Couldn’t find it by visiting every page on the website several times.  Rang the office in Paris, who told me by recorded message that they can no longer deal with passport enquiries, referred back to blankety blank website.  After another rootle round, I found a number to ring in UK, but they wouldn’t even hear the question until I’d given them credit card details, so that they could charge me 74 pence a minute to listen to me (plus the International call charge, natch!) 

The upshot was that I had to brave the infernal website again while the girl talked me through how to get the payment form.  She was a delightful Scottish girl and I asked her to tell the bosses that the site was the worst I’d come across in twenty years online, and to ask them how they thought my technincompoop husband of 78 would have coped if he were a widower.  I now have to pay £160 plus courier charges  to get the new passport delivered to us.  Jock hopes he doesn’t live another 10 years!

The upshot of this rigmarole was webweariness, aggravated antipathy, minimally mollified callcentre rage and ten years off my lifespan.

I’m just a pussycat, really,
so why did I explode today -
use words I never use
to a poor defenceless call centre girl?
If I tell all, my blood pressure
will go through the roof again
so I won’t.

Suffice it to say that my bank
gave me the runaround,
passed me from pillar to post
and back again.  It took an hour
to make a transfer no different
from any of hundreds
that I’ve made in twenty years.

This is no poem, it’s a rant.
But I did apologise for the language
if not for the rage that caused it.

“Ever have a day when you weren’t quite yourself, or maybe you felt like more than your usual self? Did someone cross you and your claws came out? Or, you needed to find the mustang within yourself and break free? Or perhaps you morphed into mama grizzly or ran with the wolves? On the other hand, you could even have found your inner sloth and spent all day relaxing! Find the animal within yourself, or within a character. We’re going to leave the actual critters at the zoo. I want the beast inside you to come out. Or the animal beauty!” This was the prompt that met my eyes at http://withrealtoads.blogspot.com/2012/01/fireblossom-friday-2you-animal.html  just after I had put the phone down on the bank, snarling and spitting.  No animal beauty in me I’m afraid.  I used some of my spleen to write what my bank manager Dad used to call a stinker of a letter which I will not send until I’ve cooled down!

I am brooding about the recent wordpress changes that have invaded my blogs, and come to the conclusion that you are ‘manned’ by children – and backward children at that.  Some of my blogging friends have been seduced into wasting their time and talent by responding to pointless, idiotic and unfunny prompts.  It is irrelevant that some brilliant and witty writing  (mostly at your expense) can be the result. And another thing. 

Why do you persist in telling me I’m groovy, or that I rock and other inanities when going from draft to publish a post.  And I don’t want to know how many words my post contains. 

If this trend is  the output of a group of pre-teen text-mad idiots, what hope is there for my grandchildren?  Please grow up, WordPress.  Stop sending me  Spam, do your job as facilitator for bloggers to communicate with their readers, and then pipe down.

Yours,
disgusted,
Normandy.

This totally untrue limerick (well, partly)  is for http://purpletreehouse.blogspot.com/2011/09/poetic-forms-wk-3-limerick-sept-21.html

On Writing Books?
Ah, that’s another matter.

3 ways when short of money:  work for it, sell something or go without. 

Viv ducks the inevitable brickbats.

The kind man found a setting which just about worked, but he told me that the camera was on the way out.  Jock was with me, or I wouldn’t have dared, but in the supermarket I bought an all-singing-all-dancing-expensive camera, the same make as the old Olympus. 

The instructions were rubbish, and it took me all evening just to programme the time and date, let alone do the setup.  You were firmly warned not to put in a memory card before setting up on the compter.  In the end, son -in-law helped me via Skype and I achieved the setup and registration at midnight French time. 

This morning, I inserted …er tried to insert… the memory card from the old camera, to take some test photos.  It didn’t fit.  Blue smoke and language erupted from my mouth.  WHY OH WHY OH WHY don’t they standardize the blank blank things?  Or better still, include them with the cameras?  The salesman had missed a trick and another sale by not telling me I needed a different one.  GRRR!

Of all the cants in this canting world
the cant of the critic is the hardest to bear.

On Googling to find the source, I realize that he has paraphrased:

“Of all the cants which are canted in this canting world — though the cant of hypocrites may be the worst — the cant of criticism is the most tormenting!”   Sterne, Laurence

and then I found this, which is much more to my liking.

“There is then creative reading as well as creative writing. When the mind is braced by labour and invention, the page of whatever book we read becomes luminous with manifold allusion. Every sentence is doubly significant, and the sense of our author is as broad as the world.”

Emerson, Ralph Waldo on criticism