Happy Easter!

It’s Easter Sunday – yet another one spent in lockdown here in the UK. For everyone for whom Easter means something, I wish you peace and contentment. To everyone else, enjoy the long weekend and try not to overdose on chocolate. I asked Miss F if she would like me to buy her a lactose-free Easter egg this year? She thought about it, then announced she’d rather I buy her a new mouse for her laptop because her old one was on the way out. I shrugged, she sent me the Amazon link, I bought it for her, and that was that. Although I am cooking one of her favourite meals tonight – barbecued pork belly with fat chips. Everyone is now aware that Miss F can’t eat dairy, luckily, so she received very nice vegan Easter eggs from my brother and her godmother. My parents bought her the black enamel cookie tin off her university wish list, which she was grateful for. It’s a very large cookie tin, which is probably a good indication of her anticipated university diet.

She didn’t buy me chocolate either. To be honest, I don’t have a particularly sweet tooth and chocolate can make my slightly lactose intolerant system quite ill, so instead, she bought me a very interesting book which I’d never heard of and I’m looking forward to reading it. And that’s it as far as Easter goes for us.

I have finally received my back to work date and will be returning to work on the 15^th of April. Whilst we’ve been in lockdown our pay structure and working hours have changed, in that yes – we have received a pay rise to finally bring our hourly pay up to the minimum for the UK. I was receiving less per hour than my 16-year-old daughter and it was only my commission on top that made it bearable. But, to balance this they are now no longer giving me a paid 20-minute lunch break, but instead are forcing me to take an unpaid hour-long break in the middle of my shift. There’s nothing I can do about this, but it is a real pain in the arse as it means that instead of getting home from work soon after five every evening, I won’t be getting home until after six.

Twenty minutes used to suit me just fine. It was long enough to eat my lunch and read a few pages on my kindle, which is all I needed. But now I will be wasting a whole hour of my day that I won’t be paid for. I will have to sit in a tiny, smelly kitchen for an hour in which I could be doing other things – like being at home. And before anyone asks, no, I can’t go home in that hour. It’s a good fifteen-to-twenty-minute drive – possibly more if the traffic and the lights are against me – so by the time I got home, I’d have about fifteen minutes and it would be time to go back to work (panicking the whole time I’m going to be late).

I’m stuck on an industrial and retail park, so there is nothing there to do but go shopping, which I don’t want to do. There is a park about a ten-minute drive away, but bear in mind I’ll be in my work shoes and uniform, so don’t want to be trouncing around a muddy park. I guess the company must claw back our pay increase somehow, so no longer giving me a paid twenty-minute break is one way of doing it. The full-time workers are losing their hour-long paid lunch break and are having to work an extra hour as well to make up for it, so I’m fortunate compared to them. There’s nothing to be done about it, it is what it is, so I just have to suck it up, but still, it’s annoying.

Talking about annoying, I have had to buy yet another vacuum cleaner this week. This will be the fourth one we’ve had over the past two years, so I hope we’ve got it right this time. Up until two years ago, we had a beast of a VAX. It was a carpet shampooer as well as a vacuum cleaner and it was okay – in shampooer mode, it couldn’t be faulted, but let’s be honest, how often does the normal person shampoo their carpets? As a vacuum, it was very big, heavy, and cumbersome. Storing it was a nightmare – Victorian houses are not known for having ample storage – so I had to try to keep it in the same cupboard where I kept the ironing board and the bin, which meant pulling everything out and hauling the beast out every time I needed to vacuum. Miss F hated it and refused to use it, claiming it was too heavy for her and just too awkward to get out of the cupboard.

For my birthday in 2019, my parents bought me one of those little light vacuum cleaners that weigh practically nothing and are easy to use. They took the VAX and stored it in their garage for whenever anyone in the family wished to shampoo their carpets. Miss F loved the new vacuum and quite happily used it – but we are a very hairy household. What with both Miss F and I having long hair, the cat, and the occasional lodger, this is a home that is in permanent moult. After about seven months the little vacuum cleaner literally fell apart and I knew I had to buy something with a bit more guts.

