'Tomorrow I will start facing the irksome tasks'.
Yesterdays prediction was grossly inaccurate and premature. I am doing nothing. It is two thirty pm. I am sitting alone in David and Jeremy's flat, being European.
I am sipping a bottle of delicious chilled Chardonnay, listening to Joan Sutherland singing Stride la Vampa from Il Trovatore, laughing until my stomach hurts at Jessica Mitford's Hons &Rebels; all these accoutrements of Europeanness courtesy of the well-stocked shelves and fridges of my absent hosts.
On the floor next to me sits, untouched, the explosive box of letters and bills and bad news of the last six months which I picked up from Cressida's last night.
All I have accomplished today is to ruin David and Jeremy's very expensive kettle. And yesterday I was so pleased with myself that I had mastered their sophisticated gaz cooker which lights without matches.
So this morning I nonchalantly picked up their shining, beautiful, expensive kettle, put it on the cooker which I lit (without matches).
A smell of burning rubber and poisonous clouds of thick smoke soon averted me to the fact that their lovely kettle was not meant to go on the stove; and closer inspection revealed a a sort of round mat with an electrical attachment directly joined to the wall, the intended position of the kettle
Let the above be a warning: do not let natives loose in your expensive flat unsupervised. In this case a native means anyone who has spent more than six months in the Interior of Africa.