Glo-sticks are back

I’ve been to three very different gigs in the past three weeks. Each of them has taught me a little something.

Crystal Castles

• Glo-sticks are back!
• Dancing to Atari noises is more fun than it should be
• I’m definitely a decade older than I used to be

Spook of the Thirteenth Lock

• You CAN rock out with a banjo
• People in Dublin have an encyclopedic knowledge of music
• A couple of sticks of incense does not conceal smelly drains

The Gutter Twins

• There’s a fine line between looking really cool and looking really awkward
• Just because someone is a rubbish singer one night doesn’t mean you should rule them out altogether
• Music, beer and jumping up and down with a rucksack on makes some people really happy

It is easier to get in than it is to get out

Well, here I am. A fully-fledged Dubliner, complete with PPS number, bank account, new phone and tax credits – all astonishingly painless to set up. Mind you, in a country where 739,000 of the 4.3m population are immigrants who arrived in the last 10 years, it’s perhaps unsurprising that they have their arrivals process down to a fine art.

What has been unexpectedly much harder is extricating myself from the UK – in particular my mobile phone contract. I started the process to end my contract two months ago; today after five phone calls and several thousand touch-tones choices I appear to be back, as they say, to square one.

Of course I understand why companies don’t want people to leave. But I don’t understand what they think they will gain by making it so incredibly difficult. I certainly haven’t emerged battered and bruised after my tussles with the (laughingly named) customer service department thinking: “Fair’s fair chaps, I tried my hardest but you won in the end. I now have a renewed respect for your tenacity and ability to hide the correct contact number on your website, only for me to then find out I need to write in to a postal address – brilliant! I think I’ll upgrade.”