The Mysteries of Central Heating & the County Court.

Just had my first overnight guest. As not everyone has a personal internal combustion engine like me, I tried to get the central heating to work. Unsuccessful! The plumber had said to have the boiler on constant & control the radiators by the wall & rad thermostats. Well, there isn't a wall thermostat for the top floor & switching on the rad ones did nothing whatsoever. Similarly the ground floor has underfloor heating & switching on the wall thermostat did nothing either. (As an aside, exactly what I wonder, is under the floor tiles? Is it water in pipes or electrical wires?) As I've got no instructions it's all a mystery.

Anyway, the sale agreement on the house included sorting out the boiler leak which I discovered had done permanent damage after I moved in. The vendors own plumber said the boiler was permanently damaged & would continue to overheat & cut out. Continuous re-setting wouldn't be good & the boiler needed to be replaced.

Fired up by this lack of heat I have finally issued a summons against my elusive vendor who hasn't kept his side of the bargain. Nor has he responded at all to several written communications & an offer of mediation. I have to say I am most impressed with the whole thing. It's all done on line through www.moneyclaim.gov.uk & couldn't be easier.  It really only took a few minutes & a fee of £80, which is refunded if judgement is found against my vendor.

I look forward to a response & hopefully a cheque or better still a wodge of money. Winter is coming, I need to be warm.

Presents & Presence

Christmas is on the horizon. This year, even more so than previously, I don't have the inclination or the time to think about, shop for, wrap & give presents & send cards. I am completely bogged down with the demands of making my new house into my home. When you know you are no longer young & cannot with any confidence predict where you will be, or what you will be doing tomorrow, time is precious.

I really don't know what any of the people I have to buy for want or need. I also suspect that they will all have everything anyway. I'm not prepared to spend hours trawling round shops hoping inspiration will strike, (I simply don't have the energy). The chances are that I will either get something safe & boring or something that will go in the "present drawer" or to charity. It all seems such a waste of time & resources.

It seems to me that if Christmas means anything at all it is being with or making contact with people you like & love. It's a good time to make sure that we renew & maintain our friendships & family. Making the effort to reach out & share lives & events is important. In our busy lives today time all too often goes by too quickly & we realise that we haven't written, spoken or met up with people who matter to us.

It really isn't about the size of the gift or the cost. It isn't about "grand gestures" & overwhelming generosity. Spending money is relatively easy. Spending time with someone is far more valuable & costly. We are social animals. It should be about our presence in the lives of our friends & family. Preferably not just at Christmas, but regularly throughout the year. I'm really lucky. My friends have sustained me & given their time, advice & practical help unstintingly over the last year or so.

Good friends are the real blessing & spirit of Christmas. According to recent statistics lonliness is a major disease of the 21st century. We really should do something about that - not just on the 25th December.

Heinz 57 Varieties

Not quite! Instead 57 large & very heavy boxes of Ikea flatpack to go in a corridor, the dining area, my study & my "arty farty" room. When you do the order you really have no concept of; the sheer volume & weight, the amount of space the boxes take up, the difficulty of moving just one box, & finally matching the boxes together to make a unit. It's a good job I cleared the sitting room area, otherwise I wouldn't have been able to get to the kitchen.

Then there's assembling it all. Maryon, (daughter), is coming at 3pm with 8year old twins. If we can move the boxes I can't do on my own it will help. Maybe we can get a couple of cupboards done too. She may be able to help a bit tomorrow too with Ed, (son in law). Then a couple of friends are coming on the 21st to help. Now I see the size of the problem I really think I need to find "a man who can" as well. This is above & beyond the call of friends & family.

So, temporary chaos - again. The sheer volume of cardboard to be re-cycled is completely beyond my small re-cycling box. I need a skip if I'm not to be buried.

It is daunting, but it is also quite exciting. Once it's assembled I will have the pleasure, to a slightly OCD, organised, person like myself, of putting everything away. Neatness & tidiness will reign supreme.

That may be some time off yet though.

Customer Satisfaction Surveys

The world & it's wife seems to want me to do one of these surveys after every contact and transaction. It seems like a rash or a contageous disease which has spread to the four corners of the business world. Every online or phone contact I make seems to ask me to spare anything from a couple of minutes to the time taken to write a short story. I don't have either the time to waste or the inclination to evaluate everything I do.

I have serious doubts about how all of this information is correlated & used. Is there any evidence that it actually improves customer service or "the customer experience" - (what a nauseating phrase that is). Are there really huge teams of people analyzing all this data or does it all go into a vast black hole somewhere? If it is evaluated, could they be better occupied actually providing the service? Maybe then we wouldn't have to go through "War & Peace" sized phone menus & hang onto a phone interminably waiting to speak to a real person.

