You know how just about everyone talks of manifesting and intention and mindset and attracting? Well, it’s all fine and fair until life decides to drop a sackful of spanners into your intention-setting with a mighty clank that shatters glass up and down your home.
Today was such a day. I had planned to do no computer work [which is frankly unheard of, unless we are in the middle of the Christmas season] because I intended to fulfil a sample candle order and then slump on the sofa with the new Nigel Slater whose delivery I was tracking on Amazon like a digitally-savvy hawk. It all went well with the candles and by the time 12:30pm rolled on, I had made all of them and was lovingly gazing at the pools of wax slowly congealing and returning to their solid state.
I then set off to get myself a bite from Marks which I always refer to as downstairs not because I actually live above one but because the closest one is out of the front door and one hundred steps on the right-hand side on the Fulham Road. It’s one of those little Simply Food Marks and it is so, so, so close [I can see their back loading bay from this very window] that it qualifies as downstairs. The time to go downstairs and return with a falafel wrap and a couscous salad was minuscule, but I knew that something was amiss the moment I stepped through the front door and all four dogs greeted me whimpering. The stench was completely unmistakeable. Someone had diarrhoea.
And it did not take long to identify the culprit, not simply because my own dog Saffy was absolutely fine but because the two little ones simply cannot store that much liquid in their tank. Poor Minnie disgraced herself over and over and over, including on the floor of the black cab on the way to the vet in Wimbledon. Don’t worry about the cabbie; not only was Minnie virtually empty by then, for it was 5pm, but the patch was so small and insignificant that, had the cabbie been a woman instead of a man, he would have certainly washed it out of the door and disinfected with a squirt of bleach in ten minutes flat, no questions asked.
I don’t know about you but I have always found women much more ready to deal with all bodily fluids with a sense of thoroughly brisk purpose. Is it any wonder that almost all nurses are women? I’m not surprised in the slightest. So I rewarded the cabbie with an extra 60 quid on top of the already excruciating fare and an hour later I took my chances on the 93 bus which tootled up from Wimbledon to Putney Bridge where we changed for the 22 which stops at the bottom of my street. We arrived with no further incident [nor accidents].
By the time I sat down with dinner, it was gone 8:30pm and the aforementioned new Nigel Slater was still firmly sealed in the cardboard envelope it got delivered in. I guess there is always tomorrow for manifesting the day I want.