w/e 2024-11-24

One of the big current admin tasks is informing organisations that my Dad has passed away. I started on the utilities this week, calling BT to let them know, and to have the name on the account changed to my Mum’s name. (They do have an online form but it’s ambiguous in places.)

That seemed to go OK. But then it was apparent the broadband at the house had stopped working. I called the phone number: “The number you have dialed has not been recognised.”

Yes, the fuckwit I’d spoken to had, instead of changing the name, closed the account.

I called back and there was no way to re-open the account.

The only option was to open a brand new landline and broadband account, which can take up to 14 days to start working. And there was no guarantee the phone would have the same phone number.

The phone number my parents have had for 58 years.

I can’t remember when I was last that angry. I’m still furious now, although the vibrations have subsided and I don’t want to cause quite so much physical damage.

I have spoken to a couple of genuinely nice and caring people at BT (or EE as they seem to be now) but they can do nothing. It’s very much “the computer says no”. There’s not even anything they can try. How is this even (im)possible.

In theory the new landline and broadband should be up and running in a few days with, hopefully, the old number being put back after that.

If not, I have spent way too much time plotting the various campaigns of annoyance and protest that I would escalate to.

So very very very angry. Also so very impotent.

Never ever use BT. Or EE I guess.

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§ On the upside, Nationwide endeared themselves to me, with a field on their online form for the date of the funeral. Why? So that if they need to call, they won’t do it on that day.

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§ I finished reading Transit of Venus by Shirley Hazzard this week and really liked it. I read some of her short stories a while back and they didn’t grab me but, having read quite a few acclaimed short story collections, I think that’s the fault of short stories in general.

There are so many good turns of phrase. I’m not good at analysing why I like how something is written. Her text often often has something ominous about it, which reminds me of Nicholas Mosley and James Salter (who I wrote about here). I wondered if this is something more common to British writers who grew up during and after World War II: a sense of conflict, engagement, the potential of things to get worse before they get better. Here’s part of a description of a well-to-do family dinner (page 17):

The girls’ curved necks were intolerably exposed as they spooned their custard: you could practically feel the axe. Upright Mrs. Thrale could never be felled in the same way, at least not now. The young man and the girls remarked among themselves on the delayed season—“the late summer,” as if it were already dead. They were like travellers managing an unfamiliar tongue, speaking in infinitives. Everything had the threat and promise of meaning. Later on, there would be more and more memories, less and less memorable. It would take a bombshell, later, to clear the mental space for such a scene as this.

Experience was banked up around the room, a huge wave about to break.

As with Mosely, there’s a way with similes (I think, not metaphors?) that I envy. Such as this, too, from page 136:

Caro sat at her office desk remembering Paul Ivory’s play and how, for an instant at the end of the final act, the audience had remained silent after its ordeal. Here and there in the theatre a click or tick, a slight crackle such as one hears at potteries among baked wares cooling from the furnace. And then the fracturing applause.

I’m not familiar with the sound of ceramics cooling but that still works so well. And then the fracturing!

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§ We started season two of Shrinking (Apple TV+), the first season of which I apparently enjoyed. I could hardly bear to finish one episode. It was too oddly slick. Every person and object and set was immaculate and lit the same. The pacing seemed relentlessly the same. There were many lines with the cadence of snappy one-liners that weren’t funny. The relationships between this insular group of characters now seem bizarre. An Apple Keynote of a show. So odd in many ways.

On the plus side, I had practically given up two-thirds of the way through season one of Ludwig (BBC) – it was OK, just a bit middle-ground – but by comparison it seemed innovative, interesting and slightly funnier. So we finished that. If you love David Mitchell being David Mitchell, with an added dose (but never enough) of Anna Maxwell Martin, you will love this much David Mitchell being David Mitchell. One very strange, and quite tedious thing though: how teal-and-brown/orange all the sets and costumes are. Can we please move on from this?

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§ The keen feed readers among you might have seen this post appear briefly a couple of days ago. For once I wrote most of this a couple of days early, but then forgot to change the publish time to Sunday.

Anyway, it’s now a very wet Sunday after a very wet and windy night and our plans to visit Abergavenny for the night have been scuppered by floods. We spent the morning reloading graphs of local river levels, flood maps (different for England and Wales for little useful reason), searching for webcams of roads, and watching Facebook videos of local villages under surprising amounts of water.

And now, minutes before finally publishing this, we’ve discovered our water’s been turned off due to emergency works at a nearby borehole. What an adventure.