It’s funny how, just as I despair of finding something to write about, a juicy morsel sometimes falls right into my lap. I was upstairs doing some crochet and fretting about what to write when the OH crept sheepishly up and informed me of the latest disaster to have befallen this family that carries the careless and accident-prone gene.

Long ago I decided that the careless and accident-prone gene is dominant. It must be otherwise those carrying it would have died out a long time ago from freakish accidents. (Forgive me, as you can tell my grasp of genetics is weak.) Instead its carriers actively seek out flexible, unfazed people who are good at just sighing a heavy sigh and getting on with a remedy for the latest calamity to befall them. And so the gene is passed on.

We have at least two people with this gene in my immediate family. I always used to joke that MsDD was the World Pencil Dropping champion. She could, can, never keep pens on a desk or in a pencil case. Instead they litter the floor around her chair and, well, you’ve seen my enraged photos of her calamitous untidiness.

Pair this, then, with a man who invariably forgets where he has left his keys or his briefcase or his wallet or his credit cards so that I have to traipse around to retrieve these items.  I’m a retriever so I have an excuse to post a photo of my beloved retriever here.

Happy birthday Oscar. xxx

It’s an expensive habit. You know how expensive alarm-control electronic car keys are to replace, don’t you? There have been all sorts of incidents: memorably I once gave him an expensive camera for Christmas that I’d bought on a Christmas shopping trip at Bluewater. Eighteen months later, when we had just moved back from Paris, I found a recipt for an identical camera but one bought in our local Fnac in France. Odd, I thought.

He’d been out for a bike ride and taken his camera, which he’d left in his rucksack next to the front wheels of our car, while he secured his bike to the rear of the car. Having forgotten all about his bag, he got into the car and CRUNCH! Which is why he’d had to replace the camera but was too careless to conceal the receipt.

Or there was the time when he was staying in Kent with my cousin for a week while the Boywonder had a week of Scholarship interviews and auditions at schools. (We lived in Paris at the time.) They spoke to me on the day of their return and I reminded them to remember their passports as they were going straight from the final school to the Eurotunnel. Needless to say the passports were forgotten; they missed the Eurotunnel and had to spend a night in an hotel in Ashford.

He has left numerous umbrellas on the train, along with a birthday present for my late mother in law and, on one occasion, four pairs of my shoes that he’d taken in for repair. He managed to retrieve those, luckily.

I needn’t go on. We have had countless, COUNTLESS, accidents and mishaps of this nature. It drives me INSANE having to think and double think for him and he is, understandably I suppose, often irritated when I remind him to go right instead of left out of our road because of the countless times he’s gone left by mistake. That sort of thing.

Carelessness, being accident-prone and forgetfulness are also signs of stress, aren’t they? Trying to keep so much in your head that often things just don’t go into your head at all. I am constantly on tenterhooks (and sometimes eggshells) wondering which mishaps I’ve forgotten to factor into to any undertaking.

Now, as you know, our huge kitchen project is behind schedule. It’s making us very stressed, particularly as we are now having to incur storage charges and everything else. I wasn’t able to cook a family farewell for the Boywonder on Wednesday and it was looking like the project would not be finished by MsDD’s 16th birthday next week. We’re wracking our brains  trying to exert some control over the lackadaisical attitudes of some of our contractors. The OH’s aunt died a couple of weeks ago and we have to go to her funeral on Friday and MsDD starts her all-important GCSE year on Thursday. And we really miss the Boywonder.

We’re supposed to be having a kitchen fitter coming tomorrow and an electrician to fit our new kitchen appliances. We already had a microwave and an oven so those are being installed too but the oven was still upstairs, out of the way of the builders’ dust.

For some reason, the OH decided to carry the oven downstairs to facilitate its installation tomorrow. He didn’t ask me to help. No. He asked MsDD. Imagine, then, the World’s Most Careless and the World Object Dropping Champion carrying a heavy two year old Miele oven down 15 stairs and into a slate floored kitchen.

This, my friends, is the result of their endeavours:

OLYMPUS DIGITAL CAMERA

I don’t know whether I should mention that the OH is a Risk Manager. Oh look. I did. Whoops.

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