A QUICK REPLY TO JOHN LEWIS

Dear Romily [not her real name]

Thank you for your reply dated Tuesday, November 29th, 2022. I’m grateful for your acknowledgment of the ‘hard time experience’ we’ve been having in purchasing the Arthur Price cutlery set. We appreciate the apology.

In your response, you gave us two options of stores which currently have the item in stock. One is in Kingston upon Thames, (where there are apparently 3 items) and the other is John Lewis, Cheadle, which (for reference) is a drive of 3 hours and 21 minutes from our current location.

You also very kindly provided telephone numbers for these stores - thank you. I rang them both, hoping once again to reserve the item.

You’ll never guess what happened, Romily! I was redirected to the call centre both times. I know! What are the odds?

I’m afraid this only adds to my growing suspicion that customers are now unable to call stores directly, even though you implied that we could. It is intensely frustrating.

In addition, the operative in your call centre went on to tell me that the price of the item in question is now a full £380, instead of its original discounted price of £190.

In effect then, for my wife and I to purchase the cutlery set from John Lewis, it would now cost us twice as much as it would have just a few days ago, and would also involve either (a) a jaunty trek into London, or (b) a 6-hour road trip, not including our already wasted trip to Oxford.

Far from helping us, your proposed solution is for us to go to even further trouble, at twice our own expense, for a product that even you agreed ‘might not actually be available’ when we got there.

Personally, I can’t see at all how any of this matches with Section 3, articles 93 and 94 of your constitution.

You claim that the Partnership will “aim to offer the best value in the marketplace for goods and services of comparable quality and availability”.

Well, for comparable availability, you might be interested to note that the same product is currently online and can be delivered to us from other retailers. Meanwhile for ‘best value’, please also note that we were able to purchase that same item, the 76-piece cutlery set, online, for less than half the price advertised by John Lewis.

I’m now escalating this because, once again, we believe John Lewis is better than this, and we want you to know.

Centralising call centres is certainly cost-effective for you, but it reduces your service quality, and isolates your customers. We don’t feel appreciated by your Partners in this experience, and unfortunately we’ve lost a little faith in your quality of service. Had there been a simple way for us to reserve the item on the day, we would have purchased it from you. Had there been a way for the partners to contact those stores and reserve the item, we would have done so. Your system let you down. And we think that is a shame.

Again, if there is any way in which you can help us, we would greatly appreciate it.

Kind regards

A QUICK LETTER TO JOHN LEWIS

Dear John Lewis,

For a long time now, my wife and I have seen your products and quality of service as exemplary.

For example, we used a John Lewis wish list for our wedding, we’ve ordered a number of subsequent items using your click and collect service, and we’ve long considered your local store as a first port of call for excellent gifts and household products.

However, we’d like to let you know about a difficult experience we had with you on Saturday, November 26th, 2022. We feel certain that informing you will help you improve your service, and we hope that it’s that spirit that comes across from our story.

First, we noticed a product online we were interested in. We’ve attached the reference for information: it’s a 72-piece Arthur Price cutlery set retailing, at the time, at £190.

As you can see, this product is ‘only available in stores’ - and we decided to visit our local John Lewis, Broad Street, Reading, to purchase it.

The product was out-of-stock, but we were told by one of your partners that there was one item in stock at the High Wycombe store, and one in Oxford, Westgate.

At this point we decided our most sensible option was to call and reserve the product with the Oxford store. Unfortunately, after some confusion, we were told by the operative that it is not possible to call John Lewis stores directly.

That left us with the only sensible option of driving to Oxford to buy the item in store. It is a 70-mile round trip, and, as you might appreciate, getting into Oxford on a busy Saturday before Christmas is neither easy nor enjoyable.

To our dismay, we were told by a partner at the Westgate store that the product was not in stock, and that there was nothing she could advise other than travelling to central London, where the Oxford Street store had the item in stock. She also told us that we could reserve the product, something the partner in the Reading store told us we couldn’t do - and in fact, were unable to do via your call centre helpline.

As you can imagine, we were less than impressed at the idea of chasing knives and forks around the country, based on a computer’s unreliable interpretation of stock, as well as the opaque communication from your partners and call centre operative.

We both feel that the system let us down, and that operating a centralised call centre instead of direct contact, actually worsened our experience, rather than enhancing it, particularly given our wasted journey.

We’d like to ask you if there is anything you can do to help us? As we mentioned, we have always considered John Lewis a champion of excellence and high quality, and we want to continue using your services with confidence.

