After writing my blog post, “Do I tell?”, last night, I went to bed and could not sleep. The events of the day kept going through my mind and I worried what Roland would say about the little incident between his new Subaru “Imprezza” (with the low mileage and pristine condition) and the stout post in the car park at Gumdale Parklands. Not my fault, of course, but I was at the wheel at the time. The policewoman had confided that she had done a lot worse to her own car in supermarket car parks, which I found somewhat consoling, but she wasn’t Roland.

I had to tell him. My conscience insisted and Chris (my husband back in England) thought that our friend would understand, and even be happy to know that I was alright. Besides, having written my blog post last night, it was already “out there”. How did I tell him? Was I brave enough to tell him outright? This is how…

“Roland, have you read my blog recently?” I asked over the telephone.

“Which one?”

“You haven’t read the one from last night then.”

“No. Why?”

“Sorry,” I said, “but I can’t talk to you until you’ve read my blog. Read it and I’ll call you in ten minutes.”

(You may imagine that I also sobbed a bit and mentioned the fact that I hadn’t slept properly.)

“The car looks alright,” he said ten minutes later. (I had been careful to post an “after” photograph of the car looking unscathed.)

Roland took the news extremely well and seemed quite unperturbed about the broken plastic bit that fits inside the wheel arch, and will have to be replaced sometime; he reacted quite as well as he did many years ago when I told him (over the ‘phone) that I had driven through his lounge-room doors. Little incidents are the stuff of happy memories. It is nice to know that I shall never be forgotten.

And now I need to catch up on my sleep as tomorrow I shall be moving twenty or so miles south down the Pacific Highway to take on house-sitting duties for friends.