Sometimes, what we sense as we go about our lives and a word find each other and capture the mood of a moment perfectly.
This morning, that word is "brittle." My dictionary defines it as "having hardness and rigidity but little tensile strength; breaking easily and suddenly." Its etymology takes me to fourteenth-century English Brytan, meaning "to crush, pound, to break to pieces."
That just about captures the last twenty-four hours. The catalyst was an interruption to our water supply. On ringing Severn Trent to report it, the opening message on the phone was, "Our operators are unusually business at the moment." At 3:00 am? I got through to a human almost instantly who told me what had happened. Why have that opening message as a default, I wonder? - and it had reinforcements in the form of encouraging me to switch to text messaging. The impression it gives is clear - we really, really do not want to talk to you in person and only will if you are prepared to wait a long time. Would …
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