I’m on annual leave this week. As with other breaks from work, I always enter the time off with great intentions, only to be disappointed by my lack of activity and another task list left to gather dust; pretty much in the same manner as my window ledges and venetian blinds.

Things haven’t started too badly this week. I have three main tasks:

Any other things that I manage to achieve will be a huge bonus (aim low, etc)

The yard is sort of tidied: I swept it yesterday and jet washed the garden furniture. I now have to jet wash the paving slabs to get rid of the patterns left from jet washing the furniture. The furniture in question is now highly flammable after being soaked in teak oil. Everything within a 10m radius smells of the stuff. It still needs more.

That’s the thing about cleaning and tidying, it never ends its expanding cyclical pattern of mess and disorder. How can a mere human fight against the universal laws of thermodynamics? These efforts are futile, so why bother? One word: neighbours. I’m the new kid on the block so I feel like I have to make a good impression still.

And so it comes to my patch. It’s rather unruly and I meant to tidy it up and pull out all the dead bits back in the autumn, but it was just too damp. I can feel my neighbours talking about it now. “It never used to be that unkempt when Ali was here”. Errm, actually, dear neighbour, I only tackled that particular jungle after she’d fucked off and left me. Anyway, it needs sorting so that it’s ready for a horticultural vajazzle once the frosts have subsided. I consulted with my man today and apparently, 4-6 weeks is what we’re looking at.

I’d love to have fun with the little dog if he wasn’t such a cunt. We had a lovely walk down the woods today. He ran like a loon, didn’t jump into any residual mud, kept relatively close by me, then attacked the most docile dog he met. If she’d have had anything about her, she’d have ripped one of his ears off, but she was too nice. And what can you say to the other dog’s owner in those circumstances? “He really is usually absolutely fine, I’ve no idea what came over him, I’m so embarrassed and very sorry.” I’ve just got my own back by playing with his ingrowing dew claw. And he might get shot by an angry farmer at the end of the week; there’s always hope.

Virgin on the ridiculous
Mother’s mobile phone has been annoying her since her hospital stay in the autumn and she decided that she wanted to take telly provider Virgin up on their offer of a new on and go pay monthly with them. I happened to be there at the time. Why always me? I have a brother and a sister and neither of them get dragged into these dramas.

“Get your bank details and a Virgin Media bill ready and I’ll phone them”

It was all going really well until the chap I was speaking to needed to talk to Mum. The first problem was that he was obviously overseas; Mum’s hearing is shocking and she gets easily confused these days.

I’ve never seen somebody panic so much when they’ve been asked for their bank account details.

“QUICK!!! BRING MY HANDBAG!!!”

She retrieved her cheque book. A cheque book?? And read out the sort code and account number. How can she not know these things off by heart? Because she pays for everything by cheque and refuses to save money by setting up direct debits for things.

Then she had to read out her card details. You’d have thought she’d have been asked to belly dance for Camilla.

But it all went really smoothly. The order was processed. She’s getting a smartphone. Jesus, Mary and all the saints. Who’s going to have to show her how to use it? Who’s going to move her contacts over? Actually, I should be exempt because it’s an Android phone, but I’ll still get embroiled in the drama. And then there’s getting her current number switched to her new provider. I’m just going to kill myself to get out of that one.

On the positive side, my Hannibal Lecter heart rate training seems to be going really well – I managed to keep mine at 62 during the whole process. A bit more practice and I’ll be able to deal with taking my dad to the shops without it exceeding 120.