Thank you,

Kind regards

TALES OF THE PUSSYCAT

I got called a ‘pussycat’ yesterday. It wasn’t endearing; in fact, it didn’t help me at all. I had become frustrated on the phone to the estate agent (not with her) about how long everything is taking, and then apologised.

“Oh don’t worry,” she said, “Compared to some I have to deal with, you are a pussycat.”

So this is how it works then: I get furious, with cheeks ablaze and the fire of a thousand suns in my eyes. And then I erupt at someone: livid, incandescent, volcanic with rage even. But then it comes out like a miaow in the wind?

Two things stood out. One, I’m a cat. And two, this horrible game is always won by lions. I mean it. Unless you roar down the phone and show your teeth, it seems you get nowhere. And in these meaner times, I’m worried that everything feels a bit like that.

Now, you could argue that a pussycat is a lion, only smaller. You could say it’s all about attitude and confidence, or even a bit of sass every now and then. You could even say that it doesn’t matter how you’re viewed by anyone, but it does matter how you see yourself. These are fair points. Except it does sort of matter when you try to be assertive with an estate agent, and she laughs it off as though she’s just seen Peter Dinklage try out for the basketball team.

You could also probably make a case for just being yourself and letting the authenticity do the work. That’s a bit like saying it will all work out in the end because love, kindness, gentleness and patience always win out over their opposites - or that the tortoise’s determination is greater than the hare’s complacency.

But even the tortoise knows he only has a chance because the hare has all the power. If the hare hadn’t stopped and rested, who would have won? And a pussycat might be a lion, but only one of them can actually catch a zebra.

So anyway, I was a bit down in the dumps yesterday. There’s no sign of anything moving, and our chances of getting in before Christmas are fading. The solicitors are waiting for other solicitors, we’re waiting for them to do something useful, the families in the chain are getting more and more agitated. It’s a waiting game - but it’s worse than that, it’s a wait for something that might not ever happen. If this goes on another month or so, we just won’t be able to afford to move at all. And honestly, that really terrifies me.

Perhaps the scariest thing is that the estate agent might just have been right about me after all.

AND THIS WAS ODD BECAUSE IT WAS

Every year on the 18th of November, I celebrate this blog’s birthday, and, as of today, I’ve been posting here for nine years. Happy birthday, little blog.

Sometimes I think it might as well be 90 years; the world is so different now. And it continues to change. Blogging itself seems quite ‘old-fashioned’ in the great scheme of things - most blogs are professional marketing tools, adverts, deep-dives on complex subjects: the kind of thing hardly anyone gets to the end of. I’m posting nonsense! Just thoughts and reactions to my day, like a public diary. And I don’t know anyone else who does this.

I think people might have, had social media not taken over the world. Flumpbook used to be the place for it, where everyone went. They even used to call a post a ‘status’ where you could tell everyone how you were ‘feeling’. Remember that? So-and-so … is down because someone who shall remain nameless isn’t talking to her… My guess is that people soon got fed up of that kind of thing.

When I started blogging, Twitter was limited to 140 characters, which made it a sort of micro-blog. I liked that. But rather than link threads together, I’ve always found it cleaner to just have somewhere to get on and write, in short-to-medium bursts of energy.

So I’ve just carried on. I’ve never pointed anyone here, I’ve never actively promoted it. I just kept on writing - about anything. And this is post number 2,207.

A lot of the talk today is about how Twitter’s new owner might be about to drive it into the ground. Apparently he’s locked all employees out of their buildings, and posted a picture of a gravestone with the Twitter logo on it. I actually think he’s trolling everyone, and loving the power. Nevertheless, there’s a chance that social media is about to change once again, especially as the post-TikTok generation grow up - there’ll be something new round the corner.

I still like blogging though. I might be a dinosaur, but I still think this is my favourite way of getting my thoughts ‘out there’. I don’t really mind if nobody reads it. It’s not a promotional tool. It’s just a thing I’ve been doing every few days for nine years. Out there for me, means somewhere outside of my head.

And I think that’s alright.

SQUASHED TEA

“Of course the other problem we’ve got is that that house is full of stuff and there’s no movement to get it cleared or anything,” said the Estate Agent at 70 miles per hour, referring to the house that our vendors are buying.

I interrupted.

“Look, I appreciate that they don’t want to start clearing out until they’ve exchanged, it’s just that we emptied our flat in three and a half days and we’ve been homeless for twelve weeks…”

My voice was strained like the final tea leaves of the day. There was a soggy tinge to it too: fed up, annoyed about the injustice of it all, squashed like a wet teabag.

