Prosaic life

The picture is Roger Poopy being very apologetic about accidentally eating my flip-flop.

Some taxi driver friends called round today, to find out the accurate version of Mark and the wicked violent customer. Obviously everybody in Windermere knows all about this by now, except that they all seem to know, on the very best authority, that he is lying on his deathbed trying to recover from having both of his eyes poked out, all of his bones broken, his takings stolen and the taxi reduced to a small pile of split atoms in the road outside the bank.

Our friends were quite sure that if this was the case it had probably been done by me anyway.

I like stories like this, they are far more interesting than anything life ever manages to come up with, and was sorry to have to explain the truth.

They did not seem to mind that real life is far more prosaic than anything you might hear on the taxi rank, and we had a happy half an hour catching up on gossip and wondering what might happen in the final chapters of a television series we have all watched, called A Game Of Thrones. We are all captivated by this, because it is not a story which is especially given to happy outcomes, and it is perfectly possible that Evil Will Triumph in the end, rather more like life than the taxi rank stories, in fact.

Anyway, Roger Poopy was so worried about having so many people in the house, talking and ignoring him, that he curled up under the table and accidentally ate my flip-flop.

He looked entirely astonished when we caught him, and looked at it as if he had got no idea where it had come from. Mark chased him round the living room with it anyway, and made him go and hide in his bed underneath the table.

We had to go out after that, because I had a dentist appointment. As it happened I was spared this, because it turned out I had messed up the time, and will have to go back again some other day, but I do not like having horrible cold air and sharp things poked around my sensitive teeth, and so I wasn’t in the least sorry.

Instead we went to a large shop that sells clutter, and brought some new plastic tubs for picnics.

Given that almost everything we eat comes in a plastic tub as part of a picnic, this was quite exciting, like buying a new dinner service only about two hundred quid cheaper. We vacillated for ages over water bottles and flasks, because they all had a little bit of paper inside them warning you not to put them in the dishwasher.

There is no point whatsoever in owning an item of catering equipment which will not go into the dishwasher. It would be like purchasing loo paper which should not be left in the toilet. Inevitably the end result would be an unpleasant mess left lying around which somebody would have to clean up, and which would probably turn out to be me, and then we would have a row, because I am not noble enough to do these things without making a huge grumpy fuss.

We considered this for ages, and in the end decided that the best course of action would be to buy the ones we liked best and throw the little bit of paper away without reading it. We put all of our existing ones in the dishwasher, and they carried on working all right for ages, right up until now, in fact, when they are all so clapped out that they have got to be thrown away and replaced.

We bought everything that we needed, and felt very pleased with ourselves. It was so exciting that I almost wanted to go out to work, so that we could try them out, instead of having the night off that we had planned, only of course we didn’t. I stayed in the house, sewing nametapes on school clothes and helping Oliver with his homework, and Mark went out to my taxi, to take the starter motor off.

He has not finished the starter motor yet, because it went dark. I have not finished the nametapes either.

I will have to get on with it tomorrow.

How prosaic life can be sometimes.