Compu'er says no

On the radio this morning, Beck singing 'Where it's at' reminded me of a time when I used to listen to Beck all the time, odd, because I saw him last Saturday on SNL, still being quirky, he played guitar while the rest of the band or his back-up band, whatever they are, sat around a fully laid table and tapped cutlery. And it was good.

And there's nothing unusual about a track or a scent that can take you WHAM back to a different place, a different time, but this morning it was a single word.
As we pulled out of the close, taking Laurence to work, people were scraping thick frost off their cars. Laurence mentioned this.
'Yes,' I said, 'if they have to park on the street then they are always caught like that,'
'Innit,' he said. Bam, South of England, kids I've taught, friends I've worked with. A boy in my class, second school I worked at, quite near to Heathrow. Imran. Every morning,
'Want to buy a mobile phone Miss innit?' Imran said 'innit' after everything. The phones were knock off from the airport innit.

Yesterday, during the last performance of the Halloween Howl, I leaned down to show a kid a snake skeleton.
'Are you Jewish?' she asked. I was totally taken aback. I was dressed as a witch. Later, that moment came back to me. From her angle she would have just seen the wide black rim of my hat, my hair scraped back underneath, making my forehead seem longer and long black hair hanging down from the hat. She must have seen an Hasidic Jew, but I have no beard, maybe she thought this must be what female ones look like.

We had no trick or treaters last night, I wasn't even aware of any in our road at all. But there was a point when a short, sharp but spectacular firework display went off across the road, behind the portacabins of the school, right, in fact, next to their propane tank. I can see it now from my window, it looks like a bomb. Now that would have been some display.

So the poisoning of those children and parents in Corfu has now been pinpointed to carbon monoxide. The Greek authorities have acted swiftly and suspended the hotel's licence. I'm impressed. Their action has been swift, decisive and appropriate,

""We will not put up with incidents that blacken the image of Greece's tourism industry and bring our country into disrepute," Palli-Petralia said." Innit.

Dealing with two different countries' institutions I am having to be bilingual in a whole new way. In Britain, you don't hassle to much because you will annoy them and they will simply 'lose' your stuff. But Kevin has been trying to coach me into a different way of approaching Canadian ones, you must bug them, bug, bug, bug, bug, bug. The last thing I heard on the subject of getting my qualifications recognised, Kings' College had simply sent a letter saying that I did indeed have an MA, but there was no transcript, even though their website said they offered this service and I had paid for one. Just to remind British friends what a transcript is, it's not the transcript of something spoken, but some kind of summary of the marks you had when doing your degree.

I had rung the people here on Monday, and they were due to call back yesterday afternoon between 13.00 and 16.00. Around 14.00 the phone rang.
'All we need now is x, y and z,'
'You have x and y,'
'It isn't checked off,'
'But I know you have it, could you look in the file?'
'Oh yes, it's here, but it hasn't been checked off,'
'Could you check it off?'
'I'll have to ask,'
'And y is part of x,'
'I'll have to ask,'
'Couldn't you just look at x?'
'Oh yes, you're right, but it hasn't been checked off,'
'Could you do that?'
'I'll have to ask,'
'Now that you have everything except z and z (my MA) isn't vital to my application, could you consider it without z?'
'I'll have to ask, someone will ring you back,'
'Today?'
'Possibly, or could be tomorrow.'

You can just picture David Walliams from Little Britain dressed as the middle-aged spinster, just sitting there and saying,
'Compu'er says no.'

It would be funny, just that, it's stopping me from even applying for anything meaningful.