I am at home faffing about with the Advent calendars.
I have reached the point where I am trying to organise the pictures for each one. All of the calendars are a bit different, depending on the special interest of the individual recipients, and my eyes are slowly crossing as I try and work out who has had which photograph and exactly where it should be shoved.
I am at the point of shoving the whole lot in the dustbin. There are twenty four small photographs and one big one. The big one has turned out to be too big for the space behind the doors, and either I am going to have to make the doors wider or lose a few of the children.
I have also run out of photographic paper. This is a massive nuisance because it means that I will have to trail out to the new incarnation of WH Smith’s tomorrow for some more, after which I will have to start again, meaning that whatever tenuous mental grasp I have got on the little lists that say things like Nan 1st 18 ok, needs 6 not 1 of boat, will have dissolved into complete perplexity by tomorrow afternoon.
I am fairly perplexed already actually.
Mark has gone to work.
I think that he might be having the easier time. When I spoke to him last he said that there were no customers and he was watching a film. I have recommended one which is a supposed-to-be-true story featuring a serial killer which I watched during some equally undisturbed evenings last week. In the usual way of my film-watching I liked the killer chap far more than all the rest of the characters, who seemed to spend the entire script agonising over their various troublesome emotions, being failing marriages, alcohol abuse and distaste for freezers full of corpses. They were so preoccupied with all of this trivia that they did not seem to be thinking sensibly about anything at all. The killer was refreshingly straightforward and direct, without any tedious character arc, and was my preferred character by a jolly long way.
This was actually my misfortunate experience during my brief foray into the prison service as well. The only person I encountered there whose conversation I found to be both entertaining and intelligent had regrettably been placed there after blowing somebody’s head off. He did not talk about that, and I found that bit out later.
Perhaps I am secretly mental as well, although probably you need not worry that I am in any danger of becoming a serial killer. The times in my life when I have been obliged to kill things have been very horrible indeed, and I do not have the smallest desire to repeat the experience.
All the same, I hope it does not give Mark any ideas.
He is quite possibly likely to become a serial killer at the moment. He has had an unhappy weekend, after I gave him all of my week’s taxi takings in order to purchase fuel and some new seat covers for his taxi. When he came home he was terribly upset because he had lost it.
He thought that it might have come out of his pocket and been dropped on the floor of the taxi, after which it had probably been filched by some tiresome rascal of a customer.
I know from bitter experience that it is quite upsetting enough to lose something without somebody else going on and on about it, and I can promise you that I had to bite my tongue very hard. I did not want him to feel guilty and miserable, and so I made a valiant, and not entirely successful, attempt not to say For Goodness’ Sake How Could You? as if being horrid would have brought the cash back, which of course it wouldn’t.
I am not at all a nice person in my soul, and it was a huge effort. Eventually I managed to say, through gritted teeth, It Doesn’t Matter It’s Only Money, but it was very quiet so he might not have heard, and after that I just tried not to think about it.
Hence I was very pleased indeed when I discovered the cash this morning, behind the sun visor of my taxi, where he had clearly stuffed it for safe keeping whilst he was cleaning it, and then forgotten all about it.
I also felt very relieved that I had managed not to be very horrid. I suspect horridness might have shown in my face a bit, but my face is so naturally scowly anyway that he might not have noticed.
He was pleased to have the cash back anyway, so probably he won’t be a serial killer tonight.
Even if he has watched the inspirational film.
