Innovations

When the post arrived this morning it contained two identical envelopes, one for Lucy and one for Number Two Daughter, inviting them separately to partake of the myriad advantages of owning a Barclaycard.

I felt a pang of pity for Barclaycard, fancy spending all of your marketing budget on an avenue of exploration so completely guaranteed to lead you into a financial disaster. 

I put both letters into the bin. Barclaycard and Lucy and Number Two Daughter can all do without embarking on such a potentially unsatisfactory relationship, There is some heartache that we would all be best to avoid. 

Having said that, there have been some joyful moments in our own relationship with Barclaycard, and I imagine there will be more in the future. They offered us a massive credit limit in a moment of weakness, they seem to believe that we are the sort of people who would borrow twenty grand and still come back. 

Obviously we don’t borrow it, because the interest costs about the same as dialling a premium rate phone number, but just the knowledge that it is there always feels rather splendid. It has encouraged me in moments of recklessness in the past. It is all right to spend anything on it as long as you are entirely certain that you can repay it before the bill comes in. Occasionally we have been right about this.

It is lurking at the back of my consciousness at the moment, because I have been looking longingly at some new kitchen lights.

Some years ago somebody invented a light fitting that looks exactly like a window with daylight coming in through it. You can see a pretend blue sky. It looks like a sunny day, and there is a little control which aligns it to the daylight in your part of the world, so that you can have sunrise and sunset without needing to bother opening the curtains.

When they invented it, it cost a fortune. We looked in wonder at it and resolved that we would try harder to be millionaires. As you know, our kitchen and living room are underground, and we have invested a very lot of time and effort trying to make them as light as we possibly can. 

These light fittings have now joined the mainstream, and you can actually buy them. Not the glossy originals, but some indistinguishable copies, from a company in China, which seems to be doing the same thing but with fewer zeros on the price tag. We have sent them an email to see if they do small ones for taxi drivers on a budget.

I remember this happening with bread making machines. The Sunday Times used to include a little catalogue of brand new, never-before-imagined inventions, which I used to read, earnestly, in my mid-twenties, when I had a secret longing to be middle class and grown up. I recall marvelling at the idea that you might shovel flour into a machine at night, and the smell of fresh bread would drift up the stairs to wake you up in the morning. 

Wonderfully, years later, this has now become an important part of my daily routine, and actually I like it every bit as much as I had dreamed that I might in my youth. Fresh coffee and new bread are the best possible scents to wake you up.

Unfortunately they were not part of our start-of-day experience this morning. This morning Roger Poopy had had an accident on the carpet, which is probably the worst possible scent to wake you up, and does not make you kindly disposed towards our four legged friends. We told him again that he was an unloved poopy, the one that everybody rejected even when he was at his most youthfully appealing. He was very upset, and hid under the table, and we wondered again, guiltily, how much English he actually speaks.

When order had been restored we had a very busy day. The sun was shining, and I cut the front lawn, which has been getting a bit excitable over the last few weeks. I am telling you this so that you can appreciate the picture, not because I imagine you will be interested in the growth achievements of Lake District grass. The clumps which are still sticking up are not bits that I have missed, they are rogue daffodils that seem somehow to have made the journey round from the back when we dug everything up for the conservatory.

We cleaned the kitchen and hung the washing outside, and now we are at work.

We are going to try and save up for a pretend window.