On a positive note...
... or at least as positive as a story about divorce can be, I'd like to hand it to the people at Salisbury County Court. When I divorced the first Mrs Olembe, they couldn't have been more helpful. When I made a mistake filling the form in and asked for another, they just shrugged it off and said that as long as the right information ended up on there, they didn't mind dealing with my mistakes and crossing-outs. They explained everything clearly and made the whole process as easy as anything.

Although now I think about it, isn't it a bit weird that the only smooth encounter I've ever had with civil servants was to get divorced?

EDIT: there are a lot of stories here complaining about car parking. Personally, I find it rather odd that people expect to be able to leave their cars in public places at all. If you had a caravan or a boat on a trailer - or even a big car-shaped wooden box - would you think you had the right to store it on the highway or on any other publicly owned space? Of course not - you have to store those things on your own land or pay somebody else to store them on their land. So why is a car any different? It's not like you get any benefit from my owning a car, so why should I be allowed to store it on public land? And before you say cars are different from other objects because we pay taxes to have them, that argument is false: I pay a *vast* wodge of tax on every bottle of whisky I buy, but that doesn't mean I can expect the public to give me somewhere to store it.

EDIT 2: Oh, and a massive WOO to the Salisbury bin collectors. I was behind the bin lorry the other day when one of the guys putting bags in the back dropped some rubbish on the road. Instead of leaving it there or kicking it into the kerb, as I expected him to do, he got a dustpan and brush from the van and cleaned it right up. WELL DONE THAT MAN!
( Olembe Refuses to write in this space, Sun 29 Jul 2007, 15:20, Reply)