Happy Mondays

Hello to you all, I hope you are all well and in one piece after the weekend. We have had a mixed weekend, some pain, some routine cleaning, some decision making about holidays and a huge dollop of wonder accompanied by stress.

I am sure it will be the last on the list that you will have caught your interest most, if indeed any one wanted to hear about the house cleaning then I will certainly oblige, however I intended to tell you about the wonder and stress from the start.

So last night Sunday the 28th at roughly 8.30pm Claire in a rather startled and panicky voice announces "That's not right". I enquire the cause of her puzzlement.
Silence
40 seconds pass, long enough for me to assume that the panic was either a false alarm or a solution to the problem had been found when one again "That's not right" came from Claire's lips although this time in a more incredulous rather than startled voice.

So this time I employed a different tactic, I do not just pretend to be interested I pull my chair back and look in her direction to give full weight to the sound of my inquiry being a genuine and eager attempt to help.

She announces that last Monday, a week ago today a mystery deposit of £20.0000 had appeared in to our current account, and this being the first time she had checked the account online in a week was also the first we knew of it. This indeed was startling and shocking news, not to mention Claire had been gripped with fear at this sudden appearance of such a large amount of dosh.

We were both silent for a moment or two and then started throwing out improbable origins of the money.
Had we one the Lottery? We thought that was not the answer as they would surly have told us, plus the stumbling bloke of our refusal to buy lottery tickets made this very unlikely.

Had our premium bonds come up? Again unlikely for the same first reason as the lottery, but we do indeed have premium bonds so it remains an outside possibility.

Had someone died and left us an amount of money? It shocked us to think that we had descended so quickly in to the levels of fiction combined with nonsensical logic. Not that we are unimaginative, or posses no talent for believing in miracles. Claire is a Christan and I am a Hibs supporter so we know about long term belief in miracles. To think though that we arrived so quickly at such a level of suspended disbelief was a wake up call about ourselves. The inescapable conclusion was that it is a mistake, and now we have to decide what to do about it.

The temptation to say nothing and quietly spend it or siphon it in to other accounts would have been irresistible to some. The advice pages of papers, magazines, and Internet sites regularly host to tales similar to ours where the money has indeed been spent, the mistake noticed and the bank or whoever starts asking for the money back. We knew it was not ours so the only way we could live with ourselves was to go and tell the bank so.
That decision made did we relax? No we did not.
Claire spent the next hour feeling creeped out by this intrusion in to our private banking affairs, then she spent the hour after that worrying that at any second the front door would be booted in by the police accusing us of money laundering, drug running, theft, bank robbery, any number of crimes. I say Claire worried but I also gave some passing thought to how we would explain the money when challenged by authority figures. I though tried hard not to think about the money as I knew I would have it spent 6 times over if I gave it any thought, which would make the "giving it back" more painful than necessary.

Well this morning we went to report the foul deed and get what we thought were our justly deserved congratulations on being honest and upright citizens. We were just a little taken aback by being told that the chap we spoke to had no idea where the money had come from, and that he would have to pass the case to someone else. This someone else will phone this afternoon to tell us what they have found out. So here I am waiting in all day for a phone call that will tell me bad news. It is not a new experience but sitting knowing for sure it is bad news and desperately wanting to here the bad news is somewhat different. I was hoping to do other things today and indeed the sun is starting to break through the clouds that has shrouded Leith all day, me though I am stuck waiting for the call that despite telling us we are twenty thousand pounds less well of, will at least give us back our calm boring world. Happy Mondays indeed.