2019 Year in Review

A complaint from 2018 – I think my final unposted one! And last ever complaint to M&S. ****** Dear M&S I went to M&S for breakfast this morning, in Moorgate, for the first time in around a month. It reminded me that I was due to complain to you – it has been on my to-do list for a few weeks. The reason it reminded me, was that I had gone in for a bacon and sausage sandwich. Alas, there was no bacon. But a sausage sandwich was sufficient. My real problem is an earlier sausage drought. A few weeks …

Why Albania? Good question. I wanted some sunshine and I wanted to be near the coast. It had to be a country that I had never visited before and also had to be fairly affordable – I had not long since started at M&S so though it didn’t need to be mega-cheap, there certainly were some constraints – Caribbean destinations definitely weren’t on the cards. Also I was going by myself. Which makes hotels and stuff much less affordable, given that I couldn’t share the cost. And I wanted something nice. I considered Malta and Montenegro, before almost accidentally discovering …

You know how you can tell it is autumn? When the Metropolitan line starts going into regular meltdown, and what an autumnal week it has been. I suspect that this is going to be a bit of a long rant, so lets start on a positive note, or what should be a positive note – donuts. On Saturday 8th September, I had quite a hangover, but had to head into central London to pick up a suit. During my short spell on Oxford Street, a bird poo’d on me for the first time in my life, I found out the …

1. I struggled to decide who to vote for on Thursday.  Really struggled – I expected some kind of support for Liberal Democrats from other remainers, but most plumped for socialism instead.  Boris’s behaviour and Brexit were why I turned away from the Conservative Party, but I felt myself coming back to the fold, the more I saw socialist thoughts and general arseholeness from entitled lefties. 2. In the end, I e-mailed both the local Conservative and Liberal Democrat candidate.  The Liberal Democrat candidate e-mailed me back – she was honest in her belief for campaigning against house-building that doesn’t …

This is an old blog – created when I was defiantly a Conservative.  Possibly the only one from Hull.  Hence the name. Now there are more Conservatives in Hull.  And I am no longer a Conservative. In my heart I am a Conservative – but as I’ve made clear over the past couple of years, the party has moved so far away from me that I struggle to recognise it at times.  I do want to vote Conservative and if I don’t vote for them this time, I want to feel able to in the future. So this page is …

I started writing this back in summer, when I’d had a few too many roast dinners by myself and was also struggling to find someone to go on holiday with me. Like the majority of my blog posts nowadays, by time I get around to publishing my thoughts, my thoughts have changed…or perhaps more realistically my reality has changed. It isn’t so much that I don’t have enough friends, but that they are all dispersed around the world doing their own thing. Which is exactly what I have done by moving to London. The dream is to travel back 10-12 …

I’ve always lumped Corfu in with the likes of Magaluf and Faliraki. It is an island that I would likely never have visited were it not for the requirement to get the ferry to my end destination, Ksamil in Albania, from Corfu. Whilst I could have arrived early and gone straight to the ferry to go to Albania, I decided to be a bit more leisurely and have an evening in Corfu Town itself. My Airbnb was top notch, in terms of affordability, location and charm. I could quite happily have stayed there longer, and even more important, it was …

Dear Hell Trains I had the misfortune of experiencing your air conditioning lottery with full force a few weeks back. I was travelling from Hull to London on Sunday 1st July, circa 14:30. I arrived at Paragon Station to be informed that there was no air conditioning in coach C, and that there was nowhere else for me to sit either. You could say I was fuming. Literally. And I hate the word ‘literally’. Originally I hoped to do some work on the train, although I know how patchy your wi-fi is (patchy being kind but this was the least …

I guess as part of the HR checks, M&S didn’t think to look through their customer complaints to see if potential employees had ever written to them. Phew. Here’s one that I can publish, now I’ve passed my probation. From 2018. Yeah I have a backlog of these things. ****** Dear M&S A few weeks ago, I had a birthday. Actually, it was a few months ago, but hey, the point still stands. I’ve already lost track of what I was going to say. Yeah I’m one of those complaint writers that always writes some long-winded nonsense that you really …

I was starting to crack a little. The last couple of months have seen multiple amounts of frustration and my anger levels rising – lets leave out the clusterfuck of Brexit for a moment (though worth mentioning), but things more directly in my control. I moved banks. Supposed to be easy but I had so many issues once moved, from randomly cancelled direct debits, to much more limited information supplied by First Direct on their online banking, and then having 3 separate passwords for their system and not being able to remember which was which, hence getting locked out constantly …

So this is the last of the blog posts that have been long-outstanding on my to-do list to write. Well, except for a review of 2018 and my goals for 2019…I think I might just skip them now! Budapest had been on my radar for a little while, and it seemed that rarely a month went by without my Facebook feed having photographs from a friend or some random that I met once, visiting the capital of Hungary. After enlisting two of my closest advisors, we set upon finding some gloriously cheap flights with Wizzair that weren’t really that cheap …

This is from last year, another one that has been hanging around my inbox: Oh TFL The imaginary ink has barely dried on the last complaint and now you have given me cause to write to you again. You do waste enough of my time as it is, without then having to write to complain about your journey refund decision. Last Wednesday I arrived at Harrow-On-The-Hill station around 8:15am. I got onto the waiting fast train. It hissed at me – like my imaginary girlfriend does when I use up too much of her imaginary ink. It hissed some more. …

