Incommunicado

I managed to lose my mobile phone on the late night train back to Croydon the other day. I confess that its loss was entirely due to my altered mental state. On its own, the experience of catching a late train back to Croydon is enough to alter anyone’s mental state. The doors at Victoria are kept locked until 10 minutes before the train leaves, presumably to keep Croydon’s denizens from making themselves at home – using the facilities to cook chicken nuggets, pushing dirty faced children around in decrepit buggies, putting knitted ballerinas on the toilet rolls in the Ladies. That sort of thing. So you wait in the crystallising frost, and join a steaming, stamping mass of ex-revellers, all nursing impending hangovers, and too cold to speak. The cold and nausea seem to drag you down like a sinking anchor. Finally the gates are opened by a chain-smoking porter – all non-smoking rules are suspended when the end of a Marlboro is the only source of warmth – and you shuffle to the platform, gradually trying to coax your limbs into forward movement. And it was whilst I was nestling in the corner of a carriage, quietly trying to remind myself that I was human, that I presume my phone dropped out of my pocket.

It’s quite liberating, really. Unless I turn on my computer and surf through mountains of spam and Facebook generated invitations to stick crappy applications to my profile, I am un-contactable. Glorious. Except that I was waiting for a call back about my flooding problems. I thought that I might finally have persuaded Thames Water that my flat has flooded four times in the last four years, and that they might look into doing something about it. Despite the fact that they still don’t have it ‘on their database’. In frustration, I had even tried suggesting that I wouldn’t put the phone down until I heard the clicking of keys as the data was being entered. ‘I can’t enter the data,’ responded the customer services drone. I asked who could. ‘I don’t know.’ I may have spotted the flaw in their data system. A shame that they haven’t. So I phoned Ofwat. Who will doubtless have the same conversation, but had promised to phone back. Possible progress after four years of repeated homelessness. And then I lost my phone. People become letterbombers because of this sort of thing. A pointless act of revenge. Thames Water’s internal post system would doubtless lose the bomb anyway.

Christmas is going to be spent at William’s Chelsea pad. It is kind of the NHS to provide us with such a fashionable festive address. In fact, we have managed to swing a ‘hotel room’ for Christmas evening. For ‘hotel room’, understand a room on the fourth floor with white walls, a single bed, strip lighting and chewing gum encrusted carpet tiles. I suppose it doesn’t do to encourage people to feel too comfortable. In contrast, Sarah has decorated William’s ‘bay’ so thoroughly that it has begun to resemble Santa’s grotto. And William has been wound up to such a level of festive over-excitement that I arrived the other day to find him bouncing up and down in his cot shouting ‘We wish you a merry, Christmas, we wish you a merry Christmas’ at the top of his voice. Santa has been once already - William gamely tried to hide his disappointment that he hadn’t arrived with any of the presents he asked for - and there is a stubbornly tenacious coating of stray glitter on every flat surface. It is in no way ideal that William will be in hospital over Crimbles, but he will certainly enjoy himself nonetheless. His impending operation – laparotomy, ileostomy and assorted biopsies – is now due in early Jan. Christmas at home has been delayed to his potential return in mid-February. I can get the girls their presents in the January sales.