CHAPTER 4
Everything’s easy in retrospect. You can spot life’s mistakes like black boulders littering a snow covered hillside or as neon lights phosphorus in the gloom - the hieroglyphics of your existence carved out in sharp relief on your memory. Sometimes in your dreams you feel as if you can run your hand over them and feel the scars.
One such scar - or rather a running sore, is my ex - not my ex-husband but my last ex-but-one boyfriend, Jack, a politics lecturer. Such a face ache. One of his most irritating traits was to smile condescendingly at me and say: “I know exactly what you want, what you think, what you think I think and what you want me to think you think.” And I would reply: “I don’t think so.”
And so it went on. But one of the most painful lessons I've learnt from that experience is that I'm rather addicted to men like that. Even worse, not particularly rich, or handsome, or kind or deeply spiritual ones. On the contrary, they are invariable left-wing urban intellectuals, with paltry public sector pay packets and deeply sexist beneath their carefully cultivated PC exterior.
But on the plus side, much more adventurous in bed than any right-wing Tory. They can’t handle feisty women, they prefer the sort that do it with their tights on and the lights out. Listen carefully and watch my lips: “That’s why I don’t fancy Charles. I might as well flog a dead horse. Preferably his.
How things have changed since Jane Austen’s day. It’s no longer a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune must be in want of a wife. On the contrary. A sensible loaded single bloke won’t risk burdening himself with a wife who could push off and hoover up half his cash, and a spinster’s no longer a marriage market commodity perched prettily on the shelf branded ‘unmarked goods.’ Unless you believe what’s written in the Daily Mail.
In Mrs Bennett’s hey day Charles would have been a monster catch. But now poor Charlie Boy is a mere minnow in the lido of life, a dying breed that will soon be extinct, incapable of adapting to mating with women with highly developed brains, voracious sexual appetites and capable of independent thought. Oh yeah, and very low boredom thresholds. A bit like me.
Which means it could be a wise move to keep old hairless but heir-to-loadsa-dosh ‘warm’ as a reserve relationship - just to amuse myself with until someone more interesting shows up. Keep him dangling on a string, as granny used to say. Let’s face it, despite my vocal protestations that I’ve got a full buzzy social life, a brill job, a fantastic kid and great friends - I’m still gagging for it in the knickers department.
Thinking about kids, Joey will be home soon from his dad’s. I must grit my teeth while I hear about this paragon of virtue who has seemingly endless patience, a bottomless wallet and is so nice that he allows Joey to watch Little Britain - unlike his evil mother who resembles an ogre - on a good day.
Joey's looking forward to this afternoon for our weekly pilgrimage to take tea at mum’s house in the next village, Humpington. Its picture postcard streets resonate with the sounds of baaing sheep and lowing cows grazing in nearby fuzzy-felt fields.
It’s the perfect vision of an olde worlde country utopia that shatters on close acquaintance when you realise that it’s been taken over by a swarm of townies. Their imported urban values now dominate the parish council which goes into a spasm every time a piece of dog poo desecrates the immaculately mown wildflower-free verges, or mud from the farm splatters their BMWs as they drive through the village. ‘And do the animals have to be so loud and smelly?’ they whimper. Grrrrrrrrrrr.
My mother fortunately is not one of those kind of people. But she does have other irredeemably bad habits. Why does the whole afternoon have to take on the form of a ritual with an atmosphere of faint disapproval and a chiding reminder of the chaotic state of my own life. She defers to ten-year-old Joey, who admires his smug reflection in the gleaming silver teapot when granny pours the tea, preening over her reference to him as the ‘man of the house,’ “seeing as grandpa has passed over to the other side - until the Rapture.”
My mother Vera is a curious mixture of execrable snob combined with low church evangelical leanings due to the fact that she married into money but couldn’t shake off the childhood shackles that bind her to the Bible and ‘The Lord.’ How can I forget one of my earliest memories visiting auntie Nora and her minah bird? She was happy in her prefab in Leicester, since swept away in the name of ‘progress’ to make way for a retail park. You don't find many people like her around anymore, a devout Methodist and a war widow. I never met uncle Cyril who was slaughtered on the Somme - she got peanuts for a pension.
“The Lord will provide’ she’d say as she packed me off to the front room to listen to Burl Ives LPs while her and mum rank orange coloured tea with two sugars. Mum would then pour out her troubles to wise old auntie Nora, usually over dad’s latest fall from grace - mainly sexually deviant in nature like looking at the girl at the till in the Co-op in ‘that way.’
I remember listening at the door and then bored, turn up the volume of ‘When the roll is called up Yonder’ so I could teach auntie Nora’s minah bird to say ‘bugger.’ Happy days.
“We amused ourselves when we were children,” I say self righteously to Joey, after the millionth time of hearing his regular mantra of “I’m bored” to the strains of 'Smile.' Poor kid, I sound just like my mum did years ago when I'd beg her for the bus fare to go to C&A’s cafe for egg and chips with my friends. Scary.
“Well, now,” my mum’s voice interjected into my musing, “how did it go with Charles Bothum-Wethum - any wedding bells yet?” We’d arrived slightly late for tea to find her anxiously scanning the street for our arrival through lead latticed windows peeping out from underneath the low thatched eaves of a former farm labourer’s cottage, tarted up for commuters hungry for a taste of the good life.
“Well if there are you’ll need ears with sonic stereo to pick them up,” I replied as I tucked into a scone with jam and cream.
“Really darling, you are a ninny you know, it’s not as if you are getting any younger and if you don’t heed my advice about staying out of the sun you’ll get as leathery as, as,” she waved her arms about vaguely as she searched for a suitable synonym, “as an old cow,” piped in Joey, faining innocence.
“Yes, well, whatever dear,” mum replied a tad sharply, not quite sure if Joey had transgressed the boundaries of good taste.
I gave him a wink.
“Charles is a sweetie mum,” I explained, “but he’s so conventional and predictable.” And short and bald and probably in possession of a small penis, I thought to myself.
“But his uncle Sir Horseham is president of the Ruddlesex Conservative Association and I do Meals on Wheels with his aunt on a Friday, they are sooooo our sort of people.” I sensed a faint rebuke.
I could feel the conversation drifting into its familiar groove, the declining drop in today’s standards, the sheer horror at the way Labour has dismantled the country, fond reminiscences of the Empire and the scandal at the indiscriminate axing of condensed milk.
“The country is falling apart, what with those 'hoodies' and single mothers, she cast me a reproving look, and your father always loved condensed milk on his tinned peaches, people just don’t know what’s good for them these days. I was only talking about it yesterday with your auntie Thelma.”
She fell into a quite reverie as her mind struggled to make sense of the frightening new world that seemed to menace her from all sides.
“I know mum,” I answered gently, wildly irritated but loving her in her bewilderment and nostalgia for a lost organasist world. Everything was so easy then, men were right and women invariably wrong.
Women in her day knew when to be thankful, most of the eligible men had been killed during the war, so if any man showed any interest it offered an escape from a sexless and childless spinsterhood where you became more and more invisible with the passing years.
Mind you, that mindset still exists for loads of divorced 40-something women today who are quite happy to trade in their independence for hard currency. It wouldn’t be so bad except for the fact that they often go all high ‘n mighty and expect the rest of us, perceived as gathering dust on the shelf to not only be envious, but respectful of their new elevated status. Yeah right. They might have designer handbags, be botoxed up to the eyeballs and drive a Porsche Carrera but they have to actually have sex with men who wear slacks! Ugh! Sugar daddies might be gold plated but they're invariably physically repulsive, wear incontinence pads or live in a permanently vegetative state. Or, like Charles are kind, wet, sexless, worthy and dull. Or maybe not. For all I know, old Charlie boy could be so turbo-charged in bed I’d be his willing and grateful slave. But I doubt it. Mind you, it could be that my scarred and troubled relationship history has made me so wary of commitment I will find fault with every man I meet until I shrivel up like a dried old prune and no one will want me anyway. I will become such a lonely old biddie I will settle for any old codger I meet in the Post Office pension queue.
