Do you remember, oh around 18 months ago, I had a terrible, terrible time trying to convince British Gas that our day and night electricity readings were the wrong way around? Took months to sort it all out. And then it was sorted out and all was well, and the nice man who eventually did sort it all out gave us £30 towards our winter gas bill. Well, he didn't personally, but he arranged a credit for us from British Gas and we received that with great pleasure.
You'd forgotten all about that? Hardly surprising. So had we.
So I was not a little disconcerted when I recently looked online at our electricity account to find that we were suddenly and abruptly £1100 in credit. By my reckoning we should have been about £150 in debit. I had, in fact, gone onto the website to make a contribution towards the debt!
I looked more closely. And about 3 days before that, someone had gone through and painstakingly reversed 18 months worth of readings and therefore amounts owed.
SIGH!
So I griddled my lions and rang them. At least this time I knew to talk about "twisted meter readings". They pay a lot more attention if you actually know the jargon. And someone has been doing something about it. Alas, however, the account now reads that we are £190 in credit (we aren't, I tell you) and the meter reads are still twisted and the nice someone has gone on holiday.
SIGH!!!!!!!!
Still - at least he seemed to be doing something useful before he went away. I am assured he'll ring me when he gets back. In the meantime, it was oh-so-tempting to ring them up when we had a balance of more than a thousand pounds in credit and asking if they could reimburse us. Would have been a mighty deposit for the Grand World Tour fund!!
In the meantime ...
The doorbell rang at about 10 to 10 on Wednesday evening. This is a highly unusual occurrence, especially at that time of day. The Builder went to investigate. And it was the new chap down in Number 12, asking what we thought about the appeal against the planning decision the council had made about the block of land at the back of his place. We weren't thinking anything about it. We didn't know about it. Come to that, we were blissfully ignorant that a planning application had ever been put in in the first place (it had - last October).
Odd, we thought. The council wrote to everyone else about it. Wonder why they didn't write to us. So on Thursday I investigated. And found that the OS maps the council and the developers were working to showed the back of our garden as still belonging to #4 - thus meaning that as far as they were concerned we didn't share a boundary with the planned development and therefore didn't have a direct interest.
This was a tiny bit of a worry. We don't want people deciding we don't own that bit of land. We paid CASH for it - well, a cheque but you know what I mean. I rang the Land Registry.
Should you ever be minded to ring the Land Registry and ask if they have any suggestions as to what you should do under such circumstances, may I gently suggest that you don't bother. Nearly half an hour later we finally managed to establish that no, I wasn't complaining that the LR had the certificates wrong and that no, I wasn't in anyway suggesting that they were responsible for OS maps and no, I understood that they weren't responsible for the maps that the Council used and yes, I do have the certificate in front of me and no, I am not wanting to complain that it's wrong and ... Well, you take my point. I was none the wiser about what I could do about it and had neither the strength nor the time to ring the Council and try and explain it to them - so have written them a letter. It's not that we necessarily wanted to make an objection to the planned development (I can't think of any legitimate grounds for objection) - but it would have been nice to have been in the loop, as they say!
Apart from all that, though, things have been trundling along. I was working Saturday afternoon, again at Collegiate, earning a few more pennies for the GWT fund. I think we now have enough to get possibly as far as Moscow, maybe a little further. I just have to RESIST the temptation to spend the moneys in the fund (maybe I should actually set up a fund :-D ) We had a lovely potter about on Sunday, in the glorious sunshine. We went to Chatsworth for a few supplies, then across country back into Chesterfield for Marlo-supplies. Otherwise we didn't really do anything very much on Sunday. I was a bit tired after all that trying to sort things out during the week, on top of all the other things I do - like go to work!
Freyja and Simon are back from New York. Austin and Kaori are in the throes of arranging to move. Tabitha and Gareth have the day off today and have gone to Endcliffe Park with Cally. Not sure why Endcliffe when there are two other huge parks nearer to them, but I'm sure there is a reason. Oh - and Austin and Kaori have *finally* remembered to ask what flavour their forthcoming baby is and think that it is probably going to be a boy
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