The Good, the Bad, and the Excusable.

The good side of today came in the form of lady contacts (several humans and a dog which had sad eyes until I paid her some friendly attention.) The bad side was provided by the pestering of rats and bluebottles (current count is 21.) The worry came from the fact that Mel failed to call me on Skype at the appointed hour which she does every Sunday. I tried prompting her with a text message but that brought no response, so I tried calling her mobile. Voice mail; left message. Repeated the exercise two hours later. Same. This is very unusual.

It occurred to me that in the days before mobile phone use became effectively universal, a situation like that could be optimistically ascribed to the person involved being in a place where there was no private or public phone accessible. But now that everybody except the strange man who lives in a cave somewhere in the Grampians has a mobile phone, there’s more reason to worry. Odd, isn’t it, how we invent something really useful, but even that has its down side.

And by an odd coincidence, I received a text from Mel while I was typing this post. Seems she’d forgotten that it was Sunday, and has had her phone switched off all day in order to escape from the world. Sounds pretty acceptable to me.

(I’m well satisfied with Diane Setterfield’s novel The Thirteenth Tale so far, by the way. More on that tomorrow, maybe.)