Mum and I sat there, quietly musing our own private thoughts on opposite side of the coffee table littered with the detritus that defined her existence, her doilies, china cups and saucers, jam spoons and crocheted tablecloth. Suddenly the leaden silence was shattered by the ring of my mobile phone.
It was Charles.
‘Oh hello,” I said, mouthing Charles’ name and pointing at the phone to mum. She sat bolt upright and listened so attentively that she mouthed every syllable as I ummed and arrred, yes and no’d and finally said goodbye.
“Is it back on?” she queried hopefully after I triumphantly put the phone back in my bag with a flourish.
Well, I don’t know about that,” I laughed, “but he’s invited me to go as his partner to a dinner party at Squire de Lyle Stocking's place at Humpington Hall. Obviously my resistance to his right-wing rantings and his amorous advances has only spurred him on.”
Mum put a warning finger to her lips and her eyes glanced sideways at Joey at the oblique reference to sexual relations, in case it sullied his innocence.
“Is he rich?” asked Joey.
“He’s a nice gentleman and your mother should thank her lucky stars,” said my mum. “Breeding and money, the perfect combination.”
I felt well chuffed, this dinner party was going to be a perfect opportunity to put myself about to scan around for other talent.
“Delia and her husband will be there,” I offered as a tit bit of information.
Mum reveres and worships Delia’s husband Tom Fielding who reads the lesson in church with the same dramatic delivery as Sir Lawrence Oliver’s rendition of Henry V’s ‘into the breach.’ She sees him as the epitome of all that’s great about England, good old gentry farming stock, backbone of almost every village committee and a paragon of self restraint, susceptible only to the odd glass of Talisker, a little more often than is good for him. But then, for mum, men are allowed their little foibles.
Little does she know that he’s humped more stable girls than hay bales during his marriage to Delia, hurls crockery at the wall if the dinner isn’t to his liking, and now, thanks to the drink, can’t get his willy up without Viagra.
Delia says she indulges him with the occasional humping session to keep him quiet. Apparently he pops his pill, waits for the desired effect and then lays down with it sticking up like a poker and then roars at Delia to, “hop on quick,” as if she’s a jockey.
Delia’s worked out that for a 10 minute gallop on top she burns off at least 250 calories so it’s really not that different from an aerobics workout and it’s great for toning the thighs.
“And, credit where it’s due,” Delia conceded with awe, “he’s hung like a bloody horse!”
‘Of course Tom’s wife’s a bit of Tartar,” Mum said suddenly.
“How’s that then?” I replied, my tolerance level dropping faster than a flasher’s trousers.
“Well, have you seen her shoes - for a woman that age! Bleached hair, and jeans with her tummy on show, it’s positively indecent. And these ‘adult’ art education classes she teaches sound very suspect to me and she never closes her eyes during confession in church, poor, poor, Tom what a heavy cross to bear.”
Joey suddenly looked up from playing with his PSP and adopted his most innocent stare. “Cesspool says Mr Fielding is as randy as an old goat and he’s had his leg over more women than five bar gates. He told me when we took Horace the bull to mate with Squire Percy’s heifers.”
His announcement had the desired effect. Mum positively swooned from the shock, spilling tea down the front of her twin set.
“I knew it!” she moaned, “It was only a matter of time before this innocent defenceless, fatherless child got drawn into the wrong company. Your father would turn in his grave.”
“Joey is neither fatherless nor defenceless, in fact he’s a machinatory little menace,” I replied, trying hard not to laugh. “And he doesn’t understand a word of it,” I lied.
Driving home in the car, I read Joey the riot act, warning him in sepulchral tones that a repeat of such a heinous crime would result in unspeakable punishment.
“Yeah, yeah, “ he replied wearily, casually picking his nose and eying a particularly juicy bogie before popping it into his mouth, “There’s no need to go into orbit.”
As I instinctively slapped his wrist I caught his eye and we shared a furtive smile, and then looked fixedly at the road ahead until we reached home.
Wednesday, 22 August 2007
Chapter 3
CHAPTER 3
Everything’s easy in retrospect. You can spot life’s mistakes like black boulders littering a snow covered hillside or as neon lights phosphorus in the gloom - the hieroglyphics of your existence carved out in sharp relief on your memory. Sometimes in your dreams you feel as if you can run your hand over them and feel the scars.
One such scar - or rather a running sore, is my ex - not my ex-husband but my last ex-but-one boyfriend, Jack, a politics lecturer. Such a face ache. One of his most irritating traits was to smile condescendingly at me and say: “I know exactly what you want, what you think, what you think I think and what you want me to think you think.” And I would reply: “I don’t think so.”
And so it went on. But one of the most painful lessons I learnt from that experience is that I'm rather addicted to men like that. Even worse, not particularly rich, or handsome, or kind or deeply spiritual ones. On the contrary, they are invariable left-wing urban intellectuals, with crap public sector pay packets and deeply sexist beneath their carefully cultivated PC exterior.
But on the plus side, much more adventurous in bed than any right-wing Tory. They can’t handle feisty women, they prefer the sort that do it with their tights on and the lights out. Listen carefully and watch my lips: “That’s why I don’t fancy Charles. I might as well flog a dead horse. Preferably his.
How things have changed since Jane Austen’s day. It’s no longer a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune must be in want of a wife. On the contrary. A sensible loaded single bloke won’t risk burdening himself with a wife who could push off and hoover up half his cash, and a spinster’s no longer a marriage market commodity perched prettily on the shelf branded ‘unmarked goods.’ Unless you believe what’s written in the Daily Mail.
In Mrs Bennett’s hey day Charles would have been a monster catch. But now poor Charlie Boy is a mere minnow in the lido of life, a dying breed that will soon be extinct, incapable of adapting to mating with women with highly developed brains, voracious sexual appetites and capable of independent thought. Oh yeah, and very low boredom thresholds. A bit like me.
Which means it could be a wise move to keep old hairless but heir-to-loadsa-dosh ‘warm’ as a reserve relationship - just to amuse myself with until someone more interesting shows up. Keep him dangling on a string, as granny used to say. Let’s face it, despite my vocal protestations that I’ve got a full buzzy social life, a brill job, a fantastic kid and great friends - I’m still gagging for it in the knickers department.
Thinking about kids, Joey will be home soon from his dad’s. I must grit my teeth while I hear about this paragon of virtue who has seemingly endless patience, a bottomless wallet and is so nice that he allows Joey to watch Little Britain - unlike his evil mother who resembles an ogre - on a good day.
Joey's looking forward to this afternoon for our weekly pilgrimage to take tea at mum’s house in the next village, Humpington. Its picture postcard streets resonate with the sounds of baaing sheep and lowing cows grazing in nearby fuzzy-felt fields.
It’s the perfect vision of an olde worlde country utopia that shatters on close acquaintance when you realise that it’s been taken over by a swarm of townies. Their imported urban values now dominate the parish council which goes into a spasm every time a piece of dog poo desecrates the immaculately mown wildflower-free verges, or mud from the farm splatters their BMWs as they drive through the village. ‘And do the animals have to be so loud and smelly?’ they whimper. Grrrrrrrrrrr.
My mother fortunately is not one of those kind of people. But she does have other irredeemably bad habits. Why does the whole afternoon have to take on the form of a ritual with an atmosphere of faint disapproval and a chiding reminder of the chaotic state of my own life. She defers to ten-year-old Joey, who admires his smug reflection in the gleaming silver teapot when granny pours the tea, preening over her reference to him as the ‘man of the house,’ “seeing as grandpa has passed over to the other side - until the Rapture.”
