Diverse Alarms
A busy weekend here on the homestead, if only for the number of things to go wrong. In reverse order of occurence:
1. Sitting up until the wee hours to watch Spurs lose 1-0 to Manchester United. I'm a big fan of Spurs manager Martin Jol: the players love him, the fans love him, he's given the club their best finish in donkey's years - for two seasons on the trot - so what if the team's in a bit of a bad patch? Keeping him on should be a no-brainer.
I fully expect the poor sod to be sacked by the end of the week.
2. Hosting a birthday party for my wife yesterday afternoon. Everything went very well indeed until after the event. That's when we found one of the smaller guests had thought it would be jolly good fun to remove the keys from every door in the house and scatter them. Still can't find the one to open the door to the back garden ... and the landlord's coming round for our quarterly inspection on Wednesday. Grrr.
3. Sitting down to eat on Friday night and hearing an ominous 'bleep'. The kind of 'bleep' you get when a curious six-year-old arms the burglar alarm system. The kind of 'bleep' that tells you you've got ten seconds to input the right code before it goes off. Thing is, we never arm the burglar alarm for the simple reason we don't have that code ...
Picture the children, running round the house in terror, screaming at the top of their lungs, hands clasped over ears vainly trying to block out a sound you'd hear on the other side of the planet.
Picture us trying to calm them down long enough to find whatever scrap of paper the right digits had been jotted on by the landlord.
Then picture the failure of both of the above tasks.
By the time we finally got the code the noise really didn't seem that bad any more - which didn't signify any stoic acceptance on my part so much as the onset of permanent deafness. But hey, we learned three things from the experience: don't let your daughter anywhere near ominous looking wall panels in the hallway; the landlord won't have the four digit code you need so don't bother calling him; and no matter how loud the alarm gets or how long it screeches for, not a single person on the whole of the street will come out to see what's going on.
Which is comforting.
1. Sitting up until the wee hours to watch Spurs lose 1-0 to Manchester United. I'm a big fan of Spurs manager Martin Jol: the players love him, the fans love him, he's given the club their best finish in donkey's years - for two seasons on the trot - so what if the team's in a bit of a bad patch? Keeping him on should be a no-brainer.
I fully expect the poor sod to be sacked by the end of the week.
2. Hosting a birthday party for my wife yesterday afternoon. Everything went very well indeed until after the event. That's when we found one of the smaller guests had thought it would be jolly good fun to remove the keys from every door in the house and scatter them. Still can't find the one to open the door to the back garden ... and the landlord's coming round for our quarterly inspection on Wednesday. Grrr.
3. Sitting down to eat on Friday night and hearing an ominous 'bleep'. The kind of 'bleep' you get when a curious six-year-old arms the burglar alarm system. The kind of 'bleep' that tells you you've got ten seconds to input the right code before it goes off. Thing is, we never arm the burglar alarm for the simple reason we don't have that code ...
Picture the children, running round the house in terror, screaming at the top of their lungs, hands clasped over ears vainly trying to block out a sound you'd hear on the other side of the planet.
Picture us trying to calm them down long enough to find whatever scrap of paper the right digits had been jotted on by the landlord.
Then picture the failure of both of the above tasks.
By the time we finally got the code the noise really didn't seem that bad any more - which didn't signify any stoic acceptance on my part so much as the onset of permanent deafness. But hey, we learned three things from the experience: don't let your daughter anywhere near ominous looking wall panels in the hallway; the landlord won't have the four digit code you need so don't bother calling him; and no matter how loud the alarm gets or how long it screeches for, not a single person on the whole of the street will come out to see what's going on.
Which is comforting.
posted by Pete Kempshall at 5:15 PM
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