getting a wriggle on

Just as we were getting ready to pop to the maternity unit for the twenty-week pregna-scan it started doing whatever the snow equivalent of pissing it down would be. Despite the extreme risk presented to road-users such as this cyclist by the taxi system we thought it would be easier/safer to call for a sturdily-wheeled taxicab than attempt to drive there ourselves in our teeny-wheeled car when we'd have the additional hassles of finding a parking-space in the sloping car park and finding another parking space upon our return, by which time someone would probably have stolen the space we'd left. Fortunately the outward journey was performed by a driver who appeared to have registered the sudden appearance of the snow and had adjusted his driving style accordingly, if not quite down to the level of everyone who'd driven past at little more than walking-speed (at least, my normal walking speed rather than the slower pace currently required by my weird left hip postural-muscle-twinge issue) whilst we waited outside the door for the taxi.

Everything appears to be correct as far as can be ascertained using mere ultrasound (and a machine with a much worse-quality printout than the equivalent in the Lauriston Place-based ultraounding facility at which the twelve-week scan was performed but which is shut over the winter festive period) and the Incipient appears to be moving about in a satisfactory manner (perhaps not as obviously as we were expecting as the placenta is one of the anterior kind) though had to be sent out and walked about for fifteen minutes as it wouldn't get in the right position of one of the required measurements, though the head circumference, abdominal circumference, femur length, lateral ventricle length and number of digits were all measurable and within the expected ranges.

In spite of the Royal Mail's online tracking system's DECEITFUL claim that they had attempted to deliver a parcel on the thirteenth the backlog of mail we collected from the doormat yesterday included a tried-to-deliver card dated the twelfth. The key to maintaining a lie is to stick to the details. There was another attempted-to-deliver card dated the twenty-second, by which time I had requested that the parcel be left in the local post-office in order to attempt to prevent it being automatically sent back to Bristol to the eBay seller whence it came. Though proven in the past to be full of lies the online tracking system now declared the parcel to be in the requested local post-office so I set out (along with my letter from the idiots at a popular city centre camera-vendor (which indicated that my 105mm macro had been available to pick up from the shop since the eighteenth (very irritating if true (as I'd walked past the shop several times on the nineteenth and missed the lens considerably when down in Parentshire))) to collect all my things and to give my leg a bit of an airing after the week of relative inactivity and possibly-car-related exacerbation of the car-related discomfort. All things were successfully collected, though the expected whinge to Jessop about their not telling me that they had my stuff (and then only telling me several days later by snail mail when they quite obviously took down my mobile number when I left the lens with them) didn't happen when they attempted to claim that they send out the letters from the shop when the repair centre tells them that the lens is on its way back up. There's probably something somewhere in their documentation which would reveal this to be a big fat lie but getting such information out of them would probably be even more painful and less successful than my attempt to get them to translate the terms used in the letter describing the portions of lens replaced/repaired into descriptive actions such as pointing at the sections of the lens described. After a five-minute wait and the consultation of two further members of staff they confirmed that the replaced bits were covered by six extra months of warranty. If they could also have explained what might have caused the malfunction in order to decrease the likelihood of recurrence it would have been handy but I had to get back home in order to rest my hip and drain some stones' blood.