The Practicalities

The Practicalities
 The practicalities left few moments to grieve. My mother had so little that I was spared the hassle of probate; there were enough forms to complete without that. Sharing her few possessions as mementos with friends and family before numerous trips to charity shops and the municipal dump seemed to take ages. Nearly every official I had to deal with was kind and considerate, though.


The Tyranny Of The Postcode
The utilities I had to contact, apart from BT, were a different matter. Unable to hang on to the phone lines for Thames Water and Southern Electricity until, conceivably, my own death might be approaching, I resorted to online contact. Their websites had “moving house” forms, the nearest to my circumstances, but all wanted my contact details and none would allow the completed forms to be submitted without a valid UK postcode and telephone number. So I put in false ones. Fortunately they all also had questionnaires asking me, when the form was completed, to please tell them what I thought of their wonderful website. So I did. I told them about the false contact details, asked if they'd ever wondered what the first two “w”s of www stood for, asked also if they remembered geography lessons at school which suggested there might be other countries in the world than the UK. Do they never have customers who move abroad? But then, if they have any problems contacting me for a final settlement, the problems will be theirs, not mine.

I spent the last night in England before returning to France in a Premier Inn right beside Southampton airport. On checking in I was asked for my name (obviously) and my address and postcode. The hotel's system wouldn't accept the foreign postcode, which had to be over-ridden by the girl at the desk with the help of a supervisor; at an airport?

Since I have already reported the same problem with the HMRC, it appears that the problem is widespread on UK websites. Are UK websites mindlessly copying one another's code and the same logical mistake? I have commented before on the supreme importance of the “else” clause in IT. The UK postcode is an extremely powerful location mechanism which is rightly widely used and which also illustrates beautifully the logical need for the “else” clause.

Thames Water did have the courtesy to reply with a helpful email. Southern Electricity seemed not to comprehend the problem and, in return, sent an email addressed to my dead mother.

Clearing Up
Clearing her small maisonette was a nightmare but, in the end, a fruitful one. She had pitifully few possessions but generally quality ones which should earn useful amounts for the charity shops in Godalming. It's what she would have wished. She also had objects of far greater sentimental value, some of which were adopted by members of the family. Among them were every letter I had written to her since the age of about 18. I even, by chance, came across a local gardening society that maintained the gardens in an old peoples' home and which gratefully took the many beautiful garden pots she had. What distressed me most was what still had simply to be thrown away even though it was still usable, particularly electrical goods, because of stupid restrictions; does “caveat emptor” no longer apply in England? Overall, I hope I did her memory justice. 

While I was in England, I came across two more idiocies. My mother's local council, Waverley, was one that had decided to reduce rubbish collections from weekly to fortnightly, to save costs. The resultant complaints about smell and rat infestations had caused a rethink. So a special collection of food waste had been instituted, weekly. Er......if there are to be weekly collections, why not.......?

The other idiocy concerned a report that passengers arriving at Heathrow had such prolonged waiting times to go through passport control that they had become unruly; so police had been drafted in to control the behaviour of the waiting passengers. So if, because of cost cuts and resultant staff shortages, extra expenditure is incurred and extra staff are drafted in, why not passport controllers rather than police? Because that would solve the problem? Better to keep the problem and, presumably, incur the extra costs on someone else's budget. Are there any brains left running the country or has that been reduced to a matter of political bun fights?