THE charming lady who had stopped me in the car park at Manx Radio to say how much she liked my Examiner column added: ‘Amusing things must happen to you every day.’
I thanked her and moved on, looking back over what had been happening during the week.
I had to go to Lloyds Bank to see if they would let me have some of my money. Because of the Department of Infrastructure’s digger-pokery up and all round Prospect Hill, I could only find a place to park right at the far end of Athol Street.
It might have been easier to drop into the railway station and catch a train to Castletown and go to the Lloyds branch there. My only comfort was the realisation that my bank’s premises on Prospect Hill, along with my money, were completely secure against any gang of bank robbers.
They could never find anywhere handy to leave the getaway car.
Walking back along Athol Street I came up with a man with one of those brushes on a long bendy stick cleaning the upper windows of offices. As I passed him some of the water came showering down on me from above. I told him sourly: ‘Haven’t we had enough rain without you making it worse?’
He grinned appreciatively. ‘Nice one, Tel,’ he said.
This was just a single day.
Nearly every morning when driving to work I have been looking intently at the two electronic displays outside the Sea Terminal which tell us the time, the date, and the temperature. I have found the latter to be consistently higher than they should have been and sometimes different from each other.
One day the temperature on one display was 12°C and on the other 9°C. The temperature display in my car was saying 7.5°C, as forecast by the Met Office at Ronaldsway.
I was pondering gloomily on the way modern technology likes to make fools of us all when I braked just in time to avoid running over and killing a terrified mother and her two small children walking over the pedestrian crossing outside the offices of the Steam Packet Company.
One evening I went to see the stunning and deeply moving production of Miss Saigon at the Gaiety. Halfway through the first act I remembered that I had not switched off my mobile phone, which was wrapped safely in my overcoat tucked under my seat.
People around me stirred and muttered as I bent down quickly to rummage noisily for it. They were caught up in the compelling intensity of the music. They didn’t want to hear my ringtone.
It was not the time or place for George Formby singing ‘Riding in the TT Races’.
Finally last week, after a night of howling wind blasting down from Snaefell, I found, lying outside the kitchen window at the back of the bijou residence, two sets of goal posts and netting which had been blown over the hedge from the football pitch used by Douglas High School Old Boys in Blackberry Lane.
I stared at them, wondering why, at this stage in my life, God had decided to move the goal posts.
• A LADY to be known only as Ali of Glen Maye reports a reader’s letter in the Examiner saying that the Green Power Manx Group are ‘resolutely anti-onshore wine farms’.
Offshore wine farms then? You wouldn’t get a really dry Chardonnay from one of those.
• RON Shimmin reports a roofer’s van announcing ‘All Ireland Covered’. Ron and his wife Jean wonder if, in the present state of the Irish economy, the country can afford it.
The slogan, of course, should be ‘All Island Covered’.
Fine, considering the rain we’ve had. But come the summer could they instal a sliding roof like the one on the Centre Court at Wimbledon?