On the Cares of the Day and the Angel Ellie May.

(I like the title because it reminds me of my mother’s infamous horror story: The Wig and the Wag and the Little Yellow Bag. Why would a mother want to tell her kid a horror story? But whatever…)

Today was another agonisingly frustrating one. It started about ten minutes after I got up and lasted until late afternoon. Phones (both mobile and landline) and the car were the issues this time, and the main villain of the piece was British Telecom who have received brickbats aplenty on this blog down the years.

The point about BT is that if you can manage to speak to a real person – sometimes you can and sometimes you can’t – their call centre assistants are fine. Today’s assistant was Ellie May, so a special shout out to her. (She’ll never read it, of course, but the energy goes out into the ether anyway and maybe it will land in her lap in some subtle form. Ellie May giggled a lot – which was engaging in itself – but never lost sight of the need to address the problem or the means of going about it. Ellie May was today’s angel sans wings.) The problem with BT, on the other hand, is that their system, and particularly their online organisation, is the very definition of the pits.

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And so this evening I set off up the lane with carrots and apples for the ladies Millie and Rosie. Millie was very stand-offish and declined the gift, so Rosie got the lot. And on the way back I saw a group of young bulls in one of the fields, so I leant on their gate for a while to watch them. Three of the black ones saw me and raced over for lots of ear and head scratchings, which they seem to enjoy immensely once they’ve plucked up the courage to trust the strange creature which walks on two legs.

And you know, it’s interesting how gaining the trust of animals and having that sort of contact with them makes you feel better about the irritating vicissitudes of life. I expect some manual somewhere says so.