Banks Again

Spent the whole day sitting by the phone trying to get my money out of one bank into another, in order to pay the deposit on the new place I was supposed to be moving into yesterday. Endless prevarication, of course, largely based on the principle that no bank is prepared to disburse its customers' money until they have had a few days to extract some juice from it, and even then only if they feel like it. Still, I'll probably have a roof over my head by the weekend. Spent the time waiting for arseholes to ring back reading Antony Beevor's account of the fall of Berlin; as I mentioned before, this tapped into a rich vein of fantasy, with tanks approaching up the Commercial Road while the air force pounds EC3 into rubble, a last stand forming around the east end of St. Paul's while snipers pick them off one by one; meanwhile Oxshott and Chobham and Woking have been overrun by the Red Army, and bankers are being winkled out of cellars and strung up outside, while the victorious soldiers are getting pissed on all the champagne they've unearthed. As a champion of legality, I do of course hope that enough of the guilty are spared to face an enormous Nuremberg trial, after which they'll get strung up just the same. Meanwhile, in each provincial town, red and black flags are flying from the windows of each bank branch, and the managers are sweating in anticipation of a People's Court consisting of their customers, who will wield powers of life or death depending on how they have behaved and how many £60 fines for petty overdrafts they have imposed. But none of them will ever again be allowed to take any job more elevated than cleaning lavatories (possibly - though this will need further thought - equipped with nothing but their tongues).