The Monday blog

26th January 2009

I’ve decided to start writing a blog entry every Monday, a sort of diary of what I have learnt and what utterly ridiculous things I have encountered over the last week. I am absolutely, positively prone to chronic procrastination and so this may well be the first and last of these Monday blogs. 

First the bank. A long while ago now I asked the bank, NatWest, to stop sending me paper statements as I could check, if I were ever so bored, my balance and the like on the internet, to which I have slowly over the last few years become addicted. They agreed, via their ‘stop us wasting paper and sending you statements that you don’t read’ button. But yesterday, on returning from a little jaunt to Liverpool, I saw two letters from the bank, both telling me exactly the same thing, that they were changing their fees and charges and I really ought to be aware of it. Would an email have been beyond their technological capability? I am trying to save the world, one paper statement at a time and they go an undo all my good work in one swoop, the bastards.

As mentioned I spent last week in Liverpool, the former capital of culture, with my girlfriend and her family. I went there to interview a few Korean expats who now live in the city as well as to spend some time with my girlfriend and to escape the tedium that is Cwmbran. We interviewed, wandered, looked at a few of the museums and exhibitions that Liverpool seems to have, not in excess but certainly in plenty and generally had a pleasant time. We discovered that amongst the 600,000 or so people in Liverpool there was a thriving little Korean community. We met 50 of them on a night out in a Japanese restaurant and had a very nice time.

Whilst on the subject of Korea I learnt that, according to the guardian it is women who stop traffic in North Korea. They are beautiful, the paper says but their beauty isn’t what stops traffic, not in the Hollywood sense anyway, causing a pile up as drivers rubber neck to get a look at the tall, beautiful, uniformed women but because being tall, beautiful and female are pre requisites for being traffic wardens. Reverse discrimination maybe but maybe drivers in so called free societies would obey traffic wardens and signals more if they had long flowing hair, legs that reach their armpits and fishnets and high heels, ok lose the fish nets but you get the point.

I also read somewhere (ok it was the observer) that more and more people are deciding that they want to be incinerated when they die, presumably because the thought of being eaten by worms and the like isn’t as appealing as it once was. It isn’t the actual burning that is causing the problems it is that relatives want to scatter ashes in inappropriate places, in a romantic and frankly stupid attempt to forever bond their dead loved one with something they loved in life like a football club, or a view from a mountain top. What’s wrong with the mantle, under the mirror so your great aunty Joyce can keep her beady eye on you until you join her in a metal canister to complain about the kids of today having no respect?

I will also be using this blog to try and keep up with the goings on of President Number 44. His weekly address to the nation, his nation that is, will be made available online so his fellow Americans and other interested parties can sit down and be read a fairy story of what he gets up to. I have no doubt that he is a good man and he will do a good job but I am skeptical of the amount of truth and un-spun material that will be fed to the world every week. Prove me wrong 44.

I haven’t watched the first address but then I am a procrastinator at heart.