Further ramblings of a self-made pauper

Although it's not been a bad day over all, I can't help but feel a little bit sad. At 5 o'clock this afternoon, give or take a couple of minutes, it has been exactly a year since I last saw Dad. In a fit of sentimentality a couple of months ago, I had Furtle scan this picture, which the family thinks was taken for his 21st birthday all the way back in November 1941.



Clearly the genes have skipped a generation; my nephew Tom, Dad's grandson looks more like him than I do; I think I take more after my Mum's side of the family, although I can see my own paternal granddad a little when I look in the mirror.

I can tell now, where I get my love of tweed jackets from, too...

Finally. I have found a frame to put my photo of Dad in. I took the picture almost exactly a year ago. It was the last one anyone took of him and despite it being outside the hospital where he went after the first of the mini strokes, he looks happy and surprisingly well.
( Dad )

It still makes me well up when I look at it, but I am really, really glad I have it. I miss the old bloke.

Speaking as a faceless bureaucrat, or as the French would have it, a fonctionaire, I am getting fed up with faceless bureaucrats.

Tomorrow it will be three months to the day since Dad died, and I have had my sister on the phone telling me that the County Council have written to Mum asking about progress on some non-existent bill for close on £1,000. Once again I am reduced to impotent rage as I have none of the details to hand, so cannot give the jabbering mongoose the bollocking he, she or it so richly deserves. In the meantime, while I’m awaiting details from my sister, so I can do so, I have to phone Mum at lunchtime to make sure she is OK since she is not really equipped for dealing with an uncaring bureaucracy.

Bah. This doesn’t really help my blood pressure, or, forgive the pun, my sang-froid. It just never ends.

I am finding it hard to think of anything to write and yet here I am making that the subject of an entry.

What a publicity hound, eh?

I don’t want to write about the weather; I’m fed up with that and I expect you are, too. There’s only so many ways to say that it’s too hot (although the chances of record-breaking July temperatures in London, where it’s currently hotter than Mauritius, is worth noting).

At the same time, I really don’t want to harp on about the tube system. Largely because any muttering I do is linked to the heat, but also because it (or at least the bit I use) has behaved itself impeccably the past couple of days. Let sleeping dogs lie, I say.

This all leaves me with precious little to write about and that is frustrating when you fancy yourself to be a bit of a writer (an unmotivated writer to be sure, but a writer nonetheless. I am blaming my lack of worthwhile written productivity on the heat and tube system. A heady blend of irrelevance and hypocrisy, but it suits me).

( Family matters: feel free to skip. )