Hopeless

I am nearly in tears over trying to get a delivery slot for groceries. I check several times a day for the next slots to be available but they're gone as soon as I see them. I tried phoning Tesco three times this morning. The help number, usually so good, cuts out as soon as the automatic message has finished. How do people get these slots? Is there a secret to it?
Meanwhile, I'm paying (Delivery Saver) for a service I'm not getting.

Sorry to moan; I feel better for writing it down.

Reading in difficult times

I read sixteen books last month and they were nearly all re-reads. Nothing wrong with that.
I put away Henrietta Sees it Through and next to it on the shelf was Sue Limb’s Up the Garden Path. Was it really 1984 when it came out? The heroine, Izzy, is really silly: in love with a married man who will never leave his wife. She is, in fact, a trollop but the books are so funny that you have to forgive her. This is from the first page of Up the Garden Path.

Izzy is sitting in the appalling squalor of her one-room flat, thinking about useless Michael, while she tries to make some resolutions.
She would use visual aids and things this term, try not to fall asleep in assembly, and urge her class (4C) away from drug abuse and racketeering and towards joined-up writing. Oh yes, and she would open her girls’ eyes to the absurdity of Cupid. His arrows would miss their mark. Izzy’s girls would sigh no more for Steve Hirst (Upper Sixth, tenor sax and fatal eyelashes). They would be intent on fulfilling careers as plumbers and brain surgeons. After all, what did love bring but dust and ashes?

Izzy may not sound like a good teacher but she is, because her classes all like her. So do men. There’s a sequel, Love’s Labours in which Izzy mistakenly gets engaged to a rich bloke (she’s such a rotten picker). I may like that one even more than the first; I’ll find out when I read it again. There was a TV series starring Imelda Staunton and Nicholas Le Prevost. I loved it until the third series, which went Too Far for me. These books are quite easy and cheap to find second hand. I seem to have written quite a lot about Sue Limb before. She's so funny.