Quintin Jardine's blog

Sitting with my grandson yesterday, looking at photos on the iPad. He reached out and swiped the screen, to move on to the next image. Rex is not yet 18 months old.

I’m not saying that he’s a genius . . . not yet. When Mia was two she could call up a video on her dad’s tablet. But it sure is a sign of the times.

That’s the worst spell of weather I can imagine, and it’s what we’ve been having in Gullane for the last couple of days. We have custody of the grand-dog and even he is complaining.

So what’s this with Hulk Hogan, the ‘wrestler’,  who it was said ‘wouldn’t know the difference between a wrist-lock and a wrist-watch’? Abruptly fired from the WWE after excerpts from a covertly (and possibly illegally) recorded tape, in which he used some fruitily racist language, were leaked on the internet.

Sack him for sure, but the recording is eight years old, and much of its content was known already. It is the subject of an imminently pending court action by Hogan, an action for $100million against a sleazy website called Gawker, which paid cash money for it. Also it was supposedly sealed by the court.

I’m not in the slightest interested in what a geriatric grappler may or may not have said in what he thought was the privacy of his friend’s wife’s bedroom, but I would like to know: who leaked the recording? I imagine the court will too.

Has anyone else been receiving automated calls from a woman telling you that you need to book a Green Deal Assessment before 2016? I have, even though I’m registered with the Telephone Preference Service and shouldn’t be receiving cold calls.

After about a dozen of these intrusions, finally I did as I was told and pressed ‘2’ to book my assessment while they are ‘in my area’. Hopefully someone will turn up at my door, so that I can tell them to fuck off, face to face. I’ve tried with the computer, but it doesn’t work.

Sasha died at noon today: he was 18 years old, a good age for a Tonkinese. For the last week he had become increasingly listless, uncomfortable and clearly unwell, making the trip to the vet, and his diagnosis, inevitable.

I stayed with him until the end, and beyond. When you commit yourself to a pet, it’s part of the job, an obligation and a way of showing the same affection that he has given to you. 

Sash was a character, a scrapper in his younger days but never given to bringing home friends and dismantling them in the hall. He lived an independent life but was always an integral part of our household, and a vocal one too.

I’ll miss him like hell, and I’m sad when I dwell on the fact that I’ll never again hear him yell for food, or attention, or anything else. But I don’t feel bad, because we both knew that I’d got the moment right. He was in a bad place, it couldn’t get any better, and no way was I going to let it get any worse.

So long, buddy, and thanks for the laughs, the loyalty and the love.

My posting yesterday of my ludicrous chat session with Vodafone’s so-called help desk may have put a light-hearted glow on something we should be considering more seriously.

Having reached and passed a milestone last week I’m more acutely aware than before of a fundamental truth. Vodafone isn’t the only organisation to run an on-line or telephone customer service set-up that is either incompetent, or deliberately understaffed. It isn’t the only company that is prepared to keep its clients waiting for inordinate periods for assistance that may never arrive or when it does, will prove to be utterly useless.

Every time they do so, these businesses are effectively stealing a piece of our lives, time that we’ll never have again, time that could be spent constructively.

To me such behaviour is criminal; I can’t find another word for it. Surely the moment has come for government to act to ensure that it is treated accordingly.

This is as it happened: