A TOUCH OF THE BLUES

After last week’s frustrating affair of the bathroom tap*, I am left a trifle curmudgeonly towards the world and its works this morning. “You are feeling vexed and sad,” I said as I lay in a post-alarm snooze preparing to haul myself from the womb-like embrace of the duvet. “Do something about it!”

But now that I have had time to reflect, ‘doing something about it’ is indeed at least part of the problem. I have been trying to ‘do something about it’ ever since January 1st - though the ‘it’ that I am trying to do something about now comes in more guises than an oriental genie.

Such new found determination would be commendable if one were actually succeeding in the doing department, but as often as not by the mid-January start of the Islamic new year I am left contemplating a sorry wreckage of abandoned good intentions, made in haste and now being forgotten, if not repented of, at leisure.

That waist line which I promised myself would in a few short weeks be again svelte and elegant, (once, I remind myself incredulously, I had a 26 inch waist) stubbornly refuses to pay any attention to scientific efforts to change my eating habits, while my time discipline - the promise to find an hour for reading, relaxation, exercise, cooking and what not, is already a broken casualty of the unexpected. The more I push, the more it seems the world pushes back. Vexing indeed, and enough to send even the brightest souls in search of the chemical happiness of a St John’s Wort tablet.

Having agreed, for instance, in a misplaced spirit of festive generosity to provide house room for my friend Helen’s elderly and incontinent bitch while she herself was on holiday, I spent the first few days cleaning up not only the inevitable damp patch, but full blown puddles as well. Avoiding further mishaps necessitated a work-interrupting trek into the garden mud every few hours, which left me momentarily debating whether puddle or mud damage was easiest to clear from the carpet. My brisk New Year Resolution to become a better housekeeper with a prettier, more comfortable house, lies in tatters.

My newly pledged bedtime reading is looking equally forsaken. Instead of happily reading for half an hour before lights out, I don a thick coat and boots and parade up and down in the cold rain on the soaking night-time grass until the wretched animal has ‘performed’ and I can retreat safely to the welcoming lights of civilisation.

As if this wasn’t vexing enough I had another touch of the blues when Helen’s son arrived to collect the dog after her ‘holiday’. I should have been happy that, this time, once the carpets had been dysoned they would stay dysoned, at least for a few days, and that I would at last be able to make serious progress in catching up with those improving literary periodicals like the Spectator and the London Review of Books.

But with typically female contrariness I found that I was not happy at all. With no dog to wind herself around my legs and halt uncannily in whichever doorway I intended to pass through forcing me to buffet her aside with my knee while trying not to spill hot tea along her back, the house suddenly seemed curiously empty.

There was no big-eyed canine face peering eagerly out of the darkness when I came down to the kitchen each the morning. No dark shape looming behind the glass of the door when I returned from the shops. No rough coat to reach out and stroke, no back to scratch. No one to follow me, thump, thump, up the stairs and down.

Perhaps it is a fancy to pretend that we can accommodate such unexpected events while keeping our Resolutions. Maybe next year there should be no more resolutions, though I suspect that is easier said than done. What after all is one to do in the guilt-tinged euphoria of an otherwise grey year end?

Not all is gloom and doom however, for I was taken to the cinema the other evening by a family friend. “£10.10 for the two,” he said, as I profferred some money for my ticket. And then by way of explanation: “You see I got a concession.”

“You could have got one for me as well”, I said grumpily.

“Mmm,” he mused. “But I never think of you, Fennie, as a concession, you always seem so young.”

“Flatterer!” I thought. Yet isn’t it nice when someone makes your day?

*For those attentive readers agog to know the sequel to my obsolete bathroom tap, I did try Araldite and so far (touches forest!) it is working still.