It’s mushroom season round our way and with the recent damp weather, wonderful wild mushrooms are popping up everywhere. I took a few snaps of these fantastic funghi. The first shot was taken outside a house on some open grassland. These almost look like the closed-cup mushrooms you get in the supermarket.

The next pictures were taken of a very small, exotic looking clump of mushrooms that have taken root by the base of our front gatepost. Now you wouldn’t notice them if you didn’t look down, but I am an eagle-eyed type of guy and spotted them, grabbed the camera and took some shots. I think they look great.



I returned to the bank yesterday afternoon and went to the teller to ask for a new bank card. Apparently, there was some kind of block on my account and a new card may or may not have been dispatched but was never delivered. They couldn’t be any more specific. I asked the whens or whys of this, but you might as well talk to your own open palm. I don’t blame the worker, they are just the frontline. So the teller got me to fill out a form stating that I had changed my address (I hadn’t. I remember filling the same form out 5+ years ago when I moved into the area). When I presented the form and my various forms of indentification, she told me that she could order a new cheque book for me there and then, but if I wanted a new bank card, I’d have to go home and call a number and speak to someone in India for them to order it for me. What kind of twisted logic says that this is a better way of doing things than getting this woman, to whom I have presented my three different forms of ID, to press a few buttons and order the card for me. At the second window, a woman was trying to order a new bank card for her severely disabled brother, who had communication problems.
“How the hell is he supposed to use the telephone to do this?” she asked, “You people have no consideration for disabled people.”
Meanwhile, I notice my teller lowering her head and smirking everytime the man groaned and gesticulated to his sister in order to relay his wishes. Pathethic, I thought. So I left in a huff, returned to Woolworths and got my DVD replaced with one that actually had the discs in it and headed home. I phoned the number to order the card and spoke to Sanjeev, who dealt with my request with no problems. This was the first time I’d ever dealt with a Indian call centre with any degree of success. Either they must be getting better at understanding my East London patois or I am getting better at understanding their rich Indian accents?
With the firework explosions getting louder and increasing in frequency, Alex the Wonderdog is looking for new and more secure places to hide from the barrage. Yesterday, he decided to try and sit on my guitar equipment.

Hey, this is quite comfortable…

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