In the mail

Our old landlord came round to our flat tonight, bearing a bag filled with mail that had been delivered to our old flat. Copious bank statements, two credit cards, communications from the Isle of Man and from the US, a new frequent flyer card and three issues of the London Review Of Books. Now I have the fun of going through all this mail and checking who I’ve told to change my address, and who else I need to notify. It’s enough to make you want to never move again.

Still, now I have lots of copies of the LRB to work my way through, which is a good problem to have. It makes for light relief from my struggle with One Hundred Years Of Solitude, where I’m a little worried that after 400 pages it will turn out to be my wife’s idea of a practical joke to make me read extended metaphors that I don’t understand. And when I finish that, I have The Constant Gardener to cheer myself up with.

After two days of failing to be present for parental duties, I took wife and child out for eggs this morning, and thus felt less guilty about deserting them spend all day in the office. Although then we had company drinks this evening, which meant I missed bath time for the fourth day on the trot (La Serpiente Aquatica Negra didn’t get a bath when we came home on Monday from Hong Kong, because we couldn’t face waking her up, and since then my wife has been on hose duty).

So again this evening I missed all the hilarity of putting my child down to sleep. Tomorrow things get back to normal, and then on Saturday I should be back to running again, after neglecting my body this week. We’ve already planned out our entire weekend and the routine will be nice. Or whatever routine we can construct before Baby #2 smashes it all to pieces again.