I lost my job and almost got slaughtered by a double mattress.

For the second time in my life I'm being made redundant and I'm beginning to take it personally.
Neither occasion has been my fault but at my age there are a lot of younger people willing to do my job for less money. I wonder if thirty years experience stands for much -  I hope so.

    And as if that wasn't torment enough, I was following a heavily laden truck this evening on my scooter. Heavily laden with mattresses, that is. I could see they weren't very well secured and according moved from directly behind it into another lane. Sure enough, a few minutes later a particularly spirited (or malicious) gust of wind took hold of an enormous and hideously stained mattress, blocking out the last of the remaining sun, before launching itself into the slipstream. But instead of falling behind the rapidly departing truck it spotted easy game and took a deliberate forty five degree angle before landing about five feet before me in the three lane hyper expressway that laughingly has a fifty mile per hour limit. Laughingly, because have you ever known anyone keep to the limit as an entire weekend beckons?

    Luckily I managed to avoid the acre or so of rotting material only to be narrowly missed by the forty ton juggernaut barrelling down the lane to my left.

    If I sell a couple of thousand books this weekend I can happily go into the office for my last few days next week with a sneer of contempt for my lost job, although I'm not holding my breath. It will take a little more than that to quell the beating of my ailing heart.