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This week is getting ever more hectic. Thank God I have a holiday next week, because things have been super stressful. Not sure that holidaying with a 2 year old will be relaxing, but it will seem so compared to this.
I don’t know why I have stayed loyal to BT - I can only assume that their great adverts from my childhood have brainwashed me, because their service has been uniformly terrible for years now and yet I still keep failing to escape (and without much choice available now have signed up in the new house too). This week our broadband stopped working - I only had a chance to look into it this morning to discover that our phone line has actually been cut off. A 45 minute phone call later I discovered that they hadn’t mistakenly thought we’d moved already, but there was just some error at their end. That might take them until the 16th to sort out. Which is annoying. But not as annoying as it taking 45 minutes of the morning to find this out. I was then playing catch up all day - having to go and pick up my car (staying loyal to VW in spite of all the shit that I’ve gone through with them - I am a dolt. It’s because of people like me that nothing improves), that taking longer than expected and then being an hour late for a redubbing of one of the short films I did last year, then having to dash back home to load up the tour car - Bex remarkably was carrying on working despite having badly sprained (though luckily not broken) her leg. I wasn’t entirely comfortable with her doing this, but massively appreciated it. We were going to drop off all the tour stuff at my new house and I was going to load up my new car too to get a bit more moving in done.
So Bex headed off in her car and I had the first five minutes of rest of the day, before loading my car and then trying to familiarise myself with it and its functions. I managed to get my phone connected up to the bluetooth, but only once the computer had vainly tried to connect with Ryan’s phone. Ryan presumably, had owned the car before me. It was quite moving to see the car computer trying to find Ryan and discovering that Ryan had gone. I hoped the car wouldn’t hate me for having usurped him. It seemed sad that he’d gone. And I bet he didn’t let the car know it was over.
I unloaded all my stuff at the new house and then had to drive over to St Albans for the show. I had chosen the wrong time to play Me1 vs Me2 snooker in the interval. But if you’re going to have a day (and a week- or really a fortnight) where nothing stops, then you might as well not have a sit down during the interval either. I felt less wiped out than I did in Reading, but still not sharp enough to make it an entertaining podcast - just a workman like playing out of a frame in which neither player managed to pot two balls in a row (which might be a record).
Bex and I had agreed that it was not a good idea for her to drive to Shrewsbury and that she must rest up and hope she could heal her leg in time for the next job. It was so admirable that she had tried to keep going - there is nothing I respect as much as a devastating combo of hard work and persistence, even when you are just facilitating a man playing snooker against himself - we really are very similar people.
Over 350 in tonight, which was great (though it’s an 800 seater) and a really fun show where I kept focused and in control in spite of this non-stop day.
Once we were done we zoomed back up to the new house, parked our two cars and started unloading snooker boards, projector screens and programmes. My new neighbour, knowing I wasn’t moving in just yet, came out to see what was going on. I had been umming and ahhing between staying over and going back to London. But my neighbour asked if I wanted a glass of wine and it seemed rude not to. I met a few of the people who live in my village. They seem to like drinking and eating cheese. I think I might fit in.
I slept in the new house for the first time - though it was cold and the water was off (as I only discovered after I visited the loo) and the rewiring and other work had begun. It had probably been a bit crazy to get drunk given that tomorrow I would be driving back to London and then driving to Shrewsbury alone, but it was good to let my hair down with a load of strangers that I have been thrown together with due to geography and chance (and amongst other things, the people who we were originally going to buy a house from changing their mind). I got some gossip and local info. but then got too drunk to remember any of it.
Outside my new car dreamt of Ryan.
