I am on the taxi rank, trying to earn enough cash to get my hair cut tomorrow.
It has been a costly sort of day.
This is because, as you can see from the picture, we have got a new addition to the household.
It is a small, and remarkably ugly kitten, the Rosie of the cat world, in fact.
She looks all right from a distance, but when she looks up at you she has got squinty blue eyes, looking in slightly different directions, and a peculiar pink smudge around her mouth that makes her look as though she has just been scoffing something very messy.
Roger Poopy is very worried about it, as perhaps you can tell. The problem is that he likes her very much, and would like to give her a thorough and reassuring wash. This interest is not, it turns out, mutual, and the kitten has decided that he should not come within spitting distance. We have measured spitting distance, with quite a bit of spitting.
She is from a household with lots of dogs, they were all barking their heads off when I went up the path to collect her, so I had thought that she might be all right, but it turns out that she is not, so far, a dog lover.
I am sure that will change.
Also she is quite ridiculously small. She is supposed to be twelve weeks old, all of her less-hideous brothers and sisters were lovingly carried off weeks ago, but she is an absolute midget, the Tyrion Lannister of the cat world. It might be a while before she is sufficiently large to wrestle a rat into submission.
Having said that, she is quite remarkably brave. She has not been in the least intimidated by the dogs, although she has made it very plain that they are not to approach, and she is busily laying claim to the best warm places in the house, as again is clear from the picture.
Despite being tiny, she has been expensive. I have been obliged to purchase cat food and cat litter, the latter of which she used, almost immediately, rather to my relief, cat accidents on the floor are beyond revolting. Since I was purchasing cat food I thought I might as well get a month’s dog food as well, and hence I am completely flat broke, which is why I am trying to raise some more for the haircut.
I had better improve on last night. Last night finished up with some ghastly customers, who got out shouting some very rude Anglo-Saxon words and telling me that I had an attitude problem. None of this was news to me, I had been painfully polite, but nevertheless they might have realised that I thought they were excruciatingly dim.
When I explained that I don’t accept card payments, we went to a cash machine. They were very drunk and didn’t know how to use it. The chap kept asking me what he should do, and whether or not he wanted to get a balance. I explained, wearily, that I didn’t need to know about the state of his finances, just cash would do, but the machine wouldn’t give him any, I suspect because he was not sufficiently able to work it.
In the end I said that I would accept an Internet transfer, and took them back to their guest house.
It turned out that they didn’t know how to do that either. I explained, as patiently as I could manage, that he needed to use his Mobile Banking App, and he accused me of being unpleasant. He didn’t say Unpleasant.
He might have had a point if he had said Patronising, because I was probably being that.
When he asked me if I was a New Payee, and I said that since he hadn’t paid me anything before then probably I was, his wife accused me of being sarcastic. I said that I thought I was being more ironic than sarcastic, and offered to explain the difference, which led to the most shocking outburst of bad language on their part, and the suggestion that perhaps I had an attitude problem.
I had lost patience by then, so I explained that the only problem I had was that I thought they were extremely drunk and probably not very clever. I had taken his telephone off him and arranged to pay myself, so it didn’t matter any more.
They got out, shouting incoherently and waving their inoperable telephone at me.
I was tempted to wave as I drove away, but thought better of it.
A thrown telephone can probably do quite a bit of damage to a back windscreen.
