ONE OF “THOSE” EVENINGS

It had, of course, already been one of “those” days… Not so terrible in the great scheme of things, and hardly traumatic in comparison to the one that somebody, somewhere had suffered, but nevertheless one which had been full of tiny little irritations (not least of which was the discovery that I am still rather traumatised by the events of late May and have become almost obsessive about security) which added up to your author pointing the car rather tetchily towards home in the evening.

I had, after all, been finally trying to make some proper inroads into a project that seems to be failing to get itself off the launch pad whilst simultaneously waiting for the “go” signal to come through to go and retrieve my mother from hospital, which is never the most relaxing way to spend a day.

In the end my mother found a rather explosive way to be kept in for yet another day and I spent much of the day fending off calls from her social worker who, by some strange means, seemed to have one identifiable skill: being able to put two and two together and making five.

Now I normally have quite a lot of time for social services. After all, my father was a social worker himself and so I do tend to forgive them and give them more credit than the average tabloid editor seems capable of, but when I am being telephoned at work and told that mother’s hospital ward are not aware of her recent bereavement (presumably because she spoke to the one member of staff who didn’t know) or that mother’s “incidents” today were down to “nerves about going home” and not the long-term medical condition which the rest of us have had to live with for nearly two years, my patience does wear rather thin.

So anyway, I headed home sweating in the stifling heat of a sudden warm spell (with intermittent showers) and battled my way through the sudden return of the “school run” and all the madness that brings with it, and arrived home with possibly a ten-minute turnaround before I had to head out again to meet the train.

During the journey home, the works ThickPhone™ had received two messages which had sufficiently drained its batteries so that I had to consider putting it on to recharge whilst I dashed about getting something – anything - done. I had, fortunately, remembered to bring the charger home and, as I went to plug it in, the box of eggs which were well past their “use by” date and which was perched precariously on the worktop executed a perfect swallow dive off it and plummeted straight towards the tiles, opening as it did so to allow the remaining eggs to crack messily onto the kitchen floor.

So my ten minute window diminished in a frenzy of floor cleaner and kitchen towels and I’m still not convinced that this is the best methodology for clearing up such things, especially as the bottle marked “floor cleaner” which I grabbed was really for use with wooden floors…

Shortly afterwards, I left, leaving the house with a faint smell of rotten eggs in the air.

The train which I was meeting was, not surprisingly, late but, confusingly, a train rolled into the station at precisely the time that the one I was supposed to meet was due to arrive and, because they were not on it, the person I was meant to collect failed to emerge from it. Naturally, this was when I remembered that the ThickPhone™ was still charging away on the counter top amidst the debris of our kitchen, and any means I had of clarifying the situation was, I realised, unavailable to me...

“Happily” (and only due to a 29000 volt cable hanging dangerously across the line), sanity prevailed and the correct train rolled after only fifteen minutes of listening to the news on Radio Four, and we were able to get home in time to just about have enough time to grab a bowl of cereal and a cup of tea each before heading out once more on hospital visiting duties, although the car is developing a noticeable tendency towards being rather sluggish at starting these days which would, of course, be bloody typical.

So, as you can tell, whilst none of these little incidents are in themselves massively traumatic or life-threatening, they all individually added up to make it one of “those” evenings and leave my nerves gently fraying and shredding just in time for the next big bang.

Later on as we staggered off to bedfordshire, I couldn’t even bring myself to go through my usual “media disease” ritual of having “one last check” on my various media outlets and email. Instead, I picked up the book about translation which has been gathering dust at the side of the bed for some time now and just about had time to read the same two pages which I always read - which were the ones lurking around the bookmark - before I realised that I had actually already read them. Shortly after that, the beloved returned and was rather pleased to find me there rather than upstairs tapping away at the computer.

“Would you rather I stopped writing that stuff altogether?” I asked.

“Yes” she replied…