I'm not doing an apology today. I believe that the slate is now wiped clean and everybody is satisfied.
Now, last day of 'having' to do the blog and I've been gypped. Yer woman is off work today and I've had to go to work, which for a woman in my profession is a bit of a shock to the system. Anyhow, I'm here now so I might as well ramble a bit.
We're all in the process of writing something. No, we really are. Honestly. It makes us all a little bit more temperamental though than is normal, even more than the usual amount of 'light the touch paper and stand well back' that we normally present. We send snippets (in the Rainbow Slider's case that would be a snip!) to each other with a 'Does this sound like so and so?' We ask 'Do you think so and so would do such and such?' We can manage to fill complete afternoons and evenings in this manner and thus actually write diddly-squat.

We tend to keep more than one story on the go at once as both of us suffer from a very, very low boredom threasehold. Then when we get stuck or bored with one we move on to another one. Yes, we do realise that it means that we finish about one story a quarter but it's our system and we like it.

One of my upcoming stories has firefighters in it. (Shall I pause while you all calm down a bit.) This got the Rainbow Slider and I talking about our experience of the boys and girls in yellow.

In a previous job I worked in a very old building which housed a number of charity and community groups. We were housed in a wing with only one other tennant and were therefore quite isloated from everyone else. We didn't mind, there were about twenty of us housed in an office built for ten, but we were community workers and did our best under stressful conditions. Most of our best ideas came about over breakfast, lunch and coffee, lots and lots of coffee around the table in the kitchen. So we were really annoyed one lunch time when we'd just got as far as getting the kettle on and the bread on the table when the fire alarm sounded. But being the good obedient souls that we were, we all trooped out to the back carpark and counted heads. And the alarm kept ringing and we kept standing and moaning that we hadn't brought the biscuit tin with us. And the bell rang some more. And some more. And nothing else happened. So we did the only thing open to women who hadn't had lunch and who needed to pee. We went back in. I was pushed in first and went back down the corridor, nothing, no smoke, no flames, no nothing. Obviously a false alarm - they did happen a lot - toasters you know. Back to the kitchen, kettle on, sandwiches underway and folk off to pee. "What are we missing? Oh, the fruit bowl." We took the 'five a day' message very seriously.

Off into the main office for the fruit bowl, kept on the window sill. It was there I came nose to nose- thank goodness for the window between us - with a very irrate Head Firefighter. The four big red fire appliances in the front carpark should have been the giveaway. This very annoyed man shouted an expression at me that I didn't think they were allowed to do to members of the public. He was not amused to see the other nineteen women, who'd trooped out of the kitchen in response to my 'Um, girls there's a very cross man outside our window and I think he would like us to get out,' standing in an office which he personnaly had checked as cleared.

We left, this time taking the biscuit tin and the fruit bowl. I didn't actually mean to take the fruit bowl but it was still in my arms when I got to the car park. Always the fall guy I was pushed to the front of the group to explain ourselves to the nice man. "You're good at things like this."

He didn't want a banana, nor an apple, and batting the eyelashes didn't really work. Playing the dumb blond card and the fact that we were in the proper car park this time surrounded by lots of people, saved me from instant death. As it was he made do with shouting and finger pointing. I thought we were going to need an extinguisher for him. He looked as if he was about to internally combust!