Log jam

The consensus among my girlfriends is that it is simply marvellous that I’m free, that I’m being true to myself, that I have taken my power back. On the other hand, if I don’t find another man soon I’m never going to get this sack of logs out of the footwell of the passenger side of my car. The gamekeeper at the farm where I keep my horses loaded them in there three weeks ago and I’ve been driving around with them ever since.

I don’t know what I was thinking. My head must have been stuck in ‘I have a boyfriend’ mode when I accepted them because it seemed a perfectly good idea at the time. It was a good idea all the way down the A3 until I pulled into my road, parked the car, got out, opened the passenger door, put my hands around the sides of the huge feed sack stuffed with timber and pulled. Nothing. Didn’t even budge an inch. How come no one mentions the weight of logs when they’re urging you to take your power back? How come there isn’t a chapter in all those self-help books entitled ‘Shifting Logs — the truth about being true to yourself’. I have options, of course. I could take the logs out one by one, or hire someone to come round to my house and haul the sack out of my Peugeot for hard cash.

But I don’t want to. The latter option is just too humiliating. The conversation I would have to have with Tony the odd-job man is just too awful to bear thinking about. He would ham it up mercilessly, gurning with every facial muscle to ram home just how sad it was that my life had come to this.