A number of years ago I took out a tiny mortgage to help my mother buy her present house. Today I got a statement which showed that it is coming to the end of its term (huzzah!). It reminded me that had I not taken out the mortgage I would never have got to meet the world’s most stupid man.

Because the mortgage was very very small I was able to offset the whole amount with money that I had saved to meet emergencies. This meant that I earned no interest on my savings and in return (and subject to a wrinkle that I am about to explain) paid no interest on the money I had borrowed. The wrinkle is that interest is charged each month on the money borrowed on a different day to that on which it is paid on savings. This meant that over the course of last year I paid a whopping 7 pence interest.

I had to call the mortgage company to get a tax statement. The man in the call centre had one of those annoying scripts that requires him to talk to you as if you have been mates since nursery school and to try to sell you things. This, as best as I can recollect it, is our conversation:

Idiot: Whilst you’re on do you want me to see if I can get a better deal for you on your mortgage?

Moobs: No thank you, I’m happy with my existing deal.

I: We’ve managed to help many of our valued customers make real savings by looking at alternative mortgage arrangements.

M: Thanks but as I only paid 7 pence interest this year I don’t really see you beating that deal.

I: I’d be very happy to try

M: You want to see if you can reduce my monthly mortgage payments to less than a penny a month?

I: Sure do.

M: OOOOOOOk, by all means try.

I: Will you hold a moment?

M: No

I: Er .. it will just take 5 minutes, can’t I pop u on hold?

M: No

I: May I ask why?

M: Because putting me on hold for 5 minutes will cost me more than 7 pence so it will make the whole thing a waste of time.

I: Oh, I see, do you want me to call you back?

M: Won’t that cost you more than 7 pence?

I: Leave it with me.

Bless his little empty head, he did call me back with the bombshell that no they couldn’t do better than 7 pence interest a year. I can’t work out whether this is the best customer service I have ever received or the worst.

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Little Emma Succumbs to CeeBeebies

Originally uploaded by moobsblog

Like many Scots P appears to be part salmon and come Christmas she is overtaken by a instinctual imperative to struggle back to her spawning ground. In consequence the Moobses tend to meet a couple of weeks before the big day and have an ersatz yuletide. This year my sister C came over from Holland with her kids. When I opened the front door C’s little son Sam came spinning in to the house full of excitement. Behind him was, to my amazement, my sister C but as she had once been: an auburn-haired three year old bright-eyed and purposeful. It was as if someone had torn time apart and she had stepped from her childhood into my middle age. It was Emma, C’s daughter. Emma stepped forward and gave my leg a hug.

C was 40 last week. Her life has been neither straightforward nor easy. As a child she was fearless. When, at age 6, I clung to Mum’s flared trouser leg and refused to go and spend a weekend with my grandparents, C simply climbed into the back of their car and waited for them to get under way.There has always been something of a psychological division between the boys and the girls in my family. My brother and I are blatherers and, at heart, a little fearful. Sometimes the fear works for us. Faced with examinations we get scared and get working. C, who is almost certainly the brightest of the four of us, did less well academically. This was partly born of the blows to self-confidence that my father was so adept at delivering and partly because she didn’t fear the consequences of doing badly. C is, at heart, a tender soul and is easily wounded but she responds to each affront with fire and defiance. What she has in common with all the Moobs kids is that she is an expert in everything and will not let the actual experience of others get in the way of her lecturing them about their own area of expertise. The four of us probably account for about 80% of the world’s remaining reserves of lightly-informed but loudly-declared opinions (17% being stored in London cab drivers).

