I got a strange urge.

Like most (moderately normal) people I sometimes get strange urges, but this time it was to write; something I haven’t done for over a year. I don’t know if I’ll carry it on but it amused me at the time – 04.30 this morning.

‘Did you go out last night?’

  ‘Do you mean last night, or last evening?’ She made to reply but her husband continued in the voice she knew very well. ‘Technically, evening ends at eight pm. Thereafter, it’s night. So if you’re asking if I went out last night, then the answer is no. I went out at seven thirty. Thus, I went out last evening.’

  She eyed the kitchen knife so close to hand. Every time he got into one of these moods the urge to disembowel him became so great she didn’t know how much longer she could resist the temptation. She stormed off before her hand automatically finished the job of which she had dreamed for so long.

  In the kitchen April nursed a cooling cup of coffee. She really didn’t want it but it gave her hands something to do which didn’t involve slaughtering her husband. How had it come to this? Their first encounter was at university. Was it really twenty years ago? April’s student days were among the best of her life. A natural at music theory, all her friends and tutors said. For their first three weeks she had assumed the man she’d met in the library to be just another faceless student who didn’t really feel the need to discuss his course. It was only after realising that he was not, in fact a first year student at all but a third year, far more experienced in life, but more importantly, student life than she, had quickly warmed to him. Expecting that they would have a lot in common, indulging his amusing slurs of everything academic and acerbic but often amusing wit, had been easy at first.

Back to work at last.

 That’s the good news.

    After almost eighteen months of lockdown, and having weekends, actual whole weekends off, two days in a row, kind of thing, I finally remembered why I so welcomed lockdown in the first place, even if I was only getting half pay.

    I’m now getting full pay once more, and in order to get that I’ve gone back to doing over, way over, sixty hours a week at work.

    I’m finished with the whining now. You can’t get anything for nothing. I’m just glad to be earning once more and not living on my wages.

    Actually, now I’m once more part of the proletariat, it’s my God given right to complain – so I will.

Britain’s going bonkers

 Yet again this morning I was up before 5am in the forlorn hope of buying petrol.

    As usual I was almost at the front of the queue after being told yesterday by the local garage manager that the resupply was happening overnight.

    It hadn’t, and when he arrived he told me it was coming between 6 and 10 am. I should have waited but it was raining so hard I was beginning to feel concussed – and thus I went home. 

    Mistake. 

    I just popped down there to look and the queue of cars seemed to last forever. Now they’re even bringing in the army (unfortunately not to shoot or arrest the idiots determined to fill up their cars up every day with fuel they don’t need) but to drive tankers.

    Well, until this is all over I have to take the Underground to work as I’ve got absolutely none left in my two bikes. Knowing my usually miserable luck I’ll probably catch Covid.

Somebody stop me.

I know, it’s rubbish.

    I’m stuck here at home with nothing to do; and I’ll be damned if I’m going to get into a four mile queue for the petrol station on my motorbike.

    If this continues I’ll have to finish the novel I started six months ago,

Off work – yet again

 Do you remember those times when most, or a lot of people were laid off work because of Covid?

   And those cretins that bought all the toilet rolls, and pasta, and long life milk because Armageddon had clearly arrived? Now, because of an innocuous story that Esso had a slight shortage of drivers, it’s been extrapolated to an absolute absence of petrol everywhere. And now there is an absence because the toilet roll, pasta brigade are now all besieging the petrol stations, jackal-like. To the point where there is no petrol – anywhere. Last week I sat behind a person at 04.30 hrs in the endless queue for the only petrol in the area for two hours. When the garage opened, she spent £4.30 on fuel. 

    So now, as I can’t get fuel for my boss’ gas guzzling monster, I’m off work yet again.

    Do you remember this from a few weeks ago?

    Well they’ve been working hard, although I’m not entirely sure that it could be called progress.

    At this rate I won’t have to wait a year until my shortcut is back. I’m not even sure I’ll live that long.