I picked up an intoxicated young man from the night club last night who sadly confided in me that he was in love with Lucy.
To his sorrow, he explained, she did not love him back, and worse, was away in York. He told me in tearful, broken English, how much he missed her when she was away, and that despite knowing that he had no chance of even catching a backward glance from her, all the same he kept hoping.
I felt very sorry for him indeed, because sweet and friendly as he was, he is an unbeautiful Romanian kitchen porter at the You And Me Chinese restaurant, and Lucy has no intentions whatsoever of falling in love with anybody of lesser rank and fortune than Prince Harry.
I considered explaining to him what a rotten wife she would make anybody, having no interest at all in any labour more exhausting than painting her fingernails, but thought that probably he was at the sort of youthful stage of infatuation where sensible advice was of no use to him.
He sighed heavily and got out, telling me charmingly and untruthfully that he thought I was also beautiful, failed to have quite enough money in his pockets to pay the fare, and buzzed off back to the You and Me where presumably he sleeps in a cardboard box next to the kitchen stove or something.
It was very odd to think of Lucy as being the object of a young man’s daydreams. I told Mark about it later, who laughed, and said that he has already threatened him with his shotgun. Sometimes it is very sad that life is not a pantomime.
To our horror when we finally stirred this morning, it was not morning at all, but twenty past one in the afternoon. Sometimes this happens when you go to bed after five, but it is always tiresome, because of meaning that there is hardly any day left for doing nice things.
Mark gulped down huge quantities of breakfast and dashed off, and I got on with trying to keep our lives in order. I put the sheets in the washing machine and washed the pots, and to my horror, because I was hurrying and my hands were slippery with soapsuds, I dropped the coffee pot.
The coffee pot is not a treasured relic like the teapot. It is a different sort of treasured relic, made of a glass jug inside a prettily cut out metal holder, with a squishy sort of sieve thing on a stick in the lid. Number One Daughter bought it for us one Christmas, and I liked it very much.
The glass jug bit smashed into fragments in the sink and cut my finger, which leaked persistently and irritatingly for the rest of the day. I was very sad, and cleared the pieces out feeling cross with myself for being so clumsy, and unhappy that we no longer had a useful coffee pot any more.
About an hour later I had an inspiration.
I realised that our brown earthenware jug was about the same size as the coffee pot.
I tried the sieve lid in it, and it fits absolutely perfectly.
We still have a coffee pot.
I can order another jug bit from the Internet, which is a magnificent invention for such disasters.
Life is still all right.