When she was old enough for high school, C went off to a convent boarding school. Had I been sent to boarding school I would have wet myself nightly and ending up choking to death on self-pitying poems about abandonment. C appeared to thrive. There came a time when my Father felt that the results being achieved were not matching the outlay on fees and poor C was taken from the school and dumped into a pitifully inadequate pseudo-school run in a house in our local town. The candy-striped dresses and straw boaters that the schoolgirls were made to wear demonstrated that even in the context of a town inclined to see a walkman as the hand-tooled instrument of the devil and rush, pitchfork in hand, to fend off modernity, the school was a laughable anachronism. The purpose of the school seemed to be to turn out women with enough education to equip them to entertain when throwing dinner-parties for their executive husbands. It should not have been surprising, therefore, when C announced, well short of her eighteenth birthday, that she was getting married.The lucky man was doughy polyp called Ian. He was barely older than C and was starting out as a car mechanic. In a nod to tradition he called upon my father and asked for permission to marry. I vivdly remember Ian trudging into our sitting room, where my Father lay waiting for him. It was all handled with considerable formality, the opening question being, improbably, “Do you play golf?” Ian did not play golf. I doubt that much affected the outcome but he was told no. C, characteristically, told us she was getting married anyway and moved out, taking up a job in a residential care home. There was an engagement party and she acquired a ring from Ian but had a change of heart and moved instead to London. London was so remote and so different a place, we could not have been more surprised if she had jumped up and started floating towards the moon. Again, she was utterly fearless and set about a career as a nanny.

I was still at university when she announced that she was pregnant. The father was a man called Alan who was from Hull or Hartlepool. He proved to be utterly feckless and fecked back off north instantly. This did nothing to deflect C from her march to motherhood. I don’t recall her expressing so much as a doubt let alone regret about the turn her life had taken. Whilst I was only then taking my first wobbly steps into the world of adult relationships, C seemed to have grown up fast enough to shoot past me and over the horizon. I did not feel like her older brother. C gave birth to Charlotte, her first daughter, far too early and she was stillborn. Charlotte’s scintilla of a life produced a single polaroid and a hole in our hearts.

C picked herself up and resumed her nannying. She was comforted by a man named Mark with whom she moved in. Mark too was something of a pudding. He was capable of sitting inert watching television with such focus that even C’s increasingly strident scolding did nothing to rouse him into trying to make something of their lives together. At one point, to our amazement, he stood up from the armchair and went on a hiking holiday abroad with some friends. C slipped a tape cassette into his rucksack full of songs, alternately angry and doleful, complaining of abandonment. Heaven only knows what went through his mind when he turned on his walkman and heard “Love Don’t Live Here Anymore”.

C is now married to another Ian. That is a story for another time. She has grown into an excellent mother: She is tender and patient with her children and they are thriving. Seeing her hold Emma’s tiny hand as they walked together to the garden gate made life somehow ring like a guitar harmonic.

C has some strange ways. In particular, in recollection she rewrites the past as a melodramatic soap opera. I was, for instance, surprised to learn that I had, apparently, spent my time at university yearning with unrequited love for Princess Charlotte of Luxembourg. Dodgy though her memory may be, I adore her. I gave a speech at her wedding and said something that will always be true: They say you can choose your friends but you cannot choose your family, but if I could choose my own sister I would choose C.

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The Adidas Silverstone Half Marathon is, according to its organisers, Â a much-loved and familiar milestone on the bitter ascending path of broken glass and crushed energy drink bottles that isÂ the London MarathonÂ training schedule. I have never really been tempted to run it beforeÂ but decided, on a whim, to give it a go. What the heck? It’s another medal and when it comes to medals I’m like Muttley. I booked a place many months ago only to realise grumpily that it meant missing a Chelsea home game.

Silverstone is a motor racing track which has the interesting geographical quirk of being situated at the very centre point of the arse-end of nowhere. P is away snow-shoeing in the Alps at the moment (don’t ask) and the car is, in consequence, somewhereÂ in an airport car park. The overwhelming difficulty of getting to the venue seemed a very good excuse for not bothering until I saw that a company was offering bus trips into the void that is Northamptonshire and glitz and glamour of 10, 000 unfit people risking an MI in unison.

