I went to the post office this morning.
“What’s he forgotten this time?” asked the lady behind the counter, as I produced the parcel of the things Oliver had left behind him. “Have you remembered his Christmas jumper this year?”
I hadn’t, so I had to go back home and unwrap it and start again.
I went to the bank next.
“I’ve lost my bank card, and somebody’s spent a lot of money on my account,” I said hopefully.
“It was almost certainly you, and does Mark know you’ve got his card?” asked the lady behind the counter, with a sniff. “I’ll get you another one sent, and you needn’t think I won’t tell Mark when I see him if there are any expensive transactions on his account.”
I went back to the post office with the newly reorganised parcel. It had become two parcels by now, as I discovered other forgotten things.
There was a big notice up advertising for a counter assistant. I asked about it, in the spirit of becoming gainfully employed, suggesting that since I had already worked there once I could help out if the postmaster was desperate in the meantime.
“He’s not that desperate,” the lady said firmly.
I had just arrived back home when the chap from up the road appeared at the end of the garden. He has had a chequered love life for a couple of years, and so it is always interesting to hear what he is up to. He has separated from his wife, after an awful lot of years of being married, and now he is having new adventures.
It is a difficult sort of thing to understand what makes people want to live together. The chap up the road rightly pointed out that he had bought his wife things stuck all over with diamonds, even when it was not her birthday. Mark has never even bought me a loose diamond that is not stuck to anything, and I can’t imagine that it would ever occur to him to look in a Diamond Things catalogue: but we are still married and our friends are not.
He made me a milking stool for Christmas once. I was very pleased indeed with it, and sat on it twice a day until we sold the cow.
We talked for ages, and I went away feeling partly interested in his adventures, and partly sad that his wife had gone away, and partly relieved that Mark does not want to go to live anywhere else. It must be very horrible to be unexpectedly not married any more.
When he had gone the lodger came home. She was profoundly unhappy because she stayed out in an hotel last night and was eating dinner when she had a seizure.
She has had them in the past, but not for years, and thought that now she was grown up and happy and well fed and healthy, they would be an outgrown thing, part of her past.
She can’t learn to drive now.
She has got to go and see the doctor tomorrow.
I felt cross with the universe on her behalf and made encouraging noises, but it is a terrible thing, and I hoped very hard that the doctor would be able to make it not happen again.
I am a very fortunate person. I don’t have unexpected seizures, and my husband wants to carry on living with me. Those two things by themselves are wonderful, and I don’t think I appreciate them enough.
I hope Mark doesn’t bump into the lady from the bank.
I have been shopping on Amazon this afternoon.
