No sunshine today, and Windermere is enveloped in a thick damp mist that made me bring my washing in.
Mark has been to Lancaster to the scrapyard for a new gearbox for one of the taxis, I forget which now, they both need something but unless he has actually told me what it is in the preceding five minutes I can never remember what it is. I am not even quite certain that it is a gearbox he has bought. It might be a clutch. Anyway he has bought something oily to put in a taxi, and whilst he was out I bathed the dog and cleaned the bathroom which are two chores which naturally have got to be done in proximity to one another, and argued for a while with the Electricity Board and made our sandwiches for work.
The Electricity Board phone call was surprisingly successful in the end. Of course it wasn’t the Electricity Board who don’t exist any more since the days of national utilities. You have an electricity supplier these days, and in fact it wasn’t even them, it was a debt collection company.
I changed our supplier ages ago, and after a few weeks of the new company who were much cheaper and answered their phone sometimes, our old supplier said that we owed them some money. I said that we didn’t, and we squabbled in the sort of way where you shout abuse at the girl on the other end of the phone for ages and then say sulkily and a bit guiltily, ‘Of course I’m not blaming you personally…’ and then they are patronising back, and everybody comes out of the phone call feeling cross.
After the last such conversation our supplier went quiet for a bit and I forgot about it, and then I got a letter from a debt collection agency which made me absolutely incandescent with rage, so I phoned them up this morning and said what I thought, and a very nice civilised lady made soothing noises and said: ‘How much do you think your bill should be, then?’
I told her that I had worked it all out properly from the meter readings and that I thought it should be about half of the ridiculous unreasonable unbelievable appalling disgraceful demand that the thieves at the electricity supplier had had the outrageous nerve to ask for which quite clearly was way over the top and inaccurate and I had got no idea where they were getting their figures from, made them up most likely, and that I was going to complain to Ofgem and my MP and the police and anybody else who would listen.
After that she put me on hold for a minute and then came back and said kindly: ‘Yes, that will do, pay that and we will accept that in settlement so that we don’t have to argue any more, would that make you feel a bit happier?’
I was so surprised I just thanked her profusely and told her Mark’s credit card number and that was that, no more grumpiness was called for and I wrote the payment reference on the letter and filed it and put all the rest of my calculations and notes and copies of bank statements and printed electricity statements straight into the bin, and my desk was much clearer and I was happy with the world.
Mark came back and I told him all about it and we had a stroll round the library garden with the dog and were pleased with the world despite the mist and a living room full of washing.
It was a lovely walk, the trees are all surrounded by that green haze that you get as the leaves are just starting to fluff out into their very first days of life. I am trying to persuade Mark that we need to get a burnt sugar tree for our garden, there is one in the Library Gardens which is wonderful and smells amazing in the autumn, truly of sugar, and and breathes the memory of candy floss and doughnuts and happy summer afternoons cycling along the Golden Mile in Blackpool into the chill October evenings: but Mark seems to think that our garden is too small even for a lilac bush which is the other thing that I really, really want, never mind a fifteen metre high burnt sugar tree.
I have thought and thought about it during moments of armchair gardening, but so far have not managed to come up with a single idea of where we might put it unless we block the front door off and dig the path up, which would upset the postman. All the same I would like one in the garden, and think it would be all right if we kept it trimmed back.
I might get one anyway. We can work out what to do with it once it’s there.
I like the smell of them so very much
