If this doesn’t get better soon I am going to book myself a place in Dignitas, although I am pleased to announce that the plague seems to have succeeded where months in the gym have failed. When I put my belt on today, I fastened it on a tighter hole without even noticing. Oh, the bitter ironies of life, imagine three days in bed being better for you than exercise and healthy living.
It appears that Lucy has caught it as well, when we spoke to her tonight she was coughing in harmony with me.
Apart from the cough, she was in splendidly high spirits. She has been shortlisted, and offered an interview for a summer job with the company that provides security for practically all of the country’s music festivals, from Glastonbury to Kendal Calling, and does all sorts of other things, like the science festival at Jodrell Bank, Bluedot, and the Manchester Marathon and the Pride festivals. This is because of her door supervisor’s licence, obviously.
She is going to have a summer of ambling from one festival to another, with a rucksack and a tent in the back of her car, wearing sandals and going brown, and earning a hundred pounds a day.
I am trying not to feel envious.
I am not really, not very. It is exciting to see one’s children leaping off the springboard into life’s adventures, and I am a bit old for camping. The ground is harder than it was when I was a teenager, I think.
I went home early from work last night. I was tired, and coughing, and I had just taken some of the least intellectually superior customers of the night, and had had enough.
The customers turned up whilst Mark was having a cup of tea in the passenger seat.
He got out when they arrived, and went round to the back of the taxi to put the flask of tea in the boot.
The man got in, his wife would not. Think youthful, with long blonde hair and almost as long spidery eyelashes. She hovered next to the open door.
“Ah’m not gettin’ in thuur,” she said, with an expression of abject terror on her face. “Quick, get out. Quick.”
Naturally her husband and I were curious as to the source of her fear.
“”Im!,” she said, indicating Mark’s departing back, and looking close to tears. “”E’s jus’ put somethin’ in’t’boot. It could be a bomb. Ah’m not gettin’ in.”
I would like to say that I reassured her, but I regret to say that I did not. Sometimes my face gives my opinions away, and this was one of those times. My expression only deepened when her husband, having persuaded her to get in, looked at my Royal Albert china in the front, and asked: “Is tha’ a cup?”
I was tempted to say that no, it was a bomb, but decided to give them the benefit of the doubt, perhaps they don’t have tea sets in Wigan.
They were very quiet all the way to their hotel, and I let my unspoken opinions wash around the taxi undisturbed. I went home after that. Sometimes the human race leaves me feeling ready to be by myself.
I spent much of today pretending to be Number Two Daughter, in order to sort out a difficulty with her mobile phone company. It was a good job that she had not tried to be herself and call them from some landline in Japan, because in total, between today and yesterday, they have kept me on hold for over six hours.
They have not cancelled her contract on the date requested, and carried on trying to take the direct debit out of her bank account. She preferred that they did not do this, and so had prudently cancelled the direct debit, which led, this week, to them sending her a threatening email. Obviously she has passed this on to me.
Hence I have been masquerading as her for the day, because of course mobile phone companies, like banks, won’t let anybody else deal with your account just because you are abroad and need them to.
We won’t talk about the bank here. There has been a lot of shouting about them, and I don’t want to think about them refusing to pay a cheque into her own account because it was me paying it in not her even though I am a signatory on her account.
In the end I got very shouty with the telephone company as well, and they have promised that they will escalate my case to the very highest of all high levels, which presumably means one which is not an Indian call centre. Also they have promised that I will receive a call back from a most very important customer relations person, yes indeed Madam, one who is very always dealing with these things, and so please do not be shouting any more, because I am already seeing that you are right, only I am so sorry, but I must just put you on hold again, just for a very very short time…
Have a picture of Oliver running up the fell again.
