The gipsy was right

14st 3lb (I spot a trend here, and I do not like it, but am too miserable to take the obvious remedial action); 9.0 units of alcohol yesterday (see previous comment); 1,256; Rutland.

I’m not actually in England’s smallest county, but I’m definitely in a Rut. It pains me to admit it, even to myself let alone on a little-read blog, but I fear that I am pining for the Less Tall Cheshire Brunette. Either that or I am a feeble and terminally lazy idiot who is incapable of exercising the most elementary self-discipline in matters of food and drink, or of getting on with some work when the opportunity arises.

Of course, both explanations might well be correct. I am a Bloke, after all.

Today would have been my mother’s 99th birthday if she had not blown her chances of getting a commemorative telemessage from The Queen by dying when she was 82. Which was pretty spooky, really, since when I was a very small boy a gipsy woman had knocked on our front door, trying to sell clothes pegs or lucky heather or a handful of gravel plucked from our own drive, and had told my mother that she was going to live to be 82. Given that both her own parents had dropped dead of heart attacks at the age of 61, my mother regarded this as a rather encouraging bit of news until she reached the age of 81, when it began to prey on her mind. I spent some time trying to persuade her that the prediction was that she would LIVE to be 82, not that she would DIE at 82, and that it did not exclude the possibility that she would live to be 83, 84 or even 99.

That was not how it worked out, though.

I have learned from this experience and never open my front door to gipsies. And just to be sure, and to avoid any suggestion of racial prejudice, I never open my front door to anyone else, either.