Ever The Sceptic

After a good night’s sleep my phone seems to be working again, fingers crossed. Although L, ever the sceptic, reckons I’m just looking for an excuse to buy a fancy smart phone like Daughter’s. It would be nice but I'm not as rich as Daughter.

As I cycle along this morning, I feel something tugging at my foot, gradually gripping it tighter and tighter, squeezing it. I finally look down and stop pedalling as I realise that I’ve managed to trap a strand from my sock in my cleats and the action of pedalling has unravelled it and wrapped it around my foot. Time for some new socks I think.

I spend all morning in a meeting, which was as dull as expected. I nodded off a few times until eventually someone served me a second cup of coffee which enabled me to see it through.

L’s having a bad day and offers two options for this evening. Either I take her to the pub, or she brings home the stickiest pudding she can find and downs it with a few glasses of wine.

I think the pub might be the safest option. So I take the boys on the park for a quick session and then we head up to meet L at Middleton’s. She's running there, having left her bike at work, which I hope isn’t a tactic to try and get her out of Hathersage on Sunday. Hmmm, no bike, no triathlon.

As we are leaving the park it starts raining, not heavily, not cats and dogs, more a case of small mice and a few gerbils. We pass a group of teenagers sheltering under a tree; one of the girls is trying to talk one of the lads out of his shirt, because she is getting cold and wet. He chivalrously, naturally hoping such an act of kindness will be reciprocated in ways to his benefit, takes it off and hands it to her. She put it over her shoulders, leaving him standing bare-chested in the rain, naive fool.

As we walk along to Middleton’s, the cats and dogs duly arrive and we are glad to get under shelter in their porch with a pint of Cumberland. It’s actually quite a romantic setting if only I had female company, then a few minutes later I see L swimming down the street towards us. My company is on its way.

We had only intended to stay for one or two but we have to buy more beer in the hope that the weather will fine up. It doesn’t and we gradually get more and more oiled. We don’t even mind that much when we get chatted up by a former professional tennis player (allegedly) who claims to have a 150mph serve and penchant for threesomes. He seems disappointed when we don’t appear keen for him to demonstrate either but we let him buy the dogs a bag of mini cheddars just to show there’s no ill feeling.