Not so much a bunch of flowers, as a bunch of statement.

“Who sent you those?” Shaun asked.

“Barclays.” Like, obvious.

After laughing a lot, “Why?”

“I suggested they could send me champagne or flowers, and they came up with that.”

“Why on earth didn’t you just ask for champagne?”

“I thought it would sound greedy.”

“They’re not exactly flowers, are they?”

I suppose if you wanted to do passive-aggressive via a florist, this would be the way to go.

It all started with my asking, on a Saturday evening when I really wanted to do business smartly before Serena’s generous takeaway arrived, if they could whack an overdraft on a business account I’d recently opened because I’d had a couple of bounced payments.

Name, date of birth, so far so good. “Age?”

“I don’t do age, and I’ve just given you my date of birth so you can work it out yourself.”

“It’s a security question.”

“It’s an arithmetic question, and one I was brought up to consider rude to ask of a woman so please come up with another.”

“So was I but I still have to ask you.”

This went on for a while until I asked to speak to his supervisor. Thing is, we were getting on quite well until then. We couldn’t quite see eye to eye on what constitutes a security question, but he hadn’t called my mother a hamster or said my father smelt of elderberries. The ‘supervisor’ changed all that. He really was something else. Even Serena — who by now was getting quite impatient about the extremely expensive dinner she’d ordered from the best Indian kitchen in the neighbourhood––could hear him ranting at me from the other side of the room. Specially when I put the telephone down because I was sick of not being able to finish the sentence, “Please could you stop interrup…”

He did, however, manage to explain why asking a customer’s age is such an absolutely foolproof security question. Because a criminal who has just nicked all your security information, apparently, will hesitate for a split second before being able to answer. By this time we had been arguing for at least twenty minutes and if I had capitulated and worked out my age for him on the back of an envelope, he still would have given me an overdraft on the spot.

“Are you still there?” the telephone said after a long pause during which I’d finished my emails and laid the table.

That was when I told them to come up with an apology and some common sense or they would lose a customer who had been banking with them for so many decades that it almost certainly predates my date of birth.

Hence — after a genuine and profuse apology from a proper bank manager several days later––several blood-red triffids, a corkscrew thingy you could brain a mother-in-law with and a few springs of something which looks like the thistle end of a chrysanthemum.

I suppose if I’d stuck to the champagne theme I might have got something which could knock out a Russian spy.