Quality will out

Ronald Reagan once told his staff that they were always to wake him if there was an emergency ‘even if I am in a Cabinet meeting at the time’. All of us, Mrs Oakley included, have our definition of an emergency and the other night she shook me awake at 4 a.m. to confront one. I was led to the bathroom where, safely entrapped under a glass, was a spider. He was admittedly a beady-eyed, muscular and long-legged spider but there was no way he could have escaped that glass before morning. Nevertheless, such was Mrs Oakley’s agitation that he had to be defenestrated at that instant.

I duly earned my Brownie points although not altogether graciously. I had just fallen asleep for the first time in 36 hours following a virulent dose of food poisoning and for me there was no reason why the spider’s return to his no doubt anxious family in our web-entwined rosebed could not have waited until morning.