The bus left CentralÂ London at 8 am so I set my alarmÂ for a much earlier time. The alarm went off, I instinctively found the snooze button and slept on. Thus 7:30 found me running to the tube station and 8:00 found me still 4 stops away. As the train was above ground I texted a desperate message to the contact number of the bus company begging them to wait for 10 minutes. I got no reply – theÂ bastards! I then phoned and got voicemail – the fuckers!

I burst out of Victoria tube station at 8:08 and skidded to a halt atÂ the relevant bus stop at 8:09. The road was empty. I was furious, mainly at myself, but I was determined to find some reason to make it the bus company’s fault. At that point I remembered that I could simply bag the race and go see the game at Stamford Bridge. I stood dithering for a minute or two.

All of a sudden my mind made itself up. I was not going to be beaten. I was damn going to well get to Silverstone. I ran back to the station at what counts for me (and anyoneÂ dependent with a Zimmer) as a sprint. ThereÂ I found a cab, toldÂ the driverÂ brusquely to make for Euston with all available speed and sat grinding my teeth and fuming as the diesel taxi chugged through the back streets of West London.

At Euston I sprang up the escalator and bought a train ticket (for $30). I just had time to get a newspaper before jumping on to the train. As the trainÂ rattled through the suburbs and out into the countryside, I sat bolt upright in my seat, fists clenching and unclenching, trying to paccelerate the train by sheer force of will and irritation. When I had calmed down enough to regain the use of my hands, I texted the bus company asking them to confirm that they would condescend to take me home at least and also arranged for a cab to pick me up from Northamptonshire station and drive me to Silverstone itself (a $40 dollar ride). Round about this stage of the hour long journey into the boondocks, my imperious irritation gave way to an equally unattractive smugness. I had not been beaten! I had sorted it out!

As the train dawdled into Northampton station, my phone beeped. The so-called organiser of the bus trip was promising to try to hold the bus for me for 10 minutes. No guarantees he warned. That sent my heart rate into a rocket assisted ascent. I texted back that that was great news but a little academic 2 hours after the bus had left. I told him I was already in Northampton and asked him to confirm that he would at least make sure I had a place on the bus home. “Yes” was the textedÂ reply.

The Northampton cab company had been as good as its word and was waiting outside the station. I raised my handÂ and waved to theÂ driver and my phone rang. It was the bus company organiser.Â He had picked a bad time to call me. I was on aÂ high induced by the cocktail ofÂ hormones and other chemicals produced by stress, anger and self-satisfaction. I prepared toÂ stab him with a barbed comment.

“Er hi” he began

“What can I do for you?” I asked in a voice so sing-song I could have been slapping my thigh a-merrily in an amateur dramatics production of Oklahoma.

“I’m a bit confused” he continued “if you are in Northampton do you still need the seat on the bus?”

Oh this was too too easy. He was quite obviously a moron and it was going to be my pleasure telling him so. I waved my hand airily at the cab driver to tell him I would be with him in a minute. First, I had some business to attend to. Before I could get a word in, however, Â Mr So-called Organiser FellowÂ went on:

“It’s just the bus is a race day transfer so if you are there already …”

The acid comment I had ready for him dissolved away on my tongue.

“Are you telling me the race is Sunday?”

“Of course. It’s tomorrow mate.”

So tonight I will set my alarm and, with any luck, I will be at Victoria Station at 8 am ready to board the bus.

Â ____________________

In the meantime, may I pimp this book:

It is a collection of funny stories by British Bloggers including Emma K of this Parish. It was conceived, collated, edited, designed and published in a single week by the indefatigable Troubled DivaÂ and the proceeds of sale go to Comic Relief. You can buy it here. Remember we are the nation that gave the world “Are you Being Served?” and “Mr Bean” so the quality of the humour is guaranteed.

I have no idea which of her articles Emma has included but I know the one I hope it is.

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