learn to love a banker now, does that word start with b or w.....

We have been faintly unimpressed of late with the system of bankerology. We have a building project here that has been ongoing for a little while but has stalled for want of that last bag of money. Not a huge ammount but certainly well servicable by our income here.

So of course we applied to the bank for an increase in our mortgauge, historically your manager sorted that, made the decision and everyone would be happy. In this case it's a no brainer,  modest increase in a mortgage that we had been up to very recently overpaying and we would be quids in with a very sensible rental income off the bit of our house that has not been in use for a while.

One might argue that this is sensible, so we jumped through hoops, filled forms, the spotty herbert in head office fed it all into his computer and said not a good idea. Well no I don;t think idea came in at all the software said no.

I might add at this point that our mortgauges are all tracked, linked to the base rate and we are paying about 1.4 percent on them.

So away i went to the pub looking for a little bloke as I needed a fight. At this point I might point out the unwisdom of picking fights with little blokes as they have spent most of their lives with a chip on their shoulder and they are very often extreemly bad news in the scrapology department.

But anyway I am diverging now, this morning, cutting the branch out of the equation entirely I went on the banks website and applied for an unsecured personal loan.

Very odd, they felt that I could not affoard to fund an increase in the mortgage spread over 10 years at a bit over base. But somehow I could affoard to pay the same ammount back in half the time at ten times the rate of interest.

I wonder how they came to that conclusion.

But whatever, we have the money and it was in my account 20 minutes after applying for it.

So it's Game on and the builders are back in very soon.

This has been a trying time, and fostering too is sticking it's nose in.

We have had a student working with little D for the last few months and she has done a few things that are a bit silly.

So at the moment we really need to speak to his social worker who is supervising her practice in training.

Then we have D the larger who goes on the work placement he found for himself tomorrow.

This is good, less good is some stuff coming in from college, allegations are flying of a less good nature.

I am going to have to make some calls in the morning that might trigger all sorts of things.

It is sad that in this case I feel it important that I know what is going on before I tell the social worker.

What does that say about professional trust?

R