I came down to the taxi rank this evening to find some tiresome idiots with an enormous television camera lurking about in my space making yet another item for the television news.
This irritated me enormously, because I wanted to park my taxi there, and it was only Mark’s restraining presence that stopped me from barging into the middle of their live broadcast to tell them to sling their hook and go and make running commentaries about somebody else’s county.
Mark said that they were telling an uninterested nation that we need them to come and have their holidays here and we ought to be patient and supportive because they are being helpful and that if tourists don’t come back soon we will all starve to death. Personally I think you would have to be off your rocker to come here in the pouring rain in the middle of December anyway and we will all just have to live off our not inconsiderable rolls of fat for a while.
I have been mildly irritable on and off all day anyway. I got lots of Christmas cards written and in envelopes this morning. This was something of a relief, because I had finished them completely, which meant that I could clean all of the gold and silver glittery dust off my desk, at least until next year.
Mark was pleased as well, he has been being witty for weeks about being cuckolded by Tinkerbell. I put everything in a neat pile ready to go to the post office, along with Oliver’s passport application and a form to send back to the stockbroker, only to discover that the dog was curled up contentedly under my desk eating the stamps.
I was not in the least pleased, because stamps are not low budget items any more. I salvaged what I could, but some recipients of Christmas cards might wonder why their stamps are a bit soggy and frayed at the corners.
I should have started making mince pies after that, but didn’t because we had an upsetting conversation with the boiler manufacturers. They called back this morning after we had left about twenty grumpy messages, and said that what we would have to do is buy another boiler from them, and then send the leaky one back to them for testing and if they could find the leak, which they doubted that they would, because their boilers didn’t leak ever, then they would refund us.
It is not very often that Mark gets cross, but he was. Actually he was really very cross. He stamped off to Lancaster to go and fit some new tyres to his car, and when he came back he said that he would send it back to them and they could put it somewhere warm and dark, and we would get a refund from the credit card company and then he would build his own jolly boiler, although he didn’t say jolly. Then he spent the rest of the day muttering about steel thicknesses and some sort of problem with his welder.
He calmed down later and we had a council on the taxi rank about what we would do. We decided that it was very upsetting and horrible to deal with people who were rude and unhelpful, and we would stop trying to telephone them to tell them what we thought about them, because it was making us feel angry and unhappy.
We thought that we would write them a very indignant middle-class letter with a copy to Trading Standards, and chuck some Radweld in the boiler in the meantime, and then Mark would make us one that was much nicer because it would be our own and if it leaked then it would be all our own fault and not something we needed to get cross with anybody else about. Then we would send them their rubbish leaky boiler back and ask for a refund, which you can do if something doesn’t work, it says so in the Consumer Credit Act.
This struck us as being a happy outcome, and then we didn’t feel cross any more, which was a huge relief. It is awful to feel grumpy about things.
We finished work early because it was very quiet and we weren’t earning very much, so we thought we would prefer to go home and have an early night, because of needing to set off for Oliver tomorrow.
I thought it would be too depressing to include a picture of a leaky boiler, so I have put another one on of the Christmas tree, which is beautiful and happy, and not at all irritating.
After all, it is nearly Christmas.