I can’t handle much more of this. I feel as though we budgeted for six weeks in our minds, had a reserve for maybe another four or five, and now we’re just at the end of our resources.

One piece of advice given to us has been to push the nuclear button, and tell them we’re pulling out unless we exchange by a certain date. Given house prices right now, that would be devastating for everyone, and potentially us. But I don’t want to play that last card in the deck just yet - I still feel as though we risk losing the stand-off, and I would like to be a man of my word. Integrity is very important - it couldn’t be a bluff. And this game is full of bluff and spin already.

Others tell us we’ll “get there” - which is true, we will. I just wonder at what cost to my mental health, and also when. Sammy is desperate to get in before Christmas; I am just feeling rough about the whole journey and want it to be over as soon as possible. I just want to go home now please.

CRUNCH WEEK

It feels like a bit of a crunch week in the Unsettling Adventure. We expected to have moved by now; we are still waiting. Nine months in.

Sometime soon we’re going to have to make decisions about what’s next, regardless of what’s going on.

The hold-up is in the chain of course. Somebody needs to sign a thing before anyone else can do anything. At least, that’s what we imagine the problem is - nobody can actually tell us.

“We’re not allowed to know what the issue is,” said the estate agent the other day, shortly after declaring that it was “Definitely something small and nothing to worry about.” I smiled weakly at that.

Crunch points are interesting. Will the miracle happen at the last moment like it does in the movies? Will the clock tick all the way down to 00:01 just as our hero saves the day? Or will seeping reality push us towards a more practical assessment of the situation?

In other words, is it better to have unshakeable, unswerving faith at the crunch point, or is it wiser to prepare for the worst and take action before the fat lady sings?

That’s been a theme for a while now: what to let go of, what to hold on to - that precarious balancing act of faith and wisdom. Somehow, I think God expects us to have a bit of both, which always creates a really interesting tension. I could spend a lifetime figuring out how to work that out.

Anyway, here we are: crunch point. One thing must be true though and that is that (as they say) ‘faith comes by hearing’ meaning that it makes sense to hold on to all the things you’ve actually heard from God. Another point is that you can ‘ask for wisdom if you lack it’, which means you can pray for it. So managing the crunch point tension is all about hearing and praying - which is no surprise, really.

Also, bubbling away in my mind, is the thought that there are lessons we’re learning and will look back on. It’s hard to reflect now, but I’m sure there’s some strengthening, some building, some testing and pruning going on for Sammy and me. One day, on our comfy sofa, in our new house, we might get the chance to see it from the other side. For now though, it’s just a rocky part of the adventure.

THE AUDACITY OF A PARKING SPOT HEIST

I had to go to the pharmacy today - long story, but I had to pick up some medication. Oh. Not a long story after all: that’s it.

Anyway, the pharmacy I go to is on a high street. There are one-hour parking spots on either side of the road, so I found one opposite the shop and went in.

I queued up. Then...

“I’m here to pick up a prescription?” I said, inflecting as though I were on Home and Away.

“What’s your name?” asked the white-coated lady. I told her. she went out back and had a loud conversation with someone unseen. For some reason they both had to repeat my name several times. How do famous people cope with this kind of thing? I wondered. Anyway, out she came, smile made out of makeup.

“Can’t give it to you I’m afraid. Our pharmacist is out to lunch and she needs to sign it off. She’ll be back in half an hour?” It was her turn for inflection.

I nodded and said that was okay. I’d have time. I drove off somewhere else, listened to the radio for a bit and then came back to the high street.

I thought the pharmacist was the person in the white coat. Not her then? Life’s confusing these days! I drove back along the street, looking for a parking space. There was one left, and just in front of it was a hatched no-parking-area in front of a driveway. I pulled into the hatches and threw the car into reverse.

Before I knew what was happening, a car screeched in behind me and took my spot. I raised my eyebrows in the mirror, made a kind of ‘what’s going on’ gesture with open hands and then wound down my window.

The guy was getting out. Short, hi-vis jacket, shorts, boots, round face. I could see him in the wing mirror. He could see me.

“Aw look I’m sorry mate,” he babbled, “I just only need to get one fing, I promise I’ll be in and out, it’s just that I got limited time on me break and I only need this one fing from the shop an’ I won’t be like five minutes mate honestly, it’s just the one item I need.”

“Yeah me too,” I said incredulously. He disappeared across the road into the One Stop newsagent, still apologising as he went.

