This week : Craig engages in a losing battle with admin
Six months ago, we were still in the early throes of excitement about moving to the Dorset coast. Like everyone else who’s moving house, we were mistakenly under the impression that it could happen in ‘six to eight weeks.’ It’s always six to eight weeks. We knew about the cliché – but that didn’t stop us thinking that we would be the exception to the rule.
At this point, I had decided I would step up to the mark. I’ve always been more risk-averse than my wife – a catastrophiser who would probably still be in nappies if someone hadn’t convinced me of the benefits of wiping my own arse. But now we’d decided that the familial homestead was to be uprooted and moved thirty miles or so south, I – as Man-of-the-House – would drive this beast forward.
I’d make a list. Lists were always a good place to start.
‘I’m going to make a list,’ I announced to my wife as she prepped an evening meal. Experience dictated that she wasn’t going to look particularly impressed by this revelation, but when she hadn’t stopped dead in her tracks and looked at me adoringly, disappointment had cut deep nevertheless. Undaunted, I had persevered. ‘I’ve found this website that lists all the things you need to do when you move. You know: changes of address, that kind of thing.’
‘Right,’ she’d said. There had been something unnerving about the way she was hacking into those carrots.
Who was I kidding? We both knew that this would involve me taking one of my special notebooks (you’re not a proper English teacher if you don’t have a stationery fetish), spending hours creating a fancy heading with my beloved Sharpies, writing the list in my best cursive script, then closing the book only to remember the list the next time I happened to need the notebook much later on to make a new, equally pointless one.
I’m living in a Nineties dystopian thriller
Six months on and in the present day: we have done the moving part (eventually), but we’re playing catch-up with the admin. I phone County Hall to cancel our council tax, only to find that our buyer has already been there, asking if we’ve cancelled yet. I call ‘MiPermit’ to revoke our residents’ car permit. The buyer has got there first too. Clearly, she’s quite a few steps ahead of us. To rub salt into the wound, the bastards aren’t going to refund us for the unused months on the permit either. The doctors’ surgery is next. ‘Oh, someone else was trying to register with us using your old address only yesterday,’ says the receptionist. This ‘someone appears to be taking over my identity: it feels like I’m living in a Nineties dystopia-cum- domestic abuse thriller, albeit less classy and not starring Julia Roberts.
Next is the DVLA. I cross my fingers, hoping that our buyer isn’t already behind the wheel of our car. Between lessons at work, I Google how to change the address on my driving licence from our old Salisbury one to that of The Shack. On the website, I quickly enter my details, whip out my bank card and pay for the privilege. Within minutes, my phone pings: my bank has disallowed the payment – suspected fraud. It’s like Santander’s version of VAR. Pooing myself, I return to the website. It’s the one that comes out at the top of the search on Google, but it’s a sponsored site and, on closer inspection, I realise with horror that it’s not the official DVLA one at all. ‘I’ve given them all my payment details – the ‘three numbers on the back’ and everything,’ I wail to one of my colleagues. I try to phone my bank but they’re ‘experiencing an unusually high number of calls at the moment’. Of course they bloody are. Patience somehow endures but once I do get through, I don’t understand the options I’m given and, in a panic, I inadvertently end up confirming that the site I was reporting was, in fact, valid and I’d be only too delighted to give them all my money after all. I put the phone down in a daze.
Now I try and phone the bank’s ‘Fraud team’ but it’s directing me through the very same channel as the previous call, each option branching out to another five options, each of them five more. I wait for the ‘or hold if you’d like to speak to a member of our team’ option, but it never comes. There goes an hour of my life that I’ll never get back – and potentially the entire contents of my coffers too.
I decide that there’s nothing else for it: at lunchtime, I will sprint to my local branch in town and speak to an actual person. When I get there, the actual person is half-way through his M&S chicken caesar wrap. He greets me with ambivalence and a mouthful of food. ‘It’s no good,’ he splutters. ‘Anything to do with scams and fraud needs to be reported online.’ He hands me a number scrawled on a Post-It note, brushing off a sprig of rocket as he does so. ‘There’s a special team.’ I’m already aware of this. A team so special that you can’t get hold of them.
Dad and his Daily Mail were right all along
I feel myself channelling the grumpy spirit of my dead father: what were things coming to when you couldn’t get actual people to deal with stuff anymore? What happened to the proper bankers wearing sleeve garters and green eye-shields – the ones who weighed farthings on brass scales whilst having a pint on the go as they served people? Dad and his beloved Daily Mail were right all along: this country was ‘going to the bloody dogs’.
Back at work, I manage to cancel my bank card online, only to realise that I’m now without the means to obtain cash – I’m not getting a new card for ‘between four and five working days.’ My colleague tells me that, if I take ID to my local branch, I can get an ‘emergency withdrawal’ without a card. Then I can spend money again.
Back to the local branch I trot. ‘Should be fine,’ says the same actual person, as I gather my breath. ‘All we need is some formal ID to confirm your identity.’
Feeling I’m getting somewhere, I whip out my driving licence and slap it on the counter. The actual person looks at the card, taps his keyboard and peers at his monitor. His fingers hover in mid-air for a moment. He looks over the top of his specs at me and I can see what he’s thinking: this is the idiot who was here an hour ago banging on about fraud and interrupting my lunch: he’s obviously incompetent. ‘Um.’ He bites his lip. ‘The address on your driving licence? I’m afraid it’s not the same as the one linked to your current account…’
I close my eyes and speak very slowly as the queue behind me builds. ‘Look. I’ve moved house, yes? I’m trying to get my address changed on various documents. Yesterday, I successfully changed my address with you over the phone, despite having to endure twenty minutes of elevator muzak and repeated messages about high volumes of calls beforehand; but I have NOT been successful in getting the address on my licence changed – apropos the earlier visit regarding potential fraud…’
With hindsight, I do acknowledge that anyone using the word ‘apropos’ in a rant is unlikely to come through to the other side without being smacked in the face; but I eventually manage to depart with two hundred smackers in my back pocket. That should keep me going for a week – or at least until the new card arrives. But this raises fresh problems. I realise that a considerable amount of time has passed – years even – since I have paid for anything with real cash. Having initially been sceptical about self-service tills, now I wouldn’t use anything else if there was the option. Scan the items, scan your card, zero pleasant chit-chat required – job done. I don’t even carry a wallet now: just one card in a phone case. But now it’s a card that doesn’t work – as I found out somewhat sheepishly at Costa Coffee two mornings ago.
Paying with cash, I find, is now a somewhat demeaning process. You join a small queue of the intellectually starved and The Great Unwashed at the old-fashioned till where you are served by an actual person – only this actual person looks up at you pitifully as you play pocket billiards, rummaging around for the right coins. In Tesco, I put Mum’s Daily Mail and a tube of Pringles down on the conveyer belt so that I can count my spare change. I feel as though I should be wearing fingerless gloves and be in possession of a tartan shopping trolley. ‘Do you need a hand?’ the lady at the till asks me.
It’s a new low point. There is always further to fall. And yes: I should probably admit to the lady that I do indeed need a hand.
©Craig Ennew 2025
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All Going South 
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