Eventing

I am having a very eventful day.

It has not been eventful in the sense of any actual events happening in it. It is not that anybody has been arrested or the roof has collapsed. I am glad about this. I can assure you from experience that both of these events leave the sort of mark upon one’s soul that can only be repaired with a great deal of whisky.

In that sense of events it has been fairly tranquil really, although Oliver and I did spend quite a bit of time completing his French prep together. One of the questions concerned the sort of person he might like to marry, so we looked up ‘blonde with long legs’ and wrote that, which made us laugh. It was simpler to translate than ‘wealthy intellectual with good teeth’.

Nevertheless the day has felt very eventful.

The first and arguably most exciting event has been that my parents have propped up our collapsed family finances yet again.

I do not know what we would have done if instead of being generously supportive, they had correctly pointed out that our current penurious state could have been entirely averted had I listened to them in the first place, paid attention at school and become a doctor.

My sister did that, so they have got at least one child to talk about at parties. I have always consoled myself with the thought that whilst she might earn more than me, I never have to stick my fingers up anybody’s bottom.

Years ago I had a friend who was obliged to suffer that particular procedure. The doctor in question had an instrument that my friend later described as a miniature umbrella, which he poked into the dark unmentionable place and then opened. Fascinated with what he discovered therein, the doctor opened the door and shouted, and six medical students came rushing in to have a look as well.

My friend’s illness did not turn out to be fatal, which was just as well, because he never mentioned it to any medical personage ever again.

Since I am not a doctor but an unemployed taxi driver, reliant on the inaccessible mercies of the government, I was humiliatingly grateful to my endlessly patient parents, not least because this morning we had sat in bed over an anxious cup of coffee after a sleepless night, wondering what on earth we were going to do now.

I know what I am going to do now.

I am going to make a payment to the Electricity Board this very evening.

The second Eventful Occurrence has made me rather quiet and thoughtful inside.

A lady from the Daily Telegraph, august source of reliable and hardly made up at all news, has sent me an email.

She thinks that their venerable publication might want to include some extracts from these very pages.

Readers, I was most surprised.

They had a note on one of their articles, months and months ago, asking if anybody had kept a diary during the wearisome months of bat flu. I ticked the box that said yes, and added a link to these pages. I had a brief fantasy about becoming a columnist earning vast millions, then nothing happened and I forgot all about it.

Today I spoke to a lady who was almost certainly from London, since everybody with important sounding employment lives there, who asked me lots and lots of questions and said that they would like to use bits of my writings in their very newspaper.

I can hardly tell you how astonished and pleased I am.

It won’t be very much, since the only purpose of a newspaper is to make itself some money, not to showcase the musings of elderly taxi drivers, and probably they will want to add a picture of me looking mad and rural.

The exciting thing is that they will include a link to these pages, which will improve the readership massively, so much that I might be able to add some serious advertisements and make some money.

I know that I have always scorned such practices of Mammon. That was before I had to become reliant on my parents for pocket money again.

Oliver said that perhaps they are looking for somebody to replace Boris Johnson.

I bet I could do that. I don’t know very much about the workings of Europe, other than roughly where it is, and I am quite sure that I couldn’t list all of its twenty-something member states, but I do not see why that should stop me having an opinion.

It never has before.

Have a picture of the hyacinths on my windowsill, because they are the first to flower and the smell is so utterly divine that it is actually distracting, and I have been having problems concentrating because of the joy of breathing.

The dog is like that. You can never get him to come to heel when there is some interesting wee to be sniffed.