Vicola’s blog

It's not even 10.30am and already I have encountered no fewer than 3 little irritations. So I'll share them -

1) Budget airlines

I used to wonder how it was that budget airlines could offer flights so very cheaply and still remain in business. Today I found the answer. Myself and Mr Vicola are going to Perpignan in mid July so, following all the sensible advice about how to get cheap flights, I decided to book now with a budget airline. After all, Perpignan can't be that far from Manchester, no more than a couple of hours anyway. I go online and bingo, look at that, only £26 per person each way, making a grand total of £52 per person return and a complete price of £104, right? Wrong. Because I didn't bank on all the little extras did I? So on we go with our little online booking expedition, next step, bags. Bags? Yes, bags, because on budget airlines it seems that bags aren't included in the price. Do they think you're going to fit all your summer clothes into the 'allowed size' of hand luggage which would struggle to carry a rolled up copy of Cosmopolitan and pair of clean knickers? Of course they don't, so they sting you with the 'bag cost', the princely sum of £10.99 per bag, per journey. So with 2 of us we've added a further £43.96 to the cost however the added price says £57.96, which is a £14 difference, so what's that for? I look it up. That, it appears, is the cost of 'checking in', something which I always assumed was obligatory and so included in the price of the ticket. Now I know I can save myself £14 by just sauntering up to the aircraft, wanging my bag in the hold myself and swanning on to the plane, ignoring check in entirely. Well I assume I can do that, since checking in appears to be an optional extra on this airline. Anyway, on we go to the next step, seats, at which a large flashing notice appears..."Don't leave your seats to chance - pre-book now to guarantee you're seated with your friends!". For an extra £7.99 per person per journey, £10.99 for extra legroom seats? You can fuck right off sunshine, for an extra £31.96 - £43.96 I'll risk sitting next to a stranger for 2 hours. If we're not sat together on the plane we're less likely to have an argument about the armrest anyway. So we finally reach the payment page and I notice another little addition "£36.00 per person taxes and charges". Taxes, well whatever, you can't even fart in this country without getting taxed on it so that's not a huge surprise but charges? What the fuck else is there that you haven't already charged me for? Seriously? Oh, and there's a £10 charge for paying by credit card. Remind me to gather up my magic bean collection next time, it seems to be the only way to pay that doesn't incur another cost. So in summary, cost of flight, £104, cost of bullshit, £139.96, total cost, £243.96. Budget my arse.

2) The DVLA   

I've recently (within the last 2 weeks) bought a car that was previously a Motorbility scheme (supplying subsidised cars to the disabled for anyone not familiar with the scheme) car, and it was pointed out to me by my dad that the car tax disc says 'disabled' on it. And I'm not disabled. So being a fine, upstanding citizen, I decided to contact the DVLA and ask them if I can keep the tax disc till it runs out in October or whether it needs to be replaced. I ring them, go through 48 thousand automated options, "If you are too stupid to be able to work out which way up the tax disc goes, press 1, if one of your equally half-witted family chose to eat the tax disc rather than affix it to your windscreen, press 2, if you are a theiving pikey who has stolen someone else's tax disc and would like to know the most effective method of changing the written date on it, press 3 etc etc" and eventually get through to a tax-monkey. Who doesn't exactly tell me what I want to hear. I explain my circumstances and after thinking about it for a few minutes, the tax monkey comes up with the following:

TM: Do you have the new keepers supplement?

Me: No, the sale was conducted over the phone and I don't have anything, the registration documents haven't arrived yet.

TM: Ooooohh, that's coz they haven't applied for a change of ownership yet, or not according to my computer (giggle).

Me (not laughing):  So how do I tax the car?

TM: You can't.

Me: So I just carry on driving it as it is?

TM: Nope, you have to take it off the road because you're committing fraud by driving it on disabled tax when you're not disabled.

Me: If I took it off the road and applied for the bloody registration documents myself, how long would that take?

TM: Well, you'd have to pay £25 to apply yourself and the documents should be with you in 20 working days.

