Monday 7th October.
I think I am going to have to prise the steering wheel from Laura’s hands if I ever hope to drive the new car again! She took driving duty to the pool and into Uni, today, and she wouldn’t take No for an answer. She was never like this with my little Picanto. One plus point, though, I have discovered I notice a hell of a lot more as a passenger than I do as a driver. I had forgotten that. It is really nice to be driven. I wonder what she’d do if I sat in the back seat when she insists on driving again? That could be funny.
Felice and I have got our routine more or less sorted out now. I do the first tea. Then she does the second one, we alternate like this odd / even until the fourth one which has biscuits. We keep the biscuits rationed as we may end up like the Michelin Man if we scoff too much. We have decided to only have them on multiples of four. Some days we never reach the twelfth pot so that is another figure saver, too. We also are trying to make a packet of biscuits last three days. We’re taking it in turns to bring those in too. She has cheated slightly with some gorgeous Palets Bretons which she brought with her back from France. I hope she has brought lots of packets over. They make our plain chocolate hobnobs rather tame in comparison.
I have finally got her to agree to Earl Grey as our tea of choice. She wasn’t sure at first but I have been working away at her, and TBH, it is by far the nicest tea available in Britain. She has also realised that it does taste better from a teapot, rather than making individual mugs full. I’ll make an Anglophile out of her yet. Loll has sussed out it is cheaper to head round to our shoe box office rather than visit the refec. for a swift cuppa during the day. That throws our regimented regime out a bit but I don’t mind. Well, I don’t usually, but this morning she brought two of her Maths colleagues with her and had promised them a cuppa too! We may need to sort out some sort of ground rules if she does this often. There are only five other girls doing her course, the rest are guys. The two she brought round, are from Skelmersdale and Wales so we had a real mix of weird and wonderful accents to confuse Felice even more than usual.
Back home I turned our kitchen into a Turkish baths as I cooked our meal. I think the cooker hood has died. It stopped extracting the steam from the saucepans just after I had got them boiling away like a Terence Cuneo painting of old steam engines. It isn’t the fuse or anything as the light was still on. I took the panel with the switches to bits after we’d eaten [the last of the lamb – it had a long bleat, did that little creature] and fiddled with my testing screwdriver. The cable to the switch just wasn’t live anymore. I couldn’t find out where the power break was as the switching unit was a sealed item.
After the Lollster had gone to work I surfed the net and found that it would be better to buy a new extractor than to try messing with the switch. A new extractor was on the agenda when I had the cupboard fronts changed in the kitchen when I bought the house, but as it still worked fine, and looked fairly clean and grease free I saved the money and bought another pair of speakers for the hi-fi, to run through into my kitchen instead. [That way I can have music in both downstairs rooms at a sensible volume rather than having it blasting out in the lounge so I could hear it in the kitchen – antisocial or what?]
The only problem may be the fitting points. They are all a standard size, 60cm, and they all have a pull out front which switches the thing on. The cupboard door fits to this pull out front. It is where the extractor fastens on to the wall which may be an issue. The old one didn’t go all the way up to the top of the units and the plug socket had been placed in the space it left. If the new ones are bigger I may have to move the socket too. That may need a real sparky for that as doing it myself may invalidate my home insurance. I put new electrics into my loft room when I moved in. There were no sockets in there at all, so I ran a cable from the fuse box in the kitchen up through the house and put a separate new ring main in there which had its own fuse down stairs. The electrician who came to inspect and validate the work was very impressed but at first refused to believe it was me that had done it all. Typical bloody man. How can a girly have done this? Sort of attitude. Needless to say I didn’t offer him a biscuit with his cup of tea. I was going to attempt to run a radiator up into there too but Phil’s friend is a plumber who did it for nothing, so I didn’t argue. Apparently my boiler could run another three radiators, goodness knows why the previous owners bought one with such over capacity for the size of the house!
Dominic’s Dornfelder has arrived. It is very nice but the wholesaler has charged him a huge amount for it. He thinks it will have to go on his wine list at almost £20 per bottle! That is a vast mark up! Laura made another £30+ in tips tonight. If she goes on like this her tips will be higher than her actual wage. Because she was tired I offered to wash her in the shower. We didn’t get much washing done. There’s a surprise!
