No, but we do chicken, lamb, and beef. Yes, it’s a terrible old joke, but the state of deliveries has turned in to a terrible new joke recently. If they were trying to shoot themselves in the foot, they would probably miss.
I sent some stuff by TNT, tightly packed and well taped up in a large cardboard box. However, as has been the case almost every day recently it was raining when they got around to delivering it. The person they were delivering it to wasn’t in, and so the TNT driver, in their infinite wisdom, thought the best place to leave the parcel was in a drain culvert. Just so they could make sure it would get thoroughly soaked through. The bottom fell out of the box when eventually picked up and the books and magazines now have that water damaged look to them.
We have been ordering delivery from Pizza Hut for Friday pizza night for months. It isn’t a tricky delivery route, and it is one their own delivery drivers do without any issues. But give it to a Deliveroo (who should be known from now on as Deliverpoo) driver and the route map looks like a kid has gone mad with a map and a red marker pen. We normally give the pizza a bit longer in the oven when it arrives to crisp it up a bit, but it needed the heat when the driver eventually got here. Parking up to bring it to the door wasn’t the end of the lunacy either. He parked randomly a few doors away and then ran around like a headless chicken to various houses on the street before eventually coming back to the open door where Helen was stood waiting for the pizza.
Saturday wasn’t much better. Fair enough, the driver from Cinnamon made it straight to the house, but they didn’t manage to get the order right. Specifically, Helen’s main. They delivered chicken and not the lamb the order they confirmed by e-mail clearly said on it. They fobbed me off with the promise of a free main next time, but Helen wasn’t having that as it isn’t the first time, they’d screwed up a delivery to us, and she got them to refund her dish instead.
I got a large heavy cardboard box delivered last week, the contents of which some of you will find impossible to believe. It was a delivery that wasn’t mired in ineptitude. It was an exercise bike. Yes exercise. Yes, a bike. A big black and red sturdy thing. Fits perfectly under the stairs. But it has been out several times, and now that I’ve finally remembered to get batteries to fit in the computer thing on it, it tells me all sorts of things about time, speed, distance, calories, and pulse rate. What it doesn’t explicitly say but has been easy to find out is I’m effing unfit, and even after a fairly easy initial session I felt a bit lightheaded, short of breath and horrible and sweaty. But on the plus side, and the reason I got it, it does seem to be helping with my aching knees. Plus, the more I use it, the easier the fifteen minutes are getting.
And this helps with the walking. Twice a week, usually once with Helen, and once by myself I’ve been going out for reasonably long walks. Long enough to get the fatbit excited and try to shake my arm off. We had a lovely walk around parts of Pound Hill and Worth the previous weekend,
https://onetruekev.medium.com/another-crawley-stroll-c4ebd995cfa0
then I had one around parts of Broadfield, then the pair of us walked to and around most of West Green this weekend. Taking in the same historic buildings and lots of geeky pictures of road signs. Today was another trip into Broadfield covering different parts and up to a very muddy Target Hill. The more I do it, the more I find it fascinating how they themed groups of roads as they built the new town around the old villages. I have at least another half a dozen longer walks to do to capture all I want to on film. Plus, I keep finding more things I want to capture on film. There are three walks that need writing up at some point.
I’m also doing weekly sessions on a writing course, which is concentrating in life writing, so there are some interesting pieces coming out of that. And it’s given me some impetus and I’ve done three short stories this month, which is three more that I’d managed in the previous six.
When I logged on to my work laptop yesterday morning a thought came to me as the Bitlocker screen came up asking for my password to use the laptop. It made me wonder whether a password to log onto a porn website should be called Titlocker or perhaps Bitslocker. No? Just me then.
Getting an exercise bike seems to have led to me getting one of those random mail outs where they advertise all kinds of health-related items. There were some pretty random items in there. Chairs and beds advertised as “helping the carer at home”; an instrument to lift and tone sagging necks or quadruple chins; talking weighing scales so you don’t need your spectacles to see the display, I can just imagine it when I step on “one at a time please you fat b@st@rd”; and the one that made us laugh the most – Diabetic Socks. Seriously? WTAF? How much sugar must anyone need to eat so they sweat out enough to turn their socks diabetic? Anyway, the catalogue had one more item that wasn’t health related that they thought they might be able to tempt me into getting, a manual typewriter. Yes, there is a cool retro thing going on there, especially for a budding writer; however, as it costs more than it would cost to buy a laptop, I don’t think that it’s going to be a goer. Plus, these posts would just be pictures of what I’d typed up onto sheets of paper.
And the less said about the shower of shit #MourinhoOut keeps mismanaging the better. Although the downturn in form and results seems to have coincided with getting additional kit sponsorship from Cinch – yes those muppets with the uber annoying adverts with the x-factor reject. It would serve the club right if there is a direct link.