My mother Vera is a curious mixture of execrable snob combined with low church evangelical leanings due to the fact that she married into money but couldn’t shake off the childhood shackles that bind her to the Bible and ‘The Lord.’ How can I forget one of my earliest memories visiting auntie Nora and her minah bird? She was happy in her prefab in Leicester, since swept away in the name of ‘progress’ to make way for a retail park. You don't find many people like her around anymore, a devout Methodist and a war widow. I never met uncle Cyril he was slaughtered on the Somme - she got peanuts for a pension.
“The Lord will provide’ she’d say as she packed me and my sister Lydia off to the front room to listen to Burl Ives LPs while her and mum rank orange coloured tea with two sugars. Mum would then pour out her troubles to wise old auntie Nora, usually over dad’s latest fall from grace - mainly sexually deviant in nature like looking at the girl at the till in the Co-op in ‘that way.’
I remember listening at the door and then bored, turn up the volume of ‘When the roll is called up Yonder’ so we could teach auntie Nora’s minah bird to say ‘bugger.’ Happy days.
“We amused ourselves when we were children,” I say self righteously to Joey, after the millionth time of hearing his regular mantra of “I’m bored” to the strains of 'Smile.' Poor babe, I sound just like my mum years ago when Lydia and me begged her for the bus fare to go into Leicester to have egg and chips in C&A’s cafe. Scary.
“Well, Now,” my mum’s voice interjected into my musing, “how did it go with Charles Bothum-Wethum - any wedding bells yet?” We’d arrived slightly late for tea to find her anxiously scanning the street for our arrival through lead latticed windows peeping out from underneath the low thatched eaves of a former farm labourer’s cottage, tarted up for commuters hungry for a taste of the good life.
“Well if there are you’ll need ears with sonic stereo to pick them up,” I replied as I tucked into my third home made scone with jam and cream.
“Really darling, you are a ninny you know, it’s not as if you are getting any younger and if you don’t heed my advice about staying out of the sun you’ll get as leathery as, as,” she waved her arms about vaguely as she searched for a suitable synonym, “as an old cow,” piped in Joey, faining innocence.
“Yes, well, whatever dear,” mum replied a tad sharply, not quite sure if Joey had transgressed the boundaries of good taste.
I gave him a wink.
“Charles is a sweetie mum,” I explained, “but he’s so conventional and predictable.” And short and bald and probably in possession of a small penis, I thought to myself.
“But his father Sir Horseham is president of the Ruddlesex Conservative Association and I do Meals on Wheels with his mother on a Friday, they are sooooo our sort of people.” I sensed a faint rebuke.
I could feel the conversation drifting into its familiar groove, the declining drop in today’s standards, the sheer horror at the way Labour has dismantled the country, fond reminiscences of the Empire and the scandal at the indiscriminate axing of condensed milk.
“The country is falling apart and your father always loved condensed milk on his tinned peaches, people just don’t know what’s good for them these days.”
She fell into a quite reverie as her mind struggled to make sense of the frightening new world that seemed to menace her from all sides.
“I know mum,” I answered gently, loving her in her bewilderment and nostalgia for a lost organasist world. Everything was so easy then, men were right and women invariably wrong.
Women in her day knew when to be thankful, most of the eligible men had been killed during the war, so if any man showed any interest it offered an escape from a sexless and childless spinsterhood where you became more and more invisible with the passing years.
Mind you, that mindset still exists for loads of divorced 40 something women today who are quite happy to trade in their independence for hard currency. It wouldn’t be so bad except for the fact that they often go all high ‘n mighty and expect the rest of us, perceived as being left idling on the shelf to not only be envious, but respectful of their new elevated status. Yeah right. They might have designer handbags but they have to actually sleep with their ancient decrepit sugar daddies who are invariably physically repulsive, wear incontinence pads or are chronically unfaithful. Or like Charles; kind, wet, sexless, worthy and dull. Or maybe not. For all I know, old Charlie boy could be so turbo-charged in bed I’d be his willing and grateful slave. But I doubt it. Mind you, it could be that my scarred and troubled relationship history has made me so wary of commitment I will find fault with every man I meet until I shrivel up like a dried old prune and no one will want me anyway. I will become such a lonely old biddie I will settle for any old codger I meet in the Post Office pension queue.
Mum and I sat there, quietly musing our own private thoughts on opposite side of the coffee table littered with the detritus that defined her existence, her doilies, china cups and saucers, jam spoons and crocheted tablecloth. Suddenly the leaden silence was shattered by the ring of my mobile phone.
It was Charles.
‘Oh hello,” I said, mouthing Charles’ name and pointing at the phone to mum. She sat bolt upright and listened so attentively that she mouthed every syllable as I ummed and arrhed, yes and no’d and finally said goodbye.
“Is it back on?” she queried hopefully after I triumphantly put the phone back in my bag with a flourish.
Well, I don’t know about that,” I laughed, “but he’s invited me to go as his partner to a dinner party at Squire de Lyle Stockings place at Humpington Hall. Obviously my resistance to his right-wing rantings and his amorous advances has only spurred him on.”
Mum put a warning finger to her lips and her eyes glanced sideways at Joey at the oblique reference to sexual relations, in case it sullied his innocence.
“Is he rich?” asked Joey.
“He’s a nice gentleman and your mother should thank her lucky stars,” said my mum. “Breeding and money, the perfect combination.”
I felt well chuffed, this dinner party was going to be a perfect opportunity to put myself about to scan around for other talent.
“Delia and her husband will be there,” I offered as a tit bit of information.
Mum reveres and worships Delia’s husband Tom Fielding who reads the lesson in church with the same dramatic delivery as Sir Lawrence Oliver’s rendition of Henry V’s ‘into the breach.’ She sees him as the epitome of all that’s great about England, good old gentry farming stock, backbone of almost every village committee and a paragon of self restraint, susceptible only to the odd glass of Talisker, a little more often than is good for him. But then, for mum, men are allowed their little foibles.
Little does she know that he’s humped more stable girls than hay bales during his marriage to Delia, hurls crockery at the wall if the dinner isn’t to his liking, and now, thanks to the drink, can’t get his willy up without Viagra.
Delia says she indulges him with the occasional humping session to keep him quiet. Apparently he pops his pill, waits for the desired effect and then lays down with it sticking up like a poker and then roars at Delia to, “hop on quick,” as if she’s a jockey.
Delia’s worked out that for a 10 minute gallop on top she burns off at least 250 calories so it’s really not that different from an aerobics workout and it’s great for toning the thighs.
“And, credit where it’s due,” Delia conceded with awe, “he’s hung like a bloody horse!”
‘Of course Tom’s wife’s a bit of Tartar,” Mum said suddenly.
“How’s that then?” I replied, my tolerance level dropping faster than a flasher’s trousers.
“Well, have you seen her shoes - for a woman that age! Bleached hair, and jeans with her tummy on show, it’s positively indecent. And these ‘adult’ art education classes she teaches sound very suspect to me and she never closes her eyes during confession in church, poor, poor, Tom what a heavy cross to bear.”
Joey suddenly looked up from a comic he was idly flicking though and adopted his most innocent stare. “Cesspool says Mr Fielding is as randy as an old goat and he’s had his leg over more women than five bar gates. He told me when we took Horace the bull to mate with Squire Percy’s heifers.”
His announcement had the desired effect. Mum positively swooned from the shock, spilling tea down the front of her twin set.
“I knew it!” she moaned, “It was only a matter of time before this innocent defenceless, fatherless child got drawn into the wrong company.”
“Joey is neither fatherless nor defenceless, in fact he’s a machinatory little menace,” I replied, trying hard not to laugh. “And he doesn’t understand a word of it,” I lied.
Driving home in the car, I read Joey the riot act, warning him in sepulchral tones that a repeat of such a heinous crime would result in unspeakable punishment.
“Yeah, yeah, “ he replied wearily, casually picking his nose and eyeing a particularly juicy bogie before popping it into his mouth, “There’s no need to go into orbit.”
