Happy Mondays

Monday evening, and all is right with the world. Several things are contributing to a warm glow inside, not least the unseasonably warm weather.

1) I thought I had a meeting tomorrow, which would have meant all kinds of inconvenience like actually getting out of bed, putting clothes on, etc. But it turns out that this meeting is not for another two weeks - which means I have a nice clear calendar tomorrow.

2) Thoughts of the approaching Bank Holiday next Monday.

3) The knowledge that I made two phone calls today which saved me £120.50. No, really, it was awfully good. First I rang up O2, the mobile people, to cancel my contract. This isn't a proper "mobile phone" contract, this is a "data only" contract, what high powered executives use to read their email on their laptops. It's not much - about £10 a month - but it's not especially useful and my year is up, so I rang up to cancel.

It should have been an easy kill - wasn't expecting any resistance at all. Got put through to "Retentions", better known as the stop-them-cancelling department, and it seems that they would just hate to lose me. Seriously. "Of course you can cancel, and that is fine, but would you be interested in a special offer?" They could offer me a handset upgrade but that would be silly for a "data" product, so instead would I like a £100 credit on the account?

Not actually a terrible offer for a contract that costs £112.80 a year. So that's another year's service for £12 and change. Daft to say no, so I said yes. Five minutes on the phone well spent.

Flushed with success, but still having spent the day not having actually cancelled anything, my attention turned to my ratty old analogue cable TV service. I'd been thinking of cancelling for years but never got around to it - so now is the time.

Virgin Media is basically the new name for what was (and actually still is) NTL, so unfortunately the process of getting through on the phone was considerably less smooth. The first lady I got through to took all my details, but noticed that I used to be an NTL customer so of course she could not help me. She put me through to someone else. More hold music later and I am speaking to a second lady, who takes my details. Apparently I am on a different system, and there is absolutely nothing she can do to help me, she will have to put me through to someone else. More hold music later and finally I end up speaking to a very nice lady indeed, who sounds like she is from Liverpool.

Of course I can cancel, and that is fine, but how about £15 a month for the next three months? Well, it's a discount, but £15 is still a lot of money for a handful of channels that even Freeview people would consider to be a bit limited. Then how about £11 for this month and £15 for the next two months?

I bottle out at the last minute. Unable to take the final definitive step to cancel my cable, I accept the discounts with good grace and promise to think about it again in three months time. But the day ends with me having saved £120.50 in total just from a few phone calls.

Of course, that's the positive spin. Look at it another way and I have in fact lost £53.80 because if I had actually cancelled the mobile and the cable I would not have had to pay ANYTHING, but these offers mean I am still paying for things I do not entirely want, even if it is £120.50 less than I would have had to.

It still seems like a good deal. But I'm definitely cancelling that cable in three months time.

You Could Have It So Much Better With Yul Brynner

"Bangkok - oriental setting and the city don't know what the city is getting..
The creme de la creme of the chess world in a show with everything but Yul Brynner..."
- 'One Night In Bangkok', from the 'Chess' Soundtrack

So here's my question. If the show has everything, where's Yul? Was he busy? Maybe he was washing his hair that day. But it seems such a shame that "the show with everything" is lacking just one crucial aspect. Imagine how great it would be if it really had everything, including Mr Brynner. That would really be the show with everything, wouldn't you say?

What Other People Eat

One disadvantage of being lazy enough to have your groceries brought to your door by the nice people at Tesco is that sometimes you do not always get everything you order. Sometimes things are out of stock, or not available in the quantity that you require. Sometimes you will get a 'substitution', where they'll give you something that's sort-of like what you asked for, because they don't have what you asked for.

Then again, sometimes you just get something else entirely. Last week (and I should have written about it sooner, I know) I found that I ended up with five bags of someone else's shopping. I did phone them up to let them know, and they said that the driver might come back to get them - but then again, they might not. After all, some people might not want any groceries that have spent a few hours in someone else's smelly old hallway.

It happens that the driver did not come back for them, and therefore to the victor go the spoils. As I look through the items in the other bags, I form a mental picture of the kind of interesting lifestyle that they must lead. Not for them the Pot Noodle and Chocolate Milk. Not in these bags, anyway. No, these mystery shoppers buy products that are different to those that I would select. This therefore makes them unusual and exotic. What kind of people would buy items like this?

Unsweetened soya milk. Presumably from unsweetened soya cows. How very curious.

