Mark has mended his digger.
He was very pleased indeed about this. He does not think that you can be a real man without a digger.
There is a picture of it at the top. It is not very modern but it digs holes, which is the important thing, especially if you need to dig a hole, which he thinks he would like to do.
I have not managed to achieve anything so spectacular.
I have had a mildly frustrating sort of day.
I have spent the last few days doing the sort of things that would make my house nicely organised in order that I could have today doing things that I wanted to do, like writing stories. I want to do this very much.
There were quite a few things that I needed to do first, although actually I would have preferred not to, like ringing up and paying for our recently-purchased taxi insurance.
Taxi insurance is a special method by which big business conspires to keep taxi drivers poor. It is about the only tool they have at their disposal for this purpose, since most taxi drivers do not use banks if they can avoid it. Hence they are immune to offers of loans and credit cards and mortgages and all of the rest of the financial paraphernalia by which the ingenious strip the desperate of their spare cash.
I do use banks because of school fees and the mortgage and also the handy overdraft facility, and although I probably wouldn’t qualify as desperate, never have any spare cash.
*The major cause of this deficiency is that I do not really earn as much as I would like to, and the secondary cause being that I spend considerably more than I should. This is a tiresome nuisance, especially when I have run out of Chanel soap.
In addition to this nuisance, the accountant has written to me explaining some inaccuracies in my accounts, and requesting that I dig back through paperwork for last year to remedy this.
I thought about doing this today but secretly I knew I probably wouldn’t bother, and turned out to be right.
I was going to do things that I wanted to do.
Then everything went wrong.
The lodger came home in floods of unhappiness. She had had a dreadfully upsetting telephone call from a child acquaintance who had called us from miles and miles away to say that her mother was awful and that she would like to come and live with us.
This was further complicated, it turned out, after some investigation, by the fact that the child’s mother really was awful, so much so that the social services had issued a care order and the child had run away and was being searched for by the police.
I explained that you are not allowed just to adopt any old child because you feel like it, and that the social services like to keep them until they are quite sure that you are not either barking mad or criminal or otherwise unreliable.
We telephoned the social services who confirmed this.
This did not stop the lodger feeling overwhelmed with distress at not being able to do something more spectacularly helpful, especially when the child in question rang her, weeping inconsolably and begging for rescue, from the back seat of a police car in which she was being escorted to a Safe Place.
I assured the lodger that any further input other than sympathetic noises was impossible, and advised her to go and get drunk.
Number One Daughter rang, having had a bad day at work. The difficulty of being a Brave Soldier is that you are not supposed to burst into tears when people at work are grumpy with you, and so she rang me instead.
I began to sympathise with the lodger. It is very troubling to hear somebody else feeling sad when they are a long way away and you cannot make things better with a nice biscuit and a cup of tea.
Oliver came downstairs to tell me that his PlayStation would not work.
We tiddled about with it for ages and then fixed it in the end by switching it off and on again.
The lodger shouted from the loft that the window was leaking.
I pretended to be deaf.
The insurance company rang with a list of questions and documents which they wished to be emailed across.
I emailed the ones I could remember and then got tired of it and didn’t bother about the rest.
I spent all of my money on insurance.
I thought I might join the lodger in the pub, but of course I didn’t. There is a paragraph further up the page which I have helpfully marked with a star to enable you to find it again, which explains why not.
Instead I went to work and listened to Mark telling me what a productive day he had had.
After a while Number Two Daughter telephoned to tell me that her life was being difficult in an unemployed-until-ski-season sort of way.
I would like some pixie dust for Christmas, the sort that you blow on people and it makes their lives tingle with shiny happiness again.
That would be even better than tea and biscuits.
