Too little, too late and way too cheap!

After telephone calls too numerous to calculate; the expenditure of amounts of nervous energy too vast to quantify; and fury whose bounds cannot be set, I have finally received the letter from the Rumney branch of HSBC which purports to answer my questions about the inexplicable inability of that bank to open an envelope take out a cheque with a paying in slip and start the process of paying it into their banking system. Having lost my cheque; found it; processed it; not told me; not written; not contacted me; ignored requests for information – in fact, the usual way in which banks treat those lesser sub species known as customers!

After much phoning of First Direct and their trying to contact the Rumney branch of HSBC (and signally failing) and enthusiastically agreeing with me that the level of service in the Rumney branch of HSBC was somewhat beneath contempt I awaited their response with some degree of excited anticipation.

But the Rumney branch of HSBC has responded with a masterpiece of content-less succinctness. I asked them to respond to four questions; they answered in five lines!

The one real piece of information or explanation is contained in the phrase “internal systems.” The mistakes, the delay, the impertinence, the lack of communication: presumably all of these are a direct result of “internal systems.” I wonder what that phrase means? Oh, of course, nothing, nothing at all. I shall treasure that phrase as one of the choicest euphemisms that I have come across for some time. I shall certainly try and use it at the first opportunity.

The Rumney branch of the HSBC had the temerity to inform me tht they had paid £10 into my account as “compensation” however, I think that I will inform them that my “internal systems” do not operate at maximum efficiency with a compensatory amount of anything less than £200! It’s worth a try!

The second stage of the Flowering of the Garden is in progress. An unfortunate side effect of planting, well, plants is that while they do undoubtedly flower they also die. And, instead of dying in colourful and interesting putrescence they die by withering untidily, necessitating deadheading and pruning.

But for the really dedicated Instant Gardener, dying flowers means “buy more live ones.” So we did just that. Venturing down to the Lambies and the garden centre which just happens to have a tank and an armoured vehicle casually situated in the car park. Toni has asked me why these military vehicles might be there, and I did once consider asking the man at the till for some sort of explanation, but then I thought that he might actually tell me some mundane story to justify them and a whole realm of fascinating speculation would be gone for ever. Better speculative ignorance than boring reality.

Every time!

“Children of Men” directed by Alfonso Cuaron has been described by one reviwer as “Un brillante relato cinematográfico ejecutado con maestría, pero sobre todo una sombría visión del futuro que es en realidad una inquietante metáfora del mundo de hoy.” And, frankly, who are you to disagree?

Based on a work by PD James which I haven’t read it was a chilling vision of a world in which fertility in women had ceased some nineteen years previously and the UK being the only state to survive some widespread plague and breakdown of law and order, though at the price of a totalitarian regime reminiscent of wartime Germany or Stalinist Russia.

The length of some of the takes in the film were extraordinary and the action sequences were choreographed with extraordinary precision. The sense of a depressingly anti utopian close future was oppressive and convincing, though close inspection of the plot was not possible, as some important aspects of the narrative thrust of the film were stated rather than explained.

The central concept of the film: that of a uniquely pregnant woman being taken to the ‘safety’ of the ship called appropriately ‘Tomorrow’ is powerful enough to work as a metaphor for the audience without the scaffolding of an exhaustive explanation for some aspects of the story line.

I do not for a moment believe that this film is presented as a realistic prophecy for the near future, but I do think that it raises some provocative questions about nascent attitudes towards immigration in Britain and also it questions the fragility of the systems that we think protect us.

As a minor aspect of the film I was particularly interested in the concept of the Ark for the arts that Britain had in what appeared to be Battersea Power Station. Here the salvaged remnants of Mankind’s artistic heritage were lodged. These included Michaelangelo's 'David' with part of his leg missing (thus giving us our second sculpture counting the RA rondo!) and Picasso's 'Guernica' which graced one wall as the characters had lunch. We were told by the 'curator' that he'd only been able to salvage a few Velasquez from Madrid! An elegant exercise in futility considering the whole of the population of the world was condemned to death, but the curator's modus vivendi was "not thinking about it" - as good a philosophy as any other in the last days.

This film had a positive ending, though the end of PD James' story did not; a similar circumstance to the filming of 'The Birds'. In Du Maurier's story the cataclysm was world wide and unresolved, whereas in the flim the attack of the birds was localised and parochial.

Mankind, as the poet said, cannot stand very much reality.