Another Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Day
So, it’s been one. In chronological order:
I gained three and a half pounds overnight. Maybe I dreamed that I was eating scones, strawberry jam and clotted cream.* Lovely menopause, when food is the enemy, and exercise no longer burns off calories, and bloat is your constant companion. And it all happens without reference to any reality you’re acquainted with. For many years I had innocently thought that that joke about being able to gain weight from looking at food was a joke. Peter is going to have to start taking his toast and honey next door.
Peter and I between us managed to buy the wrong lawnmower.** Who knew there were different ways to cut grass? So it had to go back. Conversation between husband and wife way too early in the morning: I hope you have the sales slip. I don’t have it–you have it. No, I don’t have it. Pause. Maybe it’s with the manual.***
My digital radio decided not to pick up Radio Three any more. BLAAAAAAT. SKREEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEK. Etc.
I finished playing basketball with my radio† and began to take hellhounds for their morning epic. As I closed Wolfgang’s rear door behind them, the garbage truck began backing up my tiny street, which it, of course, entirely blocks, while garbagemen hold long thoughtful conversations about the meaning of life and the profounder purposes of dustbins, punctuated occasionally by minor rearrangements of said dustbins. And when they finally leave, in a daze of higher cognition, they leave all the dustbins on this cul de sac in the middle of the road, so I have to move them before I can get out.
About five minutes into our hurtle I discover that we’re unavoidably walking past a field that is being sprayed by one of those gargantuan appliances with ramparts of spray nozzles . . . and the resulting toxic, stinking fog wraps itself lovingly around you and whispers seductively of furry green lacework lungs and mutations beyond imagining. Usually I see these monsters before it is too late, and when I don’t, usually I’m luckier with the prevailing wind.††
Both hellhounds throw up. This may have to do with the previous item. It may not.
PEGASUS, for a wonder, does not suddenly reveal itself as having an insoluble plot flaw forcing me to fall on my sword. ††† However–and while this does not count in a litany of terrible and horrible, it disconcerts me considerably–I am floundering in ancient armour, and I wanted to look up morningstar, and the only definition Encarta‡, which, just by the way, I have always thought was overrated, offers is: ‘a trademark for a US company that provides detailed periodically updated info on the performance of unit trusts’.‡‡ What? I found you have to be a trifle determined to come up with the medieval club. What Is The World Coming To, that unit trusts should come above direct bloodshed in the popular imagination. ‡‡‡
When Peter, having again donned his red-and-blue spandex with the cape, went off to change the lawnmower, returned§, it was my happy duty to take the thing up to Third House. There would be builders there, one of whom I could co-opt into helping me. This being a Very Bad Day, you can see where this is going. The builders weren’t there. I have no idea why. The day after the day after Easter is a well known builders’ holiday? But this left me with a Very Large Lawnmower§§ to hoick out of the boot, negotiate around a skip the size of Mount St Helens and across a landscape somewhat similar, and into a shed whose door I couldn’t get open wide enough to let the mower in because of the bricks and stacks of timber. Yes. I did it. See, here are my bruises.
I did manage to get out into the garden for a bit, and in a spirit of obstinate perversity I . . . started planting dahlias. In pots. If the temperature drops again I can haul them all indoors . . . we have been here before. Suffolk Punch§§§ was already sprouting in the brown paper bag.
And I had been appalled, earlier in the day, to discover an Urgent Overdue Cheque lying unposted on my desk. It’s in a bright pink envelope, you’d think it would be a little difficult to overlook, but I’ve been managing. So first stop on the day’s last hurtle was past the Post Office.
Where they have closed the post box. Have you ever heard of a post box being closed? This isn’t one of those tiny red shoeboxes nailed to trees out in the middle of nowhere which they do occasionally decommission ¤: this is the post box let into the Post Office wall. This is the main post box in this town. In fact I have no idea if there are any others. I’ve never needed to know.
. . . And, if you’re counting, I’ve just burnt my tongue on some soup. My own stupid fault for eating.
This is the one good thing that has happened today: http://www.likesbooks.com/cgi-bin/bookReview.pl?BookReviewId=7268
* * *
* Then why can’t I remember it?
** Opinions differ whose fault this is.
*** Peter had it.
† It doesn’t dribble worth a damn.
†† We were walking up a footpath with the field on one side and a row of houses on the other. If the spray-drift was sloshing poisonously over us, then it was swirling straight into the row of houses. Isn’t that illegal? I suppose the farmer says gee, the wind was in the north/south/east/west when I started. It must have changed. I do think that farmers often get a bad deal–and often in ways that prove no government minister has ever been beyond the outskirts of London other than in a well-padded first-class carriage on the way to Birmingham or Paris–but agribusiness is in my top ten pet hates.
††† It would have to be a remarkably serious plot flaw. Most of my books have insoluble plot flaws. I disguise them as best I can, and keep going.
‡ And Word auto-caps it.
‡‡ Now ask me what a unit trust is. No don’t.
‡‡‡ If it were anything but unit trusts I’d probably think it was a good thing.
§ The new one was more expensive. Peter has declared he’s covering the difference to recompense me for the hassle. Promiscuously wearing your superhero costume is dangerous. You start trying to save the world from itself, or at least your wife.^
^ Never mind my antecedents. You know what I’m trying to say.
§§ It’s bigger than the first one too.
§§§ http://www.dahlia.org/guide/images/SUFFOLK_PUNCH.jpg which is not the best photo (but it’s at least of Suffolk Punch, which a surprising number of Suffolk Punch photos are not).
This one is pretty good: http://www.dahliasuppliers.com/accent/gallery2/pages/Suffolk%20Punch%20003_1_jpg.htm
The photo may not come through [it hasn't], but the address is http://shop1.actinicexpress.co.uk/shops/rosecottageplants/index.php?page=store&cat=Dahlias&ProductsPerPage=20&ProductBySectionListPageIndex=3
And then you have to run most of the way down the page and click to enlarge. She is huge, and she also has black leaves, which adds to her glory.
¤ And which, should you post something in them, may produce an item of correspondence curiously scalloped, and embellished with my favourite PO stamp: ‘eaten by snails.’
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