Best Mum Ever

My wife took my backpack to England and left hers, because my backpack is slightly better. Well, it’s about five or six years newer and backpack technology improves at a frantic pace: better compression straps, more handy crush proof pockets for sunglasses, better little organisational zipped mesh pockets, and so on. And I couldn’t begrudge her this, because I had hers, and she diligently emptied all the things out of mine so she didn’t deprive me of USB memory sticks or the token for my online bank or a whole bunch of receipts I really needed to throw in the bin.

However.

However, she wasn’t so careful about her own bag, which is why I’ve been going to work with a bag that says "Best Mum Ever" on it, which raised a few comments. To which I agreed that I am the best mum ever, and have anyone who tried to chip in the hairy eyeball. I suppose I should have said I have the best mum ever, but esprit d’escalier and all that. (I learned the German word treppenwitz just the other day, which is perhaps even better.)

In my bag/her bag I transported all the pills I had to take at work today (one of them has to be consumed with an acidic drink and there’s only bread, milk and watermelon in the fridge so I went to get orange juice at work) and I have to relate that one poor side effect of the chemical cocktail is that my right eye got very hot for ten minutes. Otherwise, not much to relate, although apparently I was then on the nod for a whole meeting. And that’s the insomnia causing antihistamines, whereas the supposedly drowsiness causing ones had me wake up at 1am. And then go back to sleep.

Anyway, not to gas on about drugs any more. Back to my wife being remiss at emptying her bag.

Late this evening, searching for my keys in the bag, I reached in, and extracted this:

Slightly crinkled from having a laptop jammed on it was a greetings card with the Clangers on it. It took me a moment to work out that my wife had managed to find me a Clangers card for my birthday, and then the surge of gratitude that she’d think of this, and then the extra bittersweet emotion when I found it because she wouldn’t be able to inscribe for me… Well, then I had to try to explain to a Singaporean workmate what the Clangers are, while a treacherous tear escaped from my eye, and I had to clear off sharpish before I deteriorated any further.

Although I walked home (30 minutes, the same time it takes me to get to work by bus, so something is not quite right there) and the exercise did me good. My knee has only hurt once today, although when my doctor mentioned I could get an MRI I really should have pressed him to refer me, not just mention it as a conceptual possibility, and my thumb slowly improves. So I’m still in a trench, but the gradient is at least uphill. I wonder what I’ll find tomorrow.