I am having a very difficult moment.
I am writing to you from Mark’s computer. Mark is not using it because he is nailing plasterboard up in the loft. I am writing to you because I am out in the taxi, doing nothing whatsoever. So far I have been here for an hour and a half but nobody has felt any pressing need to go anywhere.
I do not like Mark’s computer, it is wrong, wrong, wrong, wrong, wrong, but mine has got some kind of Sudden-Death-Computer-Disaster problem, and will not recharge. It does not have dust in the charging ports, because it has got two, and neither of them are working. The charge leads work, it is the battery that has decided to sulk.
Today I telephoned Apple and they are going to send me a box to post it back to them. I am not looking forward to this. It will be gone for ages, and I keep feeling that somehow it might magically start working again if only I pressed the buttons in the right order, but it doesn’t. Also I expect that they will tell me it is going to cost me six hundred pounds for a new battery. Apple always says things like this.
I spent ages on the telephone today to a lady from Apple. She was foreign, and did not understand what I was saying. She kept telling me to Open The Computer And Go To Settings, whereupon I explained, rather loudly by the fourth time, that the battery was flat and I couldn’t.
Ho hum, I suppose it is just one of those things. Mark’s computer is awful, though. Everything is in the wrong place and I loathe the feel of it. I am being very patient and uncomplaining but it is not a fine moment.
In the meantime I expect you are dying to hear more snow-related news. There isn’t very much of this really, except that we still have a very, very lot of snow. Mostly it is in large, grubby piles by now, at the sides of the roads and in the middle of bus stops and around everybody’s still-abandoned cars. Today it is damp, and very, very horrid. The remaining snow has packed tight and is thrillingly slippery, it is a perfect arrangement for turning one’s bones into painful fragments. Indeed, it is adding an extra excitement even to driving. The roads are clear, having been ploughed and gritted, but they are full of people walking as the pavements are so lethally dangerous.
Talking of bones, I found out today that dolphins can see inside you with their sonar clicking. It gives them an image like our hospital scanners. When you look at a dolphin and marvel at its svelte sleekness, it is looking at you and thinking you have got a rather fatty liver. What an astonishing world.
Mark has shovelled the snow out of our backyard, as well as from around lots of poor stuck people’s cars. I was glad to see the back of the backyard snow, it was becoming unappetisingly yellow because we have not taken the dogs out very often lately. This is my fault. He has been busy working today.
Most taxi drivers do not work when it snows, because they have spent twenty thousand pounds on their nice smart cars, and do not want to use them when there is a small danger of a scratch. We do not have this business model. We think you earn just as much money in a clapped-out old wreck as in a shiny new hybrid, and today we earned a jolly lot more. It took ages to get anywhere, but Mark was kept quite busy ferrying people to their abandoned cars and helping them to shovel themselves out.
I stayed at home. I was doing a pre-Christmas clean. I have been doing this for several days and I have not finished yet. We had a minor domestic about some boards he has been saving behind the sofa, in case they came in handy for some vague non-specified purpose some day in the future. Misfortunately they had been damp. They had not dried out. They had gone rotten and left a horrid mess. We are not having any more boards in the house again ever, most especially not behind the sofa.
Mark was so penitent he mended the broken bit of sofa for me, and I cleared up the mess, so it was all right in the end.
Well, mostly all right.
I have stopped shouting now.
