The Landlady: Bad Mouth…

Before I am grounded and destined to stay in Brighton for the summer, I am off to Turkey next week with someone special. About bloody time too. As much as I am looking forward to my final trip for a while, I am not enjoying the run-up to it AT ALL.

The week started badly when I developed a tooth abscess while working in The Souvenir Shop. The following day it was even worse and, after a bad night’s sleep, I had no time to go to the dentist, or even to phone them as I was working all day. That evening, in agony, on a cocktail of ibuprofen and sauvignon blanc (not recommended by lunatics, let alone dentists), I made the dinner (a pasta bake, including a separate halal one for my Libyan lodger) for the following night and left it in the fridge. I awoke the following morning at 6.30am and got The Small Daughter off to school with her habitual boiled egg and soldiers. When I opened the fridge, I discovered that one of my other lodgers had eaten the halal pasta bake at some point between 9pm the previous night and 6.30am that morning. I was supposed to be painting my friend Miss T’s spare bedroom in Lewes as a favour that day and wanted an early start, so was not happy to have to trot off to The Supermarket in order to buy the new ingredients for the halal bake, and then make it again.

Even though I was an hour late arriving in Lewes, I almost crossed paths with my friend Miss T. She had been supposed to be on the 6.30am train to work in London, but she was in fact catching the slackers’ 9.30am train, due to an incident with pink Sambuca in a pub in Haywards Heath the previous evening. Very much a girl modelled from the same material as yours truly, that one.

In between my painting duties, I managed to telephone my dentist in Shoreham, who wasn’t there, but I spoke to another who recommended antibiotics. He said he’d leave them at reception for me and added, that if I so much as sniffed an alcoholic drink while taking them, I would end up, I quote, “in A&E with a bucket”. Because the dentist closed at 4pm, I had to rush my painting duties and high-tail it over to Shoreham, the only good thing being the maximum spanking of my day bus saver.

“The dentist said I would end up in A&E with a bucket”

Later that evening, I was working in the Souvenir Shop. The Small Daughter had been briefed to put the pasta bake in the oven at 7pm, ready for dinner at 7.30pm. After calling her approximately 18 times up until 7.30 to remind her about the dinner, to no avail, she finally sent me a text at 7.40 asking what was for dinner. AND IT’S ONLY WEDNESDAY!