I have just been horrid to the new poopy.
I was scowling at my tax return when I noticed her whimpering guiltily and slinking off.
Obviously I caught up with her and we went to discover her crimes, and indeed, there had been one, on the bottom of the stairs.
She was confronted with her wickedness and dispatched into the yard, but actually secretly I was rather impressed.
Even Mark does not have such a magnificently well-functioning guilty conscience. To know, after such a short time, that to have misfortunes in the house is the ultimate in sinfulness, is really quite impressive.
I let her in again after five minutes’ repentance, not that she was terribly contrite, and jumped around with delight at being forgiven, so we went to the Library Gardens, where she and Roger Poopy clowned about with the ball whilst I shivered in the Lake District sunshine.
It is really terribly cold for May. I expect the swifts are wishing they had stayed in Africa, it must be dreadful to have come from the sultry hot winds of the south back to this. It is jolly cold, so cold that we have lit the fire again. This is a depressing moment, I can tell you, because we had just about got to the stage of taking it all out and giving it a bit of a summertime service, and sweeping the chimney.
We needed to sweep the chimney because now that our beloved leaders have made slug pellets illegal, we need the soot to spread on the garden. This is just about the only home-remedy that actually does work, probably because it is made of carcinogens, and gets rid of them beautifully.
Talking of our beloved leaders, there was a piece in the august Daily Telegraph recently which utterly delighted me. A man has taken his workplace to court because he has been subjected to abusive language. His employer called him a bald…and then a word with four letters which is Anglo-Saxon for a lady’s personal parts. You can work it out.
The employment tribunal ruled that he had indeed been abused, because it is offensive to call somebody bald.
I am not making this up. It is honestly true. To call somebody bald is a sexist insult and a hate crime, it would appear.
I was amused beyond anything I can describe, and indeed, rang Mark to tell him. Mark is bald, except for a few bits around his ears, but it had never occurred to me that it was rude to mention it, and so I will not again. It shall forever remain one of those things which Must Not Be Said.
You had better not say it either, be warned. Perils lie in wait for the unwary insulter in our modern age.
It is all right to call somebody a four letter Anglo-Saxon word, though, so there are still some avenues of abuse open to you, do not lose all heart.
I had just about cooked the sausages and swept the kitchen ready for Mark’s return when the phone rang, and it was Elspeth with the happy news that she was in the alley outside and ready for a cup of tea.
This made for a very pleasing end to the day, which had otherwise been stuffed full of tidying up and completing tax returns.
I have completed them now, in a sort of haphazard way, and dispatched them to the accountant for his perusal. They will come back in a couple of weeks covered in red pen and a note at the bottom to See Me, probably with a D- scrawled next to it. I have already highlighted some of the worst howlers when I read them back to myself today, always check your work before you hand it in, I hope you are reading this, Oliver, GCSEs next week…
I discovered that I had claimed that I had spent £1,800 on diesel over a three day period in October, and that I had spent nineteen thousand pounds on new vehicles, which is not true even if you take the whole of my life into account. No doubt there will be a very lot of others, followed by the winner’s prize of a large invoice from Rishi, the rotter.
I might even be tempted to call him bald.