As I instinctively slapped his wrist I caught his eye and we shared a furtive smile, and then looked fixedly at the road ahead until we reached home.
Everything’s easy in retrospect. You can spot life’s mistakes like black boulders littering a snow covered hillside or as neon lights phosphorus in the gloom - the hieroglyphics of your existence carved out in sharp relief on your memory. Sometimes in your dreams you feel as if you can run your hand over them and feel the scars.
One such scar - or rather a running sore, is my ex - not my ex-husband but my last ex-but-one boyfriend, Jack, a politics lecturer. Such a face ache. One of his most irritating traits was to smile condescendingly at me and say: “I know exactly what you want, what you think, what you think I think and what you want me to think you think.” And I would reply: “I don’t think so.”
And so it went on. But one of the most painful lessons I learnt from that experience is that I'm rather addicted to men like that. Even worse, not particularly rich, or handsome, or kind or deeply spiritual ones. On the contrary, they are invariable left-wing urban intellectuals, with crap public sector pay packets and deeply sexist beneath their carefully cultivated PC exterior.
But on the plus side, much more adventurous in bed than any right-wing Tory. They can’t handle feisty women, they prefer the sort that do it with their tights on and the lights out. Listen carefully and watch my lips: “That’s why I don’t fancy Charles. I might as well flog a dead horse. Preferably his.
How things have changed since Jane Austen’s day. It’s no longer a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune must be in want of a wife. On the contrary. A sensible loaded single bloke won’t risk burdening himself with a wife who could push off and hoover up half his cash, and a spinster’s no longer a marriage market commodity perched prettily on the shelf branded ‘unmarked goods.’ Unless you believe what’s written in the Daily Mail.
In Mrs Bennett’s hey day Charles would have been a monster catch. But now poor Charlie Boy is a mere minnow in the lido of life, a dying breed that will soon be extinct, incapable of adapting to mating with women with highly developed brains, voracious sexual appetites and capable of independent thought. Oh yeah, and very low boredom thresholds. A bit like me.
Which means it could be a wise move to keep old hairless but heir-to-loadsa-dosh ‘warm’ as a reserve relationship - just to amuse myself with until someone more interesting shows up. Keep him dangling on a string, as granny used to say. Let’s face it, despite my vocal protestations that I’ve got a full buzzy social life, a brill job, a fantastic kid and great friends - I’m still gagging for it in the knickers department.
Thinking about kids, Joey will be home soon from his dad’s. I must grit my teeth while I hear about this paragon of virtue who has seemingly endless patience, a bottomless wallet and is so nice that he allows Joey to watch Little Britain - unlike his evil mother who resembles an ogre - on a good day.
Joey's looking forward to this afternoon for our weekly pilgrimage to take tea at mum’s house in the next village, Humpington. Its picture postcard streets resonate with the sounds of baaing sheep and lowing cows grazing in nearby fuzzy-felt fields.
It’s the perfect vision of an olde worlde country utopia that shatters on close acquaintance when you realise that it’s been taken over by a swarm of townies. Their imported urban values now dominate the parish council which goes into a spasm every time a piece of dog poo desecrates the immaculately mown wildflower-free verges, or mud from the farm splatters their BMWs as they drive through the village. ‘And do the animals have to be so loud and smelly?’ they whimper. Grrrrrrrrrrr.
My mother fortunately is not one of those kind of people. But she does have other irredeemably bad habits. Why does the whole afternoon have to take on the form of a ritual with an atmosphere of faint disapproval and a chiding reminder of the chaotic state of my own life. She defers to ten-year-old Joey, who admires his smug reflection in the gleaming silver teapot when granny pours the tea, preening over her reference to him as the ‘man of the house,’ “seeing as grandpa has passed over to the other side - until the Rapture.”
My mother Vera is a curious mixture of execrable snob combined with low church evangelical leanings due to the fact that she married into money but couldn’t shake off the childhood shackles that bind her to the Bible and ‘The Lord.’ How can I forget one of my earliest memories visiting auntie Nora and her minah bird? She was happy in her prefab in Leicester, since swept away in the name of ‘progress’ to make way for a retail park. You don't find many people like her around anymore, a devout Methodist and a war widow. I never met uncle Cyril he was slaughtered on the Somme - she got peanuts for a pension.
“The Lord will provide’ she’d say as she packed me and my sister Lydia off to the front room to listen to Burl Ives LPs while her and mum rank orange coloured tea with two sugars. Mum would then pour out her troubles to wise old auntie Nora, usually over dad’s latest fall from grace - mainly sexually deviant in nature like looking at the girl at the till in the Co-op in ‘that way.’
I remember listening at the door and then bored, turn up the volume of ‘When the roll is called up Yonder’ so we could teach auntie Nora’s minah bird to say ‘bugger.’ Happy days.
“We amused ourselves when we were children,” I say self righteously to Joey, after the millionth time of hearing his regular mantra of “I’m bored” to the strains of 'Smile.' Poor babe, I sound just like my mum years ago when Lydia and me begged her for the bus fare to go into Leicester to have egg and chips in C&A’s cafe. Scary.
“Well, Now,” my mum’s voice interjected into my musing, “how did it go with Charles Bothum-Wethum - any wedding bells yet?” We’d arrived slightly late for tea to find her anxiously scanning the street for our arrival through lead latticed windows peeping out from underneath the low thatched eaves of a former farm labourer’s cottage, tarted up for commuters hungry for a taste of the good life.
“Well if there are you’ll need ears with sonic stereo to pick them up,” I replied as I tucked into my third home made scone with jam and cream.
“Really darling, you are a ninny you know, it’s not as if you are getting any younger and if you don’t heed my advice about staying out of the sun you’ll get as leathery as, as,” she waved her arms about vaguely as she searched for a suitable synonym, “as an old cow,” piped in Joey, faining innocence.
“Yes, well, whatever dear,” mum replied a tad sharply, not quite sure if Joey had transgressed the boundaries of good taste.
I gave him a wink.
“Charles is a sweetie mum,” I explained, “but he’s so conventional and predictable.” And short and bald and probably in possession of a small penis, I thought to myself.
“But his father Sir Horseham is president of the Ruddlesex Conservative Association and I do Meals on Wheels with his mother on a Friday, they are sooooo our sort of people.” I sensed a faint rebuke.
I could feel the conversation drifting into its familiar groove, the declining drop in today’s standards, the sheer horror at the way Labour has dismantled the country, fond reminiscences of the Empire and the scandal at the indiscriminate axing of condensed milk.
“The country is falling apart and your father always loved condensed milk on his tinned peaches, people just don’t know what’s good for them these days.”
She fell into a quite reverie as her mind struggled to make sense of the frightening new world that seemed to menace her from all sides.
“I know mum,” I answered gently, loving her in her bewilderment and nostalgia for a lost organasist world. Everything was so easy then, men were right and women invariably wrong.
Women in her day knew when to be thankful, most of the eligible men had been killed during the war, so if any man showed any interest it offered an escape from a sexless and childless spinsterhood where you became more and more invisible with the passing years.
Mind you, that mindset still exists for loads of divorced 40 something women today who are quite happy to trade in their independence for hard currency. It wouldn’t be so bad except for the fact that they often go all high ‘n mighty and expect the rest of us, perceived as being left idling on the shelf to not only be envious, but respectful of their new elevated status. Yeah right. They might have designer handbags but they have to actually sleep with their ancient decrepit sugar daddies who are invariably physically repulsive, wear incontinence pads or are chronically unfaithful. Or like Charles; kind, wet, sexless, worthy and dull. Or maybe not. For all I know, old Charlie boy could be so turbo-charged in bed I’d be his willing and grateful slave. But I doubt it. Mind you, it could be that my scarred and troubled relationship history has made me so wary of commitment I will find fault with every man I meet until I shrivel up like a dried old prune and no one will want me anyway. I will become such a lonely old biddie I will settle for any old codger I meet in the Post Office pension queue.