I’m not sure what good an apology is if you’re doubling down while you’re making it. Yes, I’m sorry I’m stealing your money from you old lady, really I am, but get your bank card out, we’re off to the cashpoint. Mr Jenkins, I’m sorry I almost ran over your cat just now but not to worry, I’ll just hop back in and give him another go.

About three minutes later, Mr round-face-yellow-jacket stumbled out of the One Stop clutching two massive crates of Stella Artois.

“They’re not even for me!” he laughed.

I raised my eyebrows as he clunked open his door and climbed in to his car, still parked right behind me. There had been no opportunity to give him a piece of my mind (I wouldn’t), no opportunity to reassure him it was all okay (it wasn’t) and no opportunity to bless him anyway (I couldn’t). He’d talked the entire time, and I’d sat there in disbelief.

I parked up, got out and crossed the road, still thinking about it. In a way, it’s impressively audacious to risk a road-rage incident for two crates of terrible beer. I couldn’t help wonder whether I’d done anything at all to dissuade him from doing that exact same thing again, whether he’d learned anything, whether he’d done that many times before and was a practiced master at filling an angry void with cheery conversation. And then, inevitably I wondered whether I’d learned anything either. I checked my watch. I still had ten minutes to get back before my next meeting. I’d just about make it if I was in-and-out of the pharmacy.

The door jingled behind me as the warm air mingled with the cold. There were four people in the queue, and no-one behind the counter apart from the lab-coated lady I’d thought had been the pharmacist.

Brilliant, I thought.

GROUCH GRADIENT

Something I’ve noticed is that when things get tougher, I get grouchier. I don’t know whether you could draw a straight line graph - toughness of life on the x axis, grouchiness up the y, a straight line up and to the right - but there’s definitely a relationship.

I don’t even know if there’s another factor involved. Probably - probably a fear caused by difficulty that leads to snappy irritability. Recently, I’ve tried to start calling those fears out in order to deal with them. It’s the unspoken ones that jab you in the ribcage though, isn’t it?

Anyway, I was wondering if this is true for most people. The tougher life gets, the more grizzly we all become. It’s understandable. We live in a wintry world and the icy wind is biting us all. Perhaps that injects toxic waste into society and is slowly making us all just a bit meaner. I don’t want that to be the case.

I don’t think you could blame me for being grouchy. It’s been a year since we put the flat on the market and over 9 months since we made the offer on the house. Delay after delay after delay have prevented us from exchanging and completing, and the latest one has pushed things back again. It is fair to say that I am properly fed up. We are properly fed up.

But if grouchiness is the linear response to tough situations, then what you can blame me for is how I’m handling it. Because even if I can’t help what happens, I can help my reaction to what happens.

And that, as the wisest people in my life have always known, is what matters. I think those people find a way to get thankful when it hurts, to stay kind when they’ve been knocked around, to keep upright in a storm of bad behaviour.

I just wish I could be more like that instead of getting so snappy all the time.

ORIENTATION

I started the new job today. Day 1 as always is about tumbling through the wormhole and not quite knowing which way is up until someone tells you. Or as these companies like to call it, ‘orientation’.

I like it. I’ve always thought it better to know nothing at all than it is to know most things and have to explain them. Though obviously, that is my actual job, so I’d better not push that thought too far.

I did a lot of reading today. I can’t really tell you what my job is about but I can say that it’s somewhere on the complex-interesting end of the spectrum, and that it genuinely will make a difference. My hope is that as I get into the nitty gritty, I’ll understand enough of it to get by.

That’s the job part of the Unsettling Adventure then. I’ll be alright for now. The other component, the bit where we figure out where we live, is still uncertain.

“So we made the offer in February,” we told someone last night.

“Good God!” they exclaimed, accurately but missing the point. He is though, I should have said.

Apparently there’s another roadblock. I feel as though somebody is stringing this out for us now, and it’s not particularly nice. Last week it was a typo on something (not our paperwork), the weeks before that, a boundary dispute. On Friday, the estate agent told us we could exchange this week… this week that’s looking less likely than a vegan butcher selling two pound o’ Cumberland sausages.

Anyway, nothing is truly impossible. I understood some clever stuff today, and actually feel comfortable about the job ahead. Seems whenever the world looks its most disorientated, that might just be when everything clicks into alignment. That’s the prayer anyhow.

A BOWL OF COCO POPS

Well my files for my new poetry book have gone off to the printers, and I’m celebrating with a Friday afternoon bowl of Coco Pops.

That’s quite a headline, now that I look at it. It’s true though - I am eating Coco Pops and I can indeed confirm that they are still ‘so chocolatey they even turn the milk brown’.

