Sunday 27, The Caravan
I have been consumed by caravan fever! My every waking thought is taken up with finding a method of buying a caravan of my own. I have long suspected that I may have Romany blood coursing through my veins. (I cannot stop my feet tapping when flamenco is played.) However, it is not a traditional barrel-shaped horse drawn caravan I lust for.
Specifically, it is a Willerby Westmorland; a double-glazed six-berth, with microwave and private veranda in a tasteful beige. I have worked out that it would just about fit into my mother's front garden. So, for £18,999, I could have the best of both worlds: complete independence for me and my boys together with baby-sitting services only five yards away. Why didn't I think of it before?
I have obtained the services of an independent financial adviser, a very nice man called Terry "the shark" Brighton. He is nicknamed shark because he once caught a record-breaking creature of that name while enjoying a shark fishing honeymoon in Australia with his fourth wife. I asked him to help me raise the finance for my Willerby Westmorland. Terry said no probs, but asked me to send him a cheque for £500 as a returnable deposit for his services. I won't tell my mother about the caravan just yet. It will be a lovely surprise for her.
Satisfaction
Sunday, September 3, Arthur Askey Walk, Ashby-de-la-Zouch, Leicestershire
Can you trust anybody nowadays? My financial adviser Terry "The Shark" Brighton has been arrested by the fraud squad. Apparently, he has been operating a caravan finance scam for years. So I can kiss goodbye to my £500 deposit and my dream of owning my own Willerby Westmoreland 'van and siting it on my mother's property. True, she was hostile to my plan, saying, "I don't want trailer trash living on my doorstep", but I could have talked her round, in time.
At the risk of sounding like a Herman's Hermit song lyric, I've got to get out of this place if it's the last thing I ever do. The Ludlows next door are going through a period of marital discord. Hardly a day or night goes by without a violent argument and the sound of a human head being banged against the party wall. I feel sorry for poor Vince. Peggy is a fearsome woman when she is roused.
Monday, September 4
The autumn term has started, thank God. William complained this morning that his school uniform is too big for him. I told him it was his own fault for refusing to try it on in the shop. But I may ask my mother to turn up the trousers. They drag on the ground and make him look as though he is a double amputee.
Vince came round this morning, begging for sanctuary. He told me that Peggy found him in bed last week with their daughter's best friend, Mandy Trotter.
"She bleedin' flung herself at me and got me zip undone before I could stop 'er," he whined. "What was I s'posed to do?"
Glen pointed Mandy Trotter out to me when we were in the Co-Op. She was stacking the lower shelves. She is only four feet eleven inches tall and, though obviously over the age of consent, she looks like an emaciated child. Vince couldn't have fought very hard to keep her off his zip.
Tuesday, September 5
Peggy has been round to give her side of the story. Apparently, Mandy Trotter is pregnant with Vince's child. "What's he see in that skinny slag?" she asked. Her magnificent bosom was heaving and her gloriously long fishnetted legs were crossing and uncrossing as she sat at my kitchen table dropping ash on my vinyl tiles. I was speechless with desire for her.
It's time I found a sexual partner: a non-neurotic, childless, non-smoking, beautiful woman who enjoys literature, spotting Eddie Stobart lorries and housework would be ideal. Is it too much to ask that I should be allowed a little happiness?
Wednesday, September 6
I tried to understand what Mr Robin Cook was saying on the Today programme this morning. I think he was talking about his ethical foreign policy. However, he now gabbles his words and speaks at such a rate of knots that it is impossible to understand him. This is an infringement of my human rights as a British voter. Does Gaynor understand a word he says lately, or has she long-stopped listening to her wee bearded elf of a husband?
Thursday, September 7
Ivan Braithwaite has been sectioned under the Mental Health Act! It took four policemen and a straitjacket to get him in the ambulance. His mind snapped when his laptop, his printer, his fax, his three phones, his television, his radio and his pager were all switched on at once relaying different information.
When my mother came into his workspace and said, "Ivan, do you want to know something?" he flipped and started smashing the place up.
Robin Cook should take warning.
Still ill
Saturday, September 9, Arthur Askey Walk, Ashby-de-la-Zouch.
There are now two male members of our family in hospitaclass="underline" my father's infections keep mutating, and he is now the subject of a controlled trial. He's in an isolation unit. Quite honestly, this has come as quite a relief: visiting is strictly forbidden. It is possible to observe him through a glass panel, but what's the point of driving seven miles there and seven miles back to watch a middle-aged man puzzling over the Sun crossword.
Ivan Braithwaite has also been forbidden visitors. The psychiatric nurse in charge of him, a certain Steve Harper, said, "Ivan needs a break from the family dynamic." The family dynamic in question, my mother, is furious and spends most of the day sitting outside the locked ward telling anybody who will listen that it is "an overload of information technology that caused Ivan's breakdown". He'd processed 300 emails only half-an-hour before he cracked, she told me. I am now convinced that technology is to blame for most of society's ills.
I used to scoff at my dead grandmother Edna Mole's assertion that microwaves damage the brain, but since upgrading to a superior wattage I have noticed a diminution of brain power. It took me more than an hour to remember whether it was Shakespeare who wrote, "He that sleeps feels not the toothache", or Sir Walter Raleigh. I spoke these words at 4am to Glenn, who has got an abscess. However, he didn't sleep but kept me awake with his groans of pain. It was just our luck not to have a single painkilling tablet in the house.
Sunday, September 10
At first light, I went to the emergency chemist and asked for Paracetemol. The chemist, a child of 10, asked me if I intended to kill myself. I assured her that I didn't, and she handed over the pills. I tried to buy petrol today, but the queues were too long and there was a fight on the forecourt. Why?
Monday, September 11
Mohammed at the BP garage refused to sell me more than £5-worth of lead-free this morning. We were at school together, and our relationship has deepened in friendship over my fuel-buying years, yet he refused to help me out. How am I going to get William to school? There is no convenient public transport, and the journey is almost a mile.
Wednesday, September 13
I rang my MP, Pandora Braithwaite, to complain about the fuel crisis. She reminded me that when we were school-children together we used to walk a mile-and-a-half to Neil Armstrong Comprehensive School. I reminded her that, "This is the year 2000, where paedophiles stalk the avenues and cul-de-sacs."
She said scornfully, "You've obviously forgotten that sweetshop keeper who used to pretend his trousers had fallen down when we innocently asked for a gobstopper." I asked her why she was in such a bad mood. She said, "On the contrary, I'm in an excellent mood. I'm relieved that I'm not mentioned in Andrew Rawnsley's book, Servants of the People. I was sure he was going to use that story about me and Mo and Gordon Brown in that hotel service lift at Bournemouth."