w/e 2024-11-03

Still in Essex, making some arrangements but also treading water while we wait for things to happen. It doesn’t help when one organisation has an incorrect phone number for you and it gets passed along to others that need to get in touch with you to move processes along.

§ I went to the supermarket and when I went to pay I couldn’t find the debit card I was going to use. Puzzling. If it’s not in my wallet there’s nowhere else it could be. I don’t lose things!

I paid using my phone and went back to the house. The card wasn’t in any of the few places it could conceivably be, even though it couldn’t be in them because it could only be in my wallet.

There were no odd charges on the account, so it didn’t seem like someone else had got hold of it.

I looked back through the transactions to when I last had it, trying to remember which places I had used either the card or the phone. It seemed like my last use of the card was the previous time I went to the supermarket.

That time I wasn’t buying much so I’d used the self-checkout and remembered succeeding in doing everything smoothly – everything scanned first time, I didn’t mis-hit any on-screen buttons (when you’re tall the touch-targets seem slightly off), I’d paid smoothl… oh! That was the time it needed me to put my card in instead of tapping. In my very cool swiftness I must have left the card in the machine!

Back to the supermarket and to the woman selling cigarettes and vapes and scratch cards and doing customer service. Had they found an abandoned card a couple of days ago? She looked on the computer at lists of lost property, asking for details. If they did have it, it might have been destroyed by now.

But no! They had it. She called on her headset for someone to go to the cash office to retrieve it.

I waited while female staff arrived with trolleys carrying Deliveroo bags and men arrived to carry them away.

And then a woman arrived holding out my card. Like magic! As simple as that! Something went a bit wrong and righted itself! No disaster. Amazing.

§ I went to the cinema to see Anora (Sean Baker, 2024) and it was really good. It seems increasingly rare to find a movie on relatively-general release that I want to see. More than two hours long but, unusually, it didn’t drag and I could have watched more.

Despite all that, is any film worth paying £20.40 to see in a small cinema? Twenty quid! In Everyman Chelmsford’s sixth and tiniest screen! And I had to sit through 28 minutes of adverts and trailers! They should be paying me!

I know, it’s a special “big screen experience” but really: for that price, choose two months’ worth of streaming as many movies as you like at home, or a couple of hours and a load of adverts in a cinema? Increasingly hard to justify unfortunately.

§ That’s all. I’m crossing fingers for America and for all of us.