Monday

About five years ago, a water pipe under the floorboards in the kitchen started leaking. It was some months after the plumber had been that my wife pointed out we hadn’t received a single call on the landline since the leak. I picked up the phone, found it was completely dead and realised the plumber must have cut through the cable when he was mending the pipe. A normal person would have called out an engineer to fix the line, but somehow it all felt like too much hassle and I kept putting it off. And off. It was only recently that I accepted this was something I was never going to get round to doing, and I could live quite happily without all the voice messages offering to reclaim PPI that must have backed up on the answerphone, so I called TalkTalk to tell them I wanted to stop the line rental. Which is where the nightmare started. TalkTalk spent the best part of a day passing me on to different departments, each of which claimed they had no record of me as a customer, despite them sending me a bill with an account number on it every month. Time after time, I was told I couldn’t cancel an account that didn’t exist on their system. By the end, I was almost in tears and told the customer services assistant to make a note that I was cancelling both my non-existent account and my direct debit. Today I got another bill that included a £12.50 fee for late payment the previous month. I phoned TalkTalk again but am still none the wiser about whether my account has been closed. Help.

Tuesday

Some people have got themselves very worked up about the group of Oxford students who managed to get a portrait of Theresa May removed from the walls of the university’s geography department by defacing it with notes and stickers. How dare they disrespect the country’s second female prime minister! How dare they try to suppress views different to their own! All of which rather misses the point. It may have been a fairly feeble protest – Oxford students can be just as clueless as the rest of us – but at least it was a protest. Part of any good education is learning the art of dissent and you have to start somewhere. A university should be far more worried about students wanting to put up pictures of May than those campaigning to have them taken down. When I was a student I joined in any number of protests. We occupied the central administration building for a couple of days, until we all got a bit bored and ran out of dope. On another occasion I joined forces with some students from the North London Poly to take over a random office in the department of education in Waterloo for a couple of hours. I can’t remember what any of these protests were about and they achieved nothing, but they made me marginally more self-aware.

Wednesday

There was a loud cheer from the Tory benches at the end of prime minister’s questions. Not for May but for the deputy speaker Lindsay Hoyle, standing in for John Bercow, who was attending the funeral of the former Speaker Michael Martin. Hoyle had acquitted himself well, keeping the braying from the backbenches to a minimum, cutting short the more sycophantic questions and getting the whole thing done in under 40 minutes. Though that wasn’t strictly the point. He could have let PMQs spiral into a 90-minute free-for-all and he would still have been well received. The real issue was that Hoyle isn’t Bercow. There have been several attempts to unseat Bercow from the Speaker’s chair over the years – William Hague’s last day as an MP ended in humiliation when he was forced to lead a failed coup in 2015 – and many Tories are lining up to have another go. Not because they are particularly bothered about the allegations of bullying that have been made against him, but because they don’t like him. They think he is far too pleased with himself and allows the opposition too much parliamentary time to make life difficult for the government. Most of all, they can’t forgive him for being a remainer.

Thursday

Just days after Donald Trump escalated the tensions between Iran and Israel by pulling out of the Iran nuclear deal, the US president has declared war on Scotland by banning the sale of the national delicacy Irn-Bru at his Turnberry golf club. The problem is the carpets: it is proving next to impossible to get rid of the orange stains when people accidentally knock over their cans of the soft drink. Trump has no problem with covering himself in orange dye, apparently, but draws the line at his soft furnishings. At times like this, when the jokes write themselves, you can’t help wondering if there might be more to the Donald than first appears. Far from being someone who regularly bumbles into situations he doesn’t fully understand – such as knife crime in London – he is actually a calculating and sophisticated performance artist whose mission is to confuse the liberal elite by playing dumb. If so, he’s doing brilliantly. No one I know is entirely sure if the moves towards detente with North Korea are the result of clever diplomacy or a totally random coincidence.

Friday

I am in Guernsey for the literary festival – the first time I have been back in more than 45 years, since my parents took the family there for our summer holiday. Despite the Channel Islands not being members of the EU, there is intense interest in the progress of the UK’s Brexit negotiations. Or rather, the lack of progress. The news that May had divided her cabinet into two teams of three to work separately on “customs partnership” and “maximum facilitation” was greeted with disbelief. Life imitating The Thick of It. As each team is loaded with ministers opposed to the option they are working on, it’s almost inevitable that the end result will be that both ideas are dismissed as rubbish. Many islanders also think it inevitable that Britain will turn into a lightly regulated, low-tax economy and that Guernsey’s financial industry – the island’s biggest employer – will be badly hit, with many jobs relocated to London. If so, the island will have to reinvent itself quite quickly. One possibility being considered is turning itself into the go-to place to die: the island’s chief minister is backing a bill that will be voted on later this month to allow assisted dying. Guernsey is lovely and I can think of worse places to come to die, but no one I’ve spoken to is that keen on the idea and the bill is not expected to be passed. Back to the drawing board.

Digested week, digested: war and peace

Charles: ‘Why am I always a sitting duck?’ Photograph: Reuters