Me: 20 working days. How helpful. So I assume that while the DVLA has demanded I take the car off the road for 4 weeks because producing a new form and filling in a database entry takes a government department longer than it takes a house builder to produce a block of flats I will be allowed to take my bicycle onto the M60 in order to get to work?

TM: Probably not.

Me: So how else am I meant to get to work in the month I'm not allowed to drive my car?

TM: Erm...taxi?

Well thank you for your help, it's been invaluable. Why are government departments so unutterably fucking useless? What the chuff do we pay them for? This is what you get for attempting to be an upright citizen, next time they can whistle for it.

3) The work experience boy

I was asked to find some work for the work experience boy to do so I duly riffled through the list of stuff that needs doing that I either couldn't be arsed to tackle or that looked a bit tedious and I came up with the task of ringing round the site agents to ask them for a list of the subcontractors they currently had working on site. Not an especially taxing job really but a bit time consuming. Half an hour later, the lady who he's working for (who happens to be his aunt) comes trundling through, "Aww...I gave him your job to do and after a while I thought, oooh, there doesn't seem to be much noise coming from him so I went over and he's just sitting there, he's not rung any of them, he's terrified and he doesn't want to do it, do you not have any filing needs doing?". No, I don't, because by the time I've explained the system to him it'd be quicker to do it myself. For god's sakes boy, grow a pair. You're not tackling the agents about their tax returns, you're just asking for a list of names of companies and if you're too scared to do that then you aren't going to last long in this world are you?

It's clearly going to be a long week. 

I hope that the bastard viewers who just didn't bother to show up, no phone call, no apology, die very fucking slowly and very fucking painfully. I spent bloody hours getting that house ready and the bastards just didn't show up. Utter, utter pigs.

The house that we (and by 'we' I do of course mean 'I' ) really really wanted has gone up on Rightmove as 'Sold Subject to Contract'. I'm trying very hard to be mature about this and to wish the buyers well because they are probably people just like us who really liked the lovely house and garden and just want somewhere nice to live. I am however failing dismally. I know, deep down, that is is wrong to hope that they decide they hate each other and can't live together anymore, I know it's wrong to hope that whoever is buying their house and freeing up their money flies off on holiday and ends up on some weirdy island with giant polar bears and wispy dark clouds of oddness like in Lost. I know I shouldn't hope that the surveyor looking at their hosue for the new buyer discovers that it's built over a mineshaft and the resulting subsidence means that the building is unlikely to still be standing come christmas. I know that thinking all these things is not nice but I can't help it, which is really bad because given my current run of luck on all matters financial, in fact on all matters at the moment, karma will catch up with me and I'll get hit with all three scenarios before the end of the month.

On the bright side, we've got a viewing this afternoon at 5.30pm. You know how you sometimes get a really good feeling about something, as if it's all going to go right? Well I don't have one of those today which means I'm less likely to be disappointed when the people viewing don't immediately get down on their knees and beg me to allow them to buy my beautiful dweeling for twice the asking price. So, I need everyone to keep fingers, toes, knees and eyes crossed for this afternoon. Surely it's my turn for something to go right..... 

Well, the local and European elections have taken place and the first results are showing that Labour do indeed seem to be getting the anticipated kicking that had been predicted. Not really a huge surprise given that Gordon Brown appears to have fewer political supporters than he has toes and his ministers are deserting the good ship Brown in droves. I was pleased to see that poisonous little midget Blears stand down as a minister. According to her it was because she wanted to go back to Salford and do more for her constituents but we all know that it was really because she's a turncoat who never got on with Gordon Brown and has always been the first flea to desert the political corpse. In fact of all the ministers who have quit, the only one with any balls whatsoever is the former Work and Pensions secretary, James Purnell. In his resignation letter he told Gordon Brown that it was time he stepped down as PM for the sake of the party and the government. Up till then they'd all cited family reasons because they are too concerned with their own seedy little careers to risk completely alienating Brown, just in case the entire opposition and every member of every other political party were accidentally to be swept into the sea meaning he did get to be PM for a bit longer and maybe win the next general election.

