Bloggus Interruptus

After four years of being a full-time mother, my wife has a job. I can't stress what a huge relief it is to no longer be the sole breadwinner. Admittedly, it is only a temporary proofreading job, but there is a strong possibility that more work will follow. We could certainly do with the money.

The one downside of this is that I've had very limited access to the internet, as my wife has been using our (or as I prefer to call it, my) laptop almost non-stop for the last ten days. Blogging has been virtually impossible under these conditions, so I've been at a bit of a loose end.

If only I liked the World Cup.

I suppose if I was French, I'd have a mistress somewhere, but being British, the most I can hope for is probably a model railway in the attic. And anyway, how do people find the time to have illicit affairs? It's as much as I can do to get my shirts ready for the next day.

I've tried writing a blog entry at work, but it's not the most relaxed of environments. For a start, my employers tend to frown on drinking wine during office hours and second, people keep interrupting my train of thought with inane questions. The open-plan office is a terrible invention.

I even tried writing a blog post yesterday in longhand, during a train journey to London, but I was soon joined by a family of four who spent the entire trip eating malodorous food (those awful "wraps" - what are they all about?) and shouting at each other. To make things worse, the mother kept looking at what I was writing and whilst I'm fairly confident that my script is illegible, it was inhibiting.

Perhaps I should have tested the illegibility by writing something a little bit saucy about her.

As a result, I haven't been able to write about how much I enjoyed fellow blogger Ollie's poetry evening at the Lewes Arms on Thursday, particularly as it featured an eleventh hour appearance from the Incredible Dancing Man of Lewes. I was already in a state of rapture from watching the utterly beautiful Italian poet, Emilia Telese in her stunning Neapolitan fisherman-themed dress (you had to be there), so the IDM was the icing on the cake:

I suppose I could have written my blog entry on the blissfully quiet train home from London, but after five hours in a pub with some friends from university, I wasn't quite in the writing mood.

It was a good evening. We ended up at the India Club, where we decided to test the theory that no matter what you ordered, the bill always would always come to £10 per head including the tip. As with our last visit, the restuarant was like the Marie Celeste and we decided to leave and come back later. Just as we were going, a waiter popped up from behind a table like a jack in the box. He had been sleeping.

When I arrived home, I was pleased to see that a friend had come to stay for the night. She was in a rather serious mood and related a very sad anecdote about a friend of hers which ended with the words "and then she hung herself."

There was a long pause, then my wife looked up and said "You mean, she hanged herself." I suppose a week of intense proofreading had taken its toll.

I was equally tactless when our friend related another very harrowing tale of a friend who had suffered from a particularly aggressive form of cancer:

"The poor man's had part of his colon removed."

"How much?" I enquired

"Well, about half of it." she replied, looking slightly bemused.

"So now he has a semi-colon."

Luckily she laughed.