Mum and I sat there, quietly musing our own private thoughts on opposite side of the coffee table littered with the detritus that defined her existence, her doilies, china cups and saucers, jam spoons and crocheted tablecloth. Suddenly the leaden silence was shattered by the ring of my mobile phone.
It was Charles.
‘Oh hello,” I said, mouthing Charles’ name and pointing at the phone to mum. She sat bolt upright and listened so attentively that she mouthed every syllable as I ummed and arrhed, yes and no’d and finally said goodbye.
“Is it back on?” she queried hopefully after I triumphantly put the phone back in my bag with a flourish.
Well, I don’t know about that,” I laughed, “but he’s invited me to go as his partner to a dinner party at Squire de Lyle Stockings place at Humpington Hall. Obviously my resistance to his right-wing rantings and his amorous advances has only spurred him on.”
Mum put a warning finger to her lips and her eyes glanced sideways at Joey at the oblique reference to sexual relations, in case it sullied his innocence.
“Is he rich?” asked Joey.
“He’s a nice gentleman and your mother should thank her lucky stars,” said my mum. “Breeding and money, the perfect combination.”
I felt well chuffed, this dinner party was going to be a perfect opportunity to put myself about to scan around for other talent.
“Delia and her husband will be there,” I offered as a tit bit of information.
Mum reveres and worships Delia’s husband Tom Fielding who reads the lesson in church with the same dramatic delivery as Sir Lawrence Oliver’s rendition of Henry V’s ‘into the breach.’ She sees him as the epitome of all that’s great about England, good old gentry farming stock, backbone of almost every village committee and a paragon of self restraint, susceptible only to the odd glass of Talisker, a little more often than is good for him. But then, for mum, men are allowed their little foibles.
Little does she know that he’s humped more stable girls than hay bales during his marriage to Delia, hurls crockery at the wall if the dinner isn’t to his liking, and now, thanks to the drink, can’t get his willy up without Viagra.
Delia says she indulges him with the occasional humping session to keep him quiet. Apparently he pops his pill, waits for the desired effect and then lays down with it sticking up like a poker and then roars at Delia to, “hop on quick,” as if she’s a jockey.
Delia’s worked out that for a 10 minute gallop on top she burns off at least 250 calories so it’s really not that different from an aerobics workout and it’s great for toning the thighs.
“And, credit where it’s due,” Delia conceded with awe, “he’s hung like a bloody horse!”
‘Of course Tom’s wife’s a bit of Tartar,” Mum said suddenly.
“How’s that then?” I replied, my tolerance level dropping faster than a flasher’s trousers.
“Well, have you seen her shoes - for a woman that age! Bleached hair, and jeans with her tummy on show, it’s positively indecent. And these ‘adult’ art education classes she teaches sound very suspect to me and she never closes her eyes during confession in church, poor, poor, Tom what a heavy cross to bear.”
Joey suddenly looked up from a comic he was idly flicking though and adopted his most innocent stare. “Cesspool says Mr Fielding is as randy as an old goat and he’s had his leg over more women than five bar gates. He told me when we took Horace the bull to mate with Squire Percy’s heifers.”
His announcement had the desired effect. Mum positively swooned from the shock, spilling tea down the front of her twin set.
“I knew it!” she moaned, “It was only a matter of time before this innocent defenceless, fatherless child got drawn into the wrong company.”
“Joey is neither fatherless nor defenceless, in fact he’s a machinatory little menace,” I replied, trying hard not to laugh. “And he doesn’t understand a word of it,” I lied.
Driving home in the car, I read Joey the riot act, warning him in sepulchral tones that a repeat of such a heinous crime would result in unspeakable punishment.
“Yeah, yeah, “ he replied wearily, casually picking his nose and eyeing a particularly juicy bogie before popping it into his mouth, “There’s no need to go into orbit.”
As I instinctively slapped his wrist I caught his eye and we shared a furtive smile, and then looked fixedly at the road ahead until we reached home.
Tuesday, 21 August 2007
Chapter 2
CHAPTER 2
I can’t quite remember the exact moment when it all started to go horribly wrong, when the cruel finger of fate, maliciously and mischievously pressed the ‘crush’ button, so that all my dreams, glistening like some phantom silver cypher in the sun, crumpled into a dull metallic clod to disappear unceremoniously down life’s metaphorical shute to dumpsville. Not that I’m feeling sorry for myself or anything.
Could I, if I had handled things differently, be now looking forward to date number two with Charles instead of analysing the inflection of every little word, the body language of every gesture, for the moment when our burgeoning relationship was nipped in the bud, trodden under foot and flushed down the proverbial toilet?
It called for a serious dose of therapy from my closest friend - the telephone.
I rang Delia.
“Hi darling” she said. “Did he get his rocks off then?”
I took a deep breath and started the circuitous route from the mundane account of the earlier part of the day to the juicy bits in the evening.
“I had a premonition that it was all doomed when I burnt the dinner after gossiping with Cesspool,” I explained.
“Sorry darling, but where does that smelly old man fit in the grand scheme of things - lost me I’m afraid,” Delia replied.
Farm worker Cess Poole, affectionally known as Cesspool on account of the manure trapped in his turn-ups, is a living legend. He really ought to get an agent and go on reality TV. His rivetingly entertaining encyclopedic knowledge of the sexual antics and peccadiloes of almost every toff in the county is unsurpassable. He tells his tales with such relish and it’s all backed up with anecdotal evidence that goes back donkeys years. To before the war. The Boer War that is.
But then, why should Delia know that? Although she’s lived in the small and picturesque county of Ruddlesex since marrying 30 years ago, she isn’t a local. For that distinction you need to be able to trace your family’s name, carved for generation after generation, on the stone and slate gravestones in the hillocky churchyards, or carved on the village war memorials, names carried away on the wind as the rector calls them out on Remembrance Sunday while old soldiers stand like black crows amongst the gnarled ancient yews.
“Cecil Poole is our village one-stop-gossip-shop,” I told her. You can’t stop him talking mid-flow in case you miss some vital salacious anecdote.
“I see,” Delia drawled.
I ploughed on explaining how Cess had stopped by for a chat as I was en-route to put all my old red-topped newspapers in the car for recycling in case Charles saw them and realised I had tabloid tendencies. I smugly explained to Cess that I was expecting Charles for dinner.
“Sratching his head under his cap he said - ‘What that drip,’ and went on to tell me some really, really, juicy gossip involving the Ruddlesex upper crust that would make a gossip columnist’s mouth water.”
“Really - do tell,” said Delia intrigued. “Did it involve Squire de Lisle Stocking and that new stable lad of his with the bleached highlights?”
Exasperated at her inability to grasp the vital crux of the conversation I ploughed on with my tale of woe upon woe.
“No, no, nothing as interesting as that, but the point is, I forgot that I’d left some raspberries in kirsch warming over a low heat on the stove. I stood there with my ears flapping, quivering with moral indignation - I promise, I imagined I could smell the smoke of hell fire.”
“That’s what a Calvinist background does for you,” said Delia sympathetically, that and vaginismus.”
I told her mournfully how I had suddenly sniffed the air, screamed and rushed back inside to the kitchen where acrid black smoke was billowing from my best saucepan which was buckling from the heat. As I vainly poked the charred remains of the raspberries, I became aware of Cess standing behind me rubbing his stubbly beard.
“Dead loss old girl, if you ask me,” he said, “if you can resurrect that, my name’s Jamie Oliver.”
“It was awful D”, I wailed. “I could almost see the auto cue rolling in his eyes as he stored the titbits of my misfortune to entertain his cronies over the dominoes and a pint in the Doom and Gloom, you know, the pub on Main Street, the Horse and Groom.”
