Compliant

The council rang me this morning to request that I paid for the taxi licence, which was a nuisance, because I had been hoping that they might forget that small detail.

I paid anyway, with moderately good grace, and had just gone back downstairs when the telephone rang again. The house telephone does not ring very often, so I supposed that it was the council telling me that my payment had bounced.

I had not been expecting that it would, because I had not thought we were quite so insolvent, but nothing surprises me any more.

It was not the council. It was Brian from Microsoft to tell me that there was a problem with my computer.

I told Brian from Microsoft, fairly shortly, to go away, and hung up.

Two minutes later he rang back.

He explained that I had opted in to telephone notifications when I had bought the computer and now I needed to listen to him because I had a terrible problem.

I told Brian from Microsoft to go away, using a short phrase beloved of taxi drivers. We employ this when somebody wants a discount or wants me to take their dribbling and extremely intoxicated mate – him, there, over the road, they’re just carrying him across now, he won’t be any trouble, he’s probably got some money, if you just take him back to his house, he might know where it is, just wake him up and ask him.

There is a verbal shortcut which we use under these circumstances. It is pithy and leaves no room for confusion.

Brian from Microsoft was not pleased.

He launched into a tirade of abuse which I do not think was written in his customer relations script, and which made me laugh and hang up.

The phone rang again a couple of times afterwards, but I ignored it, and took the dogs out for a walk, feeling rather invigorated by the encounter.

After that the day chugged along without much incident. I occupied myself with cleaning the house, which is a tiresome chore, over which I shall draw a veil. They do this in films. You will very rarely watch a film where any character replaces the toilet roll or the razor blades or the head on the toothbrush, probably because in films they never run out of toilet roll unless the film is about drug addicts, in which case the toilet roll is missing to indicate depravity and unhappiness. Also there is little dramatic tension to be had from these small but necessary actions. Therefore I shall not bother telling you that I emptied the upstairs rubbish bins and replaced the batteries on the computer mouse and emptied last week’s flowers on to the compost heap. Such activities do not move our story along nor move us towards our thrilling climax.

Actually you will not be astonished to learn that there was not really a thrilling climax. Instead the Peppers came over when everybody had finished their day’s work. We did not mean to do this, just accidentally poured wine instead of tea when everybody came in to unload their working things, after which we were lost. In no time at all we were having dinner and blackcurrant ice cream. Of course we drank too much and laughed a great deal. This was an immensely satisfying end to a working week.

The working week is not exactly over, because tomorrow we will start driving taxis, but that is not really work. We do not have to get out of bed early to do it, which makes it very much nicer.

I am especially looking forward to the bit where I do not get out of bed.

NOTE:  The picture is me.

I have prepared my face covering. It is a fully-recycled design, made from a guest house pillowcase, and as such I have the reassuring knowledge that not only Boris Johnson, but Extinction Rebellion, and probably the Women’s Institute, will approve. I did try and find an ethnically neutral pillowcase, but they only had white, so I will just have to hope that nobody thinks I am making a statement of superiority or anything offensive.

I am now fully Covid-compliant.