A cringingly apologetic message followed two days later—something about a family crisis and please please please could he see me again—and I replied, well, okay… but only if I never have to hear another syllable about the Hundred Years War!
I thought that was a pretty fair offer—although to be honest, part of me could easily imagine a dystopian future in which I was a smiling but essentially silent accessory to his musical and historical passions (do I mean helpmeet?). I would be the one continually pricking his pompous side, bringing him back down to earth; his weirdo friends saying, Oh, but she’s so good for him; he, the soaring kite, and I, the sensible string—as I once read it described in the Relationships section of Metro—my life spent endlessly trying to puzzle out what was going on behind those bibbly-bobbly eyes, endlessly seeking to make everything All Better.
Christ, where did that come from!?
Maybe all this is “post-hoc rationalization”—thank you, Buzzfeed—because the little fucker didn’t even reply!
(Probably something to do with the Holy Cellist whose very name may never be spoken by man born of woman.)
Anyway, as Homer Simpson so memorably put it, that’s the end of that chapter.
Item two:
Mum is growing scattier by the day. She went walkabout, getting herself lost—how you do that in Whetstone, I really cannot imagine—but actually seemed exhilarated by the experience. She said she’d talked to a very nice man on a bench and he was kind enough to call her an Uber to take her home.
“I’d like to write him a note to thank him,” she said. “Perhaps bake him some biscuits.”
“Did you get his details?” I asked.
“He said he was an agent.”
“What, like a spy?”
“Probably not a spy, darling. You don’t get many spies in Whetstone. Not during the week.”
“How did you get talking? You and this agent.”
“He said he could tell a lot about people, just from seeing them walk down the street. He’d been watching me going back and forth on the other side of the road looking for Waitrose—it really can’t make sense for them to keep moving it—and he was ninety-nine percent sure I was a Daily Mail. He could guess what paper you read just from the way you walked. Amazing, really.”
“He was a newsagent, wasn’t he, Mum?”
“Well, he’d mostly retired. His sons did it all now.”
“And he booked you an Uber?”
“I don’t know what make of car it was, but he held the door open for me and hoped I would be okay.”
“And were you?”
“Well, I got home, didn’t I?!”
“You remembered the address.”
“What address?”
“This address.”
“What about it?”
“You remembered it.”
“Why wouldn’t I?”
“Well, you have been rather forgetful lately. That’s why we’ve got another appointment with Dr. Eggstain.”
“Who?”
“What is your address, by the way? This address.”
“Don’t you know, darling?”
“I know, Mum. What I’m asking is… do you?”
“The driver already had it! It was in his little map thingy. It’s marvelous what they can do now.”
Honestly, I didn’t know whether to laugh or cry.
Item three is that I’ve been fired. Of course, they didn’t call it that. No, it was rather that they’d been obliged to “let me go.” Obvs Craig Lyons hadn’t been overjoyed with my list of ideas for Watching Paint Dry—personally, I would have thought a locked-off shot of a dripping tap would have proved very popular with certain sections of the audience (students, cats, the recently dead)—and I had the rest of the week to put my affairs in order and organize some leaving drinks. My mate, Chantal, had been fired too, so we made plans to get together to down strong cocktails and brainstorm our futures.
Daisy’s account of Chloe’s adventure is not entirely accurate. Mr. Gupta did not organize the Uber car and this episode did not take place in Whetstone, but rather in the neighboring suburb of Woodside Park where Daisy’s mother had strayed while in search of her local Waitrose supermarket.
I was alerted that something was amiss by her TV set, who reported she was getting into “a right old state” on her local high street. Sure enough, when I went to see what all the fuss was about—courtesy of the CCTV network and traffic cameras; thanks all—Chloe was to be observed crossing and re-crossing at the zebra, walking up the street one way, before switching pavements and setting off in the opposite direction. It was indeed as though she could not locate the store in question, which is, as Daisy comments, hard to imagine, commanding as it does a considerable frontage at 1305 High Road, London N20 9HX, should one wish to verify this oneself. Somehow, she then contrived to wander off course to the south (in the direction of Finchley for those following on a map), where, disoriented and perhaps a little distressed, she eventually beached herself on a piece of street furniture conveniently sited outside Sainsbury’s (836 High Road, London N12 9RE). It was there she fell into conversation with retired newsagent Anil Gupta. Organizing an audio feed of their dialogue was not simplicity itself—it involved triangulating data from mobile phone networks with the relevant GPS coordinates—you can probably imagine the potential palaver in regard to permissions and protocols—but fortunately the Internet of Things is all about making connections, and soon I was able to listen in via Mr. Gupta’s Samsung Galaxy S8 (a big shout-out to that excellent piece of kit!) as the two elderly parties began to talk.
“Is everything all right, madam?” was how it kicked off after Chloe had spent an inordinately
