DM

You know they say bad things come in threes...
Well, three bad things happened on Monday with distinctly suspicious timing given it was the night we were off to see Depeche Mode -indoors this time, our little treat to ourselves to make up for getting drowned at the stadium gig last July (yes, *July*, just our luck to get the one rainy day all summer).

Well whoever Sod may be with his sodding Laws of Sod was having a right laugh on Monday. In fact he was probably doubled over clutching his belly and turning purple after what he dished out.

First, I couldn't find the tickets. You know how it is: you buy them six months ahead of time, you're going to put them somewhere safe. Now, although I would tell you I am an organised person, when it comes to paperwork that organisation consists of lots of piles round the house, some complete with plastic wallets with hopeful titles such as 'To-Do' or 'For Filing' on them. Yet still the filing cabinets I purchased at great expense some time ago lie pretty much empty, apart from all the tax forms which are diligently hidden away because Nobby's in charge of taxes.

Well, I searched high and low, getting more and more depressed at the amount of crap that I will have to file one day and more and more worried about how I was going to break the news to Nobby that I'd lost the tickets. I sent him a hopeful text in case he'd spirited them away having been through this routine with passports and driving licenses once or twice before. But no, he hadn't a Scooby Doo where to look. My system is a mystery to him (and me it seems).

The last place I looked was a file in the filing cabinet marked 'Pending'. And there they were. Doh.

Then I gaily drove off to attend a training meeting at school and collect the children afterwards, leaving Tiggy in the garden with her bedding all cosy inside the kennel so she could snuggle up if she was cold. I was sure everything would be fine for a couple of hours.
To quote David Gahan sometime later that evening: 'Wrong'.
I came back to an empty kennel - completely empty, not just lacking a dog - and there was Boy-Next-Door's puppy ripping the dog-bed foam innards to shreds all over the lawn.

I have to say I had a slight rant at that point. OK, I blew my lid, telling Boy Next Door just what I think of his hole-digging, bed-chewing, dirty-paws-on-white-walls, over-excited, out-of-control, bouncy puppy. A month's worth of frustration in a few short minutes, poor lad, he got both barrels.

Then I had to tone it down a little remembering that my kids were due to be staying at their house while we went to the concert... oops. Just like me to open my mouth and fit both feet in.

Anyway, all was well in the end, although Nobby got stuck at work so had to be picked up on the way and change into his jeans in the Budapest traffic giving all the other motorists a cheap thrill (and me) and we made it to the Arena and hung about with a drink and a snack before heading to our seats...

...then the phone rang.

It wasn't the babysitter. It was the car alarm company - wanting to inform us that the car alarm had been tripped and could we tell them if the car was OK. Now, this alarm can be the bane of my life some days. It has a mind of its own and we've had about fifty instances where its gone off even if we've opened it, got in and started it up, which should in theory deactivate the alarm, right?
Again: Wrong.

But given we had left the car parked by the roadside thirty minutes previously we were a little worried that someone had decided to have a root around and had broken into it. I'm not sure there's much dosh to be made from second-hand child seats, chewed up tennis balls, old sweet wrappers and a pile of Pickle's snotty tissues but it was dark and perhaps someone reckoned a VW Sharan Mum-Mobile was fair game for some decent loot.

Trouble was, the alarm company operator didn't speak very good English and kept insisting I had to input some pin code or insert the keys and try as I might I could not get her to understand that we were nowhere near the car and it wasn't another false alarm on our part. Argh! Then of course the girl at the turnstile couldn't let us out to go check because our bar-coded tickets had already been waved over the infra-red so we had to call out Security for permission to leave the building and potentially go and confront some car-jackers. Nobby bravely volunteered to jog over there, my hero.

And when he arrived there was nothing wrong with the car. It had just decided that now was the time to spit its dummy out and have a honk for no better reason than it didn't like being parked at the side of a busy road in the dark. Or maybe a speedy passing lorry gave it a wobble and it decided to have a tantrum, who knows.

Finally Nobby returned, puffing and panting and hot as hell in the ski-wear we'd worn for the stroll from the car park, we raced to our seats and one second later Depeche Mode appeared. We made it.

Wrong no longer, I Just Can't Get Enough of that amazing band; it was just A Question of Time before we jumped up and danced, thank goodness they weren't Walking in my Shoes.

(Yes, I'm a geek, and an eighties one at that).

And OMG it was worth it.