“It is just for one pint,” I insisted.

She stared at me in suspicion, like an old lady who’d wandered into a Bjork concert.

“Promise,” I promised.

I disappeared off down the drive. Moments later, I poked my head back through the open window. “Short Tony’s going as well,” I revealed. “Is it still OK to go?”

She acquiesced with a grudging nod, and continued making conversation with my visiting in-laws.

Some time later, I returned from the pub, having provisionally agreed to buy a third share in an Aberdeen Angus cow from a friend of a man who was sitting at the bar.

Why do I do it??? Why??? Why???

At least I agreed to negotiate in pounds sterling rather than my precious secret magic beans that are hidden away for a rainy day.

I do not need a cow. In fact, the only thing I can think of that I need less than a cow is a third of a cow.

I think the idea was to develop it into steaks, joints, beefburgers etc later in the year. I have half a drawer available in the freezer. I will need to eat a lot before there is enough room for even a third of a small cow, and even then I will not be able to enjoy it with frozen peas, ice cream etc.

I know where it grazes. I will visit it at some point and say hello. Although I did not sign anything and I do not have a cow license.

I could yet get out of this.

Thunder and lightning!!!

Lighting up the bedroom in an apocalyptic fashion!!!

I open one eye, take in what’s happening and leap over to the window faster than Jimmy Carr’s agent en route to the ‘Countdown’ offices.

On the other side of the road, the trees around the church light up. Not momentarily, as is normally the case with our pathetic English weather, but for seconds at a time in a constant barrage of electricity. It’s less like a real storm than something out of the Dr Who special effects department.

No rubber monsters appear, which is reassuring, but I keep an eye out, just in case. An alien invasion would be exciting, but with my luck I’d get McCoy and Langford rather than Baker and Jameson.

More lightning, right overhead, swamping the road in brilliant blue-white light. As happens so often, I thank the Lord that I am not making my way to a fancy dress party where the dress code is tall metal hats.

There’s something particularly cosy about being inside whilst a storm is raging. The walls here are around eighteen inches thick, which I know doesn’t make a lot of scientific difference to thunder and lightning, but it feels safe and warm.

I always think about how terrified the ancient primitive men must have been in a situation like this. With no knowledge of the meteorological basis of the phenomenon, they must have thought the world was going to end. And nobody was around not to warn them not to wear tall metal hats.

Then the storm would pass, and they would go back to their primitive lives, chasing rabbits and impregnating their womenfolk.

We are more sophisticated now, of course, and the only thing that really scares me is Comments (0) and the thought that people watch ‘Top Gear’.

The weather shows no sign of abating, and it’s round the back now as well, across the fields of the estate. Water pours from the guttering and drum, drum, drums on the sills.

I belatedly close the window in the spare bedroom and make for the safety of the duvet.

Update on the Post Office Campaign.

Thank you everybody who lent their support to my campaign to save the Village Post Office, which may or may not be threatened with closure at some point in the future.

I have to say that I was a bit taken aback by the response. Although I know a couple of people did complain that I didn’t include any genuine postal workers on the single and was thus being patronising and imperialist, it seems to have raised sackloads of awareness and that is the main thing.

The record has yet to get to number one, but that is only a matter of time.

I did think that the support from Africa was the most beautifully apt and funny thing that could happen. And several other people chipped in cheerfully. Thank you.

Then I received an email from Hungary.

Simon, at Amstelladagain, sent me a photograph.

He has MOWN ‘Save the Post Office’ in huge great capital letters into his lawn. In Hungary. So that it can be seen from the air, as you fly across in a helicopter.

The photo’s not great, because he’s only leaning out of a first floor window. You can only really read it from the air. As you fly over Hungary in a helicopter.

This is, without doubt, the most barking mad thing that has ever happened on the Internet, ever.

——-

UPDATE!!! If you are trying to post a comment but cannot post a comment, it is not me that has banned you!!!

Oh no.

It is Haloscan, which is normally so good, not being so good.

I have not banned you, no I would not do such a thing. I feel your pain.

I went to an Important Meeting.

One of the only difficulties about living in a small Norfolk village is that most of the people with whom (grammar) I need to have Important Meetings are based in London. This entails a reasonably long travel for me.

It’s kind of important that I arrive at these things in a fresh and bullish state of mind. That I appear professional and composed. In control.

Thursday’s severe heat and humidity conspired against this. Unfortunately, so did my ‘grab a quick haircut first’ mistake.

Thus it was that I staggered in from the heat to meet my client, smelling of sweat and B.O., and with an almost perfectly circular area of bare skin within my right sideburn, as if somebody had precisely utilised a hole punch on the side of my head.

I shook myself, had a drink of water, and tried to get back on to the front foot, but almost immediately realised that the chair I’d been allocated was directly to the left of that of my Important Client, and thus he’d be immediately looking at my hair disaster. Luckily, I found I could sit at a sort of ninety degree angle to him, and turn my head further. So as we spoke I peered at him from the corner of my eye.

At this point I realised I needed a poo.

I sort of jiggled around in my chair a bit, which sometimes helps, and it seemed to hold it for a while, but then the feeling came back and I had to jiggle again.

I sat there, jiggling in my seat, peering at him out of the corner of my eye, sweating profusely. He continued talking.

At this point I got my first stroke of luck. His phone rang.

“Do you mind if I get that?” he asked.

“Not at all,” I generously replied. “I’ll just pay a visit while you take the call.”

I exited to the gents toilet, which was simmering at about 10000 degrees Fahrenheit. So hot, in fact, that the lights appeared to have given up working. There was no window. I flicked the switch on and off in despair. I wiggled the light bulb. Then I looked at the angle for wedging the door open very slightly, but the toilet opened out directly onto a corridor, and I didn’t fancy somebody else walking in and displaying me to all concerned.

