I've slipped yet further back on the reading target, but there is one thing I'm inclined to note in mitigation of that: over the course of March I've read through half of "The Stand", which is by some way the longest book remaining on The List. So although the headline figure looks pretty bad, the underlying trend isn't quite as terrible as it seems.
That said, I did get bogged down in Cornwell's "Crackdown", and am even more bogged down in "The Darkest Road", so it's not all that good, either.
After two attempts, I managed to arrange with BT to get our landline service reconnected. During the course of that call, I specifically asked if our number would remain the same - if we have to tell everyone the number has changed, we might as well just tell them it's disconnected and give up. Anyway, it was confirmed that the number would stay the same.
Naturally, it didn't.
So today saw me make another call to BT, to speak to another person, tell the tale yet again... and this time an order was placed to renumber our line back to the value we had. Apparently, it should happen on Monday. I suppose twelve days isn't bad for a 'seamless' transition of an unrelated problem.
On the plus side, the assistant I spoke to today was quite impressive, so I'm at least hopeful...
I've done something to my back. It's mostly fine during the day, but my sleeping position is obviously not what it should be, as each morning I'm waking in considerable pain. Which, it's fair to say, isn't setting me up for the day in the best possible manner.
Oh well. Hopefully it will pass soon enough.
About a week ago we agreed to take a new broadband contract - a very slight increase in speed for a very slight increase in price, but otherwise no changes... and then no need to worry for two years. In the course of the call I asked, and had it confirmed, that our landline would be unaffected.
Naturally, our landline has now stopped working. And, of course, I'm now getting the runaround - their computer says that I don't have landline services on my account (since they've removed them), and so of course they don't work. Presumably the next step is that they'll offer to add them to our package, all for the low low price of...
The thing that infuriates me about this, other than it being yet another cock up by yet another internet company (are any of them any use at all?), and other than it being yet another thing I really didn't need to be dealing with, is that the landline is almost completely useless to us - about 99% of the time the phone rings it's a nuisance call. Unfortunately, there is still that 1% of calls that are actually important.
Gah!
LC lamented some time ago that she had two to-do lists: the things she wanted to do and the things that she had to do. Sadly, the nature of life is that the "have to do" list keeps getting ever-longer, and so it's almost impossible to get to the "want to do" list.
Unfortunately, while my own situation is similar, it's not the same: I have four lists to deal with:
And, as with LC, I'm extremely lucky if I ever get to the bottom of the first two lists, never mind moving onto the others. (Plus, given that many of the things on the long-term to do list are themselves pretty lengthy, even if I had some time it's unlikely to be enough to tackle one of these jobs.)
Which means that the long-term to do list is essentially the "do never" list, which is really frustrating.
#13: "Crackdown", by Bernard Cornwell
There's a big spoiler below. You know what to do.
This is the first Bond film since the start of the Brosnan era that I haven't seen in the cinema. I would really have liked to go, too, but the pandemic just didn't allow for it. Having now seen the film, I was probably lucky.
The truth is, this film was always almost certain to be Daniel Craig's third-best - it was going to have to go some to beat the stellar "Casino Royale" or "Skyfall", while "SPECTRE" was just dire, and "Quantum of Solace" was ruined by a writer's strike. Still, given the gulf between the really good and the really bad, there was a lot of scope for it to go either way.
And, alas, "No Time to Die" is very much at the lower end of the scale - it's way too long, it's really quite dull, and it's entirely devoid of humour. Basically, it's a slow burn all leading up to, well, nothing much really.
I was rather amused by the tagline, "James Bond will Return", right at the end of the credits, though - Bond pretty definitively dies in this one, which raises the question of how. (Though three answers immediately leap to mind: one is the "Man With the Golden Gun" (novel) approach - he's grabbed by Russians, reconstructed and brainwashed, and sent to kill M; one is that they jump back in time and do a 60's spy film; one is that they just reboot. Or, I suppose, they could completely ignore it and just carry on.)
But a big part of me thinks that this should just be the end. We've now had decades of people desperately trying to cast a female James Bond, a notion that makes no more sense than a male Jane Eyre. What they're really asking is that MGM instead stop making Bond films, and make something else instead. And maybe it really is time for exactly that.
Today marks the two-year anniversary of my switching to working from home. Which probably deserves at least some recognition.
Funnily enough, this anniversary comes at a time when the country is engaging in a fascinating experiment: is it possible for the people of a country to gaslight themselves? The thing is, the pandemic is very clearly not over. And yet we're engaged in a crazy process of getting rid of all the remaining measures that were put in place to protect us. And so, in order to justify the madness, we're collectively pretending to ourselves that it's all over, even as cases, hospital admissions, and fatalities all rise.
Work have been talking about us returning to the office for some time. I'm not sure when that will eventually happen, though I suspect it will be sooner rather than later. (It would be really convenient if it happened some time after July 1st, but I doubt I'll be that lucky.)
The truth is that I have very mixed feelings about a return to the office. It's adding five hours to my work week, and maybe £150 to my monthly fuel bills, which sucks. On the other hand, there is a community aspect to work that has been missing, to an extent. My answer, I suppose, is the same as it has always been: I'll go back when they ask me to, but not until then.
LC was unwell on Sunday, and as the day wore on I found myself coming down with whatever it was. On Monday I woke up feeling pretty terrible.
Now, in times gone past I would probably have taken the view that I was, just about, capable of getting through the work day. It would have been horrible, but it could be done. And since I'm still working from home, the decision should have been even easier.
Except that we're not in the same world as in times past. The pandemic has changed a very many things, and one of those key things that we really need to ditch is the culture of presenteeism - the view that one should attend work right up to the point where you literally keel over... and even if your being there represents a danger of infection to your colleagues (and, therefore, to the wellbeing of the company as a whole).
Of course, all of this is made simpler by company policy, which is that people who are ill should stay home and focus on getting well.
The upshot is that I was off sick on Monday, and had a not at all restful day. In all honesty, it would probably have been better had I gone to work after all. I woke up on Tuesday initially feeling better, but the thermoter said otherwise, so again I didn't go in. And by mid-morning was feeling considerably better.
Today I'm back at work. I'm definitely not 100%, but getting there.
#11: "Protector", by Conn Iggulden
I don't know much about the situation in Ukraine. The truth is that the whole thing is very distressing, and there's basically nothing I can do about it. Plus, the situation has the potential to become outright apocalyptic, and there's not a single thing I can do about that. So there is absolutely no benefit in wallowing in the wall-to-wall coverage of the whole thing, and sink into a mire of horror.
The upshot of all of that is that I'm not qualified to give an opinion on basically any of it, what anyone should be doing as a response, or what I think is going to happen. I'm hoping that either Putin will see sense, or that wiser heads in Russia will act to remove him, and that the consequence is a very rapid de-escalation... but I don't see any reason to think that that will happen.
And that's all I have to say on that one.
#10: "The Outsiders", by S.E. Hinton (a book from The List - five to go)
At the end of January, I had posted here 10 times, and had read four books. I finished the fifth on the 1st of February.
At the end of February, I had posted 19 times here. This represents the 20th post, on the 1st of March. I have finished nine books, but have barely started the tenth.
Unfortunately, this means that I am slowly but surely slipping back from where I had hoped to be.
The good news at this stage is that it's a recoverable slip - the key is to make sure that the required progress is made each day, plus a little bit. The first part is the more crucial of the two, as it means that there won't be any further slippage. (The problem last year was that that was exactly what happened - as I tried to recover in one area, it meant that another slipped, until everything was just irredeemably behind.)
We'll see how it goes. By the end of this month we should have a pretty good idea.
