I have become so frustrated with my elderly and recalcitrant computer that I have stopped trying to organise the last of the year’s Advent Calendars before I start to do violent and damaging things that I might regret.
I am sorry to say that it has reached a stage of such advanced senility that it fails to understand even the simplest of instructions, like: Stop Doing That, which makes it even more stupid than Rosie, who at least understands, even if she decides it is more expedient to ignore me. We are in no danger of AI taking over the universe just yet, I can tell you, certainly if my computer’s gene pool is to play any part in its ascendancy. It would be worse than sending all of your criminals to Australia and then not expecting the resulting nation to be beer-drinking rascals with a chippy indifference to the Dear Old King.
I am creating a picture with painstaking slowness, and three times now, three times, I have almost reached the last moments, and the stupid thing has become distracted and refused to function. It is, for no good reason that I can see, saving a picture of Mark which it has plastered all over the very middle of the screen and is refusing to move, abandon or delete. I have turned the power off and on again, shouted abuse at it, and looked on Google for advice, none of which has made the slightest difference.
We are going to have a decent burial and Computer The Sequel this year. I can feel it in my very bones, that will jolly well teach it who is in charge.
All we have got to do is win the lottery.
Obviously we are no closer to this target than we usually are, still not having bought a ticket, however, we have had a surprisingly busy weekend, distinguished, in my case, by a humongous tip from an unexpected Liverpudlian, and also by a sicker.
His mates cleaned up some, although not all, of the sick, and paid me some cleaning fees towards the rest. They did not do a very good job, although in fairness to them, we were in a dark country lane in Grasmere at three o’clock in the morning in the middle of one of the most lashing rainstorms I have ever experienced, and that is saying something because as an inhabitant of the Lake District, I have experienced some fairly unequivocal weather from time to time, I can tell you.
Anyway, we were all soaked and cross by the time they had finished. They went rushing inside with the intention, from what I could gather, of writing something unflattering on his forehead in permanent marker whilst he lay, unconscious on the hall floor, which was as far as he got before he passed out. This seemed to me to be an appropriate working of Karma, and so I was not especially upset when I went home, despite the lingering revolting aroma.
The tip was just somebody being thoroughly kind. I do not know what possessed him, although I have resolved that I shall remember. When the glorious Day arrives when I win the Lottery, I shall make a point of going on short and pointless taxi journeys and tipping the driver a hundred pounds every time, even the indifferently rude ones who are too engrossed in contemplating their university assignment to bother making courteous remarks about the weather, just to make the world a better place.
It made my world a better place and as soon as the Post Office opens on Monday I am going to dash in and pay off the credit card.
Mark cleaned my taxi out this afternoon, which was jolly kind of him. Sometimes it is very nice indeed to be married.
