This is, in large part, my fault.

The first thing you need to know is that Harkaway Towers is jammed in between two commercial properties and all upside down, so we sleep in the basement, under Shop A and next to a bank vault.

(I always have this thing that one day a slightly directionally challenged bank robber will tunnel through my sock drawer and try to guess the combination of Clare’s shoes.)

Shop A has the cleaners in once every two weeks at quarter to six on Monday morning. A few months ago, when we first moved in and every noise was strange and alien, we lived in a state of perpetual tension, believing every fortnight that we were being  burgled or haunted, or finally – when we figured out where the noise was coming from – that a cat had had kittens under the floorboards of Shop A.

So this morning I woke up, thought: I must remind them one of these days that we live under here and we can hear every step they take at five fifty a.m. and pottered upstairs to make some tea, leaving Mrs H to slumber like a mermaid in the sunny shallows of snooze.

All clear? So here’s the second piece of background. The other thing about Harkaway Towers is that it’s old and a bit quirky. It’s an absolutely lovely place to live, but some of the practicalities are mildly insane. One of these is that the phone wiring is… eccentric. It is, for reasons unfathomable and mysterious, impossible for us to have a second line. Now, both Mrs H and I get a fair number of business calls, and in periods of overlap where there’s a lot of in-depth chat going on, this can be something of a drag. Also, my approach to business calls is bright, sunny, and quirky, and not always appropriate to Clare’s work:

Phone: ring ring!

Me: Yyyyyes, Harkaway Towers! Hallo, what can I do fer ye this fine an’ glooooorious mornin’? And may I say you look lovely today, whoever you are?

Phone: this is the legislative counsel to the ambassador of Waramistan. We are in urgent need of your assistance regarding our extrajudicially kidnapped citizen held at a secret prison on the island of Madre Intapa. Why are you making that remarkable noise? (I’m sorry, ambassador, I think it’s the husband.)

Me: I’m a jackass. I’m very sorry, Madame, I’ll get an adult to talk to you now.

So we solved this problem by using mobiles for work communication. By a ludicrous turn of events I ended up with two – which actually came out pretty well. I have a work phone, which I switch off at the end of the day, and a family phone, which is always on.

As it so happened, the work phone was due for an upgrade, so yesterday I went to the phone shop and told them to give me whichever one I could have free which would make decent calls and not make me look like a mid-thirties guy who wants to be down with the cool kids.

(In my entire life, I have never been down with the cool kids. The cool kids have secret signals for knowing one another which I absolutely do not possess. Anyway.)

They gave me a Nokia E71, which I gather is supposed to be an iPhone killer. (Dude, seriously, lighten up. There’s not enough bad in the world without that you make mobile phones into engines of destruction?) It’s actually not an iPhone killer, it’s a Blackberry-iPhone hybrid with a funky silver case.

So while the kettle boiled, I fiddled with this new toy to get the email working and what all, and when I came downstairs with the tea, I was still holding it, and I thought: Ahah! Mrs H is sleeping! She looks so sweet – I’ll just snap off a picture of her for my wallet.

Which I did. Just as she opened her eyes.

The E71, unlike the iPhone, has a flash.

Mrs Harkaway made a noise like someone dropping a feral cat into the woodwind section of an orchestra.

The picture I have looks like what Edvard Munch might have come up with after a night on the town with Wes Craven.

The guy who was cleaning Shop A rang the doorbell and would not be got rid of until Mrs H came upstairs to tell him she was not being murdered.

I am sooooo in the dog house right now.