Many months ago, sometime last spring, I shared with you my excitement at learning, for the first time, about how to make modest little investments. I was introduced to the concept of leverage… which, very crudely speaking, in a simplistic sort of way, approximately, means that although you only have £1, you pretend that you have £1,000, so when the price of gold or oil or cotton-socks goes up by a penny, your artificially-inflated investment (of pretend £1,000 aka real £1) goes up by £100.

Something like that, anyway.

Downside, of course, being that when the value of whatever you’ve invested in is goes down by the hundredth of the breadth of a hair instead of up, you risk losing everything…

(Unless you have a really clever, smart trader, who knows what he’s doing and uses Stop Losses and Take Profits, and generally boxes and coxes for you… in which case you can, somewhat mysteriously, turn even loss into profit. But that’s by the bye for the present purpose.)

Which is the perfect metaphor for our current illustration. Because Beehas a kind of mental negative leverage.

The tiniest hair’s breadth of the wrong comment can lose you mountains of gold.

Let’s recap:

A week ago (and for some weeks previously) Serena had been looking forward to an old-fashioned sisterly visit to help her with the rampages of the LV, while the BV is away earning a crust.

Ideally, she said to Bee, turn up… well… yesterday.

Last Saturday morning, as part of preparing to go away, Bee asked if we’d need her bedroom during her absence.

Let me see how many paying guests we have coming, I said. Let’s look at it over a leisurely kitchen breakfast.

As luck, or ill-luck, would have it, at that point Ben kindly responded to something I asked his help with earlier, for which he needed to use my laptop for five or ten minutes.

Well? Bee said.

Hang on, Bee, I said. I need certain information in order to answer your question, and Ben’s doing something on my laptop for me.

I can look it up, said Gerda, our cleaner, and whipped her telephone out.

We have twenty-two coming, she said. So yes, Bee: we’ll definitely need your room.

Thing is, when you’ve lived with Bee for a while – indeed, when you’ve lived with anyone for a while – you get to know her (or his) funny little ways.

We all have these…

I must have funny little ways, myself. I just can’t immediately think what they are.

Shaun has funny little ways. When he’s got his face in a book – or the crossword puzzle, or the Beano, or anything with words on it – he might as well be in Australia. Thus, when Rose was born, he said, When did we agree that? I said, Shaun, we discussed this idea, about nine and a bit months ago. He said, really?

When I cast my mind back, I had to admit that, yes, he’d probably been reading at the time.

Alex has funny little ways. A thousand years are as the blink of an eye to him. Thus, if you want him to come down for dinner on time on a Friday night, you put it in his diary on Monday morning. Several years previously.

Ben has funny little ways (snakes in his room). Shaun’s Great Dane has funny little ways (you sometimes have to open the window a lot). The cats… the birds…

Even the Queen probably has funny little ways. Those silly dogs that don’t have proper legs, for instance.

We all have funny little ways.

And Bee has funny little ways…

With leverage.

Thus, knowing Bee as I do, I never would have said, definitely like that, like an ultimatum, yes we need your room at the weekend.

I might have said, it would be very helpful indeed if we can. If possible. Thank you, Bee.

But saying it in the way a comparative newcomer to Bee’s illness said it, as an absolute like that, it was like a hundred cannon firing simultaneously at very close range around the ears of the most neurotic racehorse you ever came across.

Vroom. Dust. Horizon. Gone.

Sigh.

It took half a week of reassurances and will now probably take another two weeks for her to recover before she can even start the process of thinking about getting ready to be at Serena’s house.

For yesterday.

So sad.