So the circus rumbles on and we carry on waiting to see which member of Gordon Brown's 'loyal' cabinet will stand down next. Today's offering was the Defence minister, Hutton. My but the military are going to miss him, the man who has sent them to war hopelessly underfunded, under-prepared and under-equipped. If he finds a job commensurate with his organisational skills we can confidently expect him to find him in uniform - asking if you want fries with that.

One interesting and amusing thing to come out of the European elections (and I am aware that there isn't usually anything even vaguely interesting or amusing about European politics), is that Nigel Farage, leader of the rather pointless UKIP (UK Independence Party) is furious. His reasoning? According to him, UKIP have lost valuable votes because.......the ballot paper was so large that it was folded over for ease of handling and UKIP were in the bottom half so their supporters didn't see the box and didn't put their X in it. If I were a supporter of UKIP I'd probably be slightly offended that the leader of my political party of choice thought I was too much of a halfwit to unfold a ballot paper and probably assumed that even if I managed to acheive viewing the entire form, I'd just draw a big. smiley face on the paper before licking it thoroughly and throwing it at the wall. Who knows, perhaps he's right about his supporters. I presume that the people sorting the ballot papers assumed that if a voter was bright enough to manage to get to the polling station without being run over by a big, red bus, eating glass off the road or getting their head stuck in railings, they were probably clever enough to work out how to unfold the paper. Clearly Nigel does not share their confidence in the great British public. Personally I think he's just looking for an excuse for his party's woeful performance in all areas, something that Gordon Brown has stopped bothering to do, posibly because there just aren't enough hours in the day. Actually I'm starting to feel a tiny bit sorry for him, it's like watching one of those films where someone has the worst year at work ever and each day receives a new slap in the chops. Everyone feels for the underdog. Sadly for Mr Brown, my sympathy for the underdog does not over-ride my fury at the smash and grab of my salary via taxation so I still wouldn't vote for him.

I don't think I'm cut out for this house selling business. I take things too personally. Last Wednesday we had our first viewing. We spent most of Tuesday evening after work frantically stuffing crap into cupboards and drawers, banished the dog to my parent's house and set about removing the vast number of moulted hairs from round the edges of carpets, scrubbed the toilets will they shone like polished silver and cleaned the kitchen to within an inch of its life. So the people came, looked round, said the house was lovely and left. The next day the estate agent rang and said that the people were trying to decide between our house and a 4 bedroom house in a scrotey bit of town that didn't cost very much more than our house. Since then, nothing, not a word. So we can safely assume that rather than pick my lovely, shiny, new, polished, recently-decorated-in-tastful-neutral-shades house, they have picked some shitty fleapit in a grotty neighbourhood where nobody works and your car wheels get nicked if you park at traffic lights. What the hell is wrong with these people? And what the hell is wrong with my house? Don't be coming in telling me it's nice and then not offering to buy it at the full asking price, I don't care what you think about my light fittings and the colour I put on the bedroom walls unless you are going to buy it. Swines. And another thing, given that my house is WAY nicer than most out there (you'd be astounded at what some people do to the interior of a house, there really is no accounting for taste), why have we only had one viewer in 2 and a bit weeks?

Told you. Not good at house selling.

On the bright side, we are having a mini heatwave here in Manchester. I count it as a bright side now because it's only 9am, by the time the sun comes round to our side of the non air-conditioned office and heats it up, taking my office temperature up to a brain-melthing 35 degrees I suspect I will count it as more of a curse. But it was lovely yesterday, sitting in the garden reading a book and hoping the barbecue that the half-wit at the back built right up against the garden boundary didn't set fire to the fence and from there, the guinea pigs. I even have a slight tan which I like to think is natural but which I suspect is a result of 4 coats of that moisturiser with the fake tan in it. You can tell it's really hot because I am wearing a skirt to work, something which I do roughtly twice a year. Hurrah for summer, if I could just stop sodding sneezing it would be marvellous!  

An MP putting in his expenses claim

It's long been known that those who are in charge of this country, our government and our MPs, can be a little bit cheeky when putting in the expenses claims, that was no secret at all, but thanks to a whistleblower and the Daily Telegraph the full appalling extent of the wholesale abuse of public funds has been opened up and we are now treated to the unedifying spectacle of many of our MPs grubbing about in the spotlight like woodlice in the sunshine when you pick up a long abandoned brick from the garden. It really isn't at all pretty.