I looked on Argos, I was drawn to VAX again simply because they are such an established brand and I hadn’t had any problems with my old VAX, other than the fact it was the wrong shape and was too heavy. I picked one that claimed to be able to cope with hair no problem, it was an upright so storage would be easier, and the reviews were good. At £99 it wasn’t a bad price, so I bought it, it came about a week later, and for a while everything was fine.

Then problems began to creep in. For a start, it was one of those bagless things and I have always had mixed views about those. Sure, it means you don’t have to empty the bag and there shouldn’t be any loss of suction, but the ones I’ve had experience with seem to need emptying a lot more times than traditional bag vacuums, and they are a great deal messier to empty. With a bag vacuum, you open the top, carefully lift out the bag, dump it in the bin, insert a new bag, and Bob’s your uncle. But with a bagless thing it always seemed to involve having to get your hands inside the cylinder to yank out the clogged dust and hair, and sometimes even involved the use of skewers to try and hook out stubborn clumps. All of which is a very messy and dirty enterprise, leaving hands filthy and usually dust everywhere.

The new VAX had a tiny dust chamber that needed emptying every single time I went to use it, so that was annoying. Then it was incredibly heavy again, so heavy that again Miss F refused to use it – claiming it hurt her back to do so. It also had a really, really, really, long cable, which sounds like it should be a good thing, but wasn’t. It got tangled onto everything, pulling over chairs and tying in big knots under and around things, so I was forever on my hands and knees trying to unknot the wretched thing.

Finally, it couldn’t cope with the sheer amount of hair it was being asked to deal with. Neither Miss F nor I have had a haircut in over a year. We have a lot of hair! This hair falls onto the carpet and then the vacuum cleaner – which is supposed to have been designed with this purpose in mind – struggled to suck it up properly. Instead, it got snagged all around the roller and proved impossible to remove. The head is a sealed unit, you can’t get to the roller inside, so the hair built up and up until finally the roller wouldn’t turn at all so the suck rate of the vacuum cleaner tanked, until, honestly, I could suck harder than the wretched thing.

In vain, I tried poking scissors and skewers through the tiny opening trying to unclog it but couldn’t remove enough to make a difference. Although, it would periodically barf up great clumps of hair every time I vacuumed, which was fun. It got so bad, that I would have a run over the carpet with the vacuum first, then would have to get down on my hands and knees with a brush and dustpan to do the rest.

Great, £99 spent to have to clean my carpet the way a Victorian housemaid did! So not what I wanted. In the end, I was grumpily forced to admit that the vacuum was only suitable for someone bald, whose entire family was bald, any visitors they had were bald, and they owned a Sphinx cat. The breaking point was reached on Thursday when I was trying to vacuum the stairs, there was a weird whistling sound from deep inside it and what little suction was left abruptly ceased. Back onto the Argos website, I went, and this time did what I should have done in the first place and spent the extra money on buying a good old reliable Henry hoover. It has a large capacity bag and is cordless. Hundreds of five-star reviews that raved about it, plus I have used Henry’s in the past – they are wonderful, sturdy, and hardworking.

At the same time, I ordered us a new printer as ours stopped working a couple of months ago and no amount of changing the fuse or unplugging and plugging it back in again, would even get the lights to come on, plus a new chair to go in the lodger’s room. I had an old desk in the corner of my bedroom which wasn’t being used, so that got moved down to the basement, the wicker armchair that was in the basement got moved up to my bedroom instead, and, with the addition of the smart new grey office chair, any future lodger now has a great workspace.

They were all scheduled to be delivered on Saturday – any time between 7am and 8pm, gee thanks, Argos – so I made sure I was up and showered by 7am and waiting. It wasn’t too bad, a big white van pulled up and the doorbell went at 9:30am, and by the time I opened the door two big parcels were standing on the doorstep – the chair and Henry – and the driver was climbing back into his cab to drive away. I dashed out into the street and waved at him. He looked petrified but cautiously wound down his window.

HIM: Yes? Yes?

ME:  You’ve only delivered two parcels, there should be three.

HIM: No, no, only two.

ME:  No, there should be a printer as well. It’s on the same order.

HIM: I don’t know, it’s not on the list. Maybe later. Sorry. Goodbye.

