From deepest, darkest Anecdotia.
Once upon a time, I was really really masculine. No, seriously, ask anyone that I went to school with. I was the hunkiest of the testosteroniest of the jockiest of the Men.
Many of you may remember Men Behaving Badly.
**Tony:** *I’m sorry, look what happens when you live with a woman? She’ll fill the place with cushions.*
**Gary:** *Cushions, yeah.*
That’s always stuck in my mind, for some reason. And it comes back particularly hard on occasions.
*This was copied from my diary sometime in 2008*
Karen has been pestering me to throw out my holy socks for some time now. I resisted, for a while, as I knew that though I currently have a lot of pairs, once the culling began then there would be no stopping, and we would find out exactly how many, or rather, how few intact socks I own.
But because I love her, I obliged, and yesterday I began the process, terrified as I was.
The girl is a darling, though. This morning I opened my sock drawer to find five new pairs. Excitedly, I decided to forgo an old pair and wear a new one today, to show my appreciation.
Here’s where it gets horrid. I grabbed some scissors to cut the plastic frob that holds the socks in the pack. However, my incision was slightly off target.
The sock that I wear on my left foot became the first sock in my history to have a hole in it before it had ever been worn.
I just vacuum’d up one of Karen’s stockings.
I was doing man-hoovering. In order to save time and energy, I avoided the need to move things (shoes, clothes etc) out of the way by just pushing them to the edge of the room with the snout of the vacuum cleaner as I progressed.
However, some things evidently don’t get pushed by an assertive appliance, but prefer to give in to its powerful wiles, spreading their arms and allowing themselves to be smothered in its awesome bulk, feeling the erotic powerlessness of submission to their mighty Master.
Wow. Arousing stuff.
I delicately extracted the stocking from the mouth of the beast, and it seems to be in one piece, though a little dusty.
Let’s see how soon she notices.
I just had an unsolicited call to my mobile. Some guy trying to sell handset insurance. He said: “I understand that you pay £7.99 per month for insurance?”
I said: “No, I cancelled it.”
He said: “Ah, well, I’d like to make you a better offer?”
“Better than £0 per month?” I said.
“Haha, ” he said, “Yes, that would be a good offer, wouldn’t it?”
“Yes, ” I said. “Yes, it would.”
“Anyway, ” he said, “I shall tell you of my offer.”
“Seriously, is it a better offer than my current deal?” I asked. “Because if it is, then I’m all ears.”
He paused, and then thanked me for my time.
As I got home just now, with the bag of chinese takeaway in my hand (which, I should add, is sat beside me, looking rather “dishy”… heheheheh…), my nextdoor neighbour, whom I have never met before, was just leaving his house.
Momentarily, I forgot that he probably had no idea who I was. I gave him the kind of “Hello”, avec smile, that one normally preserves for one’s nextdoor neighbour of eight years, or a coworker whom you don’t particularly like, when you bump into them in the town centre on Saturday.
Well, either he recognised me, or he’s not the Who the fuck are you? sort, because he responded in kind.
As I walked past his front gate and through my own, I looked back to see whether there was a visual epiphany. I have to credit him, none such was apparent.
My crispy shredded beef looks lovely.
Me: “I want to… uhm… put you in a box… with… uhm… lots of toothpaste in it.”
Her: “Mmmmm…”
Me: “And I want to… uhm… tie you to a banjo.”
Her: “Ahhhhhh…”
Me: “And… uhm… put you next to the radiator and throw foxes at you.”
Her: “Oooooh…”
That’s “car” meets “saga”. Sorry, bit obscure.
It is commonly known amongst everyone in the whole wide world that my car key has a problem. The moulded plastic bit that should hold onto a keyring is worn and cracked, and so under extreme forces, the key can separate from the ring entirely.
Today, a co-worker gave me a lift to the bank, and since we were passing very close to the castle I stopped in to get my mobile phone, which I had forgotten to bring that morning.
FFwd to later on that afternoon. I remove my keys from my pocket (they were probably interfering with my karma or, more likely, my right testicle). Or, should I say, my key (that’s singular, there).
Like a finely honed analytical machine, my brain leaps into life and replays the last five hours of film. Maybe the key fell off somewhere in the office? Five minutes later, we can discount that possibility.
Maybe the key fell off when I parked the car in the car park this morning? Ten minutes of scrabbling in the dark later, we can discount that possibility.
Maybe the key fell off when I was sat in my colleague’s car? I borrow his key, and perform a quick hunt. No joy.
My colleague gave me a lift home tonight, to my warm house, and my spare car key. And who was waiting for me on the doorstep when I got home?
