Gentle readers…..you will understand I’m sure when I tell you that not every week is as easy as others to come up with the moderate levels of value added that I normally manage to relay to you. This is one such. The fact is not much has happened. Well perhaps it has, but put it like this. My typical level of equanimity had already been jeopardised last weekend by the time Bob ( back on holiday, always a stressful time, but allowed a rare break from GCSE revision ) and I set out on Saturday morning to replace our chicken flock which had been eaten in its entirety ( that is Custard the Cockerel, Honeypot, Replacement, Norwich and two whose names I cant recall ) by a fox the evening before. I had just about been able to accept that disaster as the luck of the Gods, but then my phone rang and it was Jimmy. I knew things had been going to well as far as she was concerned. On her way trekking in Nepal she had left her Caxton card, her only means of access to funds, on the back seat of a Kolkata taxi and was therefore up sh*t creek rather than the Khyber. Although you will know me as a calm and collected type you will probably sympathise as I relate that the Toyota was brought to a screeching halt on the slip road to the A11, cardboard boxes full of chickens sliding all over the boot as I came to terms with the enormity of this latest crisis in my life.
Upon reflection though the solution was quite straight forward. This is another one of these Tony Hancock moments, but the fact is that for the last fifteen years Sophie and I have donated by standing order to the Ghurka Welfare Trust sponsoring a lovely old man who devoted his life to the British Army and is now enjoying a comfortable retirement sipping raksi in the foothills of the Himalayas. Payback time. I could simply order a replacement Caxton card and DHL it to the offices of the GWT in Pokhara, where Jimmy was heading to as the “Base Camp” for her stroll around the Annapurna Trail. Perhaps this will come as no surprise to you as I have hinted previously of her lack of a social conscience. She who has spent a fair chunk of her GAP year lounging on a beach rather than saving the world. But I have to say that even I, who knows her better than you, was appalled when her response to my calming and reassuring comment that she shouldn’t worry, we’d get a card to her “we’ve been sponsoring a Ghurka for 15 years you know” was ….. “ DADDY……I don’t get it, what do you mean you sponsored a gherkin”. Speechless.
And another thing which has upset my equilibrium this week….only that my jammy brother can still afford to go sailing in the BVI, have dolphins surfing in the bow wake of his catamaran, see three humpback whales and get invited to dinner on Necker Island. So you’ll forgive me when I tell you I’m not in
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