Makes a real change from all those so called "gritty Northern dramas" which mainly consist of violence, swearing and general mayhem.
I had a Saturday with nothing to do. Well of course that's not true. I always have something to do. What I mean is I had a day when I had nothing arranged in the diary. So I finished reading Murder on the Orient Express, a book I had never read before. Could it be called a gritty Northern drama? No because Agatha Christie came from the Wild South- Torquay to be exact and of course the plot was set on a train. So that one fits in well with my un Northern gritty drama plan.
Then Norwich were on television. Eight goals in two away games is none too shabby and another win- this time against Coventry.
The rest of the day was spent on the next edition of Hethersett Herald, reading through proposals for the Norfolk Family History Society, editing some more of my autobiography and getting my diary up to date.
Today it's the annual Hethersett village pantomime. I say annual but it's the first one for three years thanks to COVID. I expect to get insulted from the stage and will be disappointed if I'm not. I will report back tomorrow.
Is it me but does this winter seem to be dragging on? It seems to have been cold and dispiriting forever although to date we haven't had any extreme weather.
In a week or so we are popping up to Yorkshire for a few days and so hope the weather is good to us because it can be grim up north. It will give me the chance to seek out some gritty Northern dramas.
Popped over our Memorial Field yesterday to have a look at the progress being made on the building of our new pavilion. It is coming on apace and the roof is almost on. This is a building that in the past I feared we would never see and it does my old heart good to see it rising up. There's a slight delay with the finishing date which has been put back a month to the end of May which means it won't be complete for the coronation.
The next major build everyone in our village would like to see is a new health centre. Let's hope that doesn't take as long to come to fruition as the pavilion.
I spent a considerable time on the phone on Friday to Barclaycard getting ever more frustrated. It's all still tied up with the fraud I have been subjected to. There were two parts to the fraud. Thankfully the bank have got back 70 per cent of my losses. But there's still my initial outlay on Barclaycard I'm trying to get back.
I spent another half hour on the phone to them trying to find out the latest on my claim. I had to go through everything again and got nowhere. They said they would ring back but didn't. It's all so frustrating. Then I found amounts on my card for the past three months that I don't recognise. I rang a number associated with these amounts but got nowhere. A very unhelpful person at the other end wouldn't identify the spend unless I gave him my account details, something in the light of what has happened over the past few months I wasn't going to do.
So after all that, what did I do? Yes I went old school. I printed everything out, wrote a report. Put it all in an envelope. Popped an old fashioned stamp on it, walked to the post box and sent it by snail mail where I suspect it will all just disappear into another black hole.
We have all these wonderful ways to contact people and organisations - web sites. E mail, social media, chat rooms etc etc. But nothing as simple as speaking to somebody on the phone who knows what they are talking about- I suppose that's progress in our modern age. Can't help thinking it all worked so much better in the 1960s. We may now have the technology but we no longer have the personal service.
It seems that extra layers are being put in to enhance security. You know the kind of thing "we will send you a single use code." Problem is that on my mobile those single use codes can take an hour to come through by which time it's not possible to use them - cue more frustration.