Understated

I am running so impossibly late that I am not going to write much.

We have had a night off, which turned out to be a bad idea, because Oliver went to work and said they were rushed off their feet. Poor Oliver. He has become very tired, and came in from work and went directly to bed. I went up to say goodnight and found him exhaustedly blowing his nose on his towel, so perhaps we will do a hot wash tomorrow morning.

We have been looking forward to the night off for ages, but in the event it was a bit short, because once Mark came in from work we had got to write a statement for the police, and by the time we had finished it was half past seven, which is not much night off when you have got to start getting ready for bed by ten.

The statement for the police was just for a minor adventure last week when some chap seems to have had a bit of a brawl on the taxi rank. We do not know the details but the story goes that he hit some other chap with the wheel brace out of his car. We do not know if he did this or not because we both buzzed off on jobs at the interesting bit. I was gone ages because I was rushing after some tiresome drunk girl who had legged it without paying and I had to hammer on her door and drag some more solvent bloke out of bed to get the money. She had passed out on the floor of the hall and he had to step over her to open the door, but he sighed and paid up with resignation.

Mark saw the chap charging about with the wheel brace, and of course was riveted with interest, but somebody got in his taxi and he had to go. We both saw all of the flashing lights and the ambulance afterwards, which blocked the taxi rank up for the next hour.

Writing the statement took ages. For some peculiar and obscure reason the police wanted to know what we thought should happen to the chap who had done it, which seemed a very odd sort of request because I had always thought that that bit was generally sorted out by judges, not passing taxi drivers. I do not ask judges if they know how to get round to the back of holiday cottages on Lake Road and so we were not expecting to be asked for our input about what sort of sentence should be passed on a chap who had been spotted waving a wheel brace about.

Writing it was made tedious by the impossible incomprehensibility of using the new scanner. I am not going to talk about that, because it made me decidedly vexed. To my astonishment, HP Printers wrote me a note halfway through asking how I was enjoying their product. I filled the reply with the most scathing remarks I could think of, added some rude words and pressed Send. They won’t read it but I was happy to supply them with useful feedback.

I messaged the Gas Board today on their Facebook page, and actually got a message back ten minutes later, which assured me that the cheque was in the post, had been posted this very morning and would reach me some time in the next ten working days, a word of which I did not believe.

That is such a pleasing end to a sentence.

It might also be the end to tonight’s diary entry.

See you tomorrow.