I had a letter from them recently which said, terribly sorry, but we haven’t been collecting your direct debit, and you owe us £996, but don’t worry, there are lots of ways you can pay. Only do something before July 24th to avoid being pursued by our Debt Collection Services. A couple of people I’ve mentioned this to have said, oh, it’s probably a scam, but scam awareness encourages us to think that any bad news or unexpected demand might be fraudulent. With Thames Water of course it’s always difficult to establish the truth. But

And that’s where it ends. The rest is silence, it’s disappeared. For the last two or three days I’ve been determined to rewrite it but hadn’t found the time or the energy, and now I’m not sure that I want to. There was a lot of complaining. I remembered how a friend of Rosie, when they were about 9 years old, used to call me Victor. Get it? Victor Meldrew. What was his catch phrase? – I don’t believe it. But nowadays everything is incredible or unbelievable. they’ve even more or less got rid of ‘very’. Poor little very! Just too feeble for the twenty first century. Now it’s incredibly good, incredibly funny, absolutely incredible. There I go again…..

I’ll just try to give a summary of what I’ve lost. A literary problem, cleverly solved by for example Dickens and Austen (why does she almost always get her first name and he hardly ever, I mean I nearly wrote Dickens and Jane Austen) is how to portray boring people talking on and on about boring things in an interesting way, making humour out of dullness and repetition. It’s hard. The script writers of One Foot in the Grave also knew how to do it, of course.

There was buying an online train ticket from Great Western which took longer than than Rachmaninov’s first and lengthy piano concerto which was playing on the radio at the time. And how listening to a programme about the effect closing ticket offices would have on the partially sighted and those with learning difficulties made me realise (or decide) that I have a disability too. And I understood something that had puzzled me before: that people with say autism or dyslexia actually welcome a diagnosis, not because it means help will come, but because it means they’re not suffering from some moral defect. And the nice man at Euston (what a slum, crowds packed into a space that seems to get smaller all the time, squeezed and mocked by a growing number of food outlets, and you have to go outside to get back inside to the underground, and the square, the plaza, the piazza whatever outside is like a tent city choked with burgers and coffee and sandwiches and pizzas, all very handy I suppose if your train is delayed for hours) I approached him because I couldn’t find my ticket on my phone, having bought it online, and I said, you look too old to help me with this, and he wasn’t offended, he said maybe you[re right, but he found it straight away! Human beings can be so lovely! I should have scrolled more and clicked less. And the time I came out of the dentist and was walking down Parkway in Camden Town and a man pressed loud and long and very sudden on the horn of this car which for me was shocking and a little bit traumatic, mean on a trauma scale of 1 to 100 it would rank about two, but that’s enough to help you understand what the real thing must be like, and I shouted at him and he just hooted again, longer, and when he stopped I shouted you’re a tosser (I knew I was safe because he refused to look at me, kept his eyes fixed on the road in front and his hand on the horn.) And when he finally stopped again I shouted you’re still a tosser and felt a strange mixture of shame and elation. And the last week I was coming out of a health centre in Stockport where I’d been to pick up a urine sample bottle for my brother in law and there was a guy standing in the open doorway smoking and every wisp and scrap of smoke was being funnelled back inside and I tod him he shouldn’t be smoking there, the smoke was blowing in, and he said mind your own business – red rag to a baby bull! – and I said it’s everybody’s fucking business, and he just said, quietly, don’t swear.

And then there’s the burglar alarm. Why do I even still have one? Probably because the first question when you ty to get cheap house insurance is do you have an alarm, and the second one is does it work? Another mixture of shame and anger here. Shame that I let them take from two direct debits for at least as long as my online bank records go back – seven years. At some point they gave us a new contract and didn’t cancel the old one so I’ve been paying twice over every month. When I first got in touch a nice young man investigated and came back to me and said more or less yes it’s true, you do have only one burglar alarm. I eventually got come money back but not nearly enough. And then they simply stopped communicating.

I’ve now had three messages like the above. And nothing else. Upmost importance! And the appreciate my patience! But it’s all gone. Thames Water say the same thing whenever they dig up the road. I should ring them up and tell them that they’re tossers. I don’t mean that. It was the same with my rucksack, the one I left in Greece, see The rucksack. When they finally stopped trying to get money from me for import duties on something that had never been imported, when I tried to get my money back, they simply stopped communicating.

Then there was a bit about a walk in the park with two friends, a walk in two movements: one, digital laments; scams, losses and frustrations. Then a cultural interval, a film, an exhibition, a book even. Two: death and health, our own and other people’s, a mighty work. For an encore, climate change.

There’s more but let’s change the subject. Through the open kitchen door this morning I saw a little mouse. I’ve seen it a few times before. It’s very sweet. I went outside and slowly walked up quite close to it while it looked carefully at me. I begin to hate the idea of killing rodents. I said to it, just don’t come into the house. Know your place. And the other day I was trying to control the big campsis (aka trumpet vine) which grows up and out from the railings on the waterloo road at St John’s when I found myself eye to eye with a pigeon n the tangle sitting on its nest. I could see one white egg. We looked at each other for a few seconds then I carefully climbed down from the ladder. (It’s not that I wanted to control the plant, just that unless it’s somehow restrained it grows right out over the pavement and then people break bits off it even though the pavement is very wide, which ruins the flowering because it only blooms on the tips of the side shoots. The council, or their contractors used to chop it back, at least we’ve managed to stop them doing that. At St Paul’s there’s a fabulous wisteria whose flowering shoots stretch out yards over the pavement; no one seems to bother that.) Anyway: pigeons, rodents, what place for them in the wonderful new world of bio-diversity? The day I met the pigeon, and softened, was the day I properly realised that all the sparrows, the sparrows which had returned several years ago to St John’s and had increased and prospered and made their own minimalist music all day long, had disappeared together from St John’s more or less over night a few weeks ago; they must have made a collective decision. But where are they? Can they all be dead? I’ve looked, but can’t find them, though there are just s few elsewhere in the area.

Next time I’ll say more about the campsis and about my myrtle whose fallen stamens and petals are now beginning to decorate the leaves of melianthus and plectranthus beneath it and which attracts honey bees for their one annual appearance in numbers in the garden, but I need to go now to get a branch or two of cork oak from St John’s for the cage of the crested gecko which my great niece (?) is going to get. My nephew asked me to get it, and I completely forgot on wednesday. It’s the cork oak which I grew from spanish acorn, and my spanish nephew asked me for it. In his heart he’s Spanish.

And then there’s the snails.

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