11October1997

11 October 1997
My dear folks,

It’s a rainy kind of Saturday afternoon. I’ve a selection of classic film themes humming away on the CD while jockeys are galloping their horses silently down the screen of the miniature TV on the lower shelf. It’s not my sport. Every now & then the afternoon sports programme cuts to the golf which I rather enjoy; Ernie Els is trying to make it four in a row. Mavis is taking a mid-afternoon sleep on the couch after taking an early afternoon sleep on my tummy. I took a little nap myself, having been foolish enough open a bottle of wine last night after 3 weeks on the wagon. I thought I deserved a little celebration, having completed 8 shifts in 9 days. (The rota lady had said she was desperate & it was impossible to turn her down.) Wasn’t a great morning to wake up to.

The first item on the day’s agenda was a meeting with a Cape Town friend who is in London for a few days ahead of a visit to the Quinta. We’d agreed to rendezvous at the Kensington Palace Hotel at 11.00. I cycled in the rain down to Hyde Park where I was puzzled not to be able to locate the hotel at the point where I’d placed it on the London A-Z. Eventually I realised that it couldn’t be on the Bayswater side of the park – where I was - & I cycled across the Kensington side where I duly found it – and Annelise. We retreated out of the rain into a coffee shop for conversation & drying out. (A subsequent check on the A-Z reveals that I’d been holding it upside down. Strange!)

Afterwards I raided Marks & Sparks for the following week’s microwavables & cycled back home. The rain had eased. M&S stock a superb range of stuff & I lunched on poached salmon. No doubt I paid rather more than I usually do at Mr Sainsbury. Mavis sniffed the salmon appreciatively & indicated the portion of breakfast biscuits I’d given him wouldn’t have sustained a mouse. But my heart is hard. He’s far too fat for his good or for mine. I suspect that he has better luck with the neighbours he so enjoys visiting. I had an answerphone message from an American voice saying that Mavis had moved in & looked lost; the voice was worried. I left a message myself saying thank you for the consideration & not to hesitate to stick the bastard out if he visited again. Nothing lost about Mavis.

The rest has been work. The work has not been hard or dull, merely very time-consuming. After a week on Asia, I was back on bulletins on Friday & I have a 2nd week on Asia Sun to Thur (before heading for the Quinta on Fri). In-between, I’ve been chasing tenants for rent & Quinta visitors for payment. I’ve also been doing the washing, ironing & the books for “my flats”. Elisa, the Portuguese maid I’ve discovered, called in my absence on Friday & left the flat in sparkling condition. It’s wonderful having someone to do the housework.

At work, management has been replacing our old “dumb terminals” with PCs running Windows95 plus the many dedicated programmes we need. Problem has been marrying the programmes together. They’ve been running slowly & crashing all week. Computer Support have been run ragged & my language has been blue. There isn’t time to cope with flaky software on top of everything else. I took some consolation from a conversation with a colleague working in OnLine who said their software was a horror story. To fill out their web pages, they were doing the cyber equivalent of cutting out stuff with scissors & gluing it back with sticky paste. I didn’t exactly rejoice in his troubles. I just felt better about my own.

The latest version of the Oxford Compendium (dictionary, thesaurus & books of quotations) arrived on CD in the post today but refuses to run. I have emailed the suppliers in some frustration & restored the old version, which runs perfectly well. Happily, the English vocabulary does not age as fast as computers & software & the old version is perfectly adequate. I was hassled by a salesman for the Britannia Encyclopaedia in Dillons bookstore the other day. It costs £199 on CD. I told him that I’d buy it when it was reduced to two figures. That might not happen, he informed me. Well then, I wouldn’t buy it I told him. I have a thing about pushy salesmen. I have a fax from Jones telling of a night of sleeplessness after an encounter in the darkness with a large biting centipede sort of creature which escaped her counter-attack. I might just type it out & email it – as it makes better reading than my letter.

xxxxxxxxx
T