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[Photo: Mrs Moodie Report]
The nights are setting in down at The Moodie Report Worldwide Headquarters (also known as ‘The Shed’). Fall has fallen in London and with it the night shift becomes just that little more onerous.
Given the demands of our 24-hour industry and a packed editorial programme, the nights are often long as well as cold. Especially when a certain well-intentioned Mrs Moodie Report comes down to the foot of the back garden to say goodnight and to take a photo of her hard-working husband doing his best to pay off the mortgage.
Alas, as is her want, the ultra security-minded Mrs Moodie Report then absent-mindedly locked the back door to the household, leaving her hapless husband – who duly discovered his plight 30 minutes later – stranded in the Worldwide HQ throughout the night unless he could rouse his spouse from her slumbers at (the other side of) Maison Moodie Report.
In a variation on the Romeo & Juliet scenario, stones – and the odd almost poetically pleading phrase – rather than couplets were thrown at various back windows in an effort to be granted a re-entry permit. Alas with no success.
Next target? The bedroom of les petits Moodie Reports high above in the loft conversion perhaps? But it would take a decent sized stone to reach that high as well as the throwing arm of a top American quarterback.
And what if the throw was on target? While the sound of a breaking window and two alarmed children might indeed wake the intended target as well as most of the neighbourhood, the prospect of broken glass on the youngsters’ bedroom floor would surely guarantee permanent exile back to the Worldwide HQ.
Time to take stock. Plenty of Kiwi Marlborough Sauvignon Blanc in the WW HQ fridge. Some nice Woodford Reserve and Camus Borderies for the early hours. Some very good Habanos to blow the cobwebs away, everything Dylan and Zevon have ever done, light, heating and of course The Moodie Report.com. Australasia was already online and Asia would be soon. So no shortage of company. It could be worse, much worse. Time to settle in for the evening…
Then suddenly, ‘what light through yonder window breaks? It is the east (-ern bathroom) and Mrs Moodie Report is the sun’ as William Shakespeare would have surely put it if he had been locked out and stranded in his garden shed – sorry Worldwide Headquarters – by Mrs Shakespeare.
“Let me in. Let me in.” At first it appeared by her lack of reaction that Mrs Moodie Report thought her husband was simply reading The Three Little Pigs bed-time story to his children from the garden below.
Eventually though, the truth dawned. And in that eternally understanding and sympathetic way that so many wives down the ages have displayed, she greeted a by-now ever-so-slightly irritated Mr Moodie Report with the immortal words, “What’s all the noise about? I’m trying to sleep.”