Yet, despite Cess’s apparent perkiness over my predicament he came up trumps by suggesting he asked his wife Gladys to defrost some of her legendary melting moments, biscuits that always take first prize at the village show, much to the consternation and bitterness of the rest of the village WI ladies who mutter dark accounts of culinary gerrymandering and sexual intrigue of past yore. All fascinating stuff but peripheral to the urgent nature of my tale.
“I felt so grateful, but the stress of it all had made everything go pear-shaped, including my waistline which had expanded with stress. I felt like Posh Spice expecting twins,”I groaned.
Delia laughed: “Shame they weren’t conceived by David Beckham - God, I wouldn’t kick him out of bed in a hurry!”
I went on to explain that pressed for time, I scurried round doing all the essential jobs such as changing the sheets, painting my toe nails and waxing my bikini line. But due to my deformed waistline I abandoned plans to wear my slinky black sexy dress and instead defied the laws of physics by squeezing myself into black velvet boot cut jeans by pulling up the zip with a coat hanger. The pressure nearly perforated my ear drums.
I felt positively light headed as I opened the door to Charles as he stood there smiling with a bottle of Bolly in one hand, the violin strings of his hair wafting over his bald pate in the breeze.
“It was then that I felt the first twinge of misgivings, but I dismissed it as wind on account of my tight waistband, I elaborated to Delia.
I said ‘hi’ as we self consciously ‘air kissed.’ He sauntered in and plonked himself down on the sofa.
“Nice place,” he remarked looking round the room, liberally sprinkled with new county touches including a copy of Country Life, a battered old wicker basket with a tartan scarf in it and a pair of old riding boots casually tucked under a table.
I poured out glasses of Bolly, giving myself a generous slug before inviting him into the kitchen while I fiddled around with the meal. The conversation started benignly, circling round safe topics like what he’d been doing that day. He’d had a ‘jolly’ day at a Point-to-Point then he’d waited around for the vet to arrive to geld one of his favourite nags.
“Doesn't it bring tears to your eyes in sympathy?” I queried. He threw back his head and laughed so heartily I could see his tonsils quiver.
“Never thought about it really - nature’s way you see. Anyway, my tackle’s in fine fettle - good enough for a hard day in the saddle without it putting me off my stride,” he winked saucily. Things were looking up.
“Delia, I almost had him in the bag.”
“Oh,” she squeaked.
I swapped the phone from one ear to the other, a subconscious move that signalled a sudden change in the direction of events.
“Err, not quite,” I said slowly.
“You don’t mean you blew him out - just as he was within shagging distance,” Delia exclaimed in horror.
“Well,” I wheedled. “Things sort of escalated and before I knew where I was he was on one side of the front door and I was on the other. Things just suddenly started to wobble when we got on to politics.”
The saying that goes ‘the path to hell is paved with good intentions’ is one that aptly described the moment when I realised that, although he was eligible, we were about as compatible as Margaret Thatcher and Lenin and the evening was hurtling towards a scene straight out of Dante’s Inferno, rather than Hironimus Bosch’s ‘Garden of Delights.’
“Shame,” Delia murmurred.
The candles on the table were lit and I felt we were cruising, two forty somethings having an intelligent, rational debate about the political issues of the day. Then came the bombshell.
I paused for dramatic effect to impress upon Delia the yawning chasm that had opened between Charles and myself.
“He, wait for it, said: “Margaret Thatcher, bless her,’ and then reverently raised his glass to the woman he called his favourite leader of all time!”
“So?” queried Delia in a puzzled tone.
“Whadya mean, so?” I shrieked.
I drew in a sharp breath and tried patiently to explain that ideological differences could pose a barrier to a more intimate relationship and I was so irritated with him it made me chew extra hard on my pasta balls.
“Don’t you mean, bless her, and God rest her soul, that she may depart in peace? I said. I really tried hard to sound like a meek, demure Tory wife but I ended up squawking in his face like a fishwife on ketamine.”
“Charles sat up as stiff as a poker in his chair and snapped: “Bring her back, that’s what I say - sort out that rabid lot in the Commons, load of wet, lefty limp-wristed socialists.
“Quite,” Delia murmured in agreement.
“Well I think she’s barking,” I said, remembering that I followed my remark by spiking a succulent piece of garlic sausage and popping it into my mouth - a classic case of Freudian penis castration if ever there was one.
“He’s so up himself you know, he could polish the backs of his eye balls.”
Delia tittered.
“Charles’ hand froze, his fork poised midway to his mouth, he looked like some android whose batteries had gone flat on Star Trek.”
“You don’t mean you're a feminist - a woman with balls,” he whispered hoarsely.
“If you mean, am I a woman who values her independence, am I a woman who doesn’t defer to a man simply because he has a penis, then the answer is ‘yes’, I said brazenly.”
I heard Delia groan.
“Obviously fazed to find himself in such close proximity to a feminist, he started to look wary, eyeing the back door in case he needed to make a sharp exit.
Suddenly realising the enormity of the damage done, I decided to embark on a limitation exercise.”
Giving out a big sigh I told Delia how I had looked deeply into his eyes, smiled my most winning smile and said as innocently as I could: “Who cares about politics anyway let’s just forget it shall we? Then, desperate to fill the awkward silence I lisped provocatively : ‘Do you fancy a melting moment?’
His mouth dropped to reveal partially masticated pasta and his head turned purple, it was enough to dampen the ardour of a Turkish courtesan. Funnily enough it seemed to break the ice and from then on we managed to scramble back from outright war to a truce. Differences forgotten we retired to the sofa.
Charles, obviously thinking feminism is akin to whoredom pounced and started to breathe heavily like a cart horse with asthma. But the tingling sensation I felt in my loins was caused by a lack of circulation to my vital organs from my crutch-strangling jeans which felt as if they were getting tighter by the minute. I feigned virtue and said I never slept with a man on the first date.
Frantic to regain his composure, Charles rearranged his trousers with one hand to hide his hard-on and smoothed the strings of his hair back into place on his sweaty head with the other.
‘Worth a try,’ he muttered as he rose to go. We stood embarrassed and dejected on the doorstep saying our hurried good-byes, where only a few hours earlier we had greeted each other with shy curiosity.
“Why do we put ourselves through such emotional contortions to snare a man when we worked so hard to win our liberation?” I asked Delia plaintively. I feel as if I’ve just had a severe dose of the emotional trots.”
“Because it’s fun darling, celibacy is so debilitating and admit it, you love the fun of the chase, you lead all these poor hapless men such a merry dance, reducing them to tears of frustration. Revenge darling, revenge.”
“I must admit Charles is a bit of a DUD, you know, dull, ugly and desperate, but I thought I’d give him a whirl, you know, sale on return, after all he might have hidden talents.”
“Well, if I were you I would have given him a few rounds. Checked out his credentials in the trouser department. You and your principle’s. Who cares he if loves Maggie, he’s obviously the sort who likes to be dominated. Sounds as if he’s got potential to me.”
I started to giggle. “You're so naughty D - which reminds me. You know I mentioned some juicy gossip that Cecil was telling me about? Well, apparently, Digger Manners was out lamping for rabbits last night when he saw this navy Freelander in a lay-by outside of Adlesbourgh. It was bumping rhythmically up and down and he could hear a faint buzzing noise coming from the back window. He daren't go too near, because, well you never know these days. But he said the car was familiar. Hey, it wasn’t you was it with Toy Boy, trying out that new sex toy - the penis ring with the battery operated remote control?”
‘Oh my God,” shrieked Delia. And then the line went dead. I think she must have dropped the phone.
I can’t quite remember the exact moment when it all started to go horribly wrong, when the cruel finger of fate, maliciously and mischievously pressed the ‘crush’ button, so that all my dreams, glistening like some phantom silver cypher in the sun, crumpled into a dull metallic clod to disappear unceremoniously down life’s metaphorical shute to dumpsville. Not that I’m feeling sorry for myself or anything.
