No idea; 9.0 units (at a guess); 1,211, which seems curiously familiar (oh yeah, it’s the number to reactivate the answering service on my mobile: perhaps it’s A Sign); Chester.
Well, blow me down. The Government is bailing out and effectively nationalizing the Royal Bank of Scotland, and taking a huge stake in HBoS/Lloyds TSB, just as they leaked in outline to all the Sunday papers (apart from the Sunday Sport, apparently) and in detail to Robert Peston for the BBC news last night. At least it gave me a decent subject for a newspaper column, and a ready-made title: Far From Quiet on the Peston Front.
The LTCB collected our animals from the boarding kennels and cattery after work this evening, and took her two cats to the vet’s. The snag was that she only brought one of them home, the other being pronounced to be so severely dehydrated that she needed to be kept in overnight and fed through a tube. I am by no means an expert on cats, but it occurred even to me that this did not sound too good. The LTCB was perhaps not completely inconsolable, but consoling her certainly presented a major challenge. I did my best to rise to it, pointing out that it might well have happened even if she had remembered to buy the cat some more of her favourite biscuits, or take her to the vet before we went to London, or abandon the idea of going to London and staying at home 24/7 with the cats instead. My efforts were neatly balanced by various members of her family having sharp intakes of breath down the phone and saying “Well, you have been away a lot”. But isn’t that what families are for? Sometimes – well, most of the time, to be honest – I am glad that I do not have one to speak of.
The amazingly unlikely true story of how a grumpy old man and lifelong bachelor won the love of a beautiful young woman and started a family – and all by writing a curmudgeonly blog about his lonely journey to the grave.
Now who would have predicted that?
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