Just when you thought it couldn't get any worse...

We've got four days to move out of the pub.

red room

One of the nice things about living in a pub, is all the interesting people you get to meet.

Last weekend I woke up and wandered bleary-eyed into the living room, whereupon I discovered that an axe-murderer had spent the night sleeping on the sofa.

I exaggerate slightly; it was actually a claw hammer that this fellow used to kill his abusive father when he was fifteen. But it still caused me to ponder at some length, as I tried to work out the best way of telling an axe-murderer that he can't smoke in the flat...*

In the end, I resolved simply to make myself a cup of tea, clean out the mice and go back to bed.

In other news, my car is still AWOL... sort of. My insurance company has still not told me a damn thing about it, like where it is, whether I'll be getting back, or how much money they want to give me for it. However, I have had my tax disc and student parking permit posted to me by the good people at W.J. Furber, a car salvage and spares yard some 140 miles away in Shropshire.

Must play with mice... think happy thoughts... everyone's on fire...

*Disclaimer: Matt's actually an awesomely cool guy, if a little heavily medicated. My problem was more one of crippling politeness...

venting

Today was the last day of teaching for my second year of university. And on this last day, in the very last lecture (Industrial Fucking Control), we were given a list of the six topics that were the basis of the questions in the exam we are all due to sit in three weeks' time.

It was at this point that we discovered that we had not been taught one of these topics at all in the last year.

Imagine how impressed I was. Go on, just try and imagine.

This merely served to compound my rage. Less than an hour prior to this infuriating, yet depressingly unsurprising revelation, I received a text message from my insurance company telling me that I should contact their TOTAL LOSS team to help progress my claim... not a phone call, a fucking text message. At this point, I still have no idea where my car actually is, or what kind of condition it's in. When I spoke to the police initially, they told me that it had "some barrel damage and ignition damage", and that the recovery garage would phone me to tell me when it was ready to be collected/crushed into a tiny cube.

Of course, they didn't - they can charge by the day for storage, so why the hell would they want me to take my car away? I eventually got a phone number for these arseholes by going through various police departments, and duly passed this information on to my insurance company, who would provide free storage and do a full inspection. And now I have to phone their total loss team? Doesn't sound very encouraging to me. I still don't know where my car is. I don't know who's got it. I don't know if it's drivable. I don't know if it's repairable. I don't if I'm ever getting it back. I don't know if my stuff is still in it (my stuff consisting of a pair of glasses that make it relatively safe for me to be behind the wheel of a car, half a can of engine oil, some small change, and an emergency Mini Babybel cheese that has been living in the ashtray for some time). No one is telling me a fucking thing, and it is making me so angry that I cannot even maintain the pretense of proper fucking English fucking politeness.

The only thing that seems to cheer me up at the moment is imagining that everyone around me is on fire.



That, and my mice.