If I start by telling you that this week and indeed blog will be a snot free zone, then just by doing that I have made it untrue. Anyway, after a full two weeks of my life threatening cold I appear to be recovered.
With that trouble behind me I have been enjoying the finer things in life, like sleep and the ability to breathe and as such was looking forward to the weekend. I should by rights have been in London for a Christmas do with work, but decided against it as to be honest I wanted my own bed over the weekend, and the do involved making decisions about what to wear in swanky London eateries and discotheques, and I honestly couldn’t be arsed with the shopping or selection process that might involve. At my age once it goes dark I just want to get home, draw the curtains and get “seckled”.
It would seem that the Gods of Christmas dos decided to take full and vengeful revenge for this indiscretion, as I have had a weekend that makes you think you should have either stayed in bed or gone and drank forty-eight tequila shots in Stringfellows with some work colleagues.
So Saturday started normally enough. The Big Shop was on its way from Asda, and for the past few weeks they have always turned up towards the end of the two-hour slot. With this in mind, I went for a shower leaving Rebecca to look out for the van just in case it arrived. So as soon as I had unleashed my toned and teasingly taught frame from the shackles of clothing and had one toe in the shower, Rebecca shouted that they were here. A mild inconvenience, and I quickly dressed and came downstairs to deal with the delivery.
The rest of the morning dwindled away, and after lunch Louise and I had the joyous honour of a visit to B&Q (on xmas tree buying weekend) to get some wallpaper for our long undecorated kitchen. Time was already getting on by the time we set off, and the traffic was a thing from the bowels of hell. The increasingly frustrating and depressing state of the traffic whenever I am trying to get anywhere is the subject for a whole other bile ridden moan filled ranty blog at some future date!
So it took an age to drive the few short miles to our local B&Q. We got out of the car, and I did my normal pat down routine to make sure I have everything….phone….car keys…wallet….bollocks. Now, I didn’t have to pat anything to know I had those. That last expletive was more of a cry of anguish realising that I had left my wallet at home.
How I laughed. I told Louise to go and choose stuff (I have no input into these decisions anyway) and I would “pop” home to get it. So I wrestled through the crappy traffic again, dashed in to get my wallet and set off again. I needed my wallet for petrol too, so as soon as we’d done the DIY thing we’d stop on the way home for that. A few hundred yards later, as I moved out to overtake a bus that had stopped, a press of the accelerator met with no response. It soon dawned on me that for the first time ever, I had run out of petrol!
I coasted to a stop, luckily in a legal parking place, tried to phone Louise to tell her what had happened, but of course as per usual her “mobile” phone was pretty much the opposite on the dining room table.
So I set off walking back home (thankfully I had only driven a couple of minutes) to get Louise’s car. I have to say that my stress levels were a bubbling at this point. I wanted to get the wall papering done, and I could feel time rushing away as I tried to walk home as quickly as possible without slipping on the inconveniently icy pavements.
With a vehicle secured, I tried again to get to the promised land of B&Q, and the traffic had gone up by about another 25%, so by the time I got to Louise I was a coronary waiting to happen. We checked out, and set off for home.
Once home, through more tortuous bobbins traffic, I looked for the petrol canister that Louise bought recently when she ran out of petrol! Of course, I couldn’t find it, so we set off again in Louise’s car to the petrol station. I paid a ridiculous £6.99 for a suitable and legal petrol container, as apparently they don’t let you dispense it into an Asda bag.
I then filled said container, and we drove back to my car, through even more even worse traffic where I got it going again and drove home. By this stage I had fallen out with the world….all of it, and I sat in a monstrous sulk for the rest of the day whilst Louise and the girls did the Christmas decorations. My aversion to festivity at this point measured about 400 on the Richter scale.
My anger was aimed at me, and me alone, (apart from the driver of the X reg Hyundai who did 24 miles an hour in front of us all the way back from B&Q) for being such a complete arse and forgetting my wallet, which kicked off this stupid and maddening series of events.
Still, no-one died, and as the night wore on I calmed down and got back to some sort of normality even though I had to sit through most of the X Factor. You can imagine how Christopher Maloney helped my mood?
So Sunday dawned full of fresh starts and new hope. Alas, today has consisted of decorating the kitchen, and I have documented many times what sort of frame of mind DIY puts me in. It is complete, and apart from one” is it overlapping at the top” comment from Louise as I was about ten seconds into the second piece, any unpleasantness was kept to a minimum.
Oh, and the dishwasher broke.
Ho, Ho, Ho.
Till the next time…..
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