DELIVERIES MAY BE DISTRACTING

I suppose it started when I missed my dentist appointment last Friday. I who never miss appointments! I was here at my desk, beavering away, when the telephone rang asking politely why I was not at that moment in Mr Page’s recliner, my mouth full of dental impedimenta.

They were very understanding in a gentle Joyce Grenfell sort of way. “Oh you just forgot, did you?” to which I could only explain limply that I was expecting my first grandchild and my mind was on other things.

At the time I thought this a whopping lie. Not insofar as my Younger Daughter is expecting a baby. That is true enough. In fact she has been expecting now for almost a week, with false alarms necessitating urgent dashes to the hospital birthing unit every couple of days. No, the real reason, or so I thought, was that I had just been too idle to consult my diary that morning.

Still, they were compassionate and let me off without charging the punitive ‘fees for missed appointments’ spelt out prominently in big letters around the surgery walls. They fitted me in. Apparently, they are not very busy: the recession has taken its toll. Bankers and accountants are no longer smiling, they say. It matters not therefore what their teeth look like.

This made me think of another mitigating plea that I had once similarly rejected as whopping untruth, years ago. On this occasion I had joined a Civil Service colleague for a lunch-time drink, stayed rather too long and returned to the office slightly the worse for wear. Subsequently, I was called in by the boss and rightly upbraided.

He then said that he had heard that my mother had died very recently. How he knew I do not know, but there it was. I replied that I couldn’t, in honesty, claim that as an excuse. But he was a wise man and I escaped the retribution that I felt I deserved.

With the passage of time I think he was right; my mother’s death was almost certainly disturbing me more than I realised. She had died unexpectedly. Yes, she had been ill; certainly she was in hospital. But she was only 54 and one moment was sitting up in bed, smoking a cigarette and the next she had turned her face to the wall, as it were, no doubt muttering her usual cry in times of adversity “Oh God! Oh Montreal!” The family were left still gathering belongings for a London dash. Still, that was all a very long time ago.

In the meantime, between Younger Daughter’s false alarms, life goes on. We decided to celebrate surviving the double whammy of the end of January tax bill plus a hefty repayment of business mortgage by making a visit to IKEA to buy a rather fetching armchair.

Actually, I had understood we would be buying two armchairs to replace the green two-seater sofa that Younger Daughter had said would fit very comfortably in her house.
This was not quite what J had understood, which was that we would be getting shot of both our existing two seater sofas and buying a new sofa and one armchair in replacement.

I wanted the two armchairs as I knew that J would undoubtedly take ownership of a single one. I didn’t want the two-seater sofa because that would be less comfortable and more difficult to manoeuvre. Besides, I didn’t see much wrong with our pink sofa which had done noble service for over a quarter of a century. It does sag a bit, but it also has a welcoming, sat-on, feel that all good sofas should have.

Having taken the difficult decision to purchase we found ourselves perplexed and slightly cross and so tested the comfort of IKEA’s Ektorp brand, in its lively shade of scarlet corduroy, by having a seemingly insoluble argument about what exactly we should buy.

We might have been there still had we not suddenly realised - the revelation being like awakening from an anxiety dream - that the whole question was anyway academic.

For you can’t actually import new furniture without first removing the old. If we ordered today, the stuff might be delivered early next morning (when you do want something it always takes a fortnight, but this cannot be relied on). That, at the very least, would be an embarrassment.

Only then we remembered our original plan. YD’s partner (who conveniently owns a long wheelbase transit used for ferrying his circus kit) was to remove the existing sofa(s) and to collect their replacements in one seamless loop of collection and delivery. But of course YD’s partner has other deliveries in his mind, just now, besides sofas. There is a natural order in these matters and babies come before furnishings.

So we retreated from IKEA with nothing more to show for our labours than a set of nifty recycling boxes, wondering however we could have contemplated buying new furniture before arranging to get rid of the old. Both of us had clearly taken leave of our senses.

But then, I suppose, poor dears, our minds are distracted. We are in a mental limbo pending baby’s arrival. This is not the time to expect straight thinking or the keeping of appointments in this household.