Once more unto the
Breach
Like every other sane person (and probably many insane ones) I do not
like having to drag myself out of bed in the morning but necessity (as well as
being the mother of invention) dictates that rising at an early hour is
unavoidable due to having to go to work to keep the wheels of the drudgery of
life rolling. In my case the wheels are
corroded and have balding tyres but they carry on with their rotation,
stoically, nonetheless. So getting up in
the morning to face the day is a case of “Once
more unto the breach, dear friends, once more” to see what the new day
brings.
I attacked with Churchillian gusto the task of trying to transform into
something palatable the foul batch of carrot and coriander soup that I made
(see Lowlife 46) and I decided that
it might make a passable pasta sauce.
But despite enhancing the brew with what amounted to a farmer’s field
full of carrots it still failed to taste even remotely like the vegetable and
no amount of herbs or condiments could bring out the flavour. I did eat one helping of the resultant dish
and I told myself that it was mind over matter, but the matter in question was
stodgy, ghastly and had a confusion of sickly flavours, all seemingly competing
against each other. Not even the Baby
Faced Assassin at the Rhareli Peking Chinese takeaway would have served it up. So unlike Churchill I had to wave a white tea
towel and admit defeat.
Not even a rousing speech by Churchill could have stirred up the sorry
and cheerless handful of inmates I found in the Flagon & Gorses on Sunday
when I crossed the pub’s threshold at tea time.
The old place is normally thriving and lively at that hour on the
Sabbath but many of the usual Flaggoners had deserted their posts and were
absent without leave, which meant that only a few of the regiment remained to
solider on. It took a while for
reinforcements to arrive, just in the nick of time before I became too
demoralised and dispirited to carry on but things turned from the substandard
to the ridiculous when Chilli Willy produced a big box of brand new Christmas
trimmings to replace the antique, dog eared and sullied ones that usually adorn
the pub during the festive season which have been wheeled out more times at
Christmas than Morecambe & Wise.
I’m depressed by
Christmas already and it is only the first week of December. I am sure that putting up Christmas
decorations too early leads to bad luck and I do not want misfortune visiting
the Flagon, as happened to the Clutha Vaults pub
in Glasgow last Friday night when a helicopter tragically crashed into it. I am sure that putting up the Christmas tree
so early would not please the mythical pub dwelling festive ghoul, the Ghost of
Christmas P*ssed.
The bad luck brought
on by the premature hanging of trimmings in the Flagon might account for the
insect bites that have appeared on my legs this week, causing the kind of
irritation I used to get from Derek Jameson on BBC Radio 2 in the morning. One expects insect bites in joyful summertime,
especially after being in the great outdoors wearing short trousers, but it is
rotten fortune to obtain them in the midst of winter. I have not even got a flea-riddled pet to
blame the insect bites on so I had to launch an official investigation at
Codger Mansions. As regular readers will
know the Mansions are a veritable menagerie of insects but usually only
spiders, wood lice and earwigs are on show, none of which I would expect to
display the Norman Hunter quality of biting legs.
After scrutinising all
corners of the house I found a number of pesky flies in the shower (in fact
they must be more like Pecsi flies, as they are small but violent and cause
harm like Joe Pecsi’s character Tommy DeVito in the Martin Scorsese film Goodfellas.) This all culminated in my trailing round
B&Q and spending nearly four quid on a special liquid that purports to kill
all known life in drains, 100% guaranteed.
All was well the day after pouring the noxious liquid down the shower
drain and there was no sign of the dreaded Pesci flies, so I deemed the
procedure to be a resounding success.
But this morning, to my horror, I spied one of the diminutive flies
nestling on the bathroom mirror and when I approached it to swat it I found
that my attempt to kill him and his comrades off had heightened their
aggressiveness as he stared at me and menacingly snarled Pesci style, “Are you
looking at me?!”
So it is back to the
drawing board. It might be a case of me
having to arrange a sit down with the Don of the Pesci fly family to try to
reach a compromise on the issue. The
matter is now complex because even people with a basic understanding of insect
Mafioso rules know that you can’t simply go around killing a made fly, a Capo, without the nod from
the Boss.
Anyway, this insect bite business means my regime of
having to use various creams and potions on my body for a variety of ailments
and needs has reached ridiculous proportions.
I have eczema so I use prescription cream for that (which costs £7.85
for a tiny tube which is not much bigger than a super glue tube [incidentally
you no longer hear stories of people getting stuck to toilet seats in public
lavatories after some devilish practical joker smeared super glue on the seat])
and it also means that I have to use moisturiser after a shower or bath; I use
lip balm for dry lips, especially in the winter; a permanent athlete’s foot
problem means I use a remedy for that (I can practically hear the laughter of
ex-football team mates who know that the use of the word “athlete” in reference
to me is tantamount to a breach of the Trades Description Act); and now the
Cosa Nostra insect bite difficultly means that I am having to slaver Savlon
over my legs to relieve the itching. All
in all I get through more cream that a quaint tea shop in Cornwall.
It is not Mafia insects that are irritating the FA
and the Premier League at the moment but the increasing use of flares at
football grounds, so the BBC announced this week that the footballing
authorities are to take measures to enforce their ban on them. To my mind the ban has come nearly 40 years
too late as if flares had been outlawed in football grounds long ago marauding
Scottish fans in bell bottomed jeans would not have ruined the goalposts at
Wembley in the Auld Enemy international game in 1977.
Trousers are again a sore subject for me this week. My
on-going headache of trying to purchase decently cut (yet cheap) chinos for
work lead me to trawling the internet and I hazarded upon the website of men’s
clothes retailer Austin Reed. Reed’s
clothes are normally too rich for my peasant blood but they had a sale on and I
captured a pair of classy looking chinos at a surprisingly competitive
price. (By the way, I wear the cotton
based chino at work due to the eczema problem alluded to hitherto as they are
more kind to the skin than formal trousers.)
The trousers arrived on Wednesday only for me to find that despite them
being my regular size the waist was marginally too taught for me to wear them
but despite this I have decided to keep them to act as an incentive to lose
weight. This is probably a less than
sensible tactic given that Christmas and all its associated consumption of food
and booze is on the horizon but at least the inspiration of finally squeezing
into the chinos will keep me away from the Rhareli Peking Chinese takeaway.
The purchase of clothing items is always fraught
with difficulty for me given that I am what psychologist Elaine N. Aron calls a Highly
Sensitive Person (HSP), otherwise known as a right fussy b*stard. That said, when I recently bought a pair of
shoes I bought some at the first shop I entered. A rather fetching pair of black and tan
brogues quickly caught my eye and I think that they are the most alluring pair
of shoes I have ever seen and given that they were half price in a sale I
transacted without haste. I have had at
least a dozen compliments regarding the shoes, which is highly unusual because
even if people like something they are usually too miserable to mention
it. The shoes are in fact so pleasant
that just to have the pleasure of wearing them it is worth getting out of bed
in the morning.
© Dominic Horton, December 2013.
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