The Good, the Bad and the Ugly

The Good? That would be both First Born and Second Born winning their class competitions for reciting Scottish poetry. First Born has a talent for this and has won his Burns Certificate every year he has been participating. He did a spectacular rendition of "The Twa Corbies" that would send shivers up your spine. I may, if I can figure out how the technology works, get him to perform it to camera and see if I can put it up here somehow. Second Born is following hot on his heels, winning his competition too for "The Sair Finger" and he now has to perform this at the school assembly. I'm very proud.

SB also wore his football kit for the first time last night and looked pretty good. He says his coach says that his control and speed are good, but he needs to work on accuracy. Cue lots of kicking footballs at our garden shed, I suspect.

The Bad? Getting a letter from my bank "relationship manager" (I wasn't aware we were in a "relationship", but there you go) asking me to contact her about my personal current account as one of the conditions of a current account is that there are credits to it and there haven't been any for some time. ?????!! I have had a standing order going from our joint account to my personal account for years. It pays my pension contributions and sundry other bits and pieces. Like books. And gym memberships. And books. But apparently this standing order was cancelled last July. Three guesses whether I actually cancelled it. I now have an overdraft of almost £600 (we NEVER have overdrafts, good grief we even pay our credit card off each and every month) made up largely of BANK CHARGES. I await a call back from the Bank to explain who cancelled my standing order. Any ominous rumblings you hear later today may be me, explaining politely to my "relationship manager" what I think of the situation. And at the risk of sounding like Victor Meldrew's crotchety sister, once upon a time, when I had an actual bank manager, if a standing order got cancelled leading to an overdraft, I would have received a wee telephone call asking if everything was ok. Probably within days of the account going overdrawn. I would not have got an impersonal letter 6 months later, after hundreds of pounds of charges had been applied, implying I was not fit to have a current account because I wasn't putting any money in it!! Rant over.

Finally, the ugly. My feet. Sorry. Running shoes pronounced officially dead-ish at Run and Become yesterday. We worked out I have done about 500 miles or so in them and they are therefore due for replacement, hence the blisters. Yuck. So, lots of new shoes tried on and run-about-the-shop-in. Two possible contenders, one of which is the new version of the Asics I have been running in until now, but neither of them were available in my size. Run and Become are of course getting them in for me and I should be re-shod by the weekend in bouncy lovely new shoes which will make me run like a gazelle!. Or like a mildly enthusiastic wildebeest. They're not magic, you know.