The Daily Telegraph announced this morning that people aged between fifty and sixty are falling over more often than once they used to, because they are fat and idle and unfit.
They cannot balance, it explained, because of their rotundity and lack of practice at doing unstable things, which is a function of their digital footprint and lack of country walks. We should all have a Labrador and a shooting stick and stroll about our rural estates .
I made the last bit up, but you get the general tone of the article.
It added that if you are a functioning fifty year old then you jolly well ought to be able to stand on one leg for thirty seconds, and six seconds with your eyes shut.
I do not know where the Daily Telegraph digs this stuff up. I imagine it is just another brick in their campaign to make Boris Johnson feel ashamed of himself because he has failed again.
Anyway, since I pay a subscription fee to read all of this whittering, and because I am the sort of person who is very easily influenced, of course I tried it straight away, even though I had not yet had any coffee.
It is important to get your money’s worth out of a newspaper.
In fact it is surprisingly difficult to stand on one leg with your eyes shut. I wagged about considerably more than I had expected.
Here are some handy hints for those of you who are obviously going to try this at home later. First, it is easier if you stand on one leg first and then shut your eyes afterwards, once you are sure that you are firmly planted. Second, it turns out to make a difference if you have had coffee or not. I did loads better when I tried it later after coffee and cleaning my teeth.
Third, shut the dogs in another room.
Once I had finished wobbling about and tripping over the dogs I returned to bed, where Mark had made coffee. It turned out that he already knew that it was difficult to stand on one leg with your eyes shut, which made me wonder what on earth he occupies himself with when I am not supervising him.
He had made Lucy a coffee as well. She was getting up early as it was her last morning and she wanted to spend the last bit of time together.
Once he had gone, Lucy and I hauled all of her things into the car. There was a very lot, because when you come to stay with your mother you need to fill up on lots of things from home, and we had made soap and yoghurt and mayonnaise and candles.
I waved her off back to her policeman’s lot, and the sun was shining, so I bit the bullet and cleaned out Mark’s taxi
…again.
I know that Mark did not deliberately leave an uncorked fire extinguisher rolling about in the back of his newly shining and polished taxi, but even unqualified forgiveness did not exactly make the cleaning process go with a swing.
It turns out that fire extinguishers squirt out a horrid yellowish-grey powder. This settles absolutely everywhere, in every crack and crevice imaginable.
It is hellish difficult to get it out of carpets. Or seatbelts. Or seats, come to that.
It had settled in a greasy grey film over all the windows. I do not know how they had managed to drive home. It must have been impossibly difficult to see where they were going.
They had opened the windows to let some of it out, and there was quite a bit over the outside of the car as well, but I ignored that. That can just rinse off a bit at a time over the next few months as it rains.
In the end it was washed and rinsed and done, and I was very relieved, because it has been hanging over me for some days now.
He has left my taxi at work, so I can’t clean that. I can hardly believe that we are almost at the end of our sentence and we will be going back to work before we know it. There were so many things I wanted to do, and I have hardly done any of them.
He will be bringing it home at weekend. I can do it then.
I can hardly wait.
Have a picture of Roger Poopy. He is being nurtured by the Peppers having leaped into the beck.
