We had an office move today, supervised by yours truly, complete with a couple of Russians with comedy accents and a lot of drill bits in a succession of cases - like Anne Summers for DIY - and me holding a clipboard, and wearing a headset, barking orders to lowly flunkies, except that there was neither clipboard nor headset, and darling, I am the lowly flunky.
Everybody was supposed to 'muck in' but there were a few conspicuously absent employees who didn't so much as look in our direction as we heaved furniture and carried boxes, but one of whom nevertheless, bless her/him/it, took enough time from their busy non-participatory morning to send me an email to tell me that the photocopier was broken.
Imagine it. You're slogging up the face of The Great Pyramid of Giza with a boulder the size of Iraq on your back and one of your fellow Israelites painstakingly gets out a tablet and chisles: 'Oy Abe, there seems to be a bit of a problem down by the Sphinx with the water cooler, do you think you could get someone in to look at the fuse?'
I don't think I am cut out for office life. Really, I was born into the wrong class. I should be called after some Lonely Planet spot on the backpacker's trail like Ambryl (no on second thoughts that sounds like a brand of sleeping pills - well then Ind-ya then, with a nice Hippy-style drawl), and have a stately pile somewhere in Wiltshire and a trust fund, or at very least a husband who's willing to share his. Instead I have an ex-husband who is abroad 'working'- his italics, not mine, lest I think that staying in a five star hotel with room service and dinners in destination restaurants hosted by various foreign ministries is fun (I grant you - when in Sweden, possibly not so much - when I went with him once in the pre-ex days they entertained us with 'freedom songs' sung by a man with a beard and an acoustic guitar. Tears, I'm telling you. And not of Joy). In the meantime, I drink cup-a-soup and tote the bale at work, then come home and do the domestic version.
The house was eerily quiet. Son No 2 and I were sitting on the sofa whilst I read him Spanish vocabulary in an Italian/Scottish accent which he claims sounds like Portuguese, when suddenly we heard a shout. This is the Kidulthood part of Notting Hill that Eric Fellner does not make films about and which, instead of Julia Roberts and token disabled person, features a great number of boys in hoods, the odd vagrant who pees near your dustbin, and assorted drunks and yobs, all of whom are on 'best friends' terms with your daughter, and who, when she says: 'Oh Cupid, I love him, does not mean the cuddly god with wings but the six foot two Nigerian with the Willesden branch of Ratner's slung round his neck.
'I think we have a visitor,' said Son No 2, ominously.
'Hello,' came a low, tentative voice from the hall.
So not Cupid then, whose usual greeting is sweet, toe kicking, embarrased, silence.
Maybe it's Ned Flanders next door trying to attract our attention because our hedge isn't cut to regulation height (yes we live on the front line of suburbia but nevertheless, it is suburbia and some of us, namely Ned, have standards to maintain) or perhaps I had committed the style crime of planting yellow primulas some time in the 80s and the darn things just keep on having the bad taste to bloom.
Son and I looked at each other.
'Who was that?' he asked, as we, reluctantly, rose and decided to investigate. I gave out my best and snarliest straight-up Scottish accent with a twist of the knife Rab C Nesbit 'What the * is going on?' bellow, and walked out into the hall.
A man stood there, short, stocky, filling up the hallway like a bollard, and looking rather uncomfortable, as you might expect, given that he was an intruder.
'Hello,' came a low, tentative voice from the hall.
So not Cupid then, whose usual greeting is sweet, toe kicking, embarrased, silence.
Maybe it's Ned Flanders next door trying to attract our attention because our hedge isn't cut to regulation height (yes we live on the front line of suburbia but nevertheless, it is suburbia and some of us, namely Ned, have standards to maintain) or perhaps I had committed the style crime of planting yellow primulas some time in the 80s and the darn things just keep on having the bad taste to bloom.
Son and I looked at each other.
'Who was that?' he asked, as we, reluctantly, rose and decided to investigate. I gave out my best and snarliest straight-up Scottish accent with a twist of the knife Rab C Nesbit 'What the * is going on?' bellow, and walked out into the hall.
A man stood there, short, stocky, filling up the hallway like a bollard, and looking rather uncomfortable, as you might expect, given that he was an intruder.
In our house.
'Your door was open, but I did call out!' he said, like a Russell Brant sketch where the person robbing you has very good manners and thinks that issuing a verbal warning should be sufficient to allow him to walk into your home and take your stuff.
'Oh yeah great, that's okay then, help yourself to the valuables,' I said.
Well no, I didn't.
'Thank you,' I said. 'And now you can leave.'
(Still polite, see.)
He stood there looking at me peevishly, while I noticed that though he had claimed the door was open he had closed it, carefully, behind him. ( Well mannered or what? Even the hoods are civil up in North Ken. The tone has certainly risen since David Cameron moved in around the corner. I bet our would be crim even wiped his feet.) He then inched - the way you're supposed to retreat when you meet a grizzly on the Appalachians - backed down the hall, unlatched the door and let himself out, only marginally slower than it takes paint to dry. Really sinister, scary paint.
Son and I calmly returned to the sofa and continued our recital of verbs on Crime and Law Enforcement, and then after fifteen minutes it dawned on us in Evening Standard headlines.
Bloody Hell, We Were Nearly Burgled.
We then thought that it might be a good idea to check the rest of the house to make sure that an accomplice was not already upstairs.
Bloody Hell, We Were Nearly Burgled.
We then thought that it might be a good idea to check the rest of the house to make sure that an accomplice was not already upstairs.
I took the poker, he took the brass candlestick. No further intruders were found.
Mind you, by the look of the bedrooms one could be forgiven for imagining that the house had already been burgled - or at least trashed after a very good weekend party - they would have had to tidy up before they could even find something to steal. But there's nothing of value in the kids rooms except most of my my make up and my 'lost' mobile phone which my daughter 'borrowed' from me before Christmas and has been using as an illicit replacement for her own broken one.
Thieves?
We breed our own darling. We don't really need to import them.
Thieves?
We breed our own darling. We don't really need to import them.
