and protect her. May she find peace and happiness. May she be the best mother she can possibly be, before it’s too late.

I was in debt before this traumatic period, and I am no further in debt. That’s an achievement. I have hope, strength and optimism. I have faith and I know I am capable of patience and endurance.

May God bless all of you who have been following my progress and offered words or prayers of support, and often much more. Thank you.

Right - enough of the Halle Berry Oscar speech shit, back to normal service the second I have broadband. I promise to report on some really interesting stuff.