You may have noticed that I haven’t posted on The Only Tory From Hull much over the last year or two.  I couldn’t even remember how to log in the other day. My interest in politics has by no means diminished and neither has my passion…the latter has been entrenched. A lot of that has to do with simply being far too busy. But I can always make time to write a blog post if I feel passionate enough about something. The real reason, I feel, comes down to a mixture of confusion and misery. I shall start with the …

I used to be a huge fan of Boris Johnson. Hell, even as recently as 2015, I said (and I cannot quite believe I wrote this), “But I do really want Boris as leader,  He would be an inspirational leader.  He would really take our country forward and I feel that he would be able to deliver a two-term Conservative majority.  He has that common touch.”. After all, he supported immigration, he defended bankers, he attacked murderous bastards like Assad, he supported Britain being in the EU, and especially the Single Market.  Didn’t he? He seemed a liberal Conservative, which …

All this extra time I have thanks to my new job and getting home at the more human hour of around 6pm (or so) has led me to think that maybe I should try to catch up with things on my to-do list.Some things have been on there for nearly a year, such as writing a blog post about my holiday to Croatia last year. I’m not sure that I would have been able to remember much in the way of details had I written the blog when I got back home, let alone nearly a year later.  It was …

Why did I decide to go to Belgrade? Because it was cheap. Why was the flight so cheap? Because it was at 5:55am in the morning. Who’s fucking idea was that? It wasn’t actually that bad though, just needed to set my alarm for 1:30am (thankfully I had a stonking hangover the day before so going to bed early was easy), get a taxi to Wembley Park station, then get the night tube to West Hampstead, then get the Thameslink train to Luton Airport parkway, then get the bus to Luton Airport. Simples. Originally it was just me and my …

I know that I occasionally moaned about Lovespace – normally when they were stopping me from doing what I wanted to do, ie coding, and sending me to go flyering – or asking me to go on the customer chat thing when I got home from work. Despite minor annoyances, I actually really enjoyed working there. Never before have I had a job where I actually enjoyed being at work almost every day. My first proper developer role, I learnt so much there – going from complete imposter to someone very comfortable, yet still continually challenged. It was quite sad …

I used to have a really good barber, really sound guy. Then he left. I thought I’d keep going to the same barber shop, last time I went (still £35), had an unconvincing hair cut and a very quiet one too (if I’m going to be there 45 minutes then at least say more than hello). Booked with someone else this time, again at the same barber shop. After 15 minutes I realised that he was doing very little other than combing my hair. He realised that I had realised then stated that he was thinking about what to do. …

From boxes to bras. From storage to suits. From packaging to pies. Yes, you have guessed correctly – you are looking at the new software engineer at Marks & Spencer. Well, you are reading words and daydreaming about me eating an M&S steak and ale pie in a suit. I hope. Back in February, I concluded that I was pretty much ready for the next challenge in my career. There was nothing pushing me out of Lovespace – I’ve never had a job where I genuinely look forward to going to work 95% of the time, where I actually enjoy …

It’s actually been alright recently – well, perhaps more accurately I’ve been lucky and missed the worst delays. Working from home two days a week helps too. As does the relatively dry weather recently – there are definite service suspension seasons and the next will be the first really hot day, when it gets to around 30’C. This complaint is from last year and not the funniest ever – just a rant. Part 2 is more fun. ****** Dear Sir/MadamI’d like to make yet another complaint about the Metropolitan line service.Tuesday was yet another clusterfuck of a service.  A signal …

Two of my dearest advisors had concocted a birthday surprise for me at the end of February – a mystery tour of a mystery place. All that I knew was that I needed my passport. Exciting! We drove past enticing places such as Basingstoke, Bracknell and Salisbury, then past Stonehenge until it became clear that I was either being taken to Exeter or Newquay. What is in Exeter I wonder? What government enterprise might be of interest to me that is located there? After a spot of lunch and a chance to listen to 6 women loudly cackling next to …

If you saw me over the last few months of 2018, or just read the banal self-loathing crap that I occasionally spout, you’ll realise that I stepped up a gear from fat to obese last year.  At the end of 2018 I was 16kg heavier than at the end of my 2018 detox. Therefore this year’s detox comes in two parts. The first part is simply 90 days without alcohol. Though since I started, I have decided to extend this until Easter. With an emphasis on repairing my diet during this time, which has become solely focused on my brain’s …

[From 2018] Hi Sainsburys How is my favourite supermarket doing?  I hear that you had pretty good Christmas results.Alas, your avocados have been a little disappointing on occasion recently. Twice I have bought your dual pack of ripe avocados in recent weeks (I’m stretching the definition of recent here) and ended up being disappointed.  So disappointed that I have taken to buying avocados from Tesco. As you may understand, now that I have moved to London, I need to prove my credentials by eating as many avocados as possible – especially on toast.  And not just any toast, but the …

Happy birthday to me, happy birthday to me. Last year I had a bit of a miserable birthday – it was a Monday, I felt rubbish, I ate loads of junk food, I didn’t have the best day at work and then I had a really disappointing M&S pie for dinner. So I resolved to take my birthday off this year. I did. It seems that I spent half the day responding to birthday messages – some pretty damn brilliant ones on Facebook in particular, but I did manage to do a few other things. I think. Bacon and egg …