I think it might have been an accident. Kellogg’s probably wanted a chocolate-coated cereal and their boffins just couldn’t figure out how to do it without the chocolate flaking off. In the end, poring over a bowl of chocolatey milk, some bright spark must have said, “Well why don’t we just turn it into a thing?”

And then all the boffins turned and said, “What?”

“You know, make a thing of it. Coco Pops - they’re so chocolatey that they even make… chocolate milk… Like magic? No? Kids will love it! Now what are we going to do about these noisy Rice Krispies?”

Talk about turning a bug into a feature! Anyway, who knows. All I know is that I’m lapping a bowl of brown, chocolatey milk and I’m loving it like an eight year-old.

Sammy pours less milk on her cereal than I do. In fact, she’s often left with a sludge of bran flakes, instead of that lovely reservoir I scoop up with the spoon. I still argue that the bran-flake-sludge is a much worse outcome - if you leave it for washing up later, you need to bring a chisel with you because those flakes are baked on. And surely you never get quite as much of the goodness, no? I doubt this logically infallible argument will persuade her. Still, you know what I’d rather have…

Hopefully I’ll get to hear back about my files next week. I’ll be a bit more focused on my new job though, so it will probably slip out of my mind for a bit. Now that is worth celebrating.

REFLATION

I went to the gym this morning - first time in ages. To be honest it was more for my mental health than my physical health, so I just stuck to the treadmill today.

I mean not literally; that would be mad. I ran 2km, increasing the speed as I went. Tough on the old knees, but great for the rest of me. In fact I stepped out into the rain with that familiar old gym-buzz.

Then I turned on the car radio.

“Interest rates,” crackled the presenter on the breakfast news, “are likely to rise again today after the Bank of England…”

I switched off. Ever wondered what a balloon feels like when you let the air out, or even when a cake comes out of the oven and sighs itself into sinking? Yeah, something like that. Now, in theory, the rise in interest rates doesn’t affect us - at least not yet anyway. Our mortgage offer is locked in, but it’s locked in only until February. And honestly, that looks a lot closer than it did in September. And we haven’t exchanged yet.

I am worried that we won’t have anywhere to live. We’re emotionally frayed enough. After all this drama, if it falls through, or if we lose our mortgage offer, I’m not sure what will happen. I’m not sure whether I’ll have the strength I need to hold it together.

Inflation is it. Feels more like deflation to me, and what I need, perhaps what we all need, is a little reflation (not a word, I know). I mean some joy, some kindness, some life, some happiness, some encouragement.

But of course, you know what I’m going to say. Grace comes to pour through us. If there is grace for every season (and I think there really is) then it means there’s opportunity to give it away too, in every season. So as deflated as I might feel, it’s time to give away what I don’t have and receive what I haven’t got by reflating the small portion of world around me.

The windscreen wipers squeaked across the windscreen. Leaves blew along the road under grey, uncomfortable skies as I pondered this. One thing is true today: I need God more than ever.

ROUGH DEAL

The clocks went back on Sunday, giving us that extra hour of winter time to look forward to. Consequently, winter time has exacted its payment by chucking it down.

Well it’s not really winter. It’s the season I’ve been calling ‘Hood’s Autumn’, after the poem by Thomas Hood - November. ‘Keats’s Fall’ (season of mists and mellow fruitfulness) was pre the clock change, and now it’s all soggy leaves, dank evenings and enough rain to give Noah the flashbacks.

It really has rained. Yesterday it was sweeping in curtains across the shimmering concrete, thundering on the conservatory roof, and dribbling miserably from the gutters and drains. I didn’t go out in it. I stayed in and watched the grey clouds roll over.

Today, it’s scattered drizzle and blustery winds. Wheelie bins and watering cans lie flat across windswept gardens, and the last few colourful trees wave their red leaves in protest. What’s more, it gets dark early now so you can only enjoy the view until around 5pm, at which point the world is black slippery roads and bright headlamps.

Gosh I’m sounding miserable about it. I’m not really. I’m taking my Vitamin D, I promise! And there is something Christmassy in the air now that Halloween’s over. Light in the darkness, and all that - always cheers us up.

Maybe we borrow the hour from the weather, and then in Spring we give it back in return for warm skies and sunny evenings. Is that how it works? If it is, I can’t help feeling we got a bit of a rough deal. I think I’d rather not be given the extra hour over winter, endure dark mornings when I have to, and let the daylight soothe me long into Advent and New Year on those bright, hopeful evenings. To be honest, I just think I’d like it not to be raining.