Reflections of a stormy petrel

I was pouring coffee grains into the proper jar - or so I thought. I looked up, and saw the coffee jar, still empty.
I'd poured half a jar-ful of coffee into a half-empty jar of drinking chocolate powder.

It's snowing heavily under a driving wind. Winter is back, and according to the weatherman it will be around for the next few days.

...has been awful. My computers have gone, replaced by an uncertain and virus-ridden item which three sweeps of AVG have not managed to altogether clean out. The rest has not been much better. Gawd, I need a friend. How's the market in huggles looking?

(I also need a few hundred pounds and/or a new laptop, but this is not the place to find them, I guess. Besides, huggles are nicer.)

The cyber-stalking note referred to in my previous post turned up as the cherry on the cake of one of the most miserable days I had in months. As you know, I have been moving my books out of storage and into my flat. This, as a rule, involves a couple of daily journeys to the storage warehouse - which is a long way away - with a suitcase or a trolley.

Well, to begin with, it was freezing cold. And I really mean freezing cold: a street indicator in Stratford gave a temperature of one degree centigrade above zero. And it rained. And rained and rained and rained - with the kind of drippy obstinacy only England knows, and that has made the English climate a by-word throughout the world. So... on my way to the warehouse, the bus before mine broke down, stopping the road. We all had to get off and walk to a different stop and... stand there in the freezing rain... waiting for another bus. As I got to the warehouse, the rain seemed to stop; so I made up my mind to use the trolley (which allows me to carry greater weights - rather than the suitcase - that is waterproof.

So, of course, by the time I got out of the warehouse, it was raining again.

In Stratford, the inevitable happened: the larger of the two boxes broke, scattering old, valuable and beloved comic books into the mud and driving rain. I do not even want to think of what happened; it just so happened that the books that fell included some of my all-time favourites - The death of Captain Marvel by Jim Starlin, two bound collections of the original Dan Dare comics by Frank Hampson, several Perishers by Dodd and Collins, and so on and so forth and so following... all ruined, and incidentally made valueless (not that I would ever have considered selling them). After the disaster had taken place, some twerp came along and told me, do you know that your box is torn there? I will not repeat my answer, but I think the whole borough heard it clearly.

So there I was in Stratford station, with two drenched and collapsing boxes full of beloved and valuable material. There was only one thing I could do: I caught a taxi - money down the drain - and had myself and my wet property taken straight back to the warehouse, where I ripped up what was left of the torn box and left the comics to dry on some shelves which I also have warehoused there till I take them back. By this time, my heart was in my boots and my mood somewhere beneath Mount Vesuvius; but luckily, the suitcase I should have used before was there waiting to be used, and I filled it up and went home...

...on the way back, the bus I was on caught fire...

...the next one I boarded was carrying a man in the last stages of intoxication, who spent all my time there yelling about Jamaica, and was working himself up to what looked like violence when I reached my stop...

...the final bus would never come. It was after six in the evening, and eight hours after I had set out from home, that I came back - only to find that, contrary to my normal practice, I had left heating and light on while I was away, wasting them.

It was while I was in this mood that I found the cyber-stalker's most recent note in my e-mail.