The night before yesterday, before I came to bed, I did a quick check of my bank account which I often do last thing at night and record all of the results in a big black ledger I keep for the purpose. Here was a sort of pleasant surprise because it was evident that the DWP (Department of Work and Pensions) had paid some monies into my account some of which would be Meg’s back pension and some of which should be the small proportion which is a continuation of it. But without a letter of explanation which will probably arrive in the next day or so, there is no way of knowing how the figures have been calculated, how much is ‘back’ pension, whether tax has been applied to it and to what dates the monies refer. So I spent a certain amount of time before I went to bed trying to make heads or tails of the figures that had just appeared. As it stands the figures are falling between the continuation of Meg’s pension for three months which is promised on the Teacher’s Pension Agency website but then less than the continuation pension might turn out to be. I shall just have to be patient and wait to see what explanation I am given by the Teachers’ Pensions Agency. I had phoned them last Friday and they thought that I might hear from them within the next ten working days i.e. two weeks of waiting but I am relieved in the extreme that something seems to be happening some two and a half months after Meg’s demise. Some friends of mine have warned me that I might have to wait months rather than weeks for activity on the part of the TPA so I suppose I should be grateful for small mercies. Last night, it appeared to have rained during the night for which again, I and the rest of the country are grateful but we now need several days of sustained rain to return the gardens to a state of normality. In the evening before yesterday, I watched the Norway vs. Italy Euro competition deciding to support Norway which I thought I would support as I imagined them to be underdogs in the match against Italy. To my mind, and perhaps I am being unduly sensitive about this, the commentary team seemed to manifest evident favouritism towards the Italians and hostility towards the Norwegians. The reasons for this I cannot fathom although perhaps it had been judged that the Norwegians had been lucky so far in the competition. But we had a wonderful example of that is often called ‘the commentator’s curse’ when one commentator stated that Italy were now only twenty minutes away from a semi-final after which the Norwegians scored some 10-15 seconds later. Later in the day, we have the England vs. Sweden quarter final in which the Swedes may well prove to be really tough opponents. As the day unfolds, it is my shopping day and under my revised regime I try to hit the shops just after the rush hour traffich had abated and before the shops get busier. My shopping went well and truly to plan in the morning and I find I do not have to rush around with the same frenetic intensity as was my wont because I was anxious to minimise the amount of time when I was out of the house and Meg’s separation anxiety was acute. But there are two particularly poignant moments involved in my shopping ventures. The first is when I go past the shelves where I used to buy products for Meg’s use and these I now have walk on past rapidly. The second moment is when I return to the house with my full shopping bags because Meg was always so pleased to see me on my return and now, of course, I am greeted by the empty chair.
Lunch was quite considerably delayed today for the following reason. I telephoned my son to update him about one or two things and he suggested that I should download and the activate the Inland revenue app to keep control of my finances. This was, of course good advice but turned out to be pretty complicated. In the first place, having download the Inland Revenue app the system needed my Government Gateway credentials to proceed. When I eventually located this, the system informed me that my present Government Gateway credentials had been cancelled as I had not used them for some time. So, I had to download the Government gateway app and then another more specialist app to help you to gain access to the system. This offered the possibility of getting your passport page containing the photograph scanned and this took several attempts before the system accepted the photo of my face. Then my own face had to be scanned to match the passport photo. Finally, the passport had to be held in a particular way against my iPhone so that the embedded chop within the passport could then be read by the installation app. All of this took at least an hour but all of my efforts were crowned with success and life should be easier from this point on. For a start, the Inland Revenue will now log me in directly via the automatic face recognition facility now that this feature has been facilitated but I am still no nearer getting the information concerning Meg’s pension arrangements clarified. No letter arrived by his morning’s post as I hope that it would so I have to be patient for some days more. Later on in evening will be the England-Sweden match which I am sure will be a very tense and hard-fought affair. As is so often the case, I expect that the match will be decided by a single mistake, or a strike of brilliance from either side where the ball just curls inside the net. The winners of this match will play Italy in a few day’s time as well.
One announcement from the political system is that that at the next General Election, 16 and 17 years old are to be given the vote. The consensus view is that it is hard to predict which parties will particularly benefit from this but I would imagine that the Greens will probably pick up a fair amount of the extra votes and the Tories will struggle to appeal to the younger generations as their supporters are much older than the rest of us on average.