One large cucumber. OK, nothing unusual about this. Stop laughing. Lots of people enjoy cucumbers, both in sandwiches and as part of a properly cooked and assembled main meal.

Wholemeal pitta bread. Oo, exotic. Not sure this would fit in the toaster.

Wholemeal Tortilla Wraps. Hm. Spicy.

Three tins of sweetcorn. Oo, I like sweetcorn. Never had it from a tin before, though.

Mexican spice mix. Aha, it looks like our mystery shoppers are slaves to convenience food after all. Well, perhaps slightly.

Whole washed chilli peppers. Far out. But amongst an otherwise very healthy and herbal and wholemeal selection of products, these chilli peppers do not fit the ethos of the obvious hippies who ordered them. Why? Well, it says quite clearly on the wrapper that these chillies are from Zimbabwe. My limited understanding of world politics tells me that supporting Zimbabwe is not cool at all.

One jar of barbeque sauce. Yuk.

Apple juice. Ah, at last, something which I might be able to use.

So I guess this bonus shopping is not a complete washout. In an attempt to broaden my mind, I may well sample some, most, or all of these items - although the chillies can go straight in the bin along with the barbeque sauce, because I am not at home to any such things. But who knows, I might find that I actually like soya milk, even if it is the "unsweetened" variety, which sounds even more harsh and austere a regime than even having ordinary soya milk along with your wholemeal tortillas.

A few bags of my shopping weren't delivered that week, either. In my case it was a few bags of white bread that went missing. Perhaps they got delivered to the hippies. I'm sure they would disapprove. Or maybe they will consume it anyway, as it was free, and I will have set them on the road to ruin. Who knew that a simple weekly shop could have such incredible consequences? If we ever stopped to consider such things, I'm quite sure that nothing would ever get done at all.

The Year Of Tidying Up

It crossed my mind some weeks ago that, with my grand tidy-up now into its fourth great month and counting, there is still so much more to do. I wondered if 2007 might not be "The Year Of Tidying Up", in that it might take me the whole year to get it all done.

It could be worse than that - but I hope not.

A bit later I realised that maybe it might not be quite that bad. After all, there's not too many rooms that need my attention - the bathroom is in pretty good order, and the kitchen isn't in such bad shape either. The problem areas are really things like cupboards, bedrooms, front rooms, and the hallway which has been such an easy place to stack boxes "just until I get tidy".

There is some light at the end of the tunnel. It's still some way away, but I'm getting there, piece by piece. Tidying is pretty much the only thing in my life right now, but progress is slow, and this week entirely non-existent because I have been laid up with something mid-way between a cold and the full-on flu.

Tonight I am feeling slightly more human again, and as the easter weekend awaits I am hopeful that I will be able to conduct still more tidying. I have my eye on a tea chest underneath my old computer desk, which I had not been able to (easily) reach for some years. I'm pretty sure there can't be anything too important in it, so perhaps if I can break it out and have a look through it, I will find more opportunities to be ruthless and dispose of some more long-hoarded junk.

I'm making small amounts of space by judicious re-packing of storage boxes, and this evening I brought four boxes of "stuff for eBay" down to three (helped by having sold some of it), and I was also able to rationalise three boxes of used jiffy bags and bubble wrap down to just two. This has freed two boxes which I can use to store more things in, more neatly, freeing still more space to enable me to reach those previously-buried places where junk and rubbish is hiding.

Actually "junk and rubbish" is a bit harsh. None of the things I have are junk or rubbish - but with my new spirit of ruthlessness and tidiness and "can't possibly live like this any more"-ness, they are things which I don't want quite as much as I once did.

I'll doubtless be unloading more and more of the salvagable stuff onto eBay - a recent impromptu listing of about 110 CDs and books and DVDs actually ended up with me shifting about 35 of them (and making £170 in the process) and that's not bad if I do say so myself. Of course small things are easy to sell, and easy to post. It's the big things like huge old computers that are tricky. You don't see may Amstrad PC1512s on eBay (perhaps because they're nearly 20 years old now) and even when you do, nobody seems to want them. I have three of the things. I fear that I will have to be my most ruthless yet and actually throw them away. I need some time to build up to that.

I can't help but worry how astonishingly boring it must be for anyone actually reading this blog, how it seems that the minutae of tidying up is the only thing I talk about now - over and over, again and again - but hopefully once the whole agonising process is complete, I'll be able to think about more interesting matters.

Let's just hope it doesn't take me much longer.. :-)