Good Old British Beaurocracy...

British beaurocracy is irritating, reassuring, and impressive in turns. Registering at the doctor was simple and I have been able to order my thryoxine by phone and can pick it up tomorrow afternoon straight from the surgery – no effort required at all! Bingo! Compare that to an hour’s drive to Kampala, to find one pharmacy has it for one pound per tablet, two others have run out, ring a friend to ask where she got hers recently (you know who you are!), go back and buy a small amount from the first, wait and hope to find it cheaper somewhere else another day… Life in England is so much easier… Until…

… trying to get a landline and internet into our house, which is a Nightmare – you can now get it in “bundles” of internet, cable TV, landline plus a mobile phone package, in any combination of the above, from three different companies, offering twelve month or eighteen month deals for different prices, differing amounts of broadband at differing speeds… AND special offers! But they didn’t mention the cost of line rental which doubles the special offer! But THEY take three weeks to intall while WE can do it instantly. But if you’re moving soon, you MIGHT be able to take the package with you. IF the house you move into has our cable in the street. Do we even need a landline? Mobiles might work out cheaper (depending on what mobile package we go for…) Do we need cable – there are lots of free stations anyway. As long as we swim around in this huge sticky bowl of molasses, trying to make a decision one way or the other, we don’t have internet in our house so we have to drive to friends to get in our emails. Somebody help!!! Now Uganda seems so simple!  

Meanwhile, we installed the television which my parents kindly gave us, a few days before we actually moved in. We turned it on to see if the freeview channels did come in. Abby and Alex were over the moon that their favourite channel CBBC (Childrens BBC) does work. Hooray! Two days later a letter lands on the mat. “To The Occupier…” The letter goes on to say that whatever we are watching, however we are watching it, it is illegal until we get a Television License!! Wow, they really have it covered. Amazing. It only took ten minutes on the internet to become legal again – phew!

I must say that being able to do everything by internet is very easy, (so long as you are computer literate, have internet, and speak English,) compared to the time-consuming system used in Uganda for things like immigration and driving licenses: the long, familiar ordeal, of going to a particular office one day, back to office number two another day, followed by going to the bank to pay, then going back to the bank later or another day to collect your receipt, taking that receipt back to office number two, and  back again in five more days to collect the document you were after. People blame the British for all of that.  Perhaps it was like that in England in Victorian times, when important documents were written with quill pens on scrolls, and badly stored or lost (as in Bleak House). Not so any more. Now, no-one wants you to come into their office. Quite the opposite. In fact, bizarrely, if you go to the Schools Admissions team at the Local Authority building in Gloucester, they don’t speak to you face to face, but instead you go into a booth, where there is an intercom phone, and they speak to you from their office via the intercom! The irony…