Friend in need

I was halfway around my morning puffing circuit when the phone rang.

It is such a wonderful world, it is ace to have a telephone in my pocket so that people can call me and tell me interesting things no matter what I happen to be doing.

As it turned out, it was good news.

It was Elspeth, who had promised to write me a reference assuring the Prison Service of my employability.

They have written to her at long last, and asked her to supply one. This means that their endless checks must now be drawing to their conclusion.

Elspeth was aware that I am in a terrible hurry to move the process along, and so she wrote one last night, as soon as she possibly could.

This morning, on sober reflection, it occurred to her than it was probably not a good idea to write a humourous reference after having consumed a quantity of Prosecco, and so before she sent it she dug it out for a rewrite.

When she re-examined it, this turned out to have been a good idea.

She had called for a consultation about appropriate things to say, and to share with me some of the things that she thought she had better not say after all.

We concurred about those, although with some regret.

We considered the best ways of explaining my various personal strengths in an acceptable manner. Elspeth suggested that ‘not easily intimidated’ might be a better phrase than ‘good at chucking drunks out’. We thought that it would be best to draw a veil over ‘opinionated’ because there is absolutely no way of describing my tendency to say what I think that will make me sound employable; and we were both in agreement that I did not ever, ever go off sick. This latter is helped along by that handy detail that if I don’t want to go to work then I just don’t bother.

She hung up and buzzed off to craft something acceptable, and then rang back to read it to me just as I was trotting past the swings.

I was jolly impressed. It did manage to make me sound quite genuinely employable, and demonstrated a gift for imaginative and creative writing that I had never suspected she might possess.

I thanked her, humbly, and headed for home, suddenly absolutely elated and overwhelmed with gratitude. Elspeth is jolly busy running a business and being important, which is why I thought she might be a respectable sounding person to write a reference.

They had originally wanted two referees, but when I looked carefully it turned out that one had to be your employer, or to have employed you in the past. I am conspicuously lacking anybody who might fit that description, since it is over twenty years since I last had a job, and so the Prison Service decided that it did not matter, and that Elspeth would do.

Elspeth had taken ages out of her day, and probably missed Woman’s Hour on the radio in order to write it, and now, at last things might actually be moving.

She emailed it to them straight away, and I spent the rest of the day optimistically checking my emails in case they had read it and decided to employ me immediately, but they hadn’t.

I had a happy experience upon my return home. This was also courtesy of Elspeth, who had helpfully advised me of a less costly manufacturer of sports bras who produced peculiar sizes.

When I got back from my run I looked them up, and to my great happiness they had a clearance sale in progress, so I am now the owner of some greatly reduced Unpopular Size sports bras. I am very pleased indeed about this, and looking forward to their arrival. Admittedly they are in peculiar colours, since they were what was left over, but they are sporting underwear, not to be worn to dinner with the Queen, so I don’t care.

The picture is the camper van. It has no relevance whatsoever to today’s post, except in that the longing to get in it and go away somewhere is once again bubbling like Elspeth’s Prosecco. Number Two Daughter called wanting me to send her some pictures of the inside of it, so I took some. This is one of them.