I am extremely indignant.
I have been bitten by a spider.
It was in my jersey when I picked it up, and as I put it on, it took objection to being thus flapped about and bit my finger.
I shook my hand and it landed in the bathroom sink, from wherein I was angrily obliged to rescue it and dump it into the ivy outside the office window. I would have very much liked to have taught it a lesson by washing it down the sink with the hot water, that would have jolly well shown it a thing or two, but of course my civilised nature was obliged to prevail, and I didn’t.
I have got a sore finger now, and the end is all numb. It felt as though I had suddenly acquired a very nasty sort of sharp splinter, and I was obliged to smother it in Germolene, in case the spider had some kind of revolting spidery disease.
I am not pleased. I have been bitten by several spiders in the course of my life, and whilst this was not the worst, it was sufficiently horrible for me to resolve some increased attention to cobweb-removal over the course of the next few days, vengeance shall be mine, they can all start selling the Big Issue in the garden.
I do not know whether it is a good thing or a bad to confess that it was the most exciting thing that has happened to me all day, unless you count going to put fuel in the taxi this morning. Usually I fuel the taxi at night, when I go to work, but the nightshift lady at the garage talks so much that unless I think that I am going to be at the very back of a long queue on the taxi rank, with some considerable time to spare, I put fuel in during the day. This is not kind of me, because probably the nightshift lady – whom actually I rather like – is just bored and is pleased to have some company, but nevertheless if I am not on the taxi rank I will not make any money.
Probably I won’t make any money whether I am on the taxi rank or not, but that is not the point.
You have to be in it to win it, we say to ourselves, sagely, in the long hours between customers.
Apart from that I have telephoned the dentist, to make an appointment for Mark who has broken a bit off his tooth, and the optician, to make appointments for both of us, because my reading glasses do not now resolve the smudginess of the text, and because Mark’s eyes have not coped very well with occasional moments when he has been in too much of a hurry to put his welding mask on.
I have written the appointments down everywhere I can think of, but I am still in danger of forgetting them. One of the difficulties of being elderly is that your memory becomes as rubbish as your eyesight.
Apart from that I have occupied the day in pursuit of some new windows for the new camper van. We have been contemplating these for a while now, because all of its windows are in the roof, and I am far too nosy for that to be satisfactory.
We will have to get the windows made, because although you can purchase windows on eBay, they tend to be plastic, which I very definitely do not want. I want proper glass windows, with thermal blinds, fly screens and thermally lined curtains, preferably with ornate swags dangling above them.
We have been looking at prices. There is an absolutely magnificent company which produces absolutely magnificent windows, with electric opening and all manner of splendidness, but they were eight thousand pounds, and of course they don’t make curtains, so probably we will have to look somewhere else.
I have occupied today looking at several somewhere elses, but it seems that all window manufacturers close on Fridays, perhaps it is a superstition thing, like not walking under a ladder.
I have sent them all an email and will have to wait and see.
I could start making the curtains.
