EasyJet and Blackstone: FEH!

Just spent the whole morning on hold with EasyJet, music blasting through the speakerphone - at one point, I muffled the sound under a pillow. I'm booked on two EasyJet flights, one from Paris to Venice at the end of March, and one from Budapest to Paris in April. Venice is the epicentre of the Italian virus breakout; the city is a ghost town, and Bruce and I have cancelled our trip to Venice and from there to Vienna and then Budapest. It says on the airline's website that most flights to Venice have been cancelled and travellers will be contacted for a refund. I have not been contacted, so, after various fruitless, infuriating attempts to get in touch other ways, I called their Customer Service number and waited an hour and a half, trying not to listen to the horrible music.

Finally a nice woman came through, and we spent the next hour going back and forth. But in the end - my flight to Venice, for some reason neither she nor her supervisors could explain, has not been cancelled, so there's no refund for that flight and certainly not for the Budapest one. Hundreds of dollars out the window.

But - first world problems.

More work yesterday with my marvellous social media assistant Sophie - but it's going to be tough, I just do not see the possibility of posting something on Instagram every day, and as for Twitter - no. Just no.

Last night, a fantastic doc Push, about the global housing crisis. Joseph Steiglitz, Nobel-winning economist, explained that it all started in the 80's with Milton Friedman and his idiotic trickle-down economics. "He gave corporations and the rich permission to be greedy and immoral," he said, later saying that giant corporations like Blackstone, which buy affordable housing, renovate, and triple the rents - and have enormous political clout - are "evil." The doc did show cities like Barcelona fighting back, trying to buy back housing and battling giants like airbnb, which makes things worse. But truly, evil is rampant. I think of my children and their friends in precarious rental housing. The heart sinks.

Finished Five Days Gone: The mystery of my mother's disappearance as a child, by Laura Cumming, who was interviewed by Eleanor Wachtel not long ago. It's well-written, but I did skim, I confess - many minuscule details in her search for her mother's story.

I hope Joe Biden announces Elizabeth Warren as his running mate. Or another of the terrific women who ran, with Warren as Sec. of Education, plus Mayor Pete and the others in some capacity. Please God, let the Dems get it together to defeat the GOP. Talk about rampant evil.

PS Brad, friend and student, just came over to help me upload, or is it download, Spotify and to put Netflix on my phone and TV. Took hours but I'm connected, almost. Thanks Brad!

What a complex world. The whole day so far - it's now 2.30 - wrestling with technology.

It's now 4 and I've been struggling with websites to list my house for rent in July. Finally got it onto one only the site won't accept jpeg photos, only jpg. At this point, I gave up. Enough already.