Bearing in mind that the second homes allowance is supposed to provide an MP who lives too far from Westminster to reasonably commute there on a daily basis and 'expenses' are meant to reimburse essential costs incurred by doing one's job, let's have a little look at what has been claimed for shall we?

Oliver Letwin (Chairman of the Conservative's policy team): More than £2000 to replace a leaky pipe under his tennis court. I shit you not, it's true. Now leaving aside the fact that I'm sure it's essential to have your tennis court properly heated so that you can play in your underpants in mid December, why the fuck is the public paying for it? Is tennis an essential part of the job of high level opposition MP? I suspect not and it's just that the cheeky twat is taking the mick.

Alan Duncan (Shadow leader of the House of Commons): Given a warning after attempting to claim more than £7000 in two years for....wait for it...gardening. How lovely, he must live in the hanging gardens of fucking Babylon to require gardening services costing that much. If he can't handle the garden at his house for a reasonable amount, may I politely suggest that he either buys a flat or has the whole damned lot concreted over? Prat.

Gordon Brown (Useless twat): £6777 for cleaning his Westminster flat for 26 months. This works out at £260 a month. Now my mother used to pay her cleaner £25 a week to spend 2 and a half hours making her 4 bedroom family house spotless. This means either Gordon Brown's flat is 2 and half times larger than a 4 bedroom family house, making ita very large flat indeed, or his cleaner was ripping him off. Considering he was the fucking chancellor you'd have thought he'd have worked out that this wasn't good value. Although considering the royal mess he's made of the economy, perhaps not.

Lord Mandelson (Business secretary): Claimed for improvements on his constituency home AFTER he announced he was leaving Parliament to become an EU Commissioner. He then promptly sold the property for a profit of £136000. He insists that he didn't shaft the taxpayer in order to maximise profit on the place. Pull the other Mandy, it's got fucking bells on. On a scale of one to ten would anyone care to hazard a guess as to exactly how stupid Lord M thinks the electorate are?

Barbara Follett (Tourism minister, married to multi-millionaire author Ken Follett): Has claimed over £25000 PER YEAR for 'security patrols' at her London home after she was mugged and apparently also because she opposed apartheid in South Africa 30 odd years ago. While there's no doubt that it's amusing that the tourism minister is so scared of London that she feels the need for security, I can't help thinking that the fact she got mugged might not be anything to do with her being an MP. This assumption is based on the fact that the other however many dozens of people get mugged in London on a daily basis aren't. So therefore the cost of not getting mugged shouldn't be borne by the taxpayer but by either herself or her utterly loaded husband.

There are dozens more examples, including the interesting practice of 'flipping' second homes, i.e. changing what is registered as your second home and what is your main residence allowing the venal bastards to claim expenses for doing up and kitting out more than one property, but I can't be bothered to list them all because it's long and depressing and frankly, just a little bit embarrassing. God knows what the rest of the world thinks about what's going on over here, they must be howling with laughter. The stock excuse for this disgusting display of trough-raiding is that "I was operating within the Commons rules" which in most cases is technically true. This doesn't look quite so impressive as an excuse when you consider who makes the rules and votes on any changes to them. Yep, you guessed it, the rules are made by MPs themselves. And so there we have it ladies and gentlemen, the impressive spectacle of our ruling elite, a collection of a few honest people who want to improve the country and a massive number of mendacious wastes of space whose main concern is ram-raiding the taxpayer and making as much profit as they can in their time in power. Back in the days the French overthrew and executed theirs for less. Come the revolution I don't suppose there's going to be any shortage of members of the public willing to polish the guillotine....

