Getting back to (sort of) normal and an eBay sale

 Back to the office today.  Friday is an odd day to be going back especially when I could have worked from home but the diary is very full next week and getting everything in order can be rather easier in the office.  S did not need to be in the office and worked from home.  

The alarm went off at 5am.  I am not a morning girl.  It was cold.  Dilys (mint green Fiat 500) told me it was 1C and it stayed that all the way to the Essex/Greater London.    Still, the roads were not overly busy.  There were couple of cars in a hurry, not entirely sure where they thought overtaking me was going to get them when there were four lorries in close formation just ahead of me, on a standard A road, but it clearly mattered to them.  Dilys is a very friendly car to drive and copes with most conditions but she does not have pick up speed to get out of trouble so it is best not to get into it in the first place.  It may be my imagination but I find some drivers seem to be spurred on to take advantage of Dilys’s good nature and girlish looks.  Put another way, I seem to face less aggressive driving from some others when I am driving the Transit than when I am driving Dilys.  

Arriving in the car park at 7.50am it was very evident that a number of my colleagues just couldn’t wait to get back to work.  I certainly wasn’t going to be the first in or at all lonely in the usual complaints about the temperature.

The inbox has been wrestled under control if not entirely dealt with and provided I ignore peripheral influences there is a chance I might survive through to mid January. 

The boss came in, powered through admin, checked that we were all using our heating systems correctly, declined to come to lunch at the pub saying something about going for a walk.  The rest of us went to the pub.  A fish finger sandwich had been beckoning since I opened the fridge first thing to be greeted by the European cheese mountain (smelt like it) and more smoked (cured and pickled) fish than one would have thought a household of 2 would ever contemplate.  I left S the leftover kedgeree.  Even in a sparsely occupied office microwaving curry and smoked fish is not going to go down that well.  Instead I raided the fruit bowl - grapes, an apple, two satsumas and a banana - resolving to hide them in my desk drawer so the New Year sugar police would not get wind of my having 4 of my 5 a day in fruit sugar form.  

A big surprise in an eBay sale.  Aside from the MiL’s shoes on 23 December these have been few and far between recently.  This was a pair of wide legged navy Laura Ashley trousers, they are lovely and I’m pleased they have a new home.  They have been on eBay for a very long while and hope was fading.  The reason they are on there is that, for me, they need heels.  My heels usually have pointy toes.   They are quite smart and I tended to wear them in situations where I was likely to be carrying papers/bag/laptop and where there was a fair chance I would be coming across stairs.  I have found myself falling up a few stairs when my toe gets caught up in the hem.  On the last occasion I was helped up by a charming young man, who I then found to be a key player in the meeting I was going to.  I’ll get over the embarrassment but I am not sure how many more times I can avoid actually hurting myself.  They had to go, preferably to someone taller who lugs less around with her, wears round toed shoes/boots and is generally less clumsy.  £10 is hardly life changing but it did cover the fish finger sandwich. 

All that aside it is one item moving out of the house which can only be good as we have far too much stuff!