Tuesday 8th October.
The scum bags at Yahoo have sent another e-mail which ignored completely my account suspension appeal. The bastards. I have sent them three more e-mails from each of my non-Yahoo accounts telling them how rubbish their system is. I somehow don’t think I’ll be getting my account un-suspended soon.
We swan 100 lengths each this morning. Rah, rah rah! We also refrained from any shenanigans in the changing rooms. Aren’t we good girls? Laura drove us into Uni again but I didn’t sit in the back. Chick, chick, chick, chick, chicken! Felice and I had our weekly meeting with our supervisor, who seemed as vague as they always are. But they were happy. So we are obviously OK. Felice is going on another date tonight. Someone she met in the supermarket!? I will have to keep my ear to the ground and get all the goss.
At X, X, X & Y things are pretty much as they were before I went to Australia. Nothing major seems to have happened during my antipodean adventure. In fact the digitising of the files seemed to be exactly where I had left it in July. I asked Mrs Briggs about this and she said that no-one was available to do it. Mmmm…. I am not sure what to make of that, at all.
Bloody Christopher appeared like the spectre at the feast and is still giving off those bloody "love-sick" vibes. He is so annoying. I don’t really know what to do to stop him being such a pain. I don’t want to report him and get him into trouble but I wish he would stop coming down to ARR and sighing at me. Maybe I could set him up with Felice, he can’t be as bad as supermarket guy will turn out to be. [Actually, that could possibly be worse.]
Laura had dinner waiting again on my return. Very tasty. We fed each other which we thought would be quite erotic but it turned out to just be funny instead. Still, you never know unless you try, do you.
Her tips tonight were a bit lower than yesterday’s but she is still making a mint. It is kind of worrying that the customers may be giving her big tips because of her looks. I know that is silly but I have a weird feeling that it is somehow wrong. She does look absolutely gorgeous anyway. In her waitress’s outfit she looks like sex on legs too. I wonder if it is a kind of jealousy?
I spent the evening taking the old cooker hood off the wall. I said it looked clean and grease free – well, that was incorrect. It was filthy. I am surprised at how gopping it actually is. It came off pretty easily and the door was simplicity itself to remove. I am now faced with the task of searching for the best deal on a replacement. I gave the whole space a thorough clean [as you can imagine] but I have left the screw holes for the moment. I was going to pack them with filler but decided to leave them until I knew for certain then one I buy won’t share the same holes. I dumped the unit by my wheelie bin but I bet the binmen don’t take it when they are here on Thursday morning.
All three of us did the final walk tonight and then Loll and I showered together. I just don’t think I have removed all the grease from my fingers, despite repeated washings, so I was a bit circumspect about using them in Laura’s interesting little places. She was quite pragmatic and told me to stop being silly and just use them as they were. Who would have thought OCD could make a barrier to sex?
Wednesday 9th October.
Our dining group met at Claire’s tonight. She had been prevailed upon to do another Spanish meal and duly obliged. I can’t recall what she called it but we had about three different mains and a pineapple dessert. The mains were hot and meaty, full of tomatoes and spices. No rice and no prawns anywhere! They stained your fingers or clothes if spilled. Luckily I didn’t discover this the hard way, Sandy did. All down her lemon skirt! Claire gave her one of hers to change into and we tried to remove the stain. It didn’t shift! This was much later in the day of course.
Our day began with Laura still being the driver to the pool but then I took the car off to work for the day. Still being the "Digitiser", like the Terminator but in reverse, saving stuff not destroying it. Bloody Christopher came down again. He wants to know if I have played the Nigel Kennedy DVD. Just an excuse I suppose, but I couldn't bite his head off for that. It is brilliant. It isn't the Four Seasons and I imagine Vivaldi would be horrified at the liberties Kennedy has taken but I loved it. You'd have thought the idiot thought I was saying I loved him.
More bad news on the Christopher front. He has bought tickets for the entire International Concert Season at the City Hall too! Bloody shitehawks! He's seeing the Britten War Requiem which we didn't book, so he'll be there for every other single sodding concert. Staring a week on Saturday with the Halle again! Laura and I may just have to get really affectionate with each other in his presence just so he really gets the idea! I told Laura this and she thought it was hilarious.
