Still no computer, so I am just dashing off a few words before going out.
I should have dashed them off ages ago really, because I am late for work already. I do not know where the day has vanished off to, and I am feeling disgruntled that it has fled off into the darkness, leaving me with barely enough time to make a sandwich to eat when I reach the taxi rank.
In fact as I wrote those words I decided that a sandwich was a better thing to have than a completed diary, and went downstairs to do that instead. I am now dashing off a few words after coming in, and it is about to be my bedtime.
I was late starting to write them in any case, because I had just collapsed at my computer with a contented sigh, the sort that comes with a cup of tea and having finished mopping the dog paw prints off the kitchen floor, when the phone rang and it was Oliver.
Oliver, not to be left behind by his grown-up sisters, had been running in a race. This was the school cross country, and it was just slightly short of ten kilometres long. This meant nothing to me any more than it probably does to you. I had to ask Google to convert it back into sterling for me. I can save you the bother and tell you now that it turned out to have been six miles long.
Oliver had run the course in forty six minutes, which impressed me very much. It would probably take me most of the day to cover six miles, and I would probably like to make sure that there was a pub, or at the very least a decent teashop, at lunchtime. He was exhausted and covered in mud, and quite breathlessly pink in the face. More is in you, we said, happily, in true Gordonstoun style, but probably there wasn’t by then. He looked as though it had wiped him out.
Quite clearly there is a genetic component to all this dashing about.
Lucy seems to have managed to avoid it, at least at the moment. She rang a few minutes after I had finished speaking to Oliver, and although she was full of stories of a Policeman’s Lot, she did not seem to have felt any desperate urges to run about anywhere. She had arrested an intoxicated nudist and explained to somebody that if you delete somebody else’s upsetting text messages it is difficult to arrange a convincing prosecution, because just remembering what they said generally does not count as evidence, unless you are the ex-Prime Minister suddenly recalling for the purposes of an Inquiry that your Special Adviser said it would probably be all right to have a party. She is having a very happy policing time at the moment.
All of this sitting and chatting was very much nicer than beginning to investigate our tax returns for the last year, which was the thing I was supposed to be doing. I am going to have to try again tomorrow.
It is now my bed-time. I should have my computer back soon. They have told me that the problem with it is not covered by the warranty, which does not surprise me in the least, and I can either pay seven hundred and thirty six pounds plus VAT for them to fix it, or they will just send it back.,
Guess which I chose.
See you tomorrow.
