Dull at home

I expect you will be pleased to hear that I am still here.

I know that you were not expecting me to be anywhere else, but I very nearly was. Number One Daughter is in one of her Fittest People In The World competitions in Miami, and she called this afternoon to tell me how much she missed her mother and how she would have appreciated it if only I had come across to spectate.

I am sure you are all entirely convinced that I would have been an invaluable asset. I am quite certain that my presence would have improved her performance a thousandfold and if the UK lets the side down and gets beaten by some foreigners then you will all know who to blame and I would like to make my apologies to the rest of the country here and now.

Obviously I rushed upstairs to look on the mighty Internet to see if any airlines had any empty seats going for thirty quid that they did not want any more, but you might not be astonished to learn that they did not. It turned out that Cheap Flights Dot Com started at about a thousand pounds, and even with Mark’s credit card being in an unusually unblemished state at the moment I thought that probably I had better not. In any case I imagine that probably I would just have turned up dressed in something embarrassing and then said something stupid and that would have messed the whole thing up anyway. I know how these things go.

Also I know whatever I had worn would have been embarrassing because that description covers my entire wardrobe. It is not just the orange dungarees with the purple shirt that I am wearing as I write these very words. It is also the purple dungarees with the pink shirt, the pink dungarees with the orange shirt, and the green dungarees with the yellow shirt. I know that these are embarrassing because I have got children who explain this to me, although fortunately Mark does not seem ever to have noticed.

Instead of going to Miami we stayed at home. Mark has fixed the brake pads on my taxi and I have done the laundry and chased the Gas Board for two hundred quid that they owe us. They have owed it to us for more than a year now, if it had been the other way round I imagine they would have cut me off. It is difficult to think of an inverse way of doing  this, and so I was reduced to telephoning and being haughtily middle class to the young people in their call centre.

They cut me off twice, and I had to sit through their queueing system for a third time before a polite young Indian gentleman assured me that they most very certainly would be putting the money in my bank indeed this very afternoon, Madam, and indeed they had been trying to post me a cheque on very many occasions already. I did not believe a word of this because even with the postal strike a cheque would have reached me by now, since they have been sitting on the cash since November last year, and I thought about offering them a payment by instalment scheme if they were suffering from hardship.

I checked my bank when they had finished but they hadn’t paid it in. If it is not here by tomorrow I will ring them again, so they had jolly well better watch out.

Once we had concluded our day’s labours we thought we would do the hibernation activity of Watching Something, so Mark cooked some pasta and I tried to remember how to get Netflix working, which is difficult when you don’t have children at home, and we thought we would watch The Crown.

It was such horrible poisonous rubbish that we turned it off after five minutes, nobody needs malice like that beamed into their homes over the cyber-web, the poor Queen. Instead we watched a brilliant film about the awful terrorist attacks on the Mumbai Taj, which was ace, except for it being dreadful and shocking and awful, obviously. We occupied the last glass of wine by planning what we would do if ever it happened at the Midland. We had some ingenious ideas, so if ever it happens pop round to our room, we will be setting light to piles of bedsheets behind us in the corridors to protect our backs whilst we dash off down the staff staircase.

It was a very exciting film, full of rescued babies and heroic young men dashing back to rescue hapless women.

I am very glad it did not happen at the Midland, we might have missed the pantomime.

I am not sorry that these pages are uninterrupted dullness.

It would be terrible to have such excitements to report.