ker ching

neverending staircase

But you know what?

Things suddenly feel a lot better when you whip out your plastic and buy yourself a one way flight to Ecuador.

frrrrrrustrrrration

I had forgotten the familiar belly-crunching feeling of frustration life in England provokes.

Things that have gone wrong recently:

• I can't get a bastard flight to bastard Ecuador for the price I want.
• I can get a spanish course in Quito, but not for a decent price. I'm currently trapped in a bastard bidding war of ten bastard emails a day, saying 'what a shame, because unless you can get round this, I have to give all this money to that other company'.

• The bastard cat jumped on my new laptop and knocked it off the desk. This broke it.
• With the broken bastard laptop I lost all my photos of everywhere I've visited in the last two years.
• When I tried to find out service details from Fujitsu-Siemens for poxy brand new laptops, they said that you can only get them serviced in Japan, and then not by post, unless it's posted from inside the country. There's a helpline, but it only accepts local Japanese calls, from Japanese landlines, and only dispenses help in the Japanese language. (They end this information with 'sorry about that'.)

• My bastard new mp3 player won't let me transfer the bastard music files to it on my family's stone age PC.
• Which is fine, because the bastard mp3 player just decided to die ten seconds ago.

• I realised that when I totalled my car in ( - what, May 2005?) the insurance company who had declared it a write-off didn't bother to send me the scrap value of the bastard car, crippled axle and all. Oh no, they thought it was a better idea to keep the car, keep the money, and then make their customer really bastard happy by debiting £80 every month from my current account for a year without mentioning it.

• When I was in Europe for one month at new year, I tried to get medical advice, and was refused by every agency possible, because I wouldn't be in the country more than a month. Having paid national insurance contributions to the tune of three unemployed people every month for fifteen years, I wasn't best impressed with the bastard health service refusing to treat me.
• Especially since I needed to see a bastard doctor.
• Today the bastard health service refused to treat me again, on the grounds I'm only in the UK for two months. I asked them what the cut off point was. Apparently they won't let you see a doctor (not even speak to a bastard doctor) no matter how sick you are unless you are in the UK for three months exactly.
• If I can't get a bastard yellow fever cert, I can't get into bastard south america.
• Which seems mild compared to the continuing med crises.

• And the bastard transport system wanted to charge me £50 to go 75 miles to London tomorrow so I can't see Emma or Andre or buy a bastard formal dress.

• Not forgetting this bastard bidding war with eleven Ecuadorian language schools, to see who will drop the advertising spiel and let me learn as I do best - in a group, instead of one-to-one. This consists of C&Ping ten doubtful questioning suggestions about cognitive processes, then sadly regretting their refusal to take my bastard money. It's a bastard charade.
  

Bastards.