Skype

I was talking to this dealer from Altrincham the other day, who was really into cranberry ware marmelade dishes from the late 1840s and so I said to him, 'Ooh, I've got one of those. It's a bit on the chipped side, but nothing you wouldn't get away with on Flog It. I got it for £35 at Peter Wilson's, so I couldn't possibly let it go for anything less than £37. Shall we say 36?' And so he says to me, 'I haven't any cash on me at the moment. Can I skype you later instead?' Well, I was just flabbergasted. I thought, well, you've got a wife. What's wrong with her? Why can't you skype her? And I certainly wouldn't dream of being skyped by you, cranberry ware marmelade dish or no cranberry ware marmelade dish. Not at my age and not with this pelvis, I'll tell you that for nothing. The things people come out with. But then, that's Altrincham for you. More money than sense up there and too many hours in the day, that's their problem. They might be used to spending their time skyping from here to kingdom come, but I've got 4,000 individual dried flowers to price up and Evie to look after all weekend. I said to her, 'How about we go to the Monkey Park at Trentham?' She just said, 'The simian equivalent of the gulag? No thanks. Solzhenitsin might have appreciated the irony, but I'd much rather spend the afternoon with this apricot-flavoured Muller Lucky Star and Ant and Dec, if it's all the same to you.' There's no pleasing them, is there?