If you ever feel much too happy and you don’t know how to deal with it, I can thoroughly recommend looking at your spam folder. The sheer depths to which some people will sink in order to try to get you to part with your money, can make you lose faith in humanity in the time it takes to click a mouse-button. The worst ones are where they pretend to be charities or voluntary groups who are looking for your support. These people are on the same rung as Delices et Gourmandises, who I blogged about before, and whose most recent victim is none other than my Mother-in-Law.
http://blogs.mirror.co.uk/investigations/2009/12/so-delices-gourmandises-wheres.html
They seem to have moved on from promising non-existent prizes to delivering vast quantities of cakes that haven’t been ordered and then threatening people when they don’t pay – or worse, taking money out of their account. Don’t touch them: they target the elderly and vulnerable and they ought to be strung up. As I have commented before, in my fantasy of hell there is a special circle for these people where they are continually visited by ‘guides’ who offer them a way out of hell in exchange for cash. Every single one of them is a fraud…
In other news, I met the new neighbours yesterday and partly wished I hadn’t. They’ve spent the past six months ignoring us but yesterday I actually said hello to one of them, a Hungarian who was sweeping the yard. He seemed friendly enough and after a short conversation he asked whether I had a broom (he was sweeping the yard). I lent him one and he promptly broke it. He then asked if I had nails and wood glue. I found them and he mended it. He apologised. I said not to worry, it was an old broom (which it was). He then promptly asked if we had a ladder, whereupon I decided to go indoors before he could ask me for four candles:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oaGpaj2nHIo
I can’t decide if that was a bit mean of me… I did find out, however, that he was Hungarian and that the household, which I’d thought was entirely Polish, consists of 7 or 8 people, all from various Eastern European countries. He seemed a pleasant enough bloke but I did start to feel as though I were running a hardware store after a while. But now I’m having a Charlie-Brown style crisis, thinking that maybe I’ve been a tad mean and judgemental.
Sarada Gray 