Igor Clark

This morning, I rose early and, rather than do any of the interesting things that I would actually have liked to do in the time before work, I started on the list of intensely irritatingly necessary action points life had imposed upon me, and tried to carry out chore #1 by going to the Post Office to pick up the unexpected packet they'd been “unable” to deliver the other day. (I’d decided in advance not to get into a dispute about the precise level of their delivery “abilities”.) Was it waiting for me, as promised? “Sorry, Sir, no, it's not here - I know it says that you should wait 48 hours and you’ve waited about 64, but, well, even though a number of hours in this type of ‘literature’ usually refers to actual hours rather than one-seventh or one-eighth fractions of business days, as otherwise of course they’d have specified business days, in this case, it means business hours, yes, including the night time, yes, and you see yesterday was a Bank Holiday, so it hasn’t come back to the sorting office yet”. You fuckers. You fucking fuckers.

So I cycled home, took advantage of one of the few compensations of shitty weather by putting on a warm, comforting, shitty-weather coat, and started the half-hour trudge down to the bank to carry out chore #2, “pay in cheque”. See, banks usually don’t open early, because as we all know, they’re egotistical, usuring, global-economy-devouring, economic-fallacy-propagandizing, regulation-squirming, capital-propping fascist bully-boys who’d rather piss on their own feet than actually provide a realistically useful and useable service to their “customers” unless doing so happens to coincide with “streamlining their processes”, but one of my eagle eyes had happened to take in on a recent visit to said establishment a notice proclaiming the immediate effect of their new early opening hours, so I knew it would be OK. Until I arrived to discover that not only were the bastards staying firmly shut until 9.30 today because it was a Tuesday (of course), but they’d actually taken the trouble to print up notices to that effect and plaster them all over the bloody windows, with the single intention, I felt, of rubbing my recently-arrived nose in it. Fuckers. Fucky fucking fuck fuckers.

Chore #3, “buy boring but annoyingly necessary toiletry crap” was mildly less irritating insofar as the individual items of annoying crap I needed to buy were actually in stock, but as if to mitigate that small mercy, the shop fuckers had yet again moved every single thing that I needed to buy to a different place in the shop. Are you people so staggeringly crass that you think that if I arrive in the deodorant-should-be-here place and find, I don’t know, swimming goggles or thrush cream, I’m suddenly going to go “ooh yes, now I think of it, you never know when your next bout of candida will be, do you?”, and pile excitedly in to a buy-one-get-one-free offer? You fuckers!

So, maintaining a suitable combination of upper-lip stiffness and attempted muscular looseness (a tricksy manœuvre at the best of times), I moved onto chore #4, “take pleasingly nostalgia-inducing selection of old photos filtered from pile discovered in bag in cupboard under stairs during weekend faffing mission to Snappy Snaps for cheapo automated scanning”. Imagine my escalating delight on being casually informed that yes, Snappy Snaps does indeed engage in the paid scanning of photographic materials, at £1.99 per scan, and, further, my strangulated gurgles on being told that in fact no, that’s not crazy, it costs £1.99 per scan, and that’s pretty reasonable. Hang on, are you people mad? Don’t you have some sort of brutal automaton capable of ripping through this stuff at breakneck speed? If I wanted some poor human to waste hours manually scanning and cropping a load of not spectacularly interesting photos, wouldn’t I do it myself at a charge of exactly nought pounds for fifty scans, rather than ONE HUNDRED ENGLISH? You fucking, fucky fucker fuckers.

And all of this before nine o’clock in the morning. Oh well, at least I saw a big splatty pile of splatty yoghurt mess in the road.