Could I, if I had handled things differently, be now looking forward to date number two with Charles instead of analysing the inflection of every little word, the body language of every gesture, for the moment when our burgeoning relationship was nipped in the bud, trodden under foot and flushed down the proverbial toilet?
It called for a serious dose of therapy from my closest friend - the telephone.
I rang Delia.
“Hi darling” she said. “Did he get his rocks off then?”
I took a deep breath and started the circuitous route from the mundane account of the earlier part of the day to the juicy bits in the evening.
“I had a premonition that it was all doomed when I burnt the dinner after gossiping with Cesspool,” I explained.
“Sorry darling, but where does that smelly old man fit in the grand scheme of things - lost me I’m afraid,” Delia replied.
Farm worker Cess Poole, affectionally known as Cesspool on account of the manure trapped in his turn-ups, is a living legend. He really ought to get an agent and go on reality TV. His rivetingly entertaining encyclopedic knowledge of the sexual antics and peccadiloes of almost every toff in the county is unsurpassable. He tells his tales with such relish and it’s all backed up with anecdotal evidence that goes back donkeys years. To before the war. The Boer War that is.
But then, why should Delia know that? Although she’s lived in the small and picturesque county of Ruddlesex since marrying 30 years ago, she isn’t a local. For that distinction you need to be able to trace your family’s name, carved for generation after generation, on the stone and slate gravestones in the hillocky churchyards, or carved on the village war memorials, names carried away on the wind as the rector calls them out on Remembrance Sunday while old soldiers stand like black crows amongst the gnarled ancient yews.
“Cecil Poole is our village one-stop-gossip-shop,” I told her. You can’t stop him talking mid-flow in case you miss some vital salacious anecdote.
“I see,” Delia drawled.
I ploughed on explaining how Cess had stopped by for a chat as I was en-route to put all my old red-topped newspapers in the car for recycling in case Charles saw them and realised I had tabloid tendencies. I smugly explained to Cess that I was expecting Charles for dinner.
“Sratching his head under his cap he said - ‘What that drip,’ and went on to tell me some really, really, juicy gossip involving the Ruddlesex upper crust that would make a gossip columnist’s mouth water.”
“Really - do tell,” said Delia intrigued. “Did it involve Squire de Lisle Stocking and that new stable lad of his with the bleached highlights?”
Exasperated at her inability to grasp the vital crux of the conversation I ploughed on with my tale of woe upon woe.
“No, no, nothing as interesting as that, but the point is, I forgot that I’d left some raspberries in kirsch warming over a low heat on the stove. I stood there with my ears flapping, quivering with moral indignation - I promise, I imagined I could smell the smoke of hell fire.”
“That’s what a Calvinist background does for you,” said Delia sympathetically, that and vaginismus.”
I told her mournfully how I had suddenly sniffed the air, screamed and rushed back inside to the kitchen where acrid black smoke was billowing from my best saucepan which was buckling from the heat. As I vainly poked the charred remains of the raspberries, I became aware of Cess standing behind me rubbing his stubbly beard.
“Dead loss old girl, if you ask me,” he said, “if you can resurrect that, my name’s Jamie Oliver.”
“It was awful D”, I wailed. “I could almost see the auto cue rolling in his eyes as he stored the titbits of my misfortune to entertain his cronies over the dominoes and a pint in the Doom and Gloom, you know, the pub on Main Street, the Horse and Groom.”
Yet, despite Cess’s apparent perkiness over my predicament he came up trumps by suggesting he asked his wife Gladys to defrost some of her legendary melting moments, biscuits that always take first prize at the village show, much to the consternation and bitterness of the rest of the village WI ladies who mutter dark accounts of culinary gerrymandering and sexual intrigue of past yore. All fascinating stuff but peripheral to the urgent nature of my tale.
“I felt so grateful, but the stress of it all had made everything go pear-shaped, including my waistline which had expanded with stress. I felt like Posh Spice expecting twins,”I groaned.
Delia laughed: “Shame they weren’t conceived by David Beckham - God, I wouldn’t kick him out of bed in a hurry!”
I went on to explain that pressed for time, I scurried round doing all the essential jobs such as changing the sheets, painting my toe nails and waxing my bikini line. But due to my deformed waistline I abandoned plans to wear my slinky black sexy dress and instead defied the laws of physics by squeezing myself into black velvet boot cut jeans by pulling up the zip with a coat hanger. The pressure nearly perforated my ear drums.
I felt positively light headed as I opened the door to Charles as he stood there smiling with a bottle of Bolly in one hand, the violin strings of his hair wafting over his bald pate in the breeze.
“It was then that I felt the first twinge of misgivings, but I dismissed it as wind on account of my tight waistband, I elaborated to Delia.
I said ‘hi’ as we self consciously ‘air kissed.’ He sauntered in and plonked himself down on the sofa.
“Nice place,” he remarked looking round the room, liberally sprinkled with new county touches including a copy of Country Life, a battered old wicker basket with a tartan scarf in it and a pair of old riding boots casually tucked under a table.
I poured out glasses of Bolly, giving myself a generous slug before inviting him into the kitchen while I fiddled around with the meal. The conversation started benignly, circling round safe topics like what he’d been doing that day. He’d had a ‘jolly’ day at a Point-to-Point then he’d waited around for the vet to arrive to geld one of his favourite nags.
“Doesn't it bring tears to your eyes in sympathy?” I queried. He threw back his head and laughed so heartily I could see his tonsils quiver.
“Never thought about it really - nature’s way you see. Anyway, my tackle’s in fine fettle - good enough for a hard day in the saddle without it putting me off my stride,” he winked saucily. Things were looking up.
“Delia, I almost had him in the bag.”
“Oh,” she squeaked.
I swapped the phone from one ear to the other, a subconscious move that signalled a sudden change in the direction of events.
“Err, not quite,” I said slowly.
“You don’t mean you blew him out - just as he was within shagging distance,” Delia exclaimed in horror.
“Well,” I wheedled. “Things sort of escalated and before I knew where I was he was on one side of the front door and I was on the other. Things just suddenly started to wobble when we got on to politics.”
The saying that goes ‘the path to hell is paved with good intentions’ is one that aptly described the moment when I realised that, although he was eligible, we were about as compatible as Margaret Thatcher and Lenin and the evening was hurtling towards a scene straight out of Dante’s Inferno, rather than Hironimus Bosch’s ‘Garden of Delights.’
“Shame,” Delia murmurred.
The candles on the table were lit and I felt we were cruising, two forty somethings having an intelligent, rational debate about the political issues of the day. Then came the bombshell.
I paused for dramatic effect to impress upon Delia the yawning chasm that had opened between Charles and myself.
“He, wait for it, said: “Margaret Thatcher, bless her,’ and then reverently raised his glass to the woman he called his favourite leader of all time!”
“So?” queried Delia in a puzzled tone.
“Whadya mean, so?” I shrieked.
I drew in a sharp breath and tried patiently to explain that ideological differences could pose a barrier to a more intimate relationship and I was so irritated with him it made me chew extra hard on my pasta balls.
“Don’t you mean, bless her, and God rest her soul, that she may depart in peace? I said. I really tried hard to sound like a meek, demure Tory wife but I ended up squawking in his face like a fishwife on ketamine.”
“Charles sat up as stiff as a poker in his chair and snapped: “Bring her back, that’s what I say - sort out that rabid lot in the Commons, load of wet, lefty limp-wristed socialists.
“Quite,” Delia murmured in agreement.
“Well I think she’s barking,” I said, remembering that I followed my remark by spiking a succulent piece of garlic sausage and popping it into my mouth - a classic case of Freudian penis castration if ever there was one.
“He’s so up himself you know, he could polish the backs of his eye balls.”
Delia tittered.
“Charles’ hand froze, his fork poised midway to his mouth, he looked like some android whose batteries had gone flat on Star Trek.”
“You don’t mean you're a feminist - a woman with balls,” he whispered hoarsely.