We are all doomed I tell you

Swine flu - it's all the papers and the radio are full of at the moment. Apparently our government is 'fully prepared' for the outbreak, which as anyone who has lived here for any length of time can tell you is government speak for 'We're utterly fucked'. Since apparently most people in the world are going to die from pig flu because unlike bird flu you don't actually have to sleep with a chicken over a prolonged period in order to catch it, I thought I'd better be prepared for what might happen. So, I sat down to watch the very informative documentary on this subject, "28 Days Later". Although that appeared to be monkey virus, I'm quite sure that the basic principle is the same. Being ahead of the game I know where this is going and am utterly disgusted that the government has not highlighted the upcoming problem of zombies taking over our streets. Now I realise that they are possibly less destructive and more sociable than most British teenagers but I still think a little warning might not have gone amiss. Since the government are being no help whatsoever and are merely going to post us all a leaflet telling us how not to catch flu, I thought I'd make my own plans.

• I am converting the cupboard under the stairs into a hiding place. I have begun tunnelling into the foundations of the house to make a bigger space as it was a bit cramped with me, the other half and the dog in there, plus 3000 tins of baked beans, a storage tank of water and 2000 bars of soap. There's no need to let hygiene standards slip merely because we are having a crisis. On reflection the beans might not have been the wisest food choice, given the size of our new accomodation but they may have the added bonus of discouraging curious zombies from investigating the cupboard.
• I have bought 52 packs of barbecue kebab sticks and am sharpening them using my pencil sharpener. Everyone knows that zombies cannot survive a wooden stake through the heart so my kebab sticks will prove an efficient yet cost effective way of dealing with intruders. I originally purchased a sling-shot for firing them but in these days of rising obesity I'm not convinced that this is going to be enough so am scouring Ebay for a second hand harpoon which I will customise to fire the sticks. I may buy a second harpoon that can fire washing-line props for the really morbidly obese zombie.
• I am training the dog to attack anyone who looks a bit 'undead'. So far he has attacked 2 drunks, the man across the road who works night shifts and a bramble bush but I'm sure he'll get the hang of it eventually.

So as you can see, I have things under control and am ready for the coming apocalypse. Not sure what I'm going to do with 3000 tins of economy brand beans if this all does come to nothing and the dead do not rise up and attack but I'm sure I'll think of something, And a harpoon that fires kebab sticks will always be useful.

While sitting here slowly roasting to death as the sun hits the big windows at the side of the office, heating it up like a giant greenhouse and melting my brain, I got to thinking about how much more money I'd have if I didn't fritter cash on stupid things. This thought then wombled it's way along my overheated neural pathways until it arrived at the room marked 'The most pointless things I've ever bought'. After having a good rummage around I have discovered that over the course of my life I've made some really pointless purchases, including but not limited to:

The Silver Trousers

When I was about 15 or 16, I bought a pair of silver trousers. This in itself sounds bad enough but at age 15 or 16 I was 5ft 10in tall and a UK size 8. This meant that my legs were very very long and very very skinny so when I wore a pair of tight silver trousers I looked a lot like a flamingo wrapped in tinfoil. Added to that, they were that annoying inch too short, which just made the whole ensemble even more attractive. I tell you, in those silver trousers I had them queuing round the block. Fortunately I fell over a fence in them fairly soon after buying them which wrote them off. Tragically it wasn't before some swine with a camera had captured for posterity an awkward looking, teenaged, tinfoil-wrapped flamingo in a park somewhere clutching her shoes and what looked suspiciously like a bottle of cider. Teenage years are rarely anyone's finest hour.

Price: About £15

Number of uses: Roughly a cringeworthy 4.

The pink Stilettos

They had 5 inch heels and were made of dusky pink suede and leather. They were in the sale: I saw them, I wanted them, I bought them. What I didn't think to check before heading to the till with them clutched in my excited little hand, was whether I could walk in them. Which, as it turned out, I couldn't. No matter how hard I tried, how much I practiced, whenever I tried moving in them I ended up walking like I'd been kicked hard in the arse by a horse. It was not a good look at all.

Price: £35

Number of uses: A painful and limping once.

