Thank My Lucky Stars!

I've said it before, I know – but then I've said lots of things before – but working for a living is extraordinarily hard. Well, perhaps 'hard' isn't exactly the right word. Bloody nuisance is more like it. It's after nine o'clock now and all I've done this evening is change the bedding, load the dishwasher (no, not with the bedding, that went in the washing machine) and cook dinner. I have to be in bed in an hour or so and I have my Spanish lesson to complete, a letter to write, AND I'm supposed to be typing up some minutes from a meeting I had a whole week ago! Doh! It's impossible to get these things done. When I was a man of leisure, I wouldn't even be home from early doors in the pub by now. I guess I should do my Spanish lesson in the car (I spend long enough in the damned thing) but I can't seem to write up the exercises and keep my eyes on the road at the same time.

Anyway, enough of this moaning – let's look on the bright side of things. I have so much more to be grateful for – I tell myself this each morning when that public enemy of an alarm clock wakes me up (it's a nasty-looking little thing, so it is). I resist the temptation to hurl it into the abyss (I keep an abyss in my bedroom; or at least I think I do because I'm assuming that's where things disappear to - such as my favourite socks and once, an entire cheese sandwich). I resist the urge to plunge the beastly clock into the toilet, or to smash it with the lump hammer I keep beside the bed (don't ask). No, instead, I cheerfully press the 'stop' button (I never use the 'snooze' button, for to do so is to sink into despair) and I leap out of bed thanking my lucky stars that I at least have a bed to leap out of, and not a shop doorway, nor a prison cot, nor a shallow grave.

I'm very lucky, me – nothing has ever gone wrong in my life. Well, unless you count the time that Great Aunt Dolores mistakenly sold me to white slavers – she thought that her command of the Outer Western Malayo-Polynesian languages was near-perfect, and she thought that she was asking for directions to the nearest rubber plantation. It turned out that she was offering my services as a gimp to the local chief – I'd already dug three salt mines and been hung upside down from a tree before she realized her mistake and came to rescue me. I had the last laugh though – it cost her a whole carton of her damned Lucky Strikes to get me back.

No, I've led a charmed life really. No complaints from me on that score. So, in just a few short hours I shall be thumping that 'stop' button again and jumping to the floor singing 'thanks' to the lucky stars that put it there, and not the abyss.

Mind you, I wish they'd invent an alarm clock that takes thirty-six hours to get round, instead of twenty-four. To the man who does that, I'd take off my hat.