Ralph Oswick: Frantic in a floral flock

I’m nervous about crowded shops, and what with my temporary mobility afflictions, I can’t stand in queues for long, so I’ll be doing my Christmas shopping online. Not that that is without its moments of stress.

Due to a historical aberration, my road is divided into two halves, linked by a footbridge over the Avon.

I often see delivery vans searching for me in vain on the wrong side.

I once watched an Ocado driver unload what I guessed correctly was my weekly grocery order, struggle up and down the terrace opposite and then load it laboriously back in his van.

It was too far away to shout, but when he finally got here, via a circuitous route, he looked so cross I didn’t dare ask him to carry it up the stairs for me.

Getting past the gate in my place is like opening Fort Knox. The system involves keying in a code.

The gate then phones me. I tell the delivery person I’m going to open the gate.

I then have to text a gate opening centre, probably in Delhi, which then sends a signal to the gate.

This takes so long that the driver impatiently presses the code again and the whole system starts over.

Sometimes, about fifteen minutes later, my phone suddenly squawks ‘Opening! Opening!.’ The big gates have probably been flapping willy-nilly all this time, causing innocent pedestrians to scatter!

I once lived in a council flat in George Street. Entrance was by a large mortice lock.

The basement housed the vehicle licencing department and sometimes the staff would accidentally double lock the door at the end of the day, either locking us in or locking us out.

The only way to get the door open was to call the police who had night-time access for checking number plates (no computers in those days).

Once, I was doing my duty at Walcot Baptist Church children’s Christmas party in my guise as Lady Margaret. During my artistic performance, the little perishers started chucking stuff around and managed to cover me with Harpic toilet cleaning powder.

It was stinging my skin so I thought the best thing would be to hurry home and jump in the bath. Imagine my distress when I got to George Street and found the door double locked.

This was before we all had mobile phones so I couldn’t call the police, and besides they would take half an hour to arrive, by which time I would have turned into a red raw prawn, albeit a fragrant one. My skin was on fire by this point.

I noticed a lower sash had been left open a crack, so I hurried down the steps, squeezed through the window, made my way through the pitch-dark basement, and escaped into the vestibule.

Imagine the face of a police constable if he had innocently wandered in at that point to check out the details of some speeding motorist, only to be pushed aside by a portly red-faced gentleman in a floral frock and reeking of bleach, frantically hurrying through the ranks of filing cabinets!