Kevin Spacey.
The drive back from Mallory Park lead us very close to my old Uni, so I took Karen for a quick tour of the world which I once inhabited. Firstly I drove her past the house where I had lived three doors down from the fish and chip shop, and then we doubled back and drove onto the campus. I was consumed with nostalgia. I didn’t realise until we walked past a ground floor kitchen that it was five years to the day since my first day there. All the freshers were sat around having their first-night meetings with the resident tutors, like I had done five years ago that day.
Whenever I move house I lose ownership of my memories. I don’t know why this is, but everything that I have ever done seems to have happened to someone else. The images still exist clearly in my mind, but I am no longer the central character. I know that the events took place, and I was surely present, yet not there at all. I guess that it has something to do with environmental triggers. I have been living in my current flat for over a year, and in that time the same thing has happened. Flatmates have come and gone, I’ve switched jobs, I’ve moved the furniture around in the sitting room. All this combines to leave me feeling like a different person to how I did a year ago. Though I definitely remember being there a year ago, my face has been erased from my memory so that I can’t be certain that it was really me in the picture. I have to rely on logic to deduce that it had to be me – it can’t have been anybody else.
But for that half hour, surrounded by the residences and the grass and the trees and the lake and the launderette and the sports centre and the geese, all the memories belonged to me again. It was definitely me. I was there.
Maria used to cut my hair. And she was good.
We met on Valentine’s Day this year. She was on a break from her boyfriend, and was looking forward to her shift ending in half an hour so that she could go off on a girls’ night out with her friends. I was looking forward to having my hair cut, because the following day I was to take a female friend to the theatre, and though there was no romantic angle on this rendezvous, I still wanted to look nice.
We hit it off. I liked the way that she ran her fingers through my hair, and she liked the way that I liked the way that she ran her fingers through my hair. She cat my hair with precision, with deliberation and care. She made me look good.
She cat my hair on the day before mine and Karen’s first meal out together, the meal that eventually became our first date. At the time I hadn’t known that it was a date, but had I known, I’m sure that Maria would have wished me luck.
Then it all went wrong. The salon where Maria worked changed management. I put it off for as long as possible, but eventually I couldn’t hang on any longer. I needed a haircut. I phoned up for Maria but her shifts had been changed and she no longer worked at the times when I was available – I was going to have to have my hair cut by some spotty young oik.
The haircut wasn’t so good. The neckline was wrong, the sideburns were all wrong. Nobody could cut hair like Maria. I was plunged into depression, and lost my job, my car, my house, my wife and my shoes. The love af-hair had come to an end.
Today I ventured into a hairdressers for my first time in ages. From the outside, it looked cheap and tacky, exactly the sort of place which would not remind me of Maria. Maria was clean. Maria was elegant. Maria had a wondrously harmonious Southern accent, which twanged and pinged as if she was playing my hairs like a gutbucket.
I got inside and realised I had made a mistake. This place was clean. Seriously clean. Nicely decorated, shiny, and totally empty except for an attractive brunette behind the reception desk. No queue, I thought. Might as well.
The girl stood up and directed me to a free chair in front of a mirror, and proceeded to cut my hair. She asked me what I wanted, and then set about it. No small talk or chit-chat until the very end, when we had an amusing exchange about hair gel.
The haircut is good. Not as good as Maria, but time can sometimes heal.
Best bit of all was that she charged half as much as Maria used to.
You could say that she’s a cheap whair.
Now nominate me for Post of the Month.
Whilst walking from Westminster towards old Queenie’s place on Saturday afternoon, Karen and I were overtaken by a small girl on a pink bicycle, who shot off into the distance ahead of us. Bemused that she seemed to be out in London all alone, I suggested to Karen that it would be awfully easy to just grab the kid and run, going so far as to describe the dramatic scene that would be created by the image of a pink bicycle left lying on the ground, its rear wheel slowly rotating.
At this point the mother (yes, there had been a mother present) then walked past us. Whoops, I thought.
Feeling slightly awkward, we took a right at the next junction, partly to avoid a confrontation with the mother (who probably didn’t fancy the idea of her kid being taken) and also to trail a girl wearing a pink skirt with a particularly loose waistband (Karen’s idea, not mine).
Over the course of the next five minutes, the girl on the bicycle crossed our path about four times. The first couple of times it was moderately amusing, and I wondered if perhaps she actually wanted to be kidnapped.
But by the fourth time it was just scary, so I grabbed the girl off of the bike and threw her over the fence into the lake in St James’ Park, leaving a pink bicycle lying on the ground with its rear wheel rotating slowly.