[head, meet desk] this is what I get for being financially responsible

You may remember that with two banking days to spare I arranged to have most of my savings put into a fixed-term ISA. I'd heard on Radio 4 that some financial institutions play dirty tricks so as not to move your money out, but thought it wouldn't happen to me.

I just got a letter from the new building society saying they have not heard back from the old one, and that as they are not allowed, for data protection reasons, to ring to chase up, I needed to do it.

Old building society denied all knowledge of transfer request, then said that they've just moved (!!!) and new building society might have sent the request to wrong address. Give me correct address with a fax number.

Ring new building society, who say that as they sent off the original transfer request with my original signature on it, I have to fill in a new one, which they are sending me today. Only they have the impression that old building society has moved from Bradford to Glasgow, not the other way round (which I'm pretty sure is correct).

So when the form comes I'll fax it off and make sure it goes to *both* addresses of the old building society.


All this so I can make a lousy £150 in interest. By the time I get it all arranged I'll have invested more than that in my time to make it happen!

[books 2010] Halting State

25. Halting State by Charles Stross

Crime novel set in a near-future Edinburgh. So far, so Night Sessions[1]. But this one's all about an in-game robbery that has real-world repercussions and the associated fallout.

For the first 40 pages or so, the second-person narrative (as if you're in a RPG, geddit?) annoyed the hell out of me, but as the action picked up I stopped noticing. At times it reads a bit like Cory Doctorow with the descriptions of the tech. So it ended up confusing my poor brain horribly.

I found it dragged a bit towards the end, but I liked the characters of Elaine, Jack and (to a lesser extent), Sue.

In short - pretty good actually, but neither a patch on Night Sessions nor on the other Stross book I've read, The Atrocity Archive. I'm still unsure whether I'm a fan of Stross in general or just the Laundry series.


[1] Night Sessions came out the following year, which in effect means that Stross and Macleod were writing at the same time. Sadly there are no lekis (crime-busting robots) in Halting State.

[books 2010] The Hard Facts of the Grimms' Fairy Tales

26. The Hard Facts of the Grimms' Fairy Tales by Maria Tatar

In short: they took out all the sex, and not only left in, but sometimes amplified the violence.

This book outlines some of the patterns to be found in and some of the sources for the fairy tales in the Grimm brothers' Nursery & Household Tales (as opposed to the fables and folk tales, which are ignored here).

It's well written and would probably be more interesting to a reader who didn't already know as much of it as I did (odd, considering I didn't think I knew much on the subject).