November 8

I get home from work to find at least thirty children running round the

garden and swimming in the pool.  My friend, Anne, is having her daughter's birthday party at our house. Needless to say, large amounts of gin and tonic are needed to steady my nerves.  Ellie, who cannot swim because of her dog bite wound, gets stuck in a huge clump of Christ thorns in an attempt to show some boys where the fairies live.  John spends the next half hour trying to extract thorns from her feet.

The Internet is not working so I go down to the TelOne office and ask them what the problem is.  The technician looks at his watch and mutters that I have left it rather late in the day - it is a quarter past five and they close at six.  He tells me to take a seat and goes off into a room with lots of wires and flashing lights.  While he is gone, I survey my surroundings, identifying yet another place that needs some feng shui.  A swivel chair behind one of the desks has completely collapsed and I don't see how anyone could sit in it without either being some sort of contortionist or doing themselves some serious bodily harm. Broken things are another way of storing negative energy, but I suppose there is nothing to replace it with.

The man comes back and tells me all should work now.  I ask him what the problem was and get the standard vague answer: there was a problem, but we fixed it. Maybe our wire was connected to the wrong flashing light.  Who knows?  When I get home, the Internet is still not working so I fiddle around with lots of wires and connect things into different sockets and then back in their original ones and, quite suddenly, it works.

By the time we go to bed at nine o'clock, our guests have not arrived, but just as I am drifting off into that lovely tomorrow-is-Saturday-and-I-don't-have-to-get-up-early-sleep, my phone rings and then stops.  The dreaded Missed Call.  It is not a number I recognise, so I ignore it.  It rings again. Ha, ha, I think, don't play that game with me. Finally, it rings again.  It is Hillside Police.

Our guest has got completely lost and has been driving round Hillside for about an hour.  I give him directions and John goes down to the gate to meet him.  The first thing I notice about the car is its diplomatic number plates.  Oh dear, I hope these people are not going to be high maintenance.  It turns out it is a Sri Lankan man who was brought up in England, met his Japanese wife in Indonesia and now lives in Botswana.  He has his maid and his one and a half year old son with him.  His maid's niece was killed in a random shooting in a shop in Johannesburg and will be buried on Sunday.  They have come for the funeral.