Older

Older, yes. I reach the end of this week battered and bruised by the harsh mistress of ageing. My face is lined, my hair grey and thinning, my walking stick arriving in the post tomorrow. The ravages of time leave me enfeebled.

But what has my additional age gained me? Insight, perhaps. I have thought Ian particularly odd since last October, his habits inexplicable, his voice barely intelligible, his strange looks, mannerisms and alarming physical spasms highly distracting. But now that I, too, am 31 all of this is clear. It all makes sense. I won’t try to explain it here but from the other side of 30, from the perspective of an age ending in a one, these things take on meaning.

Has it gained me wisdom? No. I ate pizza on Wednesday night and had it again on Thursday morning, a car crash of poor meal planning that could have been entirely avoided. So much for ageing.

My secret tragedy

I haven’t told you about this before, but it’s about time I did. When Kev visited a couple of weeks ago we ended up talking about it and my terrible sadness was impossible to disguise. I can’t live this lie any longer.

A while ago now, I was engaged to be married. We were so happy together, so perfect for each other. I couldn’t imagine anything could come between us. I was her man and she was my bear. (She was a grizzly bear, you see.) But on the day of our wedding, just minutes before the ceremony started, she left me, running away down the street in her bridal dress. I was distraught.

You may find this hard to believe, but thankfully Kev has stepped in and provided the following sketch of that fateful moment, so you don’t have to think very hard to imagine it. In those days, as you can see, I looked a bit like Jeremy Beadle, so all in all this is a chapter of my life I’d rather forget.

Best Fwends

Friendships are supposed to last a lifetime. Friendships are the glue that hold together the people you know and without them we’d all be strangers wearing sunglasses trying to buy scouring pads. Nobody would expect a friendship to last a mere 24 hours and yet for it to mean so much.

Juggy was more than a friend. In the short space of time that we spent together it was obvious that he was more than a jug too. Juggy transcended the norm and exceeded all expectations.

What started out as a clearing out exercise at Kevin’s house, where he was sifting some carpets and buffing the parapets when I arrived, quickly turned into one of the moments that stay with you forever. Juggy met me with a high five and shortly after were cruising down to Stockport, singing along to the mix CD Kev had made when he wasn’t milking the rafters.

Juggy loved to sing. Not only this but he encouraged us to join in. He was the life and soul of the party, and when we actually reached the party he also became the loul and sife of the party too. So it was with a heavy heart that, learning of someone’s need for a jug, I handed him over to serve a greater cause. It was clear that it was destiny that Juggy came with us in order to help another’s plight and without him that person would have had to go to Wilkinsons to buy one. It was too much. I only have this photo to remember him by but, my God, he was one hell of a guy.

Here’s to you, Juggy. Salute!

The end (probably) of #TapSaga

That’s it. It’s over. For now at least anyway.

If anyone ever suggests to you that changing the taps in the bathroom is a quick and easy way to ‘refresh’ your room, my advice is to punch them swiftly in the face.

Let me give you a summary of what has gone on so far in #TapSaga in abbreviated bullet list format:

A Cry For Help

Hi, my name is (deleted for legal reasons) and I have a problem. My problem is that I am drawn towards fake doctors, some of which I create in my own mind and some of which are presented to me in my daily life.

I suppose it all started a couple of years ago. I was on a friend’s stag do and go violently sick for no particular reason and had to abandon everyone at the restaurant we were dining in. My food was wrapped up for me and I retired to the hotel room feeling very unwell. The next day the only thing that made me remotely better was Dr. Burger, a delectable cut of meat wrapped in salad and soft white bread. She looked after me as I recuperated, watched over me in my time of need and when we had to part I felt a great sadness.

A year or two passed and despite a brief fling with Dr. Pepper nothing seemed to emerge. That is until I met Dr. Pepper’s sexy sister, Dr. Fizz. Whereas the former was very sweet and accommodating, the latter was dark and adulterous. She was all over me. I just couldn’t get enough of her and, every weekend, I would hide away with her and refuse to come out until we were done. I’m trying to distance myself yet no matter what I do I seem to end up with her.

So here I am, a wobbly mess, unable to cope without my hit of Dr. Fizz. Sometimes I find myself wandering the 24hr supermarkets at 2 in the morning sniffing around Dr. Oetker. Sometimes I’m found crying into Dr. Beckmann and his Glowhite Sheets. Dr. Karg and his organic cheese and pumpkin seed crisp bread offer me no salvation. Dr. Fresh and Dr. Salts stand at the back and point and laugh at my plight.

I need to know if there’s an end to this all because if there isn’t, one day you’ll break open into my flat and find me buried under a large mound of Dr. Brown’s wide neck silicone teats… and then it’ll be too late…

Wiping away history

Today I did a kind of cleaning I’ve never done before: I cleaned the keys of my computer keyboard. Not where crumbs have landed in between them – the keys themselves. Some of them were dirty, you see, with a sort of browny-grey film on them. The keys I use all the time were white, the ones I use occasionally had a white middle and dirty edges, and the ones I never use were just dirty all over.

It’s annoyed me for a while but today I hit on the solution. I took a rubber to the keyboard and rubbed out all the dirt. Now it’s sparkling clean and all the keys are white. But while I was erasing the filth, it occurred to me that in its dirty state I effectively had a keyboard-sized infographic showing which keys I use and which I don’t. For some reason, the square brackets were completely filthy, even though I’m sure I use them sometimes, while the weird § key had a clean spot, even though I can’t remember ever having used it before typing this sentence. Comma was dirtier than full stop. Q was cleaner than Z.

Even weirder, the numbers got gradually dirtier from left to right, so 1 was clean while 9 was pretty mucky.

It’s nice to have a clean keyboard again but I feel like I’ve lost a historical record of the letters I type and the keys I don’t need. A little bit of history wiped away.

The sting

I was going to make a content-free post that would be blatantly and cynically intended just to get me up to four posts for December and win me a coveted bean. But then something happened that was worthy of making a whole post, so actually this will have something in it.

I’ve decided to buy myself a big Lego set as a Christmas present to myself, because I want one, and I’m a grown up so nobody can stop me. I was going to do it on Friday night, but now I have plans on Friday, so I set off to do it after work yesterday instead.

What actually happened was that I got to the Lego store, found the shelf where my Lego set should be, and saw that it was empty. So I asked one of the staff.

While he was explaining to me that it was sold out, and looking up when a new delivery would come in, I felt something odd on my head, and put my hand up to see what was in my hair. It felt like sticking my fingers into a ball of needles. A spiky black thing fell on the floor, crawled away for a bit, and then flew off. “Oh yeah,” said the assistant, “we’ve had wasps in here today”.

Wasps? In the Lego store? In a big shopping mall? In December? Unlikely, yes, but a wasp is what it was. A big bastard of a wasp who tried to sting me several times and did actually get his syringe of doom into my little finger.

So last night I went home, very very late, with no Lego, but with a wasp sting on my finger.

That’ll show me.

Sexatronic eviction

Gentlemen, we have a crisis. Sexatronic – my oddly named neighbour and subject of a hit single by The Papples – is about to be evicted from her ground floor hovel overlooking Church Road.

I suggest you do as I have done and write to your MP (remembering to CC the Queen) demanding that the Government steps in to prevent this impending tragedy.

Pouring
Beans

Category: Sorrow