Banker

V and I are a little under the weather at the moment, some kind of low-grade flu-like exhaustion thing. It's not just the standard exhaustion. Taking a few hours out to sleep (leaving the other half on baby duty) doesn't help at all, it just makes you more confused. But that's what we need to do. We both need rest, and F needs attention.

One way of making sure there's enough peace in the flat to sleep in is to take F on a walk. This combines well with mundane shopping duties. Yesterday, I woke up feeling extra hare-brained after a long and apparently useless afternoon nap, then decided to go out in the lovely spring weather we're having. In your face, Britain - crocuses and sunshine abound over here, and you're all stuck with George Osbourne.

I had a cheque to cash. One from the government, a travel expenses claim for job-seeking (in your face, Britain again). To be honest, I didn't really want to go to the bank. The prospect of speaking Swedish was a bit much for my addled mind, and I actually got a bit tearful at the prospect. But it needed doing, so I attempted to man up anyway.

Didn't work. Waiting in line at the local SEB, or, well, scratch that. You don't always wait in line in Swedish shops or banks, you more usually take en nummerlapp and stand in a small and politely impatient pack of Swedes until your number comes up on the tannoy. It makes everywhere remind me slightly of a GP's surgery in the UK - there's a system, you know you have to wait your turn, but nobody quite believes in their heart of hearts that it's working properly and that guy over there got here after me what the hell.

So anyway, as I was waiting in the bank lobby, F started screaming a bit. She doesn't usually when we're out. Maybe she was picking up on my mood, or maybe the bank was just particularly ennervating. I'd go with the latter. Of the two cashiers, one kept looking up at the two of us irritably as F yelled. Fair enough, it's not a nice sound. And seeing you're going to be serving the red-eyed, grey-faced mumbling foreigner with what appears to be an angry ewok strapped to his chest isn't ever going to make your cashier's day. All the same, I could have done without the two minutes of pretend paperwork as she waited to see if her colleague might finish up first, or the huge resigned sigh as she pressed the button to summon me forth.

"Don't you have any pacifiers?" was one of the first things she asked me, once I'd laboured through my explanation of what I wanted and she'd explained to me which forms I needed to sign. Well, no, not with me, F tends to spit them out when she's in the Baby Björn, but I couldn't say that because I only know about half the words I'd need, and none of the grammar. So I lurched through an explanation that she doesn't really like them and we're both really tired.

"You should buy some pacifiers. You can't pay into this account," said Helpy Helperton, "it's not yours." No, I know, it was my wife's, but now it's a joint account. I have what V (in a very rare lapse in her English) calls 'power of eternity' on the account. I like that, it makes me feel vaguely like He-Man, you know, 'I Have The Powerrrrrrr' and so on. I tried to make this clear, in a not very clear way.

"Yes, but this is a private account," I was told. And even though I've got a bank card for the account and my name is on their system, they wouldn't take my money. Which is probably a first for banking. "Go and buy some pacifiers," she said by way of dismissal. Broken, I shambled home, cheque in hand. F stopped screaming the moment we left, quite understandably.

I'm sure it wasn't easy trying to serve me. I made a number of tiredness-based errors, like getting my personnummer wrong twice in a row. And I'm sure a lot of her finer linguistic points were lost on me. She did ask about F in a genial 'how old, is it your first, how cute' way, as though reading from a prompt on her screen.

Once I relayed all this to V before crawling under a duvet to hide from the world, she got a certain look in her eye. "I'll be no more than twenty minutes," she told me as she left, thus announcing to the world the minutes left in the cashier's miserable life. There was no cheque when she came home; there was no blood on her hands either. She's meticulous that way.