pumpkinstrokemarrow

Now the government, in its wisdom, has set up something called the government gateway. This, as I recall, is a wheeze whereby with a single set of logon credentials you can log on to all the government services which have plugged themselves into the gateway, actually not all that many of them last time I looked. But idea good and would play well on the private sector side of the fence, at least from a consumer point of view. With a single set of credentials I could logon to the dozens of private sector online service providers with whom I have an account, and of which I presently have to keep my own record, there being no chance of my remembering all this stuff. All rather insecure, partly because of the need for the record which has to be close enough to the surface to be updated and partly because of the tendency to economise on the use and renewal of passwords and credentials. I have seen advertisements on the tube advertising things vaguely in this area, but more, I think, to do with making payments. Maybe I shall start to pay more attention. Is there a commercial opportunity here for someone young and bouncy?

Back at Aviva, I get myself registered and logged on and start to make enquiries about my insurance policy. As far as I got, it only seemed to be able to display the booklets associated with my policy. Didn't seem to have access to my actual policy documents. The thing with the amounts, the excesses and exclusions. So not much good. And when I tried to change an address in a part of the record which I could see, it promptly came up with an application error. Gave up and went back to the rigmarole with the call centre.

I wonder if I went to one of the dwindling band of insurance agents I would get proper service? Maybe, for example, such an agent would still take a cheque, something which Aviva no longer do. Presumably the catch would be the cost. Aviva knows perfectly well that most of us loathe call centres - but it also knows that they are cheap and they can keep the price of their products down with them. And as a retired person, the fact that they have transferred some of the cost of their product to me, in the form of my time and telephone bill, does not show all that much.

Better time with my latest policier, 'L'homme aux cercles bleus' by one Fred Vargas. Had to read it twice to get the hang of the modern French but worth the bother. Good story with four murders but involving little sex, violence or gadgets, at least not of the in your face variety. So quite unlike the sort of thriller that one buys at English airports. One quaint feature was the frequency of references to smoking. Must have been one or more on more or less every page and everyone in the story seemed to smoke copiously. One suggestion was that this was just a wheeze to give the thing a bit of period charm; the French didn't really puff as much as this. Another would be that as a giving up person myself, very sensitive to the whole subject. The inclusion of much stuff on feelings and the exclusion of sex, violence and gadgets may have been due to the fact that this apparently very successfull author is in fact a lady, in her day job something archeological for CNRS.

Mr G. rapidly takes me to the web site for CNRS (http://www.cnrs.fr/) which turns out to be a large national research institute, mainly of a scientific flavour but with some softer stuff. Don't think we do things in quite the same way here. We might have national research funding outfits, but not national research outfits. With a little more knowledge of such matters one could no doubt wax lyrical about the pros and cons. The web site comes with an English language version which is helpful of them - although once you have drilled down a bit some of the translation not too hot. Collapses into a rather tortured commission-speak. But, to their credit, one of the top level menu options is 'Mission pour la place des Femmes au CRNS'. Clearly ahead of the game on that front. Note capital 'F'.

A bit of chloresterol indulgence yesterday. Arriving home too late for regular feeding, settled for eggs on bread. That is to say three eggs stirred up and fried gently in a little butter. Somewhere between scrambled eggs and an omelette, dumped onto several slices of fresh white bread. Eaten mainly with knife and fingers. Excellent grub, although perhaps not something to make a habit of.