I've just received a call from a woman with a voice that sounded like gravel being run through a blender - pleasant enough, in small doses, from a distance greater than one centimetre and when you're not otherwise absorbed in a task that requires absolute concentration and silence, I dare say. But not so much in my present circumstances.
Still, because of the obvious urgency of what she had to tell me: something about 'Air Force One', no less, 'the President's plane', indeed, I felt compelled to give her gravel-voice my full and undivided attention, lest a matter of national security be at stake.
'BUT WHAT IS IT PERTAINING TO?' I said, finally, in a frantic and appropriately dramatic voice, when the woman was clearly having difficulty explaining the matter of national security she had been charged with telling me about, using the cryptic, gravel code that she had obviously deployed for the purpose in order to be sure I was who I said I was, perhaps, before she spoke more directly. I hadn't exactly said who I was, but I didn't have to, because she knew already, even the
Mrs part. But she has to be sure.
'Heat Pumps' turned out to be the cleverly-coded message the woman with the gravel voice urgently had to tell me about. So I now sit here, no longer entombed in a cone of concentrated creative silence listening to nothing put the productive tap-tap-tapping of the keys, and churn-churn-churning of my marvellous mind, trying to figure out what the heck the President of the United States of America could possibly want with me that he couldn't just come right out and ask me directly, without having to resort to a woman with a gravel voice speaking code. I haven't figured it out yet, but when I do, you'll be the first to know - after the President of course.
