A place in the sun?

I am typing this to the accompaniment of the voices on the television discussing which house to buy on the Costa Brava. “Brits,” we have been told, “have been coming here for forty years.” A bit longer than that: I came to the Costa Brava with my parents and uncle and aunt in 1958. I think that my (full board) 14 day holiday cost the same as four coffees and two Belgian brownies in Costa Coffee today. Progress, eh?

Progress is the one thing that is not being applied to the house sale in Rumney. I think that the viewing yesterday was the last this season and we will be looking to next spring before any money finally rests comfortably in my bank account. I remain, defiantly, optimistic. In a way. Up to a point. A bit.

The programme on Archie Griffiths was delivered by Ceri today on a DVD. No problem there, not with the number of gadgets that I have which thrive on such gleaming discs. Which machine to use to be given the honour of showing me the life and times of this neglected painter? As it happened all of them. Not one of the bloody drives would even recognise that there was anything on the disc.

Many years ago there was a battle royal between apparently mature electrical companies who both had ways of storing moving pictures on magnetic tape. They both thought that their individual systems were the best, so . . .

Once upon a time there were kind groups of people who ran companies and they really cared about their customers and wanted only the best for them; they didn’t want to waste their own, or anyone else’s resources so, rather than fighting and squabbling they sat down like grown ups and discussed their products and finally said that one way of doing things was the best and that everyone would produce wonderful machines all of which would use the same system and no one would buy anything which would be obsolescent and then soon obsolete.

Now, that’s what I call a sentence! And if you believe that, then you’ll believe what that long winded sentence says and also believe that Apple Macintosh actually thought up their own operating system rather than stealing it from someone else just like the new version of Windows. Or you’ll be what we realists call childish.

Because, of course, the disc did not play because it wasn’t being played back on the system that created it and, in spite of the fact that my laptop plays just about any form of disc, plus or minus, divided or multiplied – it didn’t play this one. So, now I’ll have to go cap in hand to S4C to ask nicely if they can give me a copy of the programme. I look forward to the challenge! I’m sure that they won’t take the fact of my being a monoglot English speaking Welshman as in any way an obstacle. We will see.

Adding to my generally high level of grumpiness was my repeated attempt to try and get in touch with Vodafone – wait for it – Customer Service. I pause to search for the right word to describe the designation of ‘Customer Service’ when applied to 191 on the Vodafone network. ‘Misnomer’ has a good ring to it (pun) but sounds too well mannered; ‘Paradox’ seems to link philosophy to prosaic ineptitude; ‘Irony’ – no, that ascribes a sense of humour to a system which is automated and, when it cuts you off, manages to say, with a bright and cheerful voice, “Thank you for calling!”; ‘Deception’ seems to be on the right track, but too gentle; LIE – yes, that’s it! ‘Lie,’ stinking lie! That has the ring of truth to it! God rot them all to the pits of hell. If anyone out there has phoned ‘Customer Services’ on Vodafone and got through, do tell. I have spent the better part of the day making spasmodic efforts to contact the Masters of Telephonic Deception. It is a good thing that I have discovered the loudspeaker feature on my new mobile otherwise I would have had to waste the whole of my attention on the futile task of trying to GTAH (get to a human) in this automated universe.

Speaking to Gaynor, who was looking for reassurance that she was on the right lines in her approaches to her teaching of English (she was by the way) brought back some of the snap on attitudes of my past life. Odd. Not unpleasant, but not something which tempted me to jump at (more away from) Gaynor’s suggestion that I could find any amount of teaching from the various agencies which exist to keep our rickety system in place. That was shudder making! Not for me, not here, not now.