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Tuesday, July 01, 2008

Big, bad bank!


Never, never bank with BBVA.

Follow this simple rule and your way through life has just got to be better.

Not only was there the usual long queue of frustrated ‘customers’ in this apology for a financial institution but also my bank book did not work. When it finally did manage to get printed I discovered that this bunch of thieving pirates had stolen over €100 to service my money which the bank has locked away.
Six months rent ripped from my hands and imprisoned as some sort of surety for the flat. I will never forgive them! This money is locked in the bank ‘in case of’ something or other and they pay me 1.7% and charge me €400 a year to look after it. I wonder what their rate of interest to borrowers is. Not 1.7% I’ll be bound. And all the time it’s my money!

I left the bank spitting fire, yet at the same time reassured that the cheques The Owner had paid as part of the recompense for my teaching in her dysfunctional school had been honoured. The only time such a positive verb is going to be used for anything connected with her!

I had calmed down somewhat by the time that I got back to the flat and soon settled down on the balcony with a book taken from Gwen.

‘This book will save your life’ is a title which is instantly arresting and sets high expectations. Putting a picture of six doughnuts on the front cover is provocative so you open the book expecting to be stimulated from page one.

The opening paragraph, written in the second person and the present tense, is frankly disappointing and that was a response I had to the book as a whole.

The action of the story is a sort of ‘new age finding yourself’ type and is written in a picaresque style by A M Homes is alternately engaging and irritating. There are moments of humour and some absurdly captivating moments, but the novel taken as a whole is less than its parts.

The girls have taken the opportunity to ‘fry’ a little more with Nia throwing caution to the wind and welcoming the rays while Gwen has shrunk a little more towards the shadows with a good book.

As it was the last evening we made another attempt to have tapas at the Basque restaurant. We were lucky we went when we did, as we were offered a full display of the whole range of tapas which, during the early course of the evening was soon reduced to a fraction of the offerings we could choose from! The poor kitchen staff were loosing out in the race to keep a full range of tapas ready for the masses of people who were hoovering them up!

The evening ended with ice cream on the beach and photographs taken to the accompaniment of flashes of lightning in the distance.

The girls have been perfect house guests managing the seemingly impossible trick of being unobtrusive yet highly visible! Each time we have gone out for dinner they have always managed to turn quite a few heads and I have managed not to smash the faces of any of the impudent males who have dared look at my charges!

Their departure forces me to focus my attention on The Campaign and to realise that the Union has not contacted me and that I need to get a few more bits of paper before the next stage in my restrained revenge can take place.

This is the last week of school for virtually all the teaching staff whatever their status in The Owner’s eyes and after that, like all educational institutions it will fall into that particular form of hibernation where all enquiries seem to fall into a black hole from which nothing emerges until September. The Owner sacking me when she did was fully aware of the limited time opportunity that I would have to make any difference and I think that the typical torpor of the summer institutions may defeat me after all. However, I shall make a spirited foray and see what I can do, after all it’s only Tuesday.

Four days until Cut Off Friday might make all the difference!

You see, ever the optimist!

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