Can't see the wood...

18th December 2022

After the helter-skelter of life last week, this week has been much more predictable as far as I am concerned, though thankfully Stephen’s week has included a glimmer of interest to warrant you opening up this page.

He once again took the high road to Milan, this time on Tuesday morning and this time not alone as the office in Montegranaro was required to show its collective face at the Christmas aperitivo of the parent company in the great metropolis. Bertrando drove Stephen and the nice assistant in his flash Mercedes, so they were travelling in style even if they did encounter a bit of snow when crossing the Apennines. They were fitting in a business meeting to make it more worthwhile, but even so it was with some reluctance that Stephen waved us a fond goodbye.

I was a little surprised to receive a WhatsApp video call in the evening around 7.30 from Stephen just before he went out so I could see him in all his party finery, because not being part of the glitterati I mistakenly thought aperitivo would be pre-dinner. Not so. From what Stephen told me afterwards it obviously means inviting people to a party and only have to serve them bite-sized nibbles (bite-sized that is if you are of the proportions of a Smurf), thereby establishing that you are not so much too cool for school as too cool to drool. Still, it was a chance to network, meaning Bertrando acted the life and soul of the party while Stephen and the nice assistant kept the wall company.

It was late before they left the do, and while his colleagues went in search of food, Stephen insisted he be dropped at the hotel, explaining forcefully, much to the taxi driver’s amusement, that he was much too old to be eating at one o’clock in the morning. While Stephen was safely tucked up in his bed, the other two were tucking into pizza and hamburger in a Pakistani café. He definitely had the better end of the deal as the nice assistant said it was the worst hamburger she had ever eaten – which sounds the perfect ending for a night out in a big city.

They returned the next day, though Stephen didn’t make it home till 7pm. They might have been earlier if (a) Bertrando had managed to get up at the time he said he would; (b) they had not stopped off at a designer outlet on the way in a fruitless search for a particular jumper as a present for his daughter, both of which meant (c) they spent an hour in stationary traffic because of an accident on the superstrada.

The rest of the week passed uneventfully, if you overlook the extension to my student taxi service when yesterday afternoon, while I was on my way to Marzia’s house for her lesson with Diego, which had, for reasons too complicated and not interesting enough to go into, been brought forward six days. Thanks to the new car, I was able to answer a call from Diego using hands free, asking if I could make a detour through the centre of Montegranaro and pick him up if he sent me his location. Working on the basis that it was all part of my USP, I was able to hang a left and follow the magical mystery tour that Google maps brought up, picking up Diego in the backstreets of the town and arriving at Marzia’s only five minutes or so later than usual.

Before that, however, there was a modicum of excitement when that which was lost was found. Stephen spent a degree of the day adorning the house with a percentage of the decorations that we have accumulated over the years. We have made the executive decision to forego a tree but there are enough bijou substitutes to group together to make up for it, as well as other tasteful arrangements.

It was, though, just after lunch that the exciting discovery of the day was made, when Stephen opened up a box that contained wrapping paper, labels, ribbon and such like, all the stuff you need to titivate your Christmas parcels, including a dinner knife with a yellow handle…

You may remember that earlier in the year we had the puzzle of the missing dinner knife, that our set of six, each with a different coloured handle, had somehow reduced to five. We couldn’t find the missing one no matter where we looked and how much we upturned the kitchen drawers. We came to the conclusion that it had somehow ended up in one of the bins, maybe the umido with some food scraps, and Stephen, on a visit to Milan, was able to buy a replacement to make the set once again complete.

More than complete, now, as I discovered when I came into the kitchen to see Stephen brandished a knife with a yellow handle at me, before going on to claim in an aggrieved tone that I had accused him of throwing it away, in an attempt to shift the perceived blame onto my shoulders. Loathe as I am to deny him the moral high ground, I have to point out in the interests of fairness, that (a) I never accused him of such a thing, merely offered, at the time, the perfectly feasible explanation that it must somehow have got mixed up with some vegetable matter; and (b) the box in which it was discovered is the one he uses, I have other arrangements that side of life.

Let us not, however, carp about it, as we now have another knotty problem to unravel: what do we do about having an odd number of knives and, moreover, a disproportionate number of yellow ones? It may seem a small matter to some of you, but I am confident that my fellow Virgos will understand its enormity.