Last night was cheered up immensely by a taxi driver friend announcing on Facebook that he had just had a dead wood louse removed from his ear.
I should not have laughed as much as I did. Apparently it crawled in whilst he was asleep one night and drove him mental with its little woodlousy pattering around his ear, until his GP kindly killed it for him, in a sort of humanitarian gesture. After this he had to wait three weeks to have its corpse extracted on the NHS.
Obviously it was a dreadful thing to have happened, especially for the woodlouse. Also the taxi driver has now been subjected to some predictable humour from his colleagues. It is not the sort of misfortune that should happen to somebody in an occupation which is notorious for its lack of sympathetic kindliness.
I laughed until people walking past the taxi rank started to stare at me.
Another cheering encounter last night was with a chef from one of the local hotels, who had been engaged to go and spend the weekend catering for a concert in London.
During the conversation I was prompted to remember an incident from my own youth. I used to go to work on the bus every night with a chap about my own age who was in a band on his nights off, and we became friends. He was terribly keen on his band, and talked about them all the time. I was mildly interested, and eventually he brought me a cassette tape, this being the olden days, of his band having a rehearsal, and singing and chatting and making jokes.
I preferred to listen to Abba in those days. I thought that the band was absolute rubbish, and taped Seven Brides For Seven Brothers over it.
Eventually the chap stopped getting on the bus to concentrate on his band, and I never saw him again. He was called Mani, and his band was called The Stone Roses, who went on, as everybody knows, to fame and fortune.
I told the chef this story, and he laughed and said that he was very likely to see Mani this weekend, because he was part of the concert, and they would probably meet up.
He promised faithfully that he would send him congratulations from the girl on the bus all those years ago, and let him know how very happy and pleased I was to know that he had done so well.
I went away with a warm feeling, how lovely to be able to tell somebody, thirty years later, that I had been absolutely and completely and thoroughly wrong.
We did not finish especially late, and managed to be in bed by two.
This shirking made it possible to leap out of bed this morning and complete all the housework in one frantic dash.
By twelve o’ clock we had cleaned three bathrooms, mowed the lawns, dusted the bedrooms and the office, put clean sheets on the children’s beds and visited Booths for some ethical shopping.
Note to self and to anybody else interested. It is a bad idea to go shopping when you are hungry. We have got a picnic at Oliver’s school tomorrow, I think, unless I have messed the dates up again, so we had to get some portable things like pork pies. After that we bought half a dozen different varieties of cheese and a great deal more pasta.
We bought some dying tomato plants for eighty pence, and I drove the car home whilst Mark climbed over Booths car park fence and down to the allotments for some buckets of muck. We soaked the poor wilting plants, and planted them in the muck, and by teatime they were looking quite revived, which was a happiness, we might have tomatoes this year.
Then, free from housework but desperate for coffee, we rushed off to the farm, where we spent a joyous couple of hours doing things to the camper van before we had to drag ourselves back to go to work.
We are expecting sunshine tomorrow.
I can’t wait.
