4August1997

4 August 1997
My dear folks,

Here we are in the study, Mavis lying in front of the fan giving himself a good lick & I writing to you. Mavis has been a pain all day, constantly demanding either food or back-scratches. If it’s not rub-a-dub on your ankles, it’s laying his half-ton corpus on your feet. You are left in no doubt as to his desires. After the third plate of crumblies & fourth back-scratch, I tired of the pantomime & remonstrated with him. Since then, he has merely followed me from room to room, squatting two feet away & regarding me with a suitably pained expression.

He even laid himself at John Pierre’s feet for a scratch, somewhat to John Pierre’s surprise. John Pierre is the “engineer” who was called in to do an emergency fix on the disintegrating railings at one of “my” houses. He came upstairs afterwards (half an eye out for parking inspectors) to get a cheque, £164 for 90 minutes work. Not bad, even though he won’t see much of it. His firm will swallow the lion’s share, with the government jackal getting most of the remains.

My day was a series of little trips between 90 Shirland & the problematic house, 1st with my fixer, 2nd with John Pierre & 3rd to inform the unfortunate Aussies who have bought the basement flat what a can of worms they’ve joined. Caveat emptor! Subsidence has caused nasty movement of the building, cracking walls & ripping the aforementioned railings out of their purchase in the process. I also visited estate agents to discuss the possible sale of the flats & spent a lot of time faxing the owner. I’ll omit the visits to the bank, locksmith, stationer, greengrocer & health shop. In short, I’ve been running around like your proverbial blue-arsed fly.

Still, it’s better than working in the newsroom/gallery which is how I spent the weekend. I had to get up at 5.30 to be at work by 0700, against all inclinations. On Saturday we crossed live to Thredbo to watch the miraculous rescue of the ski instructor who had survived the landslide that hit the resort three days earlier, lying trapped in a stream between two slabs of concrete. There are few real moments of rejoicing in my disaster-fed job but that was one. Not that I was exactly dancing around, I was too busy tossing out other stories & trying to remodel the bulletin to come out on time. The next bulletin saw the collapse of the computer driven video cassette machine & that was just as exciting. Lastly, it was the graphics hard disk that died. I resented the stress intrusion into the tranquillity of a weekend schedule.

I compensated today, falling soundly asleep over both the lunchtime and evening news. It’s getting to be a bad habit. Late night news is on. Queen Mum is waving to slobbering admirers! One guy wishes you could wrap her up in tissue paper & take her away. Bring on the men in white coats! Of more interest is the footage of the British commuter airliner making an emergency landing at Manchester airport. Have the seen the pix, I wonder? They’re really good, although they’ve been played nearly to death all day. There’s a BBC TV series running on life at Heathrow Airport, shot around all kinds of people who work there - & utterly fascinating.

Tomorrow I shall go over & get my hair cut by Elaine & find out what’s been going on in the alternative world.

Blessings
T