Red alert

 

It is empty at last. I had a good idea. It was so clever that I cannot have imagined it myself. I must have read it or heard about it somewhere.

I thought that important items should be easily identifiable when we moved house and so I bought a red box. In it I put vital documents. Just like the Chancellor’s except that mine was plastic.

Amongst the tumble of brown card boxes, we could immediately spot the red for alert. But once we were in the new house my cousin said, “Now the work starts”

How right she was.

Document after document needed to be dealt with and more came in the post. Each one went in the red box as we settled in.

It has taken me months to deal with my red box papers.  I would not make a good Minister. Now the bright container is finally empty and I am sure someone moving house would like to borrow it.

I will be ‘borrowing’ the Fire Station this week as I am to have my Covid jab there. How strange it would have seemed before the pandemic to go anywhere other than a hospital or doctors’ surgery for our vaccinations. Now it seems that any clean public place is suitable. Mind you there do not seem to be as many people going these days. Maybe we are over the fear of Covid now. I am not sure that we should be.

I was worried about our car the other day. When I got in a warning light flashed onto the dash telling me that a tyre pressure was down. Mr T pumped it up and we thought that was that, but the warning sign did not go away. We carefully drove to the garage with the warning sign disconcertingly flashing up on the dash. But when we arrived all was well because we needed to reset the pressure notification in ‘settings’ and we had not done that. There was nothing wrong at all.

That is it with computers you have to know what you are doing. When I stopped, my car suddenly pinged and sent another message

 ‘Check the rear seat for occupants.’

What a surprise I would have had if there was indeed an uninvited occupant as I was alone in the car. I once did I hear a rustling on the back seat and was frozen in fright as I drove along. Then I heard a loud ‘Meow’ from a cat that had jumped in the back when I had stopped to let a friend out.

This time the warning was telling me that my shopping was on the back seat. No need for alarm.

(Taken from  my column in the Shropshire Star)