Irresponsibility

I discovered today that the new tablets have got a warning emblazoned on the side. May Cause Drowsiness.

They did.

I have been even dopier than usual. In the end Mark got fed up with me forgetting the ends of my sentences and getting confused about washing and suggested that I went back to bed.

This turned out to be a good idea, because we had been woken up tiresomely early this morning.

Mark had a phone call the other day from an agency in India asking him to send them a CV to put forward for a job in Saudi.

We get this sort of thing occasionally, because he is on the Oil And Gas mailing list, so we emailed one off and then thought no more about it: until they telephoned again this morning at half past six, this time wanting details of the salary and benefits which Mark might find acceptable in order to consider relocation.

We had taken no notice of them up until this point, because obviously we assumed that the next communication from them would be a badly-spelt offer of an improbable job which would come our way along with a request for all our bank details and passwords which they would need in order to progress further.

We were quite surprised this morning when after the phone call we looked them up and discovered that they were entirely genuine, with a real phone number, a real email address and no interest so far in our bank account.

We sent them an email with a vastly inflated figure detailing the salary Mark would expect before he would even consider abandoning the allotment in favour of the Middle East and added some inspired details about wanting healthcare, transport, and an apartment with a built in maid and a swimming pool, and then spent the rest of the day lost in daydreams about relocating to the sunshine.

It is, of course, an impossible dream. The job in question involves managing a rolling stock of locomotives for goods transportation across Saudi Arabia, and although Mark would be more than capable of doing it, since one diesel engine is pretty much like another, if it were my job to fill I think I would be looking for a recruit who had some experience of trains beyond just getting stuck on one once when the doors closed unexpectedly.

Nevertheless of course it was such an exciting idea, imagine waving farewell to the damp Lake District winter and jetting off into the Arabian sunshine. How splendid to live in a place where it could never, ever be my turn to drive, and where I could say, with a completely clear conscience, “Oh goodness, I couldn’t possibly think about worrying things like that, I am only a girl and hence the overdraft, the mortgage, the credit card and the gas bill are all far too difficult for me to know anything about, please ask my husband.”

I am aware that there are other opinions on this topic, but having had a full and exciting life to date the idea of being demoted to compulsory irresponsibility has a certain seductiveness about it.

I had a day of voluntary irresponsibility anyway. I staggered about through a drug-induced haze for a while, and then slept the sleep of the irresponsibly oblivious until Mark came back from the allotment with the dogs. The dogs have been worried about me for the last couple of days, in a tiresome dog sort of way that involves spending the whole time sitting at my feet with an anxious stare, and immediately rushed up to try and nurse me back to health. I was woken up by a cold nose being pushed into my ear in a concerned fashion, and thought I might get up then.

The drugs had worn off by this evening, so I could go out to work and make a financial contribution to the household, since this is not Saudi Arabia. This helped a bit with the allotment-related guilt, because Mark has done lots to it now, and has built a dry stone wall at the bottom of it to stop all of the soil from falling out under the fence.

I really will go and help tomorrow.