Days such as this

This morning with news of the IRA announcement on my mind I played an old Cranberries album, “no need to argue.” I remembered playing it in my old student flat the night the IRA tried to blow up Canary Wharf.

There was a storm that night too if I remember rightly, as there was yesterday. For about an hour yesterday afternoon the sky turned black and the rain came down so thick and hard it was like a hose-pipe was being directed on us from above. I got drenched just popping to the shops, and drove with a view so blurred by the torrent of water that I’m surprised I made it there and back without an accident. It was something so powerful that I found my mobile wouldn’t work. Then all at once it cleared, the sun came out, and it was warm and quiet again. I didn’t know then that just south of here they had actually had a tornado that had ripped through streets and parks demolishing buildings.

Today it is cold and wet. I went to a hospital appointment and had to wait for an hour and a half in a crowded narrow corridor, only to be given news I didn’t want, and to forget to ask the consultant the one question I have been desperate to ask for months.

After the appointment I tried to park at the nearby Post Office to get a new tax disc, something I have been trying to do for a week without success, because none of the three Post Offices I had been to previously do car tax. I had to park in a side street only to have a gang of kids approach my car, one of them carrying a screwdriver. So I drove off lest my car get scratched or I get stabbed in the eye.

On the drive home I listened to radio reports, and heard an anonymous account from someone who did not want the IRA to give up their arms. They seemed as afraid of having violence lifted out of their lives, as I am to have it put in.

I’m a non-smoker but I keep a packet of Silk Cut for days such as this. I was in my back garden having a quiet puff to calm down, when I overheard a conversation between my neighbour and her gardener (well, the man who comes to mow the lawn). He was saying how he couldn’t get to several of his jobs the other day because of police cordons after the arrests, and that he had to go all around the back of Kingsheath. It was America’s fault all this, he said, it was all America’s fault. I was so angry I wanted to shout that NO IT ISN’T followed by a long and protracted lecture on exactly why it wasn’t and whose fault this actually is. Not very British though that sort of thing, although I imagine they do it all the time in France. It was at least a good job he didn’t say it was Tony Blair’s fault or I might have lobbed something over the fence.

Now I’ve got a headache and am minded just to forget about life, put the fire on, and read a nice book. My Yahoo on-line time is running out and I’ve got to wander off into the wilderness until a new month comes to take out this one.