Last week, someone told me I was turning into a miserable, embittered old grumbler. What rubbish. I’m as jolly as anything. All right, I don’t often write about my own happiness and successes, because they’re not that fascinating and boasting tends to get up people’s noses, but here’s a cheery episode just to prove that person wrong. On my way to orchestra rehearsal, I tripped over my dangling cello strap, fell flat on my face and smashed my knee on the road. Ouch! A crowd of drinkers outside the pub opposite rushed to my assistance, fellow players carried my 10-tonne cello upstairs, after the rehearsal I tottered out again, and guess what? I’d lost my keys.
The rain was widdling down, a gale blowing, I could barely walk, and now I couldn’t drive home. Blast. I must have dropped the keys as I fell over. Orchestra chums searched the road. Nothing. But then a miracle. Viola-player Helen spotted my keys, dangling from the windscreen wiper. Doubly miraculous, because not only had some kind person put them there, but in three whole hours, on a busy corner, no one had stolen my car!
Either a) the public are generally kind, honest and marvellous, or b) my car is very rubbishy indeed. Call me Pollyanna, but I decided to think a). So I drove home in a sunny mood, despite the pain, darkness and sheeting rain, thinking that the world was perhaps not as full of scoundrels as I had suspected.
We are going down like ninepins. Yesterday Rosemary fell flat into a tube carriage. The doors began to close, with her leg still outside.
“How much of your leg?”
“Enough to worry about,” reported Rosemary, but as she lay panicking, imagining her protruding leg being sliced off as the train reached the tunnel entrance, several chaps leapt forward like lightening, hauled her into the carriage and saved her.
Phew! We just throw ourselves on to the ground in front of strangers and we’re cared for, down here among the common people. I’m hoping that, before long, their goodness will trickle up as well as their money.
