You know a day is going to go badly when you begin it with a solid smack to the head on a freezer door. That was the precursor to some day in the vicinity of last week, which I am trying to blot from my memory, because it was simply another wreckage of a day in the curly path to book publishing. To quote Blackadder, the path of my life is strewn with cowpats from the Devil's own Satanic heard. After fighting with the printer and pulling the large, delicate piece of equipment to bits, I successfully removed the aforementioned stuck envelope, and leapt about with a few triumphant hurrahs. I then spent two hours filling in things on the Royal Mail website, thinking that now I can finally, after all my struggles, print the prepaid postage onto the envelopes and send off my submissions.
But nay, not to be! Some very small print enlightened me to the fact that the postage is only valid for three days. What, I ask you, is the point!? So yes, another utter failure and waste of time, since the postage was required 6-8 weeks later.
Then I returned to the post office for the third time to enquire about IRCs, and guess what, they don't have them at all. They suggested I drive to Queenstown, an hour or two away, which I cannot do as my van is still without a WOF and still has a split exhaust. Well fuck me. That would also cost a lot in petrol, which happens to cost slightly more in this area than it does everywhere else.
So, I think that the freezer door smacking me on the head was simply put there in advance by fate, as undoubtedly I would have spent the evening smacking my head against something hard anyway. It was just saving me the trouble. I thought booking tickets on a Romanian website was difficult, but that was a cake walk next to this.
I then purchased from the net some British stamps, which I am having sent here to the orchard. I wish I had just known to do that ages ago, would have saved a Hell of a lot of fecking about. However, on the same day I ordered the stamps, I also ordered a pocket dictaphone from eBay (terribly useful little gadget). That arrived last week, to my delight, yet still I check the mail drawer in vain every day in the hopes that my stamps will have arrived. Lord oh Lord I am at the point of tears. My entire plan is falling to pieces, time is running out quickly, I feel like I'm drowning in pressure and penury and am becoming more uncertain every day. It doesn't help that today I learnt that I am currently earning less than minimum wage, spent all day today working in the rain, and for no readily available reason I am sore absolutely everywhere. Seriously, I feel like I've run a marathon and can hardly pull my socks off without difficulty. Mind you, today did start with me sitting on an upturned bucket under a tree in the rain in a cherry orchard, entirely alone and wondering where everyone was.
In conclusion, I think the first thing one does in the morning sets the tone for the rest of the day. Tomorrow I'll do something cheery first thing, and be wary of the freezer. Do not worry about my little cafard, a touch of melancholia is needed every so often to balance things out. I'll get over it tomorrow perhaps. It would be even better, and certainly put a big, inane smile on my face if my stamps actually arrived. Hope springs eternal I suppose, it is wrong to rely on Royal Mail to be efficient and prompt, because they simply aren't. Being held back from the most important thing you've ever done by two sheets of stamps is, to say the very least, staggeringly frustrating.
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