Quintin Jardine's blog

Made the transition from Spain to Sco’land yesterday. To be accurate, it began yesterday but finished in the early hours of this morning, thanks to a flight delay, compounded by the fact that the Border Agency deployed one man to process the passports of over 300 passengers while his mate dealt slowly and deliberately with the non EU citizens. Welcome to Edinburgh, and have a ******* awful day.

Slept badly, then got up to make my way through a mountain of mail. Half-way up that I tried to made a phone call and discovered that my landline was dead; tried to report the fault to BT which did its level best to discourage me, then promised me that they’d get round to it, eventually.

Half way down the mountain, I found an interesting communication from the office of Boris Johnson. You know him, he’s the mop-headed, bleach blond Tory twat who managed to get himself elected as Mayor of London on  the basis that anyone would have been better than Ken Livingstone, only for the electorate to discover that ain’t true. Boris wants me to send him £120 because I didn’t pay the congestion charge levied on my car in his city on February 1. I have three problems with that: 1) I resent Boris thinking for a second that I’d ever be crazy enough to drive in the place. 2) Not only was I not in London on February 1, I wasn’t even in the United Kingdom. 3) I sold the car in question a month before its new owner attempted to cruise it through the metropolis on my tab.

I know, there is something comedic about it; the sort of crazy thing that only happens to other people. But when it happens to you, and you have to deal with the consequences of a chancer buying your motor and  DVLA being ludicrously slow to register the change, then compounding its own incompetence by trampling all over the Data Protection Act in sharing your out-of-date personal information with Boris ******* Johnson, you try laughing that off.