At the bus stop.

I asked the bank to lend me a lot of money and ………. they said yes.

Wow.

They must know something I don’t.

No one pays me enough money for anything I do, everyone charges me too much for everything I like doing afterwards and my savings just - aren’t.

I do own an unopened box of Magic the Gathering Unglued boosters but the last time I checked on e-bay they won’t cover a bumper, let alone the cost of a new car.

Oh, and a signed draft of my friend’s unpublished play. (Unpublished and underperformed at the moment but I have high hopes).

The question that begs though is whether my old car will survive until curtain rise or not.

My old car, you see - is, well, old.

A red warning light came on a few months back, but then went off again so I ignored it.

It came on again, went off again, came back and then, for a while I could make it go off at will with a sudden acceleration - but eventually, and probably inevitably it decided to stay on.

Eventually and probably inevitably I took it to the garage and they rang me later that day to inquire if I intended selling my house or not.

I listened to a long diagnosis that had me leafing through the dictionary after the first hour and I finally said – let me think about it.

It wasn’t a problem of finance – it was clear that I would be unable to pay – but a problem of mechanical knowledge.

- Is a lack of power steering just a case of building muscles or will something – like a steering column – suddenly drop on the motorway?
- What exactly does the big end do?
- And does it matter if the lights don’t work if you only drive in daylight?

I thought about it, rang them back, asked them to put two new tyres on and return it.

So far, so good but I have noticed that the steering will suddenly fluctuate between concrete and silly putty, usually during overtaking - and I have discovered a long detour through pretty villages in the valley that avoids the surprise police checks that take place on the bridge.

So I went to the bank and asked to borrow a lot of money.

The financial advisor looked at my pay slips and then looked at me.

“Is that it?” …….. and then she laughed.

She also asked if I wanted her to speak English.

I thought it might give me an opportunity to laugh back, but then I thought it would be better to stay in French – maybe I can use linguistic incompetence as a defence in any criminal case should one ensue after defaulting on the loan.

It turned out that she was laughing at my English accent; she even went as far as to say it was cute.

Cute!

No one has said that since I was twenty and travelling in the U.S.A.!!

I decided to exaggerate it a bit; I even dropped in a bit of Cockney AND went as ashamedly as far as suggesting deliberately that we meet ‘Sur la Banque’ instead of ‘A le banc, er Banque.’ later.

Then I blushed!

It’s difficult to blush on purpose, I always have to stop breathing and think very intensely about the day the front wheel of my bicycle fell off as I rode up to Gillian at the bus stop to ask her out.

But that’s another story.