Do companies really need customers to tell them, in minute detail, what makes for good customer service? I would have thought it isn't difficult. Simple & clear information, delivered courteously, by someone who seems interested in what the customer wants & is able to match their needs to a product or service. Job done.

I do think that customer service has improved over the last decade. Mind you the base line was pretty appalling. Competition has made companies realise that satisfying their customers by delivering well designed products & services, at a good price point & in a timely fashion is the way to market share & therefore profit. I also like the fact that the people who we customers deal with identify themselves by name & refer to us by name too.

So plaudits as well as brickbats. Hopefully companies will tire of the interminable customer satisfaction surveys & just get on with the actual job of serving customers efficiently and fairly.

No Place Like Home

I've just had a blinding revelation after talking to a couple of friends about returning to my new house from holiday. I now realise why it simply doesn't feel like home.

A home is lots of different things. It's a refuge & a sanctuary from the world outside. A place to retreat to when life gets a bit tough. A comfortable place full of your own "stuff" which reflects who you are & what is important to you. A place filled with reminders of people & a life past. A place where you can be yourself & shed the image you present to the world. A place where you can relax & entertain friends & family. A very important place to your sense of self & well being.

For me, up to 2009, it was a place had always I shared with people I liked or loved. The whole of my life up to that point was spent living with someone else - parents, friends, a husband, a child, (now very much an independent adult). Adjusting to a solitary life has been a very mixed journey, not all bad & in some ways liberating.

This is the first house I have been totally responsible for. Choosing it, furnishing it, deciding exactly what goes where. At the moment it is in a state of mild chaos. It isn't as clean or organised as I would like & feel more comfortable with. There are lots of jobs outstanding because I'm waiting for work to be done & furniture to be delivered. It doesn't seem worth blitzing the cleaning until that is all completed.

The move here has been fraught with problems, some of which are ongoing & draining. Just coping with the million & one things you have to do when you move has taxed my brain & my energy to their limits, without the additional problems I have had - & some I still have. All of this impacts on how I feel about my house & explains why it doesn't, as yet, seem like a home.

Now I understand the underlying problem I can do something about it. I've set myself a goal to have the furniture in place, the boxes emptied & the cupboards filled with everything in it's proper place by the end of November. Also I want to have the electrics & the central heating sorted by then & the whole house deep cleaned. That gives me December to do the nice things like hanging pictures & showing off ornaments. The re-decorating can wait till next year.

So, with any luck, by Christmas it will finally feel like a home.

Holidays - Are they worth it?

I've just got back from a whistle stop tour in Spain. Salamanca to Segovia via Avila. Then most of the holiday in Madrid with trips out to Toledo, Aranjuez & Chinchon, The towns are beautiful & very interesting & Madrid is an art lovers dream. The architecture & paintings are stunning, although Baroque isn't my favourite style. The food is freshly prepared from good ingredients & very tasty, apart from that in the hotels we stayed at, which was fairly bland & not that hot.

Which leads me neatly to my first point. About a third of a coach full, (45 - 50), went down with a really nasty tummy bug. It seemed to be quite virulent, lasted a couple of days & left people really washed out. My friend & I were lucky, we didn't get it. The rep's handling of the situation left a lot to be desired. We are awaiting the response from the tour company.

The timetable we were given was changed, supposedly due to the Palacio Real in Aranjuez, which is about the only thing to see there, suddenly closing on Mondays. Later we discovered that it has been closed on Mondays for a very long time. This had the knock on effect of giving us less time in Toledo, which was a big disappointment because it is a highlight of the trip.

Both of these complaints could & should have been handled much better by the rep & the tour operator. The reason people got irritated and annoyed was because of the lack of good communication & response to circumstances.

I developed Oedema at some point presumably due to all the travelling in planes & coaches & standing around in galleries & buildings. I also picked up a throat / chest infection from being confined in the same planes & coaches with lots of people who were coughing. Then there was the morning headache & dizziness. Goodness knows what caused that, unless it was the pillow over my head! (See next paragraph).

Not much sleep for a week, due to a friend who snores more or less continuously, didn't help either. I did discover towards the end that if I used ear plugs & a pillow over my head I could get to sleep. It was rather ironic, because surprisingly the rooms were quiet. 

So the question is - is it worth it? Especially when you consider the time taken preparing before you go & catching up when you get back. 10 years ago I would have definitely said yes. You simply can't beat real first hand experience of different cultures, meeting people, seeing different places. Wherever I've been, however far flung & intrepid, it's the good things I remember not the bad. Now I'm not so sure. Especially considering the time taken to recover.

Maybe travelling is for the young.