I went to the gym again today, but, sadly, there were no Strictly Come Dancing people to be seen as the touring show had packed up and moved on. Goodbye, short-lived gym ‘glamour’!
It acted as quite a good corrective to yesterday, a day where I did nothing. I watched Bargain Hunt and ate some lunch and mooched about looking at silly things on the internet, but, in terms of productivity, that counts – pretty much – as nothing.
Today, I did something. I’ve given my pitch for a new sitcom a polish and I’ve started to prod some new ideas. That might not sound like a lot to you as a day’s work, I don’t know. Truth be told, I wouldn’t attempt to pass it off as one; it isn’t. But it’s work of a kind, something that needed doing, and more than I achieved yesterday. All right? Blimey. (I also read this, which made me chuckle. Frighteningly accurate).
I did manage a walk into town to pay a cheque into the bank. This is notable only because the woman from the letting agency who had written the cheque (in recompense for a grill pan, fact fans!) has that peculiar, scrolling, slightly twee, over-elaborate handwriting that some women seem to like to use. I don’t know why it should be that a certain type of woman favours this illegible means of communication, but it’s not the first time I’ve encountered it. Please don’t think that this is random sexism: men can have bad handwriting too, though it’s usually an artless scrawl, lazy and haphazard. I don’t mind that so much, though it can be equally indecipherable, because I can kind of excuse, or understand, laziness, but there’s usually such pride in the female version, and that I find incomprehensible.
Her preposterous rococo script meant that it wasn’t obvious whether she’d written a ‘4’ or a ‘6’, and, just to maintain the mystery, on the part of the cheque where you’re meant to write out the sum in words, she’d split the difference, writing the first part in words and the second in numbers. I thought for one horrible moment that the cashier was going to ask me to take it back and substitute it for a legible version, but, it being lunchtime, we both lacked the will for such an exchange, and decided to plump for a ‘6’.
It’s an irritating problem, given that the whole point of handwriting is to communicate meaning. I’d had a similar difficulty when looking through the documents she’d left for the meter readings, and I questioned why ‘date one’ and ‘date two’ were listed, when we’d definitely moved in in one day. I was told that it was meant to say ‘rate’, not ‘date’ (to be honest, the stupid hoopy character looked more like the christian fish symbol than either an ‘r’ or a ‘d’, but I used my judgement and guessed that she probably wasn’t using an electricity meter reading card to convert me. What a missed opportunity!).
Anyway, she’s going to get her comeuppance if she’d meant to write a ‘4’. That 20p will probably come out of her wages, and you don’t want to be making those mistakes in the current climate.
IN SUMMARY: I done some work!
