Letter to Boots; latest developments (plus a sad goodbye)

I had an email reply from Boots The Chemists' customer service team. It came quickly, it was courteous, and it didn't contain any spelling errors or dodgy grammar.  So far, so good.  I was told that they were sorry I'd been having trouble finding the product I wanted, but not to worry, because it hasn't been discontinued.  Again, so far so good. 

Instead, they've been making some "changes and improvments" to it.

Ah.  Now that could be a good thing or a disaster, depending on what the changes are, and whether they really are improvements or not.

They gave me the correct product code, which should help, and said any Boots staff member should be able to assist me when I next want to find it.

Well, at the moment I still have a supply, thanks to my display of embarrassing hoarding-for-the-rainy-season behaviour in Hammersmith.  When that runs low, I will take this product code and go to look for these "changed and improved" sage capsules.  And I hope I find them.  And - since apparently "It's a good product, let's not mess around with it" is seemingly not the way business works - I hope I will find that they are improved. 

Good customer service, though, Boots. Fast and efficient.  10 out of 10 for that. 

Otherwise, it's been quite a busy week at work, and I've been doing some sewing in my lunch breaks and some writing in the evenings.  Then yesterday evening was Farewell Cake, followed by leaving drinks at a local pub, for the Redhead, one of my favourite colleagues.  She's going on to what is, for her, a dream job, so I can't begrudge her departure.  But I'm going to miss her; she's been a delight to work with.

It was a good evening in the pub, anyway.  Sometimes I sit at these things silently nursing a half of cider and feeling as superfluous as a spider's ninth limb.  This time there was a lively group and lots of people I get along with were there.  I ended up having a long intense talk about the theatre and what a great thing it is, with two people I like very much, my boss Daryl and the lovely Mr Dapper, the Man With The Answers.  It was good to get Mr Dapper, who is normally quite a quiet chap, into a proper conversation; and a couple of gin-&-tonics helped me to feel less crucifyingly shy talking to him.  He may be quiet but he's a very interesting man.  All silly crushes aside, I do enjoy his company and conversation; that kind of quiet, measured intelligence is worth its weight in gold. 

Then I had a catch-up with my previous boss, dear Paul, who seems to be busy as very 'eck but thriving on it.  Then some more frivolous conversations about random things, ending up with us going back to theatrical subjects and comparing notes on "my strange roles in school plays" - a tree, a hamster, a rock, a rose-seller, one of Emperor Ming's harem...  Sadly by this time Mr Dapper had left; I suspect he may have played the odd tree or hamster in his time.  The Redhead had got rather squiffy by the time I left, and I gathered this morning that she'd not got home till pretty late.  But she still came in to work today and spent all day writing up handover notes and training people on covering her role.  Good woman.  She leaves a gap.

Bank Holiday weekend now, anyway.  Have a good one, everyone!

Talking in public...

On Saturday, after bending our brains together at “Looper” (excellent, but inevitably a little brain-bendy, by dint of the subject) the Dipgeek and I went for a meal and a quiet drink in a pub in Richmond.  We started off talking about all the general “how are you?” stuff one always starts with, followed of course by “how’s your food?”; but then we got onto alternative lives/alternative universes, and would-you-change-the-past-if-you-could; and excrement, of course (the Dipgeek works with it, and I use it in metaphors perhaps rather more often than I should); and then we got onto the subject of blowing things up.

It’s amazing what some of my friends know.   I had no idea how dangerous liquid nitrogen is, for example.  I can have so much fun now, writing stuff that would make any health and safety conscious person run a mile.  I have just enough factual info to make the destruction of the Droit Institute in "Gold Hawk" sound moderately credible instead of really, really lame (it was limping along on the level of “He hit him, then he hit back and a bit of the wall fell down”, which is pretty shameful).

The Dipgeek had read this, and realised she could advise me to a certain extent, simply because she's a Dipgeek and I'm not.  She very sensibly decided against sending me a detailed email entitled “How to blow up a research institute”, since it could be, well, misunderstood...  So, being two terribly intelligent people (well, actually, being two trusting souls who are used to living in a free country) we sat in The Duke off Richmond Green and talked about it in public.  

I made a lot of notes.  I now have a notebook with some really appalling things written in it.

If anyone did overhear the conversation, we’ve probably both moved up the MI6 watch list.  Particularly as we kept laughing.  It was normal laughter, though; not Evil Villain mwahahah laughter.

The Dipgeek may have missed her forte, incidentally; she shows great promise as an Evil Villain, with some quite extraordinary blow-things-up ideas.  Not quite up to James Bond standards (she needs to work on the baroque hairdo and the sadism, though she does now have the white fluffy cat, and can do a better mwahahah than me), but certainly better than the average “Mission Impossible” baddie, for example.  Mind you, it's hardly difficult to be more evil than Dougray Scott; while the Evil Villain in “MI4” is described at one point as having a ludicrously high IQ - 185, was it? - (I can’t remember, damn it; now I shall have to watch a bit of the dvd in order to check.  Lunge scene, here I come! Oh no, it isn’t in the lunge scene.  Hmm.  I think I shall watch the lunge scene anyway, simply because it is so... so... words fail me.  So - so lunge-y) and he’s just a blank cipher with a glassy stare.  If that’s an IQ of 185 then maybe I’ve got one too.  I can certainly do blank and glassy-eyed.  Pass me the whisky and I’ll show you right now.

Certainly Dipgeek would be far more interesting than Mr Glassy-eyes; but of course, she’s sane, which does make the whole Villainy plan a little redundant. 

Anyway, I now have a bit more knowledge about dangerous things in labs, and coincidentally also about Informed Consent (which is going to be really useful in Chapter One when I get the the rewrites stage), and I'm a happy writing bunny.  With an excuse to watch the lunge scene again.

Aftermath...

One of those odd post-pub things...

My right foot hurts. It's puffy, tender, and just starting to turn faintly purple under the tan. In a couple more days I think there's going to be a socking great bruise there. At some point on Saturday night, someone or something must have landed on my foot - on the scale from "gentle bump" to "horse trod on me" this is shaping up to be close to the horse end of the spectrum. A sheep, perhaps.

I have absolutely no recollection of what it was. A sheep, perhaps? In Ealing on a Saturday night, anything is possible...

I've been trying to get a nice picture of a bruised foot off the internet to paste here, but bizarrely everyone who has posted pictures of their feet with bruises has made them not-public-copy-able. Weird. One of the Press team made some suggestions but none of them had pictures of bruised feet. Oh, life is a weird place sometimes.

Spent yesterday evening going back through the first half of "Ramundi's Sisters" doing rewrites and trying to excise purple. After getting some very useful feedback from one or two people I am now on a mission to try and see my writing as if I were someone else and not me; not to feel precious about my purple but to see it coolly and chop it out when it serves no purpose (ie, a lot of the time).