My redemption arrived with a closer examination of the room – there was a shaving light!!! I pulled the cord, and an eerie dim glow filled the small room. Mopping my brow, I mounted the porcelain.

There is probably a biological reason why, no matter how desperate one is to do a poo, one always has to have a wee wee first. I had my wee wee. But thank you – thank you – to the God of Biological Oddities, as it was during this first (pre-poo) procedure that I realised that there was no toilet paper.

I checked myself just in time.

There’s a certain level of despair that takes hold of one at moments like these. It incorporates so many emotions – hopelessness, helplessness and humiliation, but also the humour of the ‘this is so bad it’s funny’ variety, stemming from the knowledge that there is no bigger comedy cliché than not having toilet roll when you desperately, desperately want it.

I checked under the bowl, behind the pipes. On the windowsill. I scrabbled around in the corners, and in a little alcove above my head. In the dark. Nothing. Nothing at all.

So I pulled up my trousers and returned to the meeting.

And this was it.

I was fully prepared to walk in, cough politely, mention that there was no toilet roll and ask if I could have some as I wished to use the toilet.

However, as I opened my mouth to speak, it dawned on me. With all the faffing around in the dark, I’d been a while. They’d been waiting for me to return. I had not just left the room. They would think that I had already performed my motion, and had been forced to abandon wiping my bottom in order to come and beg them for toilet paper.

And that was the last piece of dignity I had left. There, sweating, flustered and shaking, with a bare patch in my hair, clenching my buttocks, at least I had one thing left. That they did not think I was standing there before them in shit-encrusted underpants.

I couldn’t do anything else. I kept my mouth shut.

“Shall we continue?” he asked.

We continued. I jiggled, and peered from the corner of my eye.

Recap: Closing time.

The evening before the hangover/Monday’s post debacle.

Sat there. One last drink.

Me. Short Tony. Contented after a few pints taken in a celebratory mood.

The Unfeasibly Tall Kitchen Manager. The Foxy Barlady. Unwinding with a cigarette after a hectic evening.

I perched on my barstool, passively smoking. I like passive smoking – it is so much cheaper, and you don’t need to feel self-conscious about holding it in a masculine way.

“What’s the occasion then?” asked the Unfeasibly Tall Kitchen Manager, having missed the news.

“Jonny’s going to be a father,” replied the Foxy Barlady. She kept her eyes steady, but I could tell that welling up inside her was an unstoppable torrent of grief and torment drawn from a bottomless pond of regret that the LTLP had got in with me first. She had encountered me at the wrong time in her life and, deep in her Foxy Barlady consciousness, she had to accept that it was now never going to happen between us.

It was a subtle welling, almost indiscernible.

Perhaps she will break down into insanity and chop up all the kitchen staff in a massacre of jealous rage before using the mezzaluna on herself. I will feel a bit responsible for this, but it will only be moral responsibility and not legal, so I will be OK with the police, don’t worry.

Unless I have contrived to help her obtain an illegal mezzaluna. Then I’d be stuffed.

I finish my Jack Daniel’s and Coke, wondering why I am drinking a Jack Daniel’s and Coke.

Short Tony and I stroll back, walking unsteadily down the middle of the road. The night is warm, close and still – no rustling in the leaves. There’s the sound of a car passing, far, far in the distance.

I am stung by her insinuation.

“It is not,” I inform her, “my responsibility to ensure your husband stays out of trouble.”

Mrs Short Tony taps her foot and purses her lips. I am not entirely sure she is convinced.

“Look!” I explain. “We were in the pub. We came home from the pub. I left him there,” and I wave my arms in the general direction of the street twenty yards from our front doors, “and came inside to go to bed.”

“Well how come then…”

I think back to the night before, and hope that I don’t smell too much of sick. My secret cleaner has just left, possibly in disgust at her extra duties that morning. I suspect I still have a little alcohol in my bloodstream as I also seem to have spent an hour or so that morning sitting in the shed clutching the lawnmower.

“I’d got myself a drink of water and went to turn the lights off. And suddenly a big shape loomed up at me from the patio and asked me if I had any more drink and whether I fancied a sing-song.”

“But why did you let him in?!”

“Well – I couldn’t just leave him out there,” I replied. “Plus, I suppose I just fancied a sing-song,” I ended lamely.

Mrs Short Tony leaves in disgust. Just before it’s too late I remember to thank her for the bacon sandwiches. It’s what neighbours are for.

I skulk back inside, once more putting off the need to hose down the patio.

I hobble to the Village Shop!!!

Apparently, calf muscles heal quite quickly. But that should not stop everybody from being sympathetic.

Although I still have to use Big A’s crutches to go any distance, by sort of extending my left leg and placing it down slightly in front and slightly to the side of me, without bending it, I am able to sidle round the house. I look a bit like a crab. Or John Cleese auditioning for the biopic of Albert Steptoe, practising the scene where he’s gingerly waddling to the bathroom having just shat himself.

The lady in the Village Shop looks at me strangely. Perhaps she has read about my Post Office campaign in the Independent on Sunday. (Note for overseas readers – this was a big boost to its influence and scope, as the IoS is the twenty-second most read national newspaper in the UK.)

I buy my newspaper and hobble to the Post Office. This is a bit out of my way and takes me ages. The bruising on my hands is sore and aching as I edge up the path and duck my head as I walk through the doorway.

The Post Office lady informs me that I am one day early to be able to renew my car tax.

The ingratitude!!!