Βι¶ΉΤΌΕΔ Truths newcomer, Sue Gaisford, struggles with things that nearly work...
The post brought a polite, if regretful, letter from Boots the Chemists. They thanked me for applying for a job with them but - alas - none was available. The trouble was that I hadn't actually asked them for a job and I don't honestly think I want one.
It's this morning's example of things going wrong. Not seriously, life-threateningly wrong, just mystifyingly, tiresomely, inexplicably wrong. It's been happening for some time but now it's got worse: the infection has spread into the metaphysical world of the post.
What generally happens in our family is that the things we rely on stop working properly. They never pack it in completely, never so much that it's perfectly obvious that their only future is the dump. They go just wrong enough to make life that bit more complicated.
There was the phone. A smart, modern little number it was, attractive, round-shouldered, squat and comforting as a Christmas pudding. It was grand at first, then the 8 stopped working. That wasn't so dreadful. Not everyone needs an 8. I could still ring people in Edinburgh and quite a few in central London, which was occasionally useful, but the suburbs were out of bounds and so were my mother and a couple of my sisters. For a while, I'd ask friends whose numbers did not contain an 8 to get people to call me back but it became embarrassing. In the end we bought a new phone.
We should really be used to it. Kind-of-almost-functioning equipment is not a new problem for us. The loo has always needed to be, as it were, taken by surprise before allowing itself to flush. The iron hisses soothingly and efficiently for months before suddenly and balefully spitting rust onto a pillow-case. Our new shower was terrific until a week the wrong side of its guarantee, when it clearly decided that it's good for us to be drenched with sudden streams of icy water, whilst, at the very same instant, fusing the light in the hall and the freezer.
All the same, as other people's lives become ever more sophisticated, our technological hopelessness becomes less bearable. It might be better, I sometimes think, to eschew all dependence on these things, to pack it all in and go back to nature. Maybe a croft on the fringes of the Outer Hebrides would be the answer. There would, at least, be no Boots there to refuse me a job which - as far as I know - I don't think I want.
