Reasons to suspect I am losing my mind

1. The other day, I parked in an underground car park. I extracted her highness, I locked the car and opened the boot. I took out her pushchair, strapped her in, attached the string bag, grabbed the rucksack and double checked that I had my keys in my pocket before closing the boot. You see, I am cunning, I have often worried that it is easy to lock my keys in the boot and that, frankly, would be disastrous. My keys were not in my pocket. I checked the string bag. No. I checked under the car. No. I double checked my handbag. No. Not in any of my four pockets. I took the Princess out of her pushchair and checked whether she was sitting on the keys. No. I put her sitting in the boot and checked around her. I took out everything in the boot. No. I double checked my pockets. No. I emptied out the nappy bag. No. This was ridiculous. I had used the keys minutes ago (about 15 minutes ago at this stage) to lock the car door. Could I have left them in the door? Could somebody have come and taken them while I was getting the pushchair out of the boot? That was the only explanation. You know, “when you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth” or words to that effect. I decided that I had better ring my loving spouse to get him to come and rescue us, bringing his car keys. I went to the car park entrance to get a signal, carefully keeping the car in view lest the scam artist should come up and try to drive it away. There was, of course, no one in the reception area which boasted a number of cameras. A pity, if there had been, I would have asked them to replay so that I could see the person who had stolen our car keys. I rang my husband and started to explain what had happened. “Um” he said “the keys wouldn’t be in the lock of the boot, you know, it would be up in the air and you wouldn’t see them.” Yes, that’s where they were.

2. On Monday morning, a friend of Mr. Waffle’s was in Brussels and, since I’m not working, I invited her round for coffee. While she was here, a friend of mine telephoned. Conversation was as follows:

Me: Hi, I can’t actually talk, there’s a person here, sorry not a person, a friend, well, not a friend of mine, a friend of Mr. Waffle’s, well, sorry a friend of mine too, but not as good a friend of mine as of his.

(Friend person – Um, I’ll just go to the bathroom).

Me: Oh well, she’s going to the bathroom so we can chat for hours, well, not hours, obviously, but minutes, well, a while, anyway.

Friend person sidles out of the room nervously.

3. Yesterday afternoon, I dried all my liquits with a teatowel. Liquits are these little plastic sacs of washing liquid that dissolve in water. You shove them in with your washing and hey presto the plasticky stuff dissolves away in the wash and your wash comes out clean. I suspect, they are almost certainly as damaging to the environment as SUVs. I don’t care. Unfortunately, it’s a bit of a design flaw, like superheros, their greatest strength contains the seeds of their destruction, they dissolve in water. I keep them under the sink. So some water dropped in on them. And they started to dissolve. So I took them all out and dried them lovingly with a teatowel to preserve them. Even as I was doing this, I wondered “should I be safely in an institution?”

Completely unrelated point, if you are Irish and haven’t heard it, have a listen to this http://www.rte.ie/radio1/morning/morningireland/. Click on audio for today Wednesday (don’t know if they archive, so hurry) and listen at about 8.30. Cathal Mac Coille (who I normally loath) does an outstanding job interviewing Beverly Flynn.