Basking in the
Basket Glory
Even I concede that
the internet can be a wonderful thing.
On Tuesday I purchased a Mega Sonic Cat Repeller, a bargain at £14.99,
half the price of the usual RRP. The
Repeller is required as I have recently noticed that next door’s cat is not
satisfied with digging up her owner’s lawn but has now progressed onto mine,
causing several pot holes. I could raise
the issue with my neighbour but I surmise that there is little she can do about
the issue, short of keeping the excavating moggy indoors, which is somewhat
unreasonable, and I am keen to maintain our excellent neighbourly
relations. So a quick search on the
internet revealed various feline rebuffing products and I decided to not mess
about but to go straight for the top of the range, number one best-selling Mega
Sonic Cat Repeller.
Apparently the product
works by projecting an infrared beam across the lawn and is alerted when a
moggy enters its field whence it fires a small but lethal missile and destroys
little kitty on the spot, leaving only its smoking tail resting forlornly on
the lawn. I am of course
fantasising. In actuality the Mega Sonic
shoos Tiddles away by emitting a high pitched voice (that is inaudible to the
human ear) which terrifyingly asserts (in the voice of Christopher Lee), “you
have one second to get off this lawn moggy before the Grim Reaper appears with
a scythe (and I have it on good authority that he is in a foul mood today) and
you end up in a chow mein in the Rharely Peking.”
Of course the days
before the internet were simpler times and one could still find the required
information as to how to solve a problem by raising the issue in the pub and
people would spout forth their simple housewives’ remedies as how to solve the
problem, all of which tended to be poppycock and less use than a comb to cue
ball headed Abdul Dave in the Flagon & Gorses.
I used to have a cat
living in Codger Mansions but she has long since shed her fury mortal
coil. My brother Codger made it a term
of renting his house that I would look after the cat Holly, who I used to call
Bloody Holly at 0500 hours as she would nip at my feet while I tried to sleep
as she wanted to be fed. When it was
time to take Holly to the vet it was a right game getting her into her cat box
unless you caught her unawares and shoehorned her in there before she got
spooked. If I tried the fish in the back
of the box tactic to lure the cat in she used to look at me and think, “you can
f*ck right off if you think I am falling for that old trick.” Ironically, when she was on the veterinarian’s table sh*tting herself with
fear all of a sudden the dreaded cat box seemed more attractive to her than the
Flagon & Gorses does to yours truly.
Talking of the Flagon
Toby-in-Tents horrified me on Sunday when he disclosed to me in the pub that he
had recently tipped a whole bottle of ouzo, one of my favourite spirits, down
the sink. Being a former member of
Amnesty International I am not in favour of capital punishment but such a
heinous act should be punished extremely severely. This was the first of three alcohol fiascos
this week. On Monday Tesco dutifully
delivered my monthly shop to Codger Mansions but instead of including a bottle
of the delightful Sicilian lemon based spirit limoncello they instead delivered
a bottle of Jeeves Original fruit mixer drink (17.5% ABV), which even mixed
with lemonade and ice is ghastly; the drink tasted like a chilled cough mixture
shandy. The third incident in the
triumvirate of booze disappointments was me erroneously ordering a bottle of
non-alcoholic beer at Villa Park on Tuesday, which was later compounded by the
team incompetently being knocked out of the League Cup without so much as a
whimper.
Toby told me about his
shameful Greek spirits crime after we had completed our 10k charity run on
Sunday morning. We did well for first
time racers so to congratulate ourselves on our efforts we ventured to the
Flagon & Gorses at noon for some much needed R&R including the consumption
of delicious Portuguese cakes cooked by Tony’s girlfriend, the lovely Samuka
Dudlovski. On arrival we were greeted by
the sight of the hard settles in the bar having been completely re-upholstered
with soft, cushioned seating, which on the face of it should provide more
comfort for the punters. However, by
early evening on Sunday I started to get the numb sensation in my rear that one
gets towards the end of a film in the cinema but such numbness never used to
prevalent with the hard, wooden settles; mind you I would hazard that this will
not be an issue for the vast majority of Flagoners as few will remain in situ
in the same spot, uninterrupted, for seven hours.
I enjoyed the days of sobriety leading up to
the road race so much last week that at breakfast on Monday morning I resolved
to have a pop at it again over the days that followed. Such delusions of sobriety lasted less than
an hour as the Flagon’s own Chilli Willy called me an at early hour to inform
me that he will be in Birmingham all day on a course and he requisitioned me
for a lunchtime pint or three. In the
words of Al Pacino in The Godfather III,
“Just when I thought I was out, they pull me back in.”
In many ways the lunchtime pint with Willy and the Phantom was a rare
treat as in these times of austerity I have cut back on such indulgences. In the period of austerity after the war my
dear Grandad Charlie grew all manner of things, as many people did, to
supplement his family’s rations and it was a practice he continued for all of
his days. Even though we are in a period
of austerity now I have grown nothing except for my overdraft. I buy my tomatoes from Tesco and take great
pleasure in complaining about the price.
Mind you I doubt very much whether anything of any use would grow in the
Codger Mansions garden on account of the lack of sunlight, the murky conditions
and the proliferation of hungry insects, not to mention the cat sh*t from the
aforementioned next door’s moggies. Even
the hardiest of vegetables would have none of it and would quickly sink back
down into the largely infertile soil after popping out above the ground and
surveying the shabbiness of the surroundings.
Unusually I have had a horticultural highlight this week as I consider
myself to have finally won the Furnace Hill hanging basket war with my
neighbour Lester Fester, which finally reached a thrilling climax. Arguably (though I dispute it myself)
Fester’s hanging basket has looked more resplendent and colourful than mine
throughout the summer months but Fester has now taken his basket down and as
mine endures (and still looks illuminating after my gentle and devoted care) I
have taken Fester’s actions as an admission of defeat. In my estimation I am the ultimate winner of
the war and I am not hesitating in basking in the basket glory. Little victories of course make life
worthwhile.
If I was a highflyer in my career like Willy Mantitt then I could relate
the hanging basket story on the networking circuit but alas I am less of a
highflyer than a limbo dancer with house bricks in his pockets. I’d imagine
that “networking” is a euphemism for everybody getting drunk on the company’s
money and if you do happen to get a good contact you lose the business card
anyway through being awash with booze.
And in the unlikely event that your hangover lets you remember the
contact’s name the following morning and you look him up and contact him, in
the cold light of day you realise that he’s a bumbling fool but you didn’t
grasp it at the time because you were sozzled.
One man who was not a bumbling fool was the 19th century
painter, writer and explorer George Catlin, who made it his business to
document the lives and traditions of Native American tribes in the old American
west as he thought, correctly, that the tribes and their culture would all but
die out. The other Sunday in the Flagon
Gary Sitting Bull tipped me off that there is currently an exhibition of
Catlin’s work at Birmingham Museum & Art Gallery, so I toddled off there to
have a look and it was highly impressive and entertaining. One of Catlin’s painting depicts a rites of
passage practice of suspending young braves from the ceiling of a tepee by
rope, which is secured to the body by pegs dug into the brave’s flesh; the
brave hangs in such a state until he passes out and he is then cut down. I would be less than pleased to partake in
such a barbaric and brutal custom so if I were a Native American I would form
my own tribe called the Wussies whose rite of passage would be to down a pint
of bitter in one go without spilling a drop.
The first rule of the tribe would be that under no circumstances are
members allowed to tip bottles of Ouzo down the naffing sink.
© Dominic Horton,
September 2013.
