Difficult

I have had such a difficult day.

This morning, whilst I was cleaning my teeth, I knocked over the little china soap dispenser at the side of the sink.

It caught on the edge of the sink and broke.

I yelled for Mark, whilst trying, without a great deal of success, to catch the liquid soap in my hands. This was, as you might imagine, somewhat sticky and made a terrible mess.

Mark went downstairs for a bowl, and we scooped the soap into it and cleared up.

I was dreadfully upset about the soap dispenser. It was made of the prettiest bone china, and was my favourite Royal Albert. It matched the dish where I put my home made soap to dry, and the mug for my toothbrush. It was delicate and lovely and it was broken.

Mark said that there was not much point in trying to mend it. This made me even more upset, and I cried whilst I put the bits in the bin.

It seemed such a terrible tragedy, such a loss, that when he had gone to work I dug the bits out and tried to glue them anyway.

This took almost all of a tube of expensive glue and looked awful. After an hour’s messing about, which included my fingers being cut into painful slices by the edges of the china, it would still not hold water, and I was obliged to desist.

I came back to it several times during the day and tried again, but to no avail.

I wasted an hour trying to find another one on the mighty Internet, but of course it was rare, and discontinued, and nobody was even selling an old one on eBay.

In the end I had to give up. I filled a horrible horrible plastic soap dispenser and put that there instead, rage and sadness beating in my heart.

After that I was bringing the logs in when one slipped and crunched down on to the lighter that we use for the fire, smashing it to smithereens and splashing lighter fluid all over my feet.

We do not have another one. I hope that the fire does not go out.

I had wasted so much of my day on the hopeless soap dispenser that there was not time to do any of the things that I had wanted to do. I swept up hastily, and tidied up, and brought the washing in.

We were expecting Lucy to arrive.

She has got a few days away from work and the friend that she was going to see suddenly can’t see her now, and so she thought she might like to come home.

Obviously I was looking forward to this.

I put a chicken into the oven and set the bread maker off and filled the hearth with firewood. Then I watered the conservatory and covered some of the newly-potted hyacinths, but she did not come.

I made a flask of tea and packed my bag ready for work, but still she did not come.

She has got to drive slowly and sensibly because she is a police officer and also because the insurance company have made her have one of those telling-tales black boxes in her car. This means that it takes her ages to get anywhere at all.

In the end I was so late for work that I had to give up and set off. I do not like being late for work.

I sat forlornly in a long queue of unemployed taxi drivers and longed to be at home waiting for Lucy, and of course in the end she telephoned and said that she had arrived.

I dashed home as soon as some customers wanted to get out somewhere near our house, and she is looking very well and happy.

She was making beef burgers out of mincemeat and spices, and told me police officery stories. Mostly what they do seems to be to rescue mad people and listen to people grumbling about their neighbours. Imagine telephoning the police to report that your next door neighbour is having a birthday party for their little girl, and imagine, being a police officer, that you are sent there to break it up.

Certainly it was not what we had expected when we were filling in her application forms.

We had a glass of wine together when we came home from work. It was lovely to be together, and we missed Oliver. Poor Oliver is stuck in his house at school because in the house somebody he knows, knows somebody who has tested positive for bat flu, so nobody is allowed to go out any more.

I would like to end on a happier note.

I think I might have managed to glue up all the leaks on the soap dispenser.

I will let you know.