pumpkinstrokemarrow

Like those people who like to drive in gentle rain with their headlights on.

And then we have the fun of filling in forms on computers. Some weeks ago I participated in the completion of an application form for a visa to visit Russia on a computer. Leaving aside the fact that the whole bureaucratic thing would have done well in the dying days of the first Russian empire, they had chosen to deliver their form using Acrobat. Now Acrobat at some point must have issued a forms version. That is to say you make the form available over the web, then punters can fill it in and print it using nothing more than Acrobat, freeware from Adobe which most PC's have on-board anyway. Not expecting the punters to have Word and not having to go to the expense and bother of a proper online application. The catch was that lots of the questions, if taken seriously, required quite long answers, far longer than the number of charecters allowed by the form. And the fields did not grow to hold the answers. So one was caught between a rock and a hard place; between being told to tell the whole truth and nothing but the truth, with the Lubyanka and Room 101 looming in the background, and a field which could only manage half the truth. So we settled for some interesting abbreviations, which in the event, served their turn. But one might have thought that a wannabee-serious-country-again like Russia could have done better.

Then we move onto proper online applications. So today with Shearings the bus people (http://www.shearings.com), who have quite a whizzy system. You can do things like ask for a gluten free diet - and on the one occasion tested it worked. But you do have to do things in the right order. You have to start off by specifying a particular holiday for a particular date. If you then find that you cannot have the seat number on the bus that you want or that you cannot have the number of rooms with a sea view that you want, you have to go back to the beginning. But at least either they, or possibly Chrome, remember a lot of what you typed last time around and do most of it for you.

Feeling very pleased with ourselves, we then moved onto Epsom coaches (http://www.epsomcoaches.com/) , a company which I am fond of because I really like the crimson and cream livery of their coaches. Very smart to my mind. But perhaps because they are a smaller company and cannot afford to spend so much on their computers, we did not get on so well with them. Fell at three hurdles. First, BIL wanting to see some bulbs in the Netherlands (I seem to remember recently that the Netherlanders do not like their country being called Holland. Equivalent to talking about Surrey when you mean England), we asked for holidays in Europe and got nothing. Asked for all holidays and up they popped. At which point the left hand brain power of BH kicked in. Apparently I was selecting on the name of a brochure, not on a destination. Bulbs did not figure in the brochure called European Holidays. Get through that and onto the seat allocation system. BIL, being short, likes to sit in front. But although the system appeared to know all about seat numbers, you were not allowed to pick one for yourself. It just filled the coach up from the front, working from left to right as you face forward. No chance of buying a block of seats to make up a den at the back of the coach. Crawled through that hurdle, achieving second row seats, and onto insurance where we did not understand what they were asking or what we would be getting. Maybe one needed to have read the small print in their brochure first. Decided to abandon ship - and perhaps abandon the online discount - at that point. We shall go to their office in person tomorrow to to talk to a person. This second person will quite possibly have to talk to the same booking system as us but at least they will be able to explain it as we go along.

On the other hand, the codfish was very good today. 75 minutes at 180C seems to do the business. No pepper, ground or otherwise. Nice and firm as it should be.

In a post luncheon surf, interested to find that asking Mr G. about a colour resulted in the Dulux Paint peoples' main site coming top of the list - http://www.dulux.co.uk. Odd I thought. Then when I tried it, found it was quite good at giving me a sample of a named colour. So fair enough.