Mitchell goes green, bald cat, hot rear, flat tyre ... bank holiday hell!

THIS bank holiday weekend was doomed from Saturday morning. That was when I noticed Gay Mitchell had changed colour. He was flesh-coloured on his election posters last week. This week, he’s turned a spectacular seasick green.

Fine Gael will either sue the printers or give them a bonus for finding a way to make the same posters attract new attention halfway through the election campaign.

I spotted the posters from my husband's car, heading for the airport to drop him off. On the return journey, I got too hot to care about Gay Mitchell's neon green visage. This was because I didn't know how to turn off the heated driver's seat. The sensation was drive-your-own-funeral pyre. I possessed the hottest rear end in Ireland when I got home and noted that my own car had a slow-puncture relapse.

The puncture started the previous weekend. Our son is a knight with a spanner in the back pocket of his shining armour if you have complex, important, high-end vehicular failures. But a puncture is beneath him. Get the AA, he'd said, when invited to be a problem-solver.

I half-expected the AA man to say "'allo, thees eez AA eemairgancy sairvees," the way they do on the ads, but he concentrated on getting the wheel off and seemed quite disappointed that it didn't have a great slashing wound with tyre entrails handing out.

He was even more disappointed when he went to stick on the replacement wheel. I had the wrong nuts, he said severely. The dinky temporary wheel has special nuts. Except that mine didn't.

I began to get desperate. Finding the AA man has issues with your nuts after he's taken the wheel off is like finding the cardiac surgeon has issues with your arteries after he's taken your heart out.

He got on the phone to HQ for a nut conference and they all decided the dinky wheel would be OK if he used the ones he'd taken out of the bad wheel. When he departed, I took the flat tyre to a garage, which fixed it and reattached it. That pretty much ate a hole in last weekend.

Now, seven days later, the bloody puncture is doing a repeat performance. I'm standing there, wondering if a relapsed slow puncture would be interesting enough to justify my son's attention, when the phone rings.

"My passport is out," my husband announces.

"Out where?"

"Out of date. It expires on Tuesday next."

A marital moment of silence happens at this point. Marital moments of silence are filled with thoughts like "What kind of an eejit are you?" and "Don't go there, sunshine, you're the one who lost her passport on a one-day business trip to Geneva."

"They won't let you on the plane."

"They say they will."

"But they'll deport you on Tuesday."

"I'm sure the Irish Consul in New York can give me a new passport." I'm in the middle of telling him the Irish Consul won't be open at a weekend, when Scruffy the cat deposits a recently dead, heavily bleeding mouse on my brand new shoes, with me in them and indicates he wants stroking for giving me this present.

My husband rings off. I now have a dead body in the kitchen, a dead tyre in the driveway and an outward bound husband of doubtful citizenship.

This is par for the course. It happens every time: bank holiday hell.

On last year's June holiday, Scruffy fell into a vat of diesel and lost the coat that makes him look like a small polar bear. Scruffy is thick as a plank. But big on killing instinct. He mows down rats, birds and mice and drags them home, boasting at the top of his voice. (In contrast, his black-coated brother, Dino, is a cowardly neurotic who gets picked on by magpies and retreats indoors to whinge about it). This time last year, I was out of the country when my next door neighbour found Scruffy in her back garden, reeking of diesel, minus his fur and shivering in agony. She wrapped him in a bath towel and went in search of a vet. A tall order on a bank holiday. After three hours, she found one and left the cat with him.

When the holiday weekend was over, the vet rang our office to say the cat really should be put down.

"OK," my son agreed. "As long as you're prepared to put my mother, down, too, when she gets back and finds Scruffy is past tense."

The vet agreed to hold the euthanasia and stuff Scruffy full of antibiotics instead. The patient couldn't eat or drink and looked like your worst nightmare. A completely bald cat has goose-pimply saggy skin of impressive ugliness. But he lived, and, when I arrived a week later, was out of danger and ready to come home. He leaped out of the cat-carrier purring like a lawnmower with delight at seeing his brother again.

His brother took one look, hit him between the eyes with a clenched paw and had a feline nervous breakdown over being forced to share a house with this pink warty stranger.

Scruffy the new Skinhead shrugged off the rejection and went out to murder wildlife. His kill rate went from good to phenomenal, now he was starkers. Birds and mice were transfixed by a cat with no clothes on. While his prey tried to figure out whether he was a tall skinny pig or a very short moulted ostrich, it was easy for him to knock them senseless.

The vat of diesel was last year's bank holiday thrill. This year, it's been punctures and passports. I couldn't bring myself to ring the AA. They probably never get to draw breath on bank holidays, never mind say "'Allo," and I'd feel guilty about annoying them with a relapsing slow puncture.

The man in my life, however, had no compunction at all about annoying the Manhattan Consul on a Saturday. At three in the afternoon in New York, he rang to say he'd telephoned the consulate and got a recorded message stating they were all gone for the weekend. However, the recording added, a caller with an emergency should leave their telephone number. He'd left his number.

"I wouldn't hold my breath waiting for a return call," I said.

Whereupon he told me, with lamentable smugness, that within five minutes, a consular official named Darragh Holmes HAD rung him back. Not only that, but Mr Holmes was going to provide him with a new passport within the hour.

"He's from Walkinstown," my husband concluded, as if this explained everything. "He even told me where I'd get passport photographs taken."

"He sounds wonderful," I conceded, surveying my own miseries. "Tell me. Is he any good on slow punctures?"