Gym Membership

I decided to get fit and join the gym, so off I toddled, down to our local gym with dreams of a washboard flat stomach and impressively toned arms. I had my induction (almost giving myself a stroke in the process), and left with a dent in my debit card made by the cost of my year long membership and a programme of exercises that involved 3 visits a week to the gym. Which I managed to keep up for the length of time that I managed to convince myself that I really did like the gym and enjoyed my time on the cross trainer. I think it was about 4 weeks. After this honeymoon period ended, the truth slowly began to dawn on me - I bloody hate the gym. It's full of miserable people who are also only there because they dream of an unattainable body shape and are pissed off that 3 months later they are still the same shape as a King Edward potato. It smells of exercise.  There are naked people in the changing rooms, I'm British, I don't do public nudity and I've no wish to see a complete stranger's lady bits. Then there are the people who are on the cross trainer, going 4 times faster than you and who aren't even out of breath, while you are panting like a Newfoundland dog in a sauna and wondering whether you're having an actual heart attack. My realisation that I hated the gym and my attendence at the gym were directly correlated, as the former became clearer, the latter became less frequent until I was forcing myself to go about once a month, making the cost of each visit a princely £45. Needless to say, at the end of the year I didn't bother to renew the membership, opting instead for the far cheaper option of walking the dog.

Price: £540

Number of uses: Impressive to start with, dismal from 2 months onwards.

Exercise DVDs

Before the gym debacle I decided that the best way to get fit was in the privacy of own home, where people wouldn't laugh at me, so on the internet I went and came away happy with my purchase of some dance fitness DVD thingy. When it arrived I was initially perturbed by the pneumatic blonde woman on the cover, but then figured that she probably wouldn't be the one actually doing the exercises, no, surely that would be led by some ordinary shaped person. Wrong. It WAS led by the pneumatic blonde, who came complete with more teeth than is natural, an annoyingly cheerful voice that never seemed to get out of breath, a collection of half a dozen backing dancey women who all looked the same and who couldn't have had a combined weight of more than 12 stone plus a rather sweaty looking bloke who I think might have been Mexican. I never really did work out what his purpose was, other than to lech over the blonde. So I put my trainers on, put it on the DVD player (with the blinds shut) and away I went. I quickly discovered several things: The dog didn't appreciate the concept of personal space while exercising, no matter how often I kicked him in the head while flailing about, and had to be shut in the kitchen where he barked solidly until I'd finished; I was hopelessly unfit; I have no natural coordination whatsoever and all the suppleness of a mahogany sideboard; dance music gets on my wick after a very short space of time; while swinging my arms and legs about trying to get fit while fruitlessly attempting to copy the steps if the blonde, the skinny women and the sweaty Mexican I looked like a complete and utter twat. So I gave up on the exercise DVD and the one that came free with it which I believe is still in its shiny cellophane wrapper, gathering dust under the bed.

Price: £10

Number of uses: Not enough to look like the women in the DVD but almost enough to leave the dog with permanent brain damage.

And there's so very many more things than this. One day, if I ever have enough money to not feel depressed by the figure, I'll sit down and try and work out the cost of all the pointless crap I've bought and never used but in the meantime I'll just carry on as before. Go on, 'fess up, what's your most pointless ever purchase?  I suppose I should just be grateful that I never developed an Ebay habit, imagine the amount of useless crap I could have bought then. In fact, maybe I'll just go and have a little look, just in the name of research you understand..... 

Those greedy bastards in Westminster are looking to add another wodge of tax onto every litre of fuel we buy, presumably so that Jacqui Smith's husband can afford the deluxe premium porno channel and Alistair Darling can add another tax-payer funded property to his portfolio. In an attempt to have this stopped, the Freight Transport Association are looking to get MPs to put a stay of execution on this idea, as a lot of freight companies are struggling to stay afloat in the recession. The more it costs to transport goods and the more freight companies go to the wall, the more it's going to cost us all to buy anything that's transported by road. And let's be honest - if we give more money to the government they are only going to piss it up the wall or install a solid gold shower in Harriet Harman's bathroom with it. So if you've got a spare minute, please visit the Freight Transport Association's "Every Penny Counts" campaign site here and order some postcards. You just fill them in, get all your mates to fill them in and everyone in the pub and then pop them into the post. You don't even have to attach a stamp, couldn't be simpler! Go on, do it, you know you want to.......