Some Things That Happened Today

Somebody did a poo on the floor in Morrisons today.

I am telling you this because it is the most surprising thing that I have seen for some time, and in a fairly uneventful life it is worthy of comment.

It was an old lady whose carer was a bit cross about it, although she herself seemed largely untroubled. However I can tell you that it completely put me off buying the fresh bread rolls from the bakery section and so I had to go across the road to the Co-op instead where they have just as good a selection, and also had the immeasurable bonus of not having a pile of poo on the floor by their side.

Other than that it has not been an especially exciting day. Most of it has been occupied by trying to write a lot of letters that should have been written ages ago and hadn’t been written, and indeed most of them still haven’t.

One of them was to the Inland Revenue who had sent me an unexpected letter this week telling me I owed them ten thousand pounds and I had got two weeks to pay or else.

I spent ages composing a mystified reply, but in the end decided that I would really rather know the worst, and that I would ask them to explain themselves directly.

This of course involved an hour sitting in their telephone queueing system, which I occupied quite pleasantly reading about other people’s adventures on Facebook, and when I eventually got through to them a kindly girl explained that it must be because we were earning so much and probably owed some unpaid tax or something.

I must have squeaked, and she helpfully offered to look through my notes, and after some investigation eventually she explained that I had filled in an online form some months ago on which I had inexplicably declared that our joint annual income was ninety thousand pounds.

She listened patiently whilst I stammered and begged for understanding and in the end we worked out that I had optimistically credited Mark with three full time employed jobs, all of which had a salary of thirty thousand pounds.

Since he doesn’t have a full time employed job at all we quickly rectified the issue and I hung up, feeling staggered yet again by the extent of my financial ineptitude and a profound and heartfelt respect for accountants everywhere, but also resolving never again to attempt to do paperwork when I have been drinking.

I had barely put the phone down when it rang again, and this time it was the nurse from Oliver’s school, with that impossible conversation opener that goes: “Now, you don’t need to worry about this, but…”

I like the nurse from Oliver’s school very much indeed. She is ex-Army, and learned her bedside manner in Afghanistan, which is perfect for dealing with small rascally boys, however it does occasionally mean that we have different opinions about what might be worrying, as I suspect that she is perfectly capable of being upbeat about missing limbs.

This time it turned out that Oliver had got in the way of a flying cricket bat and has a large lump on his head and a cut which she has efficiently glued shut again. I asked about concussion, (no) and scarring (yes) and distress (wouldn’t stay in the San, gone out to play on his bike).

Since there didn’t seem to be anything else I could usefully contribute without sounding like a dimwit I thanked her for her undoubtedly brisk and entirely splendid handling of the matter and hung up, to go and wail to Mark that our little boy was injured: who was equally brisk, and laughed, and said that if Oliver had been concentrating on what was going on properly he might have seen it coming, which I had to acknowledge was probably true.

After that we had to get ourselves ready for work.

The plan for the day had been to do sensible chores like letter writing and car fixing all day, and then go out to work all night, thus neatly achieving everything that needed to be achieved. It is eleven o’clock now, and I am now on the taxi rank, just beginning to become aware of the rather obvious flaw in that plan. Sometimes my ideas of life planning can be less than masterly.

I wasn’t sure what would be an appropriate picture to put on the top, as there hasn’t really been anything that could be described as a theme to the day, and I didn’t take a photograph of the poo in the supermarket: so I have put a picture of the taxi as the running theme to life.

I am sitting in it as I write these very words.