I am having a wearisome day, the sort where you start wishing that something nice would happen just to cheer things up.
Instead, when I checked my email in search of cheering communications, there was a bill warning me that Mark’s recently-closed account at BOC useless gases has still got thirty quid owed on it. I feel sure that this is probably wrong but it would be easier to get a guided tour of the Kremlin than it is to get a response out of their customer services department.
There was a grumpy letter from the council stuffed with very dull things that have got to be read before I make my unwelcome address to the Licensing Committee meeting next week, an email from the university with a list of work needing to be done, also before next week, and an email commenting about the use of bad language in stories.
I switched the emails off and will not look at them until tomorrow night, by which time perhaps somebody will be letting me know that I have won the lottery.
Other than that it was about as exciting as discovering that your dog-poo bag has got a hole in it.
I sloped off for a peaceful afternoon at work, but gave it up in the end. There is such a thing as too peaceful. Nobody wanted a taxi and so I have decided that tonight I am just going to drink wine instead. It has taken me all afternoon to make just less than a tenner, although on the interesting plus side I have managed to catch up with the current taxi-rank gossip.
One of the drivers had his windows smashed outside the nightclub this weekend.
I am sympathetic about this. It is an occupational hazard, and has happened to me a couple of times, but it is very horrible when it happens. This is not just the upsettingness of finding oneself unexpectedly in the middle of a violent baseball-bat swinging fight, but also because even if the police catch them, which in this case they didn’t, it is invariably at least two years before the responsible villains pay up.
The sun has been shining, which I suppose ought to qualify as nice, and I have managed to complete the list of chores that I set myself, except the hoovering. This is also nice. At any rate it is a relief, especially if I don’t think about the hoovering, which I am not doing.
All the same it is still somehow a wearisome day. Probably this is not being helped along by not having heard about the Master’s’ thing yet. I would like to know whether or not we are going to need to find a vast fortune to pay for it, or whether we need not bother. It is difficult to contemplate the year ahead without that rather key piece of information, and I jolly well wish they would get their fingers out and let us know.
Everything depends on that. If we need to find massive amounts of extra cash then there are all sorts of things that we will not be doing. If we do not, then we could start contemplating a rather more hedonistic existence. I am getting fed up with the winter economy drive and am yearning for interesting cheese and things for dinner that are not shepherd’s pie.
We are having shepherd’s pie for dinner again tonight. This is because we have got lots of very useful vegetables that Mark has grown at the farm, and our diet has become quite astonishingly carrot-based. We have got carrots both in the pie and the mash on the top, and also in the cake for pudding, which also contains courgettes, they are surprisingly all right in cake, that is to say you do not notice them, especially if you pour plenty of brandy over the top. I did not put any in the cornflake cakes prepared for Oliver’s return, but I was tempted.
LATER NOTE:
My equilibrium has been somewhat restored by two glasses of wine and some carrot pie. It was more carrot than shepherd, really, although there were some bits of beetroot and some of the really very splendid Yakons. If you have never grown these then I thoroughly recommend them. They are very nice indeed, like water chestnuts in texture and taste, but the size and shape of very large sweet potatoes. Also they have gone on producing for the entire year, and there are still lots left.
This is the sort of advice for which you will be very grateful if the Russians invade, I can promise you.
There might come a day when you are very glad to have read the sage advice in these pages.
You never know.
