It is still terribly cold.
I was not at all enthusiastic about setting off over the fells this morning, and I dawdled about quite reprehensibly, delaying it as long as I could.
I had some telephone calls to make, which were considerably slowed down by the discovery that the telephone is not working, and presumably has not worked since Kyle’s fibrous visit the other day.
I meant to call BT and complain when I had finished calling everybody else, and promptly forgot all about it, so it is still not working and I will have to write a note to myself to remember tomorrow.
I suspect that I am turning into a barmy old lady.
I used my mobile to telephone the hotel in Cambridge where we have booked ourselves to stay for a weekend of luxurious idleness whilst I graduate in a few weeks. I booked this several days ago, but during a call yesterday, about something else completely, the hotel dropped into the conversation that my credit card had been declined when they had tried to take the money.
I instantly panicked about this. I have barely bashed the credit card at all since Christmas, and so this morning I hunted the web page out on the mighty Internet to find out what was happening. A brief examination led to the rather surprising discovery that it had kindly made available the staggering and completely unrealistic sum of nine thousand pounds available, for me to waste on anything I liked.
That was nine thousand pounds that I could have borrowed but hadn’t, not nine thousand pounds that I was going to have to try and raise by digging my fingers down the backs of the seats in the taxi.
I telephoned Barclaycard.
A very nice Indian lady assured me that my call was very important to them and that she was grateful for my patience.
I had been patient. I had been hanging on the phone for twenty minutes, waiting for them to stop counting their interest for long enough to have time for a chat.
Interest on a Barclaycard is something like the National Debt every month. They are worse than the sort of chaps who come round to your back door and smash your windows and nick the telly as a warning to let you know that you had better start having some money to give them very soon.
We do not use our credit cards very much. We are only using them at the moment because the rascals who employed Mark in Norway have messed up their timesheets and hence have not paid him yet. When we are driven to using them, we pay them off straight away, before they start sending cooing emails telling us that they are Here To Help Us if we are facing financial difficulties.
We are always facing financial difficulties, because usually I have spent all our money.
Anyway, the Barclaycard lady said that the only reason they had refused my card was because the hotel had put the number in wrong.
When I thought about that afterwards it seemed entirely unlikely. If the number had been put in wrongly then Barclaycard would have no way of knowing whose card it was, since the only information given was the number and the expiry date, but I did not feel like ringing back again to spend another twenty minutes of my precious life in their queueing system, especially not on my mobile phone.
I rang the hotel, and we wasted an extremely frustrating half an hour trying to persuade my card not to be declined. In the end the chap had a brainwave, and emailed me a link. This worked brilliantly. I clicked on the link and my computer helpfully inserted the card details, and it was done, so probably tomorrow I will discover that I have been scammed out of the whole nine thousand quid.
I did not care. After that I had to find another excuse for not going out into the cold, and elected to purchase some buttons. I am going to sew some buttons on to my dungarees so that they fasten neatly, instead of with a knotted strap, which looks lumpy and peculiar underneath a jersey.
I investigated Amazon’s Button Department.
There were loads.
I had never considered buttons as a fashion and lifestyle statement before, but it seems that they are, and the choice was quite astonishing.
I stared at them for ages, trying to weigh up the pros and cons of beautiful colourful patterned buttons, or tin ones with stick-on plastic diamonds, or wooden ones with printed pictures of flowers.
I am sure you can work out which ones I chose eventually. I almost chose all of them, but when I looked I discovered that my Amazon Basket was about to cost me thirty quid, which I thought was probably too much to spend on buttons, and reluctantly removed some..
After that I had run out of excuses, and had to go up the fell. It was terribly cold, but I saw my friend Susie, and we walked back together, so that was all right.
My plastic diamond buttons will be arriving tomorrow.
I am looking forward to that.
