With good reason, I get suspicious and frightened when things go right. I have learned certain truths during my time on this planet, not least that all events in the end conspire against me and that every rule and regulation I encounter has been tailor-made specifically to frustrate my progress. And yet. And yet. A lot of things have been going right lately. The system seems suddenly to have completely turned around in order to work with me, not against me.
I don’t want to be churlish about this. I want to give credit where it is due — to the gods and/or the ruling authorities on earth — but I also want to register extreme anxiety bordering on panic because some of the appealing things that have been happening to me are downright weird. Like this:
For three days running I’ve come out of my house to see two police officers patrolling my street. They show no interest whatsoever in whether the residents’ cars are parked correctly and seem to concentrate wholly on protecting us from crime. On one occasion I witnessed the officers questioning a hooded youth who was hanging around bothering people. You can imagine how unnerving it was to see that they were not offering him a form explaining his rights in case he snagged his jeans on the jagged edges of a windowsill while removing a flat-screen television from someone’s living room, but instead seemed to be bizarrely focused on warning him to steer clear of breaking the law.
The other evening, as I walked home from the station, I saw another police officer. This one was stopping people and offering them words of advice to make their homes more secure. I am forced to consider the possibility that the Labour government has actually kept its word in putting more police on my street. I feel a warm feeling towards Gordon suddenly. Oh, dear. What if, my tortured mind torments me, what if he has ruined the country as a whole but improved a few important things for me? What then, eh? It doesn’t bear thinking about. But that isn’t all. There has been a whole catalogue of eerie incidents of efficiency making my life feel slightly less like it is an unending endurance test of pushing a great boulder of Melissaness uphill.
Imagine my surprise, for example, when I arranged to have my drains unblocked and the man from Dynorod turned up as promised at 9 a.m. They had offered me one of those maddening all-day appointments — ‘Someone will be with you between 8 a.m. and 10 p.m.’, as if that made life even vaguely livable — but at 8 a.m sharp he rang and said he would be with me at 9, and with me at 9 he was. Not only that, when I opened the door he remembered me and the intimate details of my drains from this time last year, and greeted me like an old friend.
Now, what happened next is possibly the eeriest thing of all. Because I hadn’t even considered the possibility that he might be operating along spacetime continuum rules, I had taken the liberty of booking a doctor’s appointment for 9 a.m. So as he got to work on the drains, I phoned the surgery to apologise for missing it, braced myself for an almighty row and some sort of draconian cancellation fine.
‘Oh, don’t worry!’ the normally firebreathing receptionist said. ‘Just come along when he’s finished.’
‘B-b-but…’ I exclaimed, ‘he could be 15 minutes yet.’
‘That’s fine,’ she said, sounding just like Julie Andrews in The Sound of Music. ‘We can give you 15 minutes’ grace.’
And when I turned up 15 minutes later, they did give me grace. And the doctor saw me promptly and was thoroughly helpful and polite, forcing me to contemplate the following: is the NHS working now? Whatever next!
On and on it went. The girls next door sent me a sweet little card warning me in advance that they were having a party on Saturday night and promising to try to keep the disturbance to a minimum, which they duly did. The next day they put their empty bottles out in a neatly tied little recycling sack and the rest of their rubbish fitted nicely into the black wheelie bin. Are people becoming more neighbourly and courteous? Are wheelie bins suddenly holding more rubbish? Curiouser and curiouser.
In racking my brains for an explanation I have hit upon the possible theory that these may be the effects of the recession kicking in. Perhaps the sudden loss of economic confidence has made people nicer, the system more forgiving already.
On the other hand, will someone please wake me. I’m sure this dream is going to turn into a nightmare any second.
Melissa Kite is deputy political editor of the Sunday Telegraph.
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