I confess I am guilty of a heinous crime. We had some young colleagues of Alison’s over for a drink last night. It was a hot, sticky evening and I was quite thirsty. It’s possible that my sampling of an excellent local Sussex Rosé, three different white wines and a nice Chilean Pinot Noir may have been slightly excessive. The last thing Alison said to me before retiring at 10pm was “don’t forget to turn off the sprinkler”. “No, Darling I won’t”; with raised eyebrows at the cheek of her suggestion. As if I would. So I settled down to watch the climax of a very exciting PGA Championship in San Francisco. (That’s a golf Major, for the uninitiated). A new boy on the block, twenty three year old American Collin (one l is silent) Morikawa, played sublimely, shooting a final round 64 to win by two shots. It had to be watched to the end, which meant crashing at about 2am. In my befuddled state I slid into slumber with the strong sensation that the noise I was hearing shouldn’t have been there. I woke sharp at 6 to the awful realisation (now fully compos mentis) that the noise was that of water leaving the garden tap close to my window and being deposited on a by now pretty sodden top lawn. Embarrassed and ashamed I leapt out of bed (well ok, crawled) and wearing only a rather crumpled pair of Tommy Hilfiger boxers, dashed out to the front of the house to turn off the exhausted tap. Perhaps the most surprising part of this soggy tale is that the top lawn wasn’t soggy at all. The ground is very parched.
Television’s sixty year old entertainment entrepreneur, Simon Cowell has just shown that not all Briton’s have got talent. Whilst testing a new electric bicycle in the courtyard of his Malibu home he came to grief and has broken his back in three places. A six hour operation seems to have worked but he will miss the upcoming live editions of America’s Got Talent. It just goes to reaffirm how life can dramatically change in the blink of an eye. Returning from a dog walk and blackberry picking excursion this morning, Callie the whippet decided not to follow daughter Tiggy through the garden gate, but rushed back to find her Mistress out on the road. A passing car missed her by the narrowest of margins. How different today might have been.
I might have been using a word that I saw for the first time in The Times today; the headline read “Don’t catastrophise bad exam results, parents told”. The quote comes from Melanie Sanderson, Managing Editor of The Good Schools Guide. I wonder what Good School she went to! It seems that nowadays you can add “ise” to any noun to make a verb on a personal whim. If you can Nationalise and Privatise and Dramatise and Monetise, why shouldn’t you Catastrophise? I’ll leave you with that rhetorical question. Please don’t thoughtise too deeply.
ADayInTheStrifeOf 