I don’t know if last night’s diary reached you, so I am resorting to this until I can be reassured of a definite outcome with the new provider.
Apologies if it didn’t.
In the meantime, I am getting late for bed and so am bashing out a few words as quickly as I can. Mark is in the shower and Oliver is at work, and we have had a night off.
We decided not to bother with work after last night, when we sat on the taxi rank for six hours and earned thirty seven quid between us. Apparently the Uber drivers have not only been hacking, they have been telling tourists that local taxis are really expensive and then charging them twice our fares.
I rather admired their creativity.
Instead we stayed at home.
We have watched something which, I think, is Reality Television.
I have never seen any of this before, and I was absolutely entranced. Of course it is not reality, nor anything even remotely like it, because people cannot help but behave in a peculiar manner when they are being observed, especially by a television camera and several million idly curious spectators, a bit like those quarks which do weird things when somebody shines light on them.
It is charitable to consider that the behaviour of these individuals was being determined by the presence of the cameras, because otherwise one would have to conclude that they were slightly unhinged.
I chose the programme, because we thought we would like to watch something whilst we had dinner, and Mark was about to dish it out, so I had to be quick, and it was the first thing that came to the Netflix button.
It was about couples whose relationships were not going very well, and who had agreed to be filmed whilst telling a therapist all of their dark secrets and also their complaints about their partner.
Actually, I think unhinged might be a good word, on reflection.
By some quirk of casting they were almost all black. I wasn’t sure if we were supposed to notice this or not, but I did. I couldn’t decide if this was because the casting directors had decided to err on the side of caution with their diversity budget, or if black people are just generally more inclined to embarrassing public outbursts of therapeutic confession.
We were absolutely gripped.
We watched them owning up to all sorts of lunatic behaviours for almost two hours, when we had to turn it off, with considerable reluctance, and go to bed.
I do not know if the therapy helped any of them. Mark said that he thought some vigorous exercise and not so many take-aways might be the most useful course of action for quite a few.
On the whole it quite cheered up my day, which had otherwise been occupied with cleaning.
Mark went over to work on the camper van, and I had resolved to do something about the dustily neglected state of the house. I have been made miserable by its winter grubbiness for a few weeks now, although not sufficiently miserable actually to do anything about it.
It was not a proper spring clean, which involves considerably more commitment than I could muster, but it was a start. I washed and wiped, and even scrubbed a few spots, turning my gaze into the secret dark corners where I have been ignoring the dust as it has been quietly snowing down, and gazed in fascinated horror at the blackened state of the dishcloth after every sweep.
We have not all been poisoned, but I am not quite sure how.
There is a lot more cleaning yet to be done, and I suppose I am going to have to get on and do it. It is a year since last spring, which you might remember was the last time that I washed the shelves, it doesn’t seem very long ago but an awful lot of dust has appeared in the intervening months.
These pages might be a bit dull for the next few days.
Ho hum.
