The Bank Account - Part 3

Floody Monday

I just can't believe this. The NI number interview is a joke. They just rang me from Southampton JobCentre Plus and said they have water flooding accident in the office and they need to cancel all interviews for today. They asked me to rearrange the appointment by calling that damn phone service again! After queuing yet another 10 minutes I managed to get another appointment. The interview for having the NI number will be held on 4th August 10:15am, so yet another two weeks of waiting to ge my bank account issues solved. I had already some plans to travel to Finland to see relatives during that week, but that must be postponed now, luckily I didn't book flights to Finland yet. Anyway, I'm going to try to reimburse my already paid train tickets to Southampton for today from the JobCentre. Let's see what happens next.

This is definitely not the best Monday so far. The dishwasher stopped working again, and that happened soon after the phone call from the JobCentre. The dishwasher power went off and it left all water flooding to the bottom of it. So I rang to the Rayner Appliance Care again to get some help. The bloke asked me to leave the dishwasher as it is, and he will come to see it tomorrow. So there will be now 24 hours of waiting that cursed dishwasher to come back alive again. Which it apparently does, as it has always started working properly on the next day. More embarrassing happenings to come...

The Secret Cultural Index

Do you know what is my secret cultural index? Remember, in my last blog I was wondering about real ale culture dying in Southern parts of England. The other day I found an excellent website for searching for pubs, it's called http://whatpub.com/, and it truly offers very comprehensive database for all types of pubs in UK. Just enter your location (postcode) and it tells you where you can find the nearest pubs which offer great ales for all beer lovers. The more importantly, it also tells the number of pubs around you. The default radius of the search is 10 km (6.2 miles), and the the number of pubs is my secret cultural index. The search tells me now, that there are 71 pubs around me. It also makes me wonder why I'm writing my blog here at home now?

Right now I really need a pint. My attempts to get British bank account, NI numbers and clean dishes can wait. Besides Oak pub just around the corner offers minimum of withdrawal £10 of cash while purchasing some of their excellent products (Marston's Pedigree for instance), so that gives me a really good excuse to explore more about British living culture. It also helps me to forget all bank and money issues, flooding problems or national insurance numbers.

As a first initial test of finding the best place for cultural index in UK, I searched pubs in Tipton, which is in the heart of the Black Country area in West Midlands. The index there was 406. This really tells something about differences between northern and southern regions, maybe I should soon consider moving?