Dialogue of disbelief ... (recorded just in case I forget how absurd it all was ... although, hopefully, record and forget ...)

After another restless night I was looking forward to getting home after work and, if dry, have a wander. There was a van parked where I usually park with the ladders on the roof overshooting the end of the road ... okay for my little car but a problem for a tractor or bigger vehicle. I've given up caring about parking with the holiday homes next door so I just parked up further along and went into the house. I watched this guy put ladders up the front so went outside to just see what he was doing. He said he was repairing/replacing the aerial on the holiday cottage next door and I said to take care because the slates would be very greasy after the recent rain and to give me a shout if he needed anything. So far so good. I went inside and changed out my work clothes and went to write up some work notes and saw him move his ladders to the front of my house which I thought was odd but assumed he'd taken my conversation as permission and didn't put two and two together as I was preoccupied with the stuff I was working on. I decided not to go for a walk in case he wanted a hand and needed something. Eventually, about an hour later I went into the back garden to dig up some potatoes looked up and realised he had replaced my aerial by mistake. I went out the front and said 'you've done my aerial' ... 'You're kidding me?', he said. 'No, I realised when I just went out the back' ... I pointed to my aerial, now at our feet, and said, 'that's my aerial and there's nothing wrong with it'. He said, 'it's not in very good nick'. I said it was absolutely fine and I only had it replaced in the last year or so. 'What do you want me to do about it?', he said ... 'that's £175 worth or work I've just done ... you should have said something, I can't believe you didn't say anything'. I said, 'it's absolutely nothing to do with me ... I came home from work, saw you, asked you what you were doing and if you needed anything to give me a shout, I thought it was odd when you put the ladders up where you did outside mine but had other things to get on with'. 'But you said it was that one', he said. We then got into a game of tennis where I said I had said nothing of the sort and that he had made assumptions and that oddly enough I assumed he knew which aerial he was working on. And then the conversation went back to, 'So what do you want me to do about it?' .... I said, 'it's entirely up to you, you've done what you have done and need to put it right' ...'That's a new aerial, you could at least give me £40 for it and my trouble, it's late and I've been working on it for an hour and a half, you should have said something'. I was utterly baffled by now and said I certainly wasn't going to pay him anything. He said he was going to take it down. I said fine, and you'd better put mine back in working order. He went up his ladders saying he wouldn't so I shouted up asking if he had a contact number for whoever arranged for him to do the job ... and saying it was crazy that it hadn't been supervised in some way in the first place and established which aerial he was replacing. No answer. By this time and further heated exchange we were both pretty angry. Whilst he was on the roof he obviously realised he'd better put mine back so he came down, continued to rant but put mine back up and told me to check my TV which I did. All was fine. He then moved his ladders to do the right aerial but continued to shout at me saying, 'the decent thing would be to pay me for all this trouble and all the work'. I said, 'the decent thing would be to know what you were doing in the first place and to have had the job properly agreed/overseen by the company responsible and that absolutely none of any of this should have happened'. I retreated inside and rang the company. They haven't got back to me yet even though the woman that oversees the place just lives down the road.

Once inside the fragile bubble burst. I so desperately miss P. The carrying on is just that, carrying on and it doesn't take much. I didn't feel like any tea then but decided cooking something would be a distraction. I never eat at my table in the kitchen because it's a dark, cluttered corner but the living room looked out onto his van and him still working, angrily, so I went to sit in the dark corner to eat and decided that I'd light some candles and invite some friends to sit at the table with me for company.

p.s. these are different varieties of mint ... experimenting with growing them on as I seem to have managed to have killed my mint (who'd have thought it possible ... to kill mint ... that's what the kiss of death does ..)