2014: pretty awful so far.

I had high hopes for this new year but it hasn't brought me much luck so far. On Thursday, I went to see Cinderella at my local theatre and had a great time singing and yelling, "Oh no, it isn't!" etc. I had a glass of wine in the interval and was feeling on a high when I left, but when I switched on my phone I found a message telling me that Mr Grumpy had been taken to A&E.

My friends kindly drove me there and I found him with a tube in his arm and a nurse checking his blood pressure, which had gone through the roof. He suffered a small bleed on the brain three weeks ago, which affected his speech, but he was getting over that. They decided his BP meds weren't working as he hadn't had a review for five years. They gave him a pill and took his BP at half-hourly intervals, then when they saw it was coming down, they let him come home. Next day he visited his GP, who prescribed a new pill regime.

I didn't sleep all that night. I was shivering, even though I was wearing a dressing gown over my long nightie and had a hot water bottle. So on Friday I didn't go out at all. It was pouring, anyway. This morning, I had a half-hour trudge around the pavements, then came home and decided it was time to open my credit card statement, which had been sitting on my desk since before Christmas. It had been a deliberate decision not to open it as I knew the bill was going to be HUGE.

Unfortunately, it was a lot huger than my worst nightmares. Someone had managed to get hold of my details and go on a sizeable spending spree at John Lewis's. I just rang Barclaycard to tell them - and of course the Fraud Team don't work on Sundays! Anyway, they have the details and now I await a form to fill in.

"Aren't you going to block my card and send me another?" I asked the man in Mumbai, or wherever. "No," was the reply. Extraordinary. What happens if, having got away with it once, the bastards do it again?

It happened to Mr Grumpy once, after he had used an ATM at Sainsburys. Someone used his card to withdraw money in Rotterdam at 4 am! It was lucky he could prove it wasn't him because he'd just come out of hospital and couldn't walk or drive. How am I going to prove it wasn't me buying whatever it was in John Lewis's? I hope they'll believe me.

So that's two rotten things that have happened in the first week of 2014. I await the third with trepidation. Cross your fingers for me, won't you?