Bah!

My mother gets up in the night to use her commode, finds herself sitting on the side of the bed and, forgetting the reason, decides it must be breakfast-time and hollers...

"Antoneee...!"

She did it at around four o'clock and then again half an hour later. When she did it a third time just short of ten this morning I was feeling brittle and resentful. But I'm a nice person and I didn't say, "Stop shouting at me like you owned me, you stupid old bat. " Instead I helped her sit up in bed, made her a nice cup of tea- and emptied her commode...

Shouting at her wouldn't work anyway because firstly she wouldn't hear me and secondly even if she did she wouldn't understand.

The Millionaires Gather

The sales board hasn't gone up yet and already we've had two guys- local geezers- standing out on the drive, talking to Julia and acting casual. "You want cash for it?" says the guy with the flat cap and the northern accent who came over on the pretext of telling Julia about the repairs he's doing to her van. I mime astonishment- which isn't such a stretch really- because I'm not used to living in an area where the local mechanic has millions in the bank. The other guy works as a gardener for the people at the big house; apparently he's also a millionaire.

The estate agent has three people booked to come view the property on Saturday. We ran the names past Julia and she didn't recognize them so they're probably Lunnon folk. We were told to expect buyers from the Smoke- because there are so many of them selling their preposterously over-priced gaffes and looking to move out into the less preposterously over-priced Home Counties...