Nearly Moved In

I AM SO EXHAUSTED. I spent the afternoon trundling even more boxes along multiple landings, up and down lifts, to get to my "apartment" (as I like to call it; I mean, this puts me in company with the Queen, who also lives in an apartment (in Buckingham Palace...)). I'm SO GLAD I invested in this trundling trolley: it can hold three fully packed boxes at once. Saved me a hell of a lot of time and back trouble. That's probably the best-spent £20 of the entire year!

As for the television: the Freeview is appalling ~ so bad the BBC won't tune in ~ but a whole load of adult channels would. But I don't watch that anyway, I watch Freesat. CBS Drama, True Movies 1 etc aren't on Freeview. The Freesat signal is 100%. Then we come to foreign language TV and the council promised us two community dishes, one to be pointed at Turksat 42 east which seems to have services ONLY in Turkish (and possibly Kurdish) and comes through irritatingly loud and clear and Hotbird 13 east, which is mostly in Polish and Arabic but has a rag-tag selection in a host of languages including German, French, English, Tamil, Italian, Somali, Kurdish, Farsi, Romanian blah blah blah. It seems the bunglers at the council installed a system that can only route one foreign satellite at a time (so what happens in a household where a Turk is married to a Pole?) meaning the cable to my flat must be rerouted at rooftop level. I have a feeling I'm going to have fight on my hands to get anything done. But I've always won battles of the legalistic kind where, as in this case, I just have to point out that I'm paying (via a weekly service charge) for a service I don't get (Hotbird) and therefore my landlord (the borough council) are duty-bound to act. I may have led a mostly braindead life for the past decade-&-a-bit, but I can still fight for my rights. I also think it's execrable of them to have prioritised TV for just ONE national group over scores of others, but I won't make this point unless the fight gets really dirty.

Apart from that, once this place is done up it will look really nice. Presently I'm living with home-made curtains in the form of coloured bin-liners stuck to the windows and I made a beanbag-type thing out of three quilts on the floor. There is no furniture, no central heating (which isn't required even in this cold weather: I get so much heat from downstairs I never feel cold). The shower does work, because it's electric. I found the switch. The gas people have yet to send the promised top-up card. I'm thinking of doing the living room as a rhapsody in blue with blue carpet or lino against pale blue walls with dark blue furniture and chests of drawers etc painted blue. The colour blue makes me feel excessively happy, when I'm in the right mood... I just don't know how long I will have to wait to put any of this in operation...

Erm, there's nothing else to say. I'm just fed up of having to complain about so many points. Doors and windows left unlocked and no key provided, blah blah. I hate complaining (though I'm actually very good at it, when I put the complaint in writing, I'm normally good at pointing out my rights and their obligations. My head feels like it is turning to mush, what with STRESS over a million little things. And my body is exhausted. I keep getting dizzy spells (does that mean anything? I always thought it just meant you were weak and neurotic. Or at least, that if you told a doctor, that's what they'd think you were...) Anyway I have to go, this computer is running out of time...