ANOTHER ORDINARY SATURDAY

It's twenty past nine and another raucous party is going on across the way. Some drunken women are singing 'Fat-Bottomed Girls' - must be autobiographical. Today I played tennis for 3 hours. My tennis elbow hurt badly. I sprayed 'Deep Heat' on my wrong arm. It didn't help. I mowed both front and back lawns. I moved the wrought-iron bench onto the drive so that I could cut the whole lot evenly. I put the bench down on my big toe. I washed two cars with soap and water from a bucket. At one point the handle came off the bucket and soapy water cascaded all over my socks. I shan't need to wash them, then. I walked down to the main street to the ironmonger's and bought a four-foot fluorescent tube for the garage light and a pack of junior hacksaw blades. I hurt my right knee trying to get down from my workbench in the garage having successfully fitted the new lamp. I fitted the first hacksaw blade to the junior hacksaw upside down, so that the clean edge was in the place the cutting edge should have been. I tried to remove the blade and it shattered. I fitted the second blade the wrong way round, with the teeth facing backwards. I tried to remove the blade and it shattered. I made it with the third blade. I hacksawed the seized bolt in my bicycle seat pillar mounting and replaced the nut and bolt with one from my dwindling stock. It took forty minutes to find a nut and bolt both with the same thread and another ten to find a suitable washer. The nut was slightly rounded and I had to use a Mole wrench to tighten the last couple of turns. I found I had secured the seat far too high. I had to put the bike in the gutter so that I could step onto it from the kerb. I practically had to lie the bike down, with me on it, to get off. I went wearily round for the Mole wrench. Finally, back in the house, I had to try and repair my good spectacles, but found the screw that secures the lens in the frame had sheared, a job for the optician. As Saturday draws to a close, I have a rick in my neck, cramp in one leg, what might well turn out to be a broken toe and am exhausted to boot. Am I happy? Strangely, yes. Several good jobs were carried out today.