Claire's home is in one of the new flats they have build along the River Don in the city centre. It is straight down the road for us and a doddle to find. She has been in it for about a year now. The view is pretty smart from inside although I wouldn't want to be a ground floor resident. We had Spanish food, as I have said and everyone brought Spanish wine. We brought some Tempranillo Rose, which I was surprised to find and even more surprised to discover it was delicious. There were only six of us tonight, which was a bit disappointing but hey, it isn't a three line whip.
She is mad keen on women singer song writers so we had an evening being serenaded by Katie Melua, Amy Macdonald et al. I asked if she got any Joni Mitchell and she'd never heard of her! Can you believe it? I rushed down to the car and brought out one of my CD wallets. I put Dad's CDs in them. He burns me everything he buys and some I have had since I was at school. Each wallets hold 200 CDs and there are six in the car. I took out "Court and Spark" and everyone was amazed by the purity of J M's voice and how good the songs were too.
She ended up burning copies of my burned copies of five Joni Mitchell albums. That was quite an unexpected turn up for the books. I think when she gets time to listen to them properly she'll fall in love with "Blue" it is my favourite. Even the Lollster was a Joni Mitchell virgin. I guess you need to have an older person introduce you to stuff if you are ever going to find anything of interest.
We got talking and looking through the CD wallet and I have a wealth of Classic Albums from my Dad over the years in there. Wallet is a misnomer. They are ring binders with clear plastic pages. Each page holds four CDs and each binder has fifty pages. They do take up a lot of space in the car, to be honest. You can guess they are all indexed. I did have them arranged by title but now they are by artist instead. It makes things easier to find. This wallet was K to O.
In my descriptions of him I think I have sort of made him out to be some cool, switched on parent, they all want to meet him. Mmm.... that could be interesting. Laura helped fuel the fire by saying her Mum fancied him like mad. (I did know that already!) They were amazed by the fact he married a woman almost twenty years his junior last year and even more so when I told them that Louisa was hoping for a baby! They were totally unsympathetic to my objections and thought it would be lovely. Lovely?! Arrgghhh!!
We hit the road at about ten past midnight and witnessed a chap being breathalysed just near Sheffield Wednesday's football ground. Luckily I had the recommended amount to keep me under the limit. Loll on the other hand was a little inebriated. She dug out the Flying Wilbury's CD and played Tweeter and the Monkey Man over and over again all the way home. We both did an out of tune sing along, I have to admit.
She stayed in while I took Callie out for her last walk of the day (or the first of Thursday). When I got back Laura was fast asleep in the kitchen arm chair with one arm still in the sleeve of her duffel coat. I took her coat off or her and tried to get her to stand but she was out of it, big time. So I managed to stand her up and fireman's lifted her up to bed. I know she is very slim but seven and a half stones gets heavy when you are carrying it upstairs.
She was still fast asleep when I poured her onto the bed from my shoulder. I took great delight in slowly and carefully undressing her, then getting her into her PJs.
She woke up just as I was climbing in alongside her. "You are the best thing that's ever happened to me...." she slurred at me and then was off again. It made me cry, I used to say that to Richard.
Thursday 10th October.
It seems that Claire had been topping everyone's glass up all night, except mine. I had said I was the driver. I hope the other three weren't driving home or they could have been like that poor guy at Hillsborough.
Looking very fragile, Laura cried off walking, and swimming, this morning. Sarah noticed, at the pool, and we joked about youngsters not being able to hold their liquor! Back home I was greeted by the smell of frying bacon. The gorgeous girl had done bacon butties for breakfast! She was still feeling very delicate and I drove us into Uni. It was probably a good thing I did too.
The wind which had been pretty strong for most of Wednesday seemed even stronger as we left the village and, driving along Middlewood Road, a huge branch fell from a tree right onto the roof of a car heading in the opposite direction just as it passed us! Out of the corner of my eye I could see the thing fall and the splat onto the roof of the car. The guy swerved and then when straight into the bank side crumpling up the front of the car.
