The clocks go back!!!

At least that is what it said on the news. My immediate problem is that the Baby does not seem to have realised, and so rather than enjoying an extra hour in bed (as the cliché goes) I am tireder than ‘Extras’. Frankly, if anybody should ask me again if I enjoyed my extra hour in bed then I will kick them hard in the GMT’s. At present I am an energyless mass of blob.

I am a bit concerned that the Baby is a simpleton. She can’t work out the clocks, she eats the newspaper instead of reading it and she is still amused by my impression of Rosco P. Coltrane from the Dukes of Hazzard (although admittedly it is rather good). She will never grow up to be a nuclear physicist at this rate, not even in one of the lesser branches of nuclear physics that they teach at polytechnics.

In fact it is the LTLP who would prefer the Baby to be a nuclear physicist, whereas I would quite like her to be a drummer, as I was never allowed to have some drums when I was a kid. Truly I endured social deprivation as you wouldn’t believe. We didn’t have a video either, or electric windows until much later.

The best solution would probably be for her to be a drumming nuclear physicist. She could do equations between paradiddles (or whatever they are called, I was not allowed to know). Then she could form a band with Stephen Hawking on bass and Francis Crick on saxophone. They could do functions.

But it will not work if she has a brain the size of a molecule.

I am tired; I am listless. Mechanically, I dress her and plonk her on the floor to play whilst I wait for the Replacement Carpenter to arrive.

I hurry to the pork pie shop.

I’m not in a particular rush; no more so than anybody would be who hadn’t got a pork pie about their person but was in the vicinity of a shop that sold them. The rain teems wetly, swelling the minor brook that cleaves the village, and I stride piewards with a spring in my step.

Beside me, a doddery old fool in a silver car drives blatantly front-first into the river.

I am a bit taken aback by this, so much so that I continue my walk thinking ‘how odd’ before I find myself in the pork pie shop feeling a bit guilty about not stopping to offer some assistance. I absent-mindedly order my pie, and the pork pie lady absent-mindedly serves me, both enthralled by the cruel spectacle of an elderly man climbing unsteadily up the banks of a wet stream before looking at his handiwork in some dismay.

Truly I will go to Hell. Already I can almost feel the heat of the fires and the opening theme to ‘Heartbeat’.

I have always feared a car accident or breakdown, but my morbid fear is having one of these in embarrassing circumstances. With people hooting, or pointing and laughing, or simply shaking their heads in bemusement from within a pork pie shop. Sympathy wells up inside me for this chap. He has been sent by some higher power to show me the error of something, like in ‘A Christmas Carol’ by Dickens (Charles). He is me!!! I am shocked by this revelation.

It is clear that some form of tractor and hoist is required; instead two fishmongers run out from their shop to try to push. But the angle is too steep, and their hands are probably slippy, what with the fish an’ that. Now he has a broken car stuck in a small river with fishy handprints on the bonnet.

At this point I take my pork pie and leave. I have no wish to see myself reflected further in the misery of his circumstance.