I have just had an encounter with a nuisance.
He is a little twerp who, months ago, was sacked from the local garage after Mark complained that he was rude. You have got to be very rude indeed before Mark cares about it, but it turned out that lots of other people had complained as well and it was on CCTV, so they sacked him.
Since then he has appeared on the taxi rank occasionally issuing threats that he knows where I live and that I am a wicked scam merchant who steals from innocent travellers for a living, and one day he will hunt me down.
Obviously he waits until I am by myself. He has never been brave enough to say anything horrid to Mark.
I am not the sort of person who is rendered anxious by this sort of behaviour and so I have ignored him for the last couple of times, but tonight when he came and poked his head in through my window, yelling insults, I got fed up and called the police, partly because I couldn’t think of any other way of getting rid of him, and indeed it worked and he buzzed off.
The copper, when he turned up, recognised the photograph that I had taken as depicting a youthful local nuisance. He went to look for the chap, but it turned out that he was not in the pubs because he had been barred from all of them.
We contemplated this for a while and decided that I would make a statement and we would see about making a charge of harassment, so tomorrow I am going to have to make a statement.
This is a nuisance because we are going to spend tomorrow over at the van, and, you might recall, have occupied today with domestic consolidation in order that we can spend the entire day filling holes with windows and creating exciting new holes for the same purpose.
Mark went to get some tyres on his car. I was left in charge of cleaning and cooking.
The sun was shining, so I took the dogs over the fell, where I met another, very different sort of young man. We stopped to chat because of the sunshine, fell instantly into a fascinating conversation about the nature of faith and goodness, and he assured me, happily, that God loves me.
I was pleased about this, few things are nicer than sunshine and interesting ideas with the added bonus of God being on your side, and I came down from the fell positively glowing with the cheerful opinion that he very probably is.
This sort of optimism is most likely when you are in the middle of an exciting project, the rain has stopped, you have a new kitten and a husband at home, all your children are doing very nicely and you are not actually into your overdraft facility at the moment.
Also when you are about to have a couple of days off work.
With this in mind I spent the day cooking things so that when we have finished fitting windows into holes, we can just come home and have dinner waiting, all ready to warm up. I made garlic bread and cooked bacon and mushrooms to go in pasta, and made a large pan of curry with some leftover bananas and cream donated by the people staying in the holiday house next door. Actually quite a lot of it had come from the holiday house next door, they didn’t want to take their shopping home with them for some inexplicable reason.
I even made a pudding. I tried to think of something healthy that I could make but couldn’t think of anything that would taste nice without either sugar or cream. Actually, preferably puddings include both, so I made a fruit mousse, so that the Vitamin C could mitigate the guilt a bit.
When Mark came home he sawed up some firewood, and then we rushed around together dusting and hoovering and hurling the clean sheets back on the bed, because of course by then we were starting to be late for work.
We are here now. I don’t at all mind about the tiresome twerp who was rude to me, because tomorrow is a holiday, and a nice dinner, and probably a whisky and soda to go with it.
There can be no better happiness.
Hurrah for God.