I stamped on my anchors and pulled up on to the kerb. I got Laura to phone for an ambulance and the Police and rushed over to the car, which was partially embedded into the side of the hill. I don't know why I did it but I took out my phone and started filming as I hurried over to the car. It was a silver grey Honda Jazz. 63 Plate. Sheffield letters: YT. The driver was a white haired guy who was sat looking completely dazed behind his air bag.
I yanked open the door and asked him if he was OK? Was he hurt? Could he move? What was his name? I told him I was Vicki. I was from the white car.
I was still pointing the phone all through this. Filming away. He said, "Are you the police?" I assumed it must have been the white car and my outfit which made him ask. A dark navy two piece (blazer and pencil skirt) and dark tights. He said he was called Henry, but everyone called him Harry. He was fine. He thought he was fine. A bit shook up. He wanted to know what had hit his car. I was able to tell him he'd been hit by a falling branch.
He had a graze on the side of his forehead but otherwise I couldn't see any other visible injuries. I asked him again if he was hurt and he told me his foot hurt. His left one. I couldn't see under the airbag all that well, but it looked like the whole front of the car had been pushed backwards. I assumed that his left foot could be trapped by the pedals or something but didn't pursue it further.
I told him that Laura had phoned for an ambulance and help would be here soon. As I said that she walked across and told me and Henry the same thing.
She then went into the road and started to help move vehicles past the Honda just like a traffic cop would do! In about three minutes we heard a siren and an ambulance came haring round the corner. It pulled up behind the Honda and two people got out, a man and a woman. They asked me who I was and I explained and told them about Henry. They said they would take care of things from there and if I could help that other woman guiding traffic it'd be useful.
Another couple of minutes passed and a second siren drew closer, this was a police car. The WPC parked behind my Kia and came across to talk first to the medics and then to Laura and me. Then a second police car pulled up and a very overweight policeman clambered out. He talked briefly to the WPC and then took over directing the traffic while she walked us back towards her car. She asked us to sit in the back, she sat in the front and then turned round and asked us what had happened.
So we explained. About our drive to work. Where we were going. The fact I was driving because Laura had had a skinful the night before; the fact we lived together. We gave her our names and our address and our work address. I explained about the branch and how I'd seen the car swerve into the bankside. I then remembered my phone and played her the video I'd shot. It went on up to me pointing it at Laura directing traffic. Then I'd turned it off.
She talked with us a bit longer and then said we could go on our way. She thanked us for our help and said they'd take care of everything from now on. She told us that someone may be in touch with us later and they may need a copy of the phone footage too. This must have taken way longer than it has to write it. But it seemed to pass very quickly.
The big guy was still directing traffic as we left and a police Landrover pulled up on to the space we drove away from, nose to nose with the WPC's car.
We arrived at Uni as excited as little children who'd been to a fair or circus and nobody took a blind bit of notice. I walked up to our office and Felice had left a post-it on the door asking me to go along to the French Department where she was tied up with something. It was such an anti-climax. We felt like super-heroes and no-one there gave us another glance.
Loll and I met up for lunch in the refec and she was greeted as a star by Felice which made me feel jealous as hell, because that was just what I hoped would happen to both of us when we arrived. Yes, Felice thought I'd been very responsible and public spirited, and all that sort of stuff, when I explained where we'd been and why we were late. BUT Laura got the shrieks and the loud cries and the excitement. It was so disappointing. Then I felt really guilty for having wanted to be feted because old Henry's misfortune.
Life is so weird like that. Isn't it. You want to be calm and matter of fact and say it was no big deal, anyone would have done the same thing and yet you want to be fussed and praised and told you are brilliant and stuff, all at the same time! Perhaps I am just a really immature person at heart.
Sitting at the refec table I had this unbelievably horrible thought. It was the very first time it had occurred to me. I must have gone as pale as death because they both asked me what was the matter? I just said, "Bloody hell, you know, we were so lucky. That branch could have hit us!"
Do you know, that was the very first thing my Mum said (and my Dad) and Dominic at the restaurant, and virtually everyone else we told about it?
I bet Callie would have said the same too if she could talk!
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