no sign of the times

I was feeling rather down already when there was a knock at the door. When I opened it I found standing outside a woman brandishing a shorthand notebook and a scruffy man in a raincoat clutching a camera. ‘Oh, hello darling’, said the woman, ‘fetch the lady of the house for me, there’s a dear’ I think she detected my puzzlement. ‘Is she in then, you know, wife in the north , tell her the Sunday Times is here will you’. ‘Are you doing a feature on her?’ I asked. The woman leaned forward. ‘between you, me and the reclaimed antique gatepost’ she said, ‘I’m the new education correspondent and I’m just here to see if she knows about some stationery that we can't find and ask her where she left the keys to the cabinet with all the biros in it'. ‘She doesn’t live here’ I explained. ‘You need to go a bit further north’. The woman looked at me uncomprehendingly. ‘Bloody hell!’ she said ‘You mean there’s somewhere that’s even more north than this?!’ She thanked me for my assistance and walked back to her van muttering to the man in the dirty raincoat. I thought about how the Times education section had obviously gone downhill since wifey had left just as the Saint bartholomews orphanage and abandoned puppy rescue sanctuary newsletter had similarly declined since I stopped writing it. It made me think back wistfully to my last day there before I moved to the north, the orphans waving the last newsletter that I wrote at me and asking ‘please miss, more’ and the puppies looking forlornly at me through the bars with their big sad puppy eyes. I haven’t talked about my work with orphans and puppies before lest people should think I was just trying to exploit their emotions but it left a big mark on me. I had even resolved to give the profits from my book to help those less fortunate than myself, until I moved to the north and then there wasn’t anyone less fortunate than myself so I’ll probably just spend it on a cruise instead. The big sky satellite dish on the Sunday times van disappeared behind the trees as it headed up the A1. One day they would come back and it would be to write a big feature about me instead of just to find out what happened to the office stapler, and I sighed for the life that lay ahead and the one that I had left behind.