News of the finance

You have now given up work so you can prepare for your training to become a school teacher, starting in two weeks.

In honour of this, on your last day you baked a cake for your colleagues which, owing to a kitchen accident, enjoyed the twin flavours of chocolate and pesto. You also attended the leaving party of a group of Chinese teachers whose professional development course you had been dabbling in a bit. There is now video footage of you waving your hands in the air and wiggling your bottom energetically to selected songs of the Beach Boys while adjudicating a closely fought game of musical statues.

Thank goodness the Chinese don't belong to the same Internet the rest of us do, is all you have to say about that.

Next week you are actually having a holiday, so this week is devoted to catching up on the reading list, writing a couple of pre course essays and dealing with the ongoing Funding Saga, now in its second month.

You may decide to share this with the world at some point, but you are not sure the rest of the world would appreciate the bad language you would employ were you to go into it now.

So instead you are going to write about the enjoyment you had when you were first back in the UK from dealing with banks.

You were calm for the first six months of trying to open B and yourself a joint bank account.

You recognised that the banks have to do something to pretend that they give a hoot if Roman Abramovitch is laundering money though their hallowed halls (oh, wait, I bet they gave him a bank account pretty smartish), and you managed not to grind your teeth too obviously when, when presented with a parade of address bearing bits of paper they smiled brightly and told you it has to be on BLUE paper, not PINK; in Comic SANS not Times New ROman; stamped and signed by god alMIGHty, not the head of the ANGlican church. You must have stormed out of every major High Street bank before one of them reluctantly admitted that official documents from the Inland Revenue might count, although not until they'd spent thirty minutes on the phone to Head Office.

It was, you suppose, your fault for having rented a flat that had all bills included apart from the phone bill. And why couldn't you use the normally acceptable phone bill? Because BT were baffled by the fact that you and your husband, following Russian convention, have a one letter difference to your surnames and took to addressing letters to you with 'Mrs [Solnushka's surname] and Mr.'

And every time you phoned them up to get it put right they changed the address instead.

Your favourite bit of ID which the banks claimed would have been ok was a statement sent from B's (non-existent) bank account in Russia to his address in the UK. Except then he would have had to prove his Moscow address for some reason, and, you've guessed it, would they accept things like the Russian national identity card equivalent - an official stamp in his internal passport confirming his residency? Anyone who is answering 'yes' at this point has not had sufficient exposure to the banking system in Britain.

Anyway.

You did not become more than normally sarcastic when, having spent two hours filling in forms and waiting while they stood around sucking their teeth over whether a LIGHT blue piece of paper with your address on it could substitute for a DARK blue one, you thought you had finally succeeded, only to find out a few days later that in fact the account wasn't open, never had been open, and because there was no computer record of any such event taking place, it CLEARLY had never happened.

So two hours more of filling out forms, head scratching, and general faffing about and finally you had, apparently, a working bank account.

With actual money in it and everything.

Much to your surprise, the chequebooks and cash cards turned up bang on schedule.

But you think you can be forgiven a rather impressive amount of eye rolling when, just as you were being lulled into a false sense of security, a letter arrived stating that they couldn't activate your card, as your signature was wrong.

And you know why it was wrong? It turns out that they scanned into their computer (repeat after me "It's on the computer. It must be right") not your actual signature, but the name you carefully printed under your signature.

Of course, says the bank, you must have written your signature in the wrong box.

The fact that you could just see the bottom of your signature at the top of the scanned in bit was neither here nor there.

You considered pointing that out and waving their own application form at them to show the relative positions of the two boxes, but in fact by this stage all you were capable of was standing at the bank's information desk producing faint but indignant splutters.

I suppose that's the point of the 45 minute wait in the queue, watching the information desk clerk trying to find some other luckless customer's cards. They were supposed to be sitting waiting for her at the bank, and computer records showed they had, in fact, arrived.

But the fact that they had been cunningly placed next to each other in the box meant that it was clearly impossible to find one of them.

After that, you were too worn out from trying to suppress your killing instincts to protest.

Anyway, your card was now activated.

Your husband's was not.

"Well, it should be. I can't imagine what's happened. You must have forgotten to send both slips of paper back."

Cue such immoderate rage that you were forced to leave immediately or you would have forgotten yourself and actually said something rude.

Which of course would be wrong, as the only proper response to all this uselessness is "Oh that's all right" as repeated over and over by the two card inconveniencer of the bank in front of you.

Still, it was all sorted out in the end.

And it only took you another four months to get the online banking working.

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