Quality will out

Ronald Reagan once told his staff that they were always to wake him if there was an emergency ‘even if I am in a Cabinet meeting at the time’. All of us, Mrs Oakley included, have our definition of an emergency and the other night she shook me awake at 4 a.m. to confront one. I was led to the bathroom where, safely entrapped under a glass, was a spider. He was admittedly a beady-eyed, muscular and long-legged spider but there was no way he could have escaped that glass before morning. Nevertheless, such was Mrs Oakley’s agitation that he had to be defenestrated at that instant.

I duly earned my Brownie points although not altogether graciously. I had just fallen asleep for the first time in 36 hours following a virulent dose of food poisoning and for me there was no reason why the spider’s return to his no doubt anxious family in our web-entwined rosebed could not have waited until morning. (Mrs Oakley’s arachnophobia does not demand destruction; removal from her vicinity is enough. But she does insist on the vital need for speed.)

It will, however, be a long time before in a fit of bravado I again prize open and consume a brace of firmly closed mussels in a dish of moules marinières. For three days, no organ in my body seemed to be left undisturbed by the reaction induced by those malevolent molluscs. The only good thing was that feeling too wrecked to do anything else I became completely enthralled by the Paralympics: wheelchair rugby, sitting-down basketball, Ellie Simmonds in the pool, David Weir and Hannah Cockcroft hand racing their way to victory in their chariots, Jonnie Peacock and Oscar Pistorius flashing to victory on one blade or two.