Down Down

I sat at my desk the other day, typing away as usual. There was the sound of the wind howling around, the tippet-tap of my fingers on the keyboard and the thundering of jackdaws clog dancing on my dormer roof. All quite normal sounds for here, even the world’s heaviest jackdaws.  However these were then unexpectedly joined by another noise: A ‘pffft’ sound almost exactly the same as that made by the air escaping from a Scotch egg when you bite into it.

Sadly though the noise wasn’t accompanied by the Scotchy’s delicious salty meatiness and rough texture on my tongue, rather by a slow but inexorable sinking feeling. The compressed air cylinder in my chair had given up the ghost and I slid ever so slowly towards the floor.

I suppose I should be grateful that it hadn’t exploded, catapulting me though my attic office window and launching me into the twinkling night over the grim ex-mining towns like a portly Billy Elliot. Only I’d be the version without the aid of an Elton John tune or stagehands struggling with heavy duty flying cables, obviously.

So it now seems like I needed a new office chair. That would be about £150, which is money that I simply don’t have to spend, especially at this time of year. There’s no way that I can afford it. The cash I’d saved for Christmas had already gone to Santa’s financial services (at only slightly better rates than Wonga.com) and I’d already blown my recently awarded ‘Twenty years’ service’ money on setting up my home office. So like most of the western world I’m officially skint. And of course it’s not my fault, oh no.

I blame the government. That’s usually the correct thing to do when you have no money isn’t it?
And a large portion of fault has to be apportioned to the previous government too. Like the BBC, I have to be seen to offend all political persuasions equally.
And the Greeks / Irish / Italians / whoever’s in the worst Eurozone trouble by the time you read this. I can’t keep up.
And of course the bankers can be accused of anything. They’re a popular scapegoat. I think they were behind 9-11, the faked moon landings and Kennedy’s assassination too.
And while I’m at it I’ll also point the finger at Jeremy Clarkson. He won’t mind.

Or I could just be insolvent because I spent too much on beer and pizza?

Despite my financial embarrassment I still needed something to sit on, so I did what I usually do in these circumstances: I looked in the Argos catalogue. Glory be, they had the perfect  black (fake) leather number. I couldn’t afford it, but what the heck, it’s Christmas.

Just before I set off I had one final fiddle underneath the chair, and guess what? I found another lever, a teensie weensie one that I hadn’t noticed before. And guess further what? It was a locking bar, and it had worked loose. Once I slid it into the correct position the chair worked perfectly again. It went up. It went down. It went boing-boing when I bounced happily on it – an action which may, if I’m being honest, have contributed to it failing in the first place. You can imagine how foolish I felt.

But looking on the bright side, I’ve now got £150 to play with!

Did I mention that I failed my A level economics?


© Shaun Finnie 2011