ME:  But wait, couldn’t you check…

It was no use, he was gone. But as he pulled away at speed, I saw his number plate. It was him! The infamous Yodel delivery driver who smashed into the side of my car at the end of January and drove away without stopping. For those who haven’t read my blog since then, I did manage to get his number plate when he tried to stealthily deliver to my neighbour early one Sunday morning, so the insurance claim has been sorted and my car fixed, but I’m betting he thought I was chasing after him to have a go at him about it.

So, I had to try and telephone Argos to discover where the printer was and when it was going to be delivered if indeed, it was coming at all. They have been known to simply cancel part of any order due to stock issues with no prior warning to the customer. It took a good thirty minutes of hanging on the phone, listening to dodgy “shopping made easy” muzak, and then repeatedly bellowing my order number to a stupid bot who kept cheerily informing me that they – hadn’t quite got that and please could I repeat it – until I was grinding my teeth in frustrated rage. Why is everything so niggly and annoying and just a downright pain in the arse these days? Anyway, I finally got through to the lovely Lucy, who had a look on her system and perkily reassured me that the printer was coming sometime that day and that I was not to worry.

Why didn’t they deliver the whole order in one go, as they were supposed to, and why, if that was impossible for some reason, didn’t they simply email or text me to let me know that the rest of my order would be coming later? Instead of sending me a Yodel delivery satisfaction survey to complete – hmmm – so it looked like what I received was all I was getting.

I wonder which delivery driver will come back with the printer. I wonder if it will be him. That would be interesting. Should I say something? Or is there no point? Once upon a time, I would have gone out there all guns blazing, but the older I get, the less I can be arsed with confrontation, because, really, what purpose will it serve? At the end of it, the Yodel delivery driver won’t be any less of a cockwomble, he won’t have a “road to Damascus” moment and become a better person merely because a pissed-off middle-aged woman has had a moan at him.

Anyway, as I said, the clock is now counting down to an end to my lovely long time at home. Over the past year, I have spent almost eight months of it at home, which, I’m not going to lie, has been wonderful. Not once have I been bored or frustrated, and not once have I suffered from cabin fever. Maybe it’s because I have so much to fill my days with that there simply hasn’t been time to be bored. My to-do list is still so long, I could do with another eight months off to catch up on all I want to do – but that’s not going to happen. The death and infection rates are radically dropping here in the UK, so unless something happens, I cannot see us ever going back into lockdown. No, I think this weird period of history is over – at least for the UK, although I know many other countries are going back into quarantine because they haven’t been maybe as efficient as us at vaccinating their population.

Finally, I do have the wonderful news that after two months of being blocked from it, I got my original Instagram account back. To be honest, I had given up on it, but I needed to decide which Instagram account I was going to tag on my new website and in the front of my books so decided to have one last try and was stunned when I was let back in. So now I have two Instagram accounts. My main account and my back-up one, I’m trying to encourage people to follow me on both as I don’t want to give up the second account – after all, Instagram giveth and it taketh away – but neither do I have the time to run both full-time.

Additional update: the printer has been delivered, by a lady Yodel delivery driver this time, so, no confrontation needed. Also, we have had a panic-stricken ten minutes because when I went to save this blog, Word put up the blue spinning doughnut of death, then gave a hiccup and I lost the whole lot into the fifth dimension, or the nether regions, or wherever it is unsaved documents disappear to. I was gutted, it had taken almost two hours to write it and of course, I hadn’t saved it yet, and I couldn’t remember what I’d said – something about vacuum cleaners and lunch hours? Shaking with panic, I went to ask the IT Department, who was cooking her lunch and not best pleased at being interrupted.

Anyway, after a few minutes of searching through the computer, she crossly ordered me to go away because apparently me heavy breathing over her shoulder was annoying her. I skulked off to the kitchen to make myself a coffee and a sandwich, desperately hoping that somehow, she could perform a techie miracle and find it for me and cursing my own stupidity for not saving it. I’d no sooner finished making a ham salad sarnie and a cup of frothy coffee when she called me back. She’d managed to recover 90% of it and saved it for me and my gratitude was boundless. I’m cooking meatballs for dinner, so that might go some small way to saying thank you.

So that was my week. I really don’t know how I’ve managed to write so much, when very little has happened. Enjoy your long weekend, if you get one, and I hope you have a calm and restful week.

Look forward to chatting with you next Sunday.

Julia Blake