catastrophe, missed by a hair

Okay, so it was nearly very bad.

My parents had, as mentioned earlier, gone off to Cambridge this weekend. I took a phone call this morning at around 10 am -- what can I say, I was sleeping in -- from my mother. My father had slipped in the shower and broken his glasses. (To be more precise, he'd slipped, grabbed for the shower curtain, it had come down together with the pole, and the pole had struck his glasses where they lay on the bench at a distance.) Would I be prepared to get up and come down to Cambridge with my father's spare glasses, as otherwise he couldn't drive the family car back home?

(Cambridge, I should note, is currently about 3 hours away, given the vagaries of British Rail, and the journey would have involved several changes and a bus journey.)

Of course I said yes. Of course, once the phone had been hung up, I swore.

Five minutes later, my mother rang back. They'd managed to get something else sorted out, and would be coming back by train instead, and my father would go up tomorrow by train and fetch the car and bring it back. So I didn't need to come up.

I was extremely grateful. Really. Seriously. Words were insufficient. But there was the nice warm bed waiting, so I went back to it.

Other than that -- a quiet day. Let's hope that counts as the required catastrophe for Christmas.

Oh, wait, we've got another candidate for "required catastrophe". I booked tickets for Two Towers for 8pm on Friday the 20th. My parents have just received tickets for a carol service at Winchester Cathedral for the 20th at 6.30 pm.

Please, let that count as the required catastrophe, the "something has to go wrong", as I really don't want to have any more awkwardness for the moment.

---

"Our strength is often composed of the weakness we're damned if we're going to show." -- Mignon McLaughlin

I haven't the faintest idea

One of my friends has split up (painfully) with current boyfriend and is muttering about him at most opportunities. Another coworker was having fits of the manic giggles all day long. The third at least had the virtue of silence. Do you ever have the urge to defenestrate your entire office, Genevieve? Why, yes. Frequently.

Sometimes a piece of writing hangs in front of you like a complicated piece of knotwork, covered in mud or cased in clay, so that you can only see fragments of it through the gaps in the covering, and have a vague impression of the whole. You pick and chip at it, trying to gauge the weight, to follow the lines of narrative or the pattern of words and sentences and paragraphs, to have a gem-like glint of a turn of phrase, to see the structure of the thing. The nub of the matter is, you know that it's there. You just can't see it yet.

Pardon my maundering. I'm annoyed.

Other than that, a cold grey Monday. I wish we'd had the scattering of snow they forecast for us. It would have been a pleasant foreshadowing of Christmas.

---

"Through me you pass into the city of woe:
Through me you pass into eternal pain:
Through me among the people lost for aye.
Justice the founder of my fabric moved:
To rear me was the task of power divine,
Supremest wisdom, and primeval love.
Before me things create were none, save things
Eternal, and eternal I shall endure.
All hope abandon, ye who enter here."
-- Dante Alighieri, The Divine Comedy