Pompey

Pompey doesn't change much. The football obsession, the smells, the chavs, the others, the streets jam-packed with colour and character.
Once we were within spitting distance of Portsea island, the radio was all about the football game. Pompey had lost to Sleepy's team.
On Albert road, taking the children for a walk at dusk, a Father Christmas in every doorway, the last one a skinny Thai woman dressed in short, red plastic trimmed with fun fur. Or maybe it wasn't a woman at all. I couldn't be sure what she was trying to advertise and perhaps I didn't want to know.

Today the jet-lag kicked in. Wide awake at 4.30, then dead to the world from eight or nine until eleven thirty.
My mobile phone doesn't work. The network no longer recognises the SIM card, I can't work out whether the phone is so old and knackered that it has just given up the ghost, or whether SIM cards have some kind of sell-by date. Ultimately, the answer is to get a new Canadian one that can be used here too.

In Waitrose I see the folly of my old ways. The alluring up-market ready meals. No need to go out to eat when you can shop at Waitrose. But for all that, I select something that Kevin, his eyes hollow from lack of sleep, has to cook. It's either that or I can torture it myself until no-one wants to eat it.

Yesterday I was awed by my daughter on the phone haranguing her mobile phone company. She wouldn't let up and she didn't ever shout at them or allow them to derail her. And yet still they continue to be incompetent, lazy buffoons. But the important thing is to exercise the right to complain otherwise how do they know?
I admire her for that.
I admire the British for that.

If Crisp-e's reading, cover your eyes. Kevin has a new i-book and it is still what we have to use when travelling. And I still have an uneasy relationship with it. But I can put up with it for two weeks.