Sometimes when I speak in public – in a classroom setting, or at a literary event, or at the Ealing Civic Society’s annual building design awards presentation, someone will come up to me and say, “Is this going to be the subject of your next column?” I always say, “Possibly, if something goes really badly wrong!” But what I’m really thinking is: my version of events versus the recollection of 80 to 100 independent witnesses? Not likely. An argument with a squirrel – that I can write about.
Memory and perception can be famously poor mediators of reality. In this dark era of disinformation and fake news, I find it helpful to take stock of my life on an annual basis, reckoning with nothing but cold, hard numbers. These, then, are my personal statistics for the year 2018, using the very latest obtainable figures.
6 Number of columns over the course of 12 months that I have written about having a bad car. I am truly sorry about this. I never set out to try the patience of readers by revisiting the subject so relentlessly, but then I had never previously understood the myriad ways in which a single secondhand automobile can be bad.
7 The approximate numbers of ways, in my newfound understanding, in which a car can be bad: the badness of having warning lights that come on for no reason; the badness of leaking oil; the badness of being a model recalled by the manufacturer because of a tendency to suddenly lose all power while driving at high speeds; and of also being recalled for sometimes catching fire while standing still; of having a key part installed the wrong way round; of having a gearbox that periodically overheats; and of being officially listed – erroneously, as it happens – as stolen by a prominent credit reporting agency.
1 Scraps of paper on which I felt obliged to write a quotation from my wife, to be signed, dated and held in my wallet for safekeeping, in order to remind her of her previous attitude to our car problems at a point later in the saga. The exact quotation was, “Come on – it’s funny!”
365 Number of mornings I have told the cat to shut up after it woke me by yowling in my face in order to get me to go downstairs and turn the kitchen tap to a trickle, because that’s the only way the stupid cat will consume water these days.
365 Times I have relented and gone down to turn on the kitchen tap immediately afterwards.
5 The approximate total number of squirrels that I now actually believe constitute the previously supposed single squirrel I consider to be my arch-enemy, and one of which is staring at me through the window with hate in his eyes as I write this.
36 Miles per hour I was travelling, in a 30mph zone – ironically, in a car so troubled it would give out for good the very next afternoon – thereby obliging me to attend my first ever speed awareness course in Dorset.
3 The number of times, in 2018, I have reinstalled the same bathroom shelf that is even now leaning so badly that anything you place on it slides off and crashes to the floor. I figure I can get one more ineffective repair out of it before the year is out.
11 Number of swearwords I immediately deleted from my prepared remarks to the Ealing Civic Society’s annual building design awards as soon as I laid eyes on the audience.
9 The approximate number of decent laughs I nevertheless managed to wring from that same Ealing audience, thereby rendering the evening insufficiently disastrous to appear in the subsequent week’s column.
66 Percentage of those successfully landed jokes that were at the expense of Acton.
43 Instances per annum of a fox crossing the large garden of a house 100 metres away, thereby interrupting a sensor beam and triggering a security light so powerful that it creates a window-shaped beacon against my bedroom ceiling bright enough to wake me up, affording me a few quiet lonely hours to ponder the meaninglessness of existence, the certainty of death and, at some indefinable point in the future, the possibility of curtains.
Happy New Year.