“If you mean, am I a woman who values her independence, am I a woman who doesn’t defer to a man simply because he has a penis, then the answer is ‘yes’, I said brazenly.”
I heard Delia groan.
“Obviously fazed to find himself in such close proximity to a feminist, he started to look wary, eyeing the back door in case he needed to make a sharp exit.
Suddenly realising the enormity of the damage done, I decided to embark on a limitation exercise.”
Giving out a big sigh I told Delia how I had looked deeply into his eyes, smiled my most winning smile and said as innocently as I could: “Who cares about politics anyway let’s just forget it shall we? Then, desperate to fill the awkward silence I lisped provocatively : ‘Do you fancy a melting moment?’
His mouth dropped to reveal partially masticated pasta and his head turned purple, it was enough to dampen the ardour of a Turkish courtesan. Funnily enough it seemed to break the ice and from then on we managed to scramble back from outright war to a truce. Differences forgotten we retired to the sofa.
Charles, obviously thinking feminism is akin to whoredom pounced and started to breathe heavily like a cart horse with asthma. But the tingling sensation I felt in my loins was caused by a lack of circulation to my vital organs from my crutch-strangling jeans which felt as if they were getting tighter by the minute. I feigned virtue and said I never slept with a man on the first date.
Frantic to regain his composure, Charles rearranged his trousers with one hand to hide his hard-on and smoothed the strings of his hair back into place on his sweaty head with the other.
‘Worth a try,’ he muttered as he rose to go. We stood embarrassed and dejected on the doorstep saying our hurried good-byes, where only a few hours earlier we had greeted each other with shy curiosity.
“Why do we put ourselves through such emotional contortions to snare a man when we worked so hard to win our liberation?” I asked Delia plaintively. I feel as if I’ve just had a severe dose of the emotional trots.”
“Because it’s fun darling, celibacy is so debilitating and admit it, you love the fun of the chase, you lead all these poor hapless men such a merry dance, reducing them to tears of frustration. Revenge darling, revenge.”
“I must admit Charles is a bit of a DUD, you know, dull, ugly and desperate, but I thought I’d give him a whirl, you know, sale on return, after all he might have hidden talents.”
“Well, if I were you I would have given him a few rounds. Checked out his credentials in the trouser department. You and your principle’s. Who cares he if loves Maggie, he’s obviously the sort who likes to be dominated. Sounds as if he’s got potential to me.”
I started to giggle. “You're so naughty D - which reminds me. You know I mentioned some juicy gossip that Cecil was telling me about? Well, apparently, Digger Manners was out lamping for rabbits last night when he saw this navy Freelander in a lay-by outside of Adlesbourgh. It was bumping rhythmically up and down and he could hear a faint buzzing noise coming from the back window. He daren't go too near, because, well you never know these days. But he said the car was familiar. Hey, it wasn’t you was it with Toy Boy, trying out that new sex toy - the penis ring with the battery operated remote control?”
‘Oh my God,” shrieked Delia. And then the line went dead. I think she must have dropped the phone.
Monday, 20 August 2007
Sex in the Shires
CHAPTER 1
I woke up this morning feeling like a defrosted mammoth, looked in the mirror, saw the head of Medusa and recoiled in horror. Last night was a not-to-be-repeated event where a favour for a friend resulted in me soaking up enough duty free to compete with a trifle sponge.
It’s no consolation that my malady is the result of an altruistic gesture and maybe, I have to concede, a teensy weensy little bit because I was lured out, against my better judgement, to meet a man. It’s not as if I indulged that much, but when you get to a certain age you have to grapple with the realisation that carnal sin is cumulative. Once, in the first flush of youth, you could stuff your face with chips, go from one year to the next without so much as a sliver of fruit or vegetable passing between your teeth, stay up till dawn and still operate like a human being. But, eventually, it all catches up with you. Hit forty and lick a biscuit, and your face breaks out in pustulating sores whilst a layer of fat in the shape of a rubber ring suddenly appears beneath your ribs. Sniff a whisky and you look as if you’ve spent a hard night hanging round King’s Cross touting for business.
That reminds me, I must remember to avoid going near a naked flame because one spark from a lighted match in a public place and I’d be turned into an incendiary device and a suspected suicide bomber. Am I crazy or what? I have within my sights one of the most eligible men in Ruddlesex who isn’t old, impotent or gay and I go and reduce my chances of success by helping a friend get their leg over, how ironic is that? I am offered a rare window of opportunity and I slam it shut on my own little paws. So ungrateful. Last night I should have been sorting out my slap and waxing my bikini line for a potentially steamy session with Charles Smythe-Bothum Wethem (pronounced Bottom Wettum) - he’s got 2,000 Rutland acres and a pied-à-terre in Hampstead and he’s coming here for dinner tonight - with moi!
Delia says he’s an awful snob and makes Prince Charles sound like an old lag off a sink estate. But she’s just jealous. He’s got everything a girl could want except hair and a chin, but let’s face it, at my age I can’t afford to be picky.
Or blasé for that matter. Goodness only knows what he’d think if he caught sight of me now, a sozzled slattern sitting at my kitchen table obscured by packets of Co-op own brand and the floor littered with tat. I must remember to push all the pot noodles to the back of the pantry, buy some sun dried tomatoes, avocados for the fruit bowl, put a few strategically placed country magazines around the place and sling some jodhpurs over the back of the sofa.
If only I didn’t feel quite so depressed that I feel the urge to eat an industrial supply of Smarties to raise my serotonin levels. It’s all the fault of Delia and her toy boy. Gorgeous Delia - fit, 50 and rich, asked me out on a blind date to amuse Toy Boy’s cousin Mervin, a loss adjuster from Leicester. She drools over Toy Boy. Says he’s the must-have accessory for every woman. He’s got low mileage, runs on one brain cell and comes complete with a 40-year guarantee. So how come I got Mervin?
We decided to meet in a pub in the nearby town of Broadmarket. I set off fired up with a sense of optimism, driving dreamily all the way there with romantic visions of Mervin in my head. I imagined our first encounter, eyes meeting across a crowded room, a frisson of sexual chemistry as our hands touched and the delightful discovery that we share common ground about music, politics, religion, child-rearing and the best way to save the world.
I parked the car in one of Broadmarket’s beautiful, ancient, tree-lined streets and headed for the Cock and Bull, a once venerable chapel recently converted into a trendy bar where hopeful people congregate, eager to meet potential partners for nocturnal fornication fests. I could hear the thump, thump, thump of house music 100 yards before I reached the door, which, on opening revealed a tightly packed throng bathed in a kaleidoscope of coloured lights which swirled swiftly around the room before leaping up and arching across the chapel’s lofty vaulted ceiling, visible through a haze of cigarette smoke.
My eyes expertly searched the crowds with more precision than a barcode scanner at a supermarket checkout, for any noticeably decent men. I immediately eliminated the usual native male crew of spotty teenagers, red necked invaders from the Fens and the gorgeous groups of fit, 20-something guys eyeing up equally gorgeous gaggles of strikingly pretty girls.
My eyes skimmed fleetingly over a solitary figure standing at the bar with one hand nursing a pint of beer while his other was vainly trying to block out the din by poking a fat finger very firmly inside one of his not inconsiderably-sized ears. I immediately thought of an elephant. My attention was riveted by a pair of gruesome ‘easy rider’ specs circa 1970 which shrieked ‘loser’ and his polyester clothes in various shades of drab, from beige shirt to dog-shit brown slacks confirmed that he was a stylistic dodo. Bless. My gaze drifted down his body until they reached his feet clad in those weird faux walking boots with eyelet holes that you see advertised in Sunday supplements. Sheer heresy in such a trendy joint. I almost instinctively genuflected at his complete crucifixion of decency and taste.
Then I spotted Delia who was waving in the general direction of this person and I realised with mounting horror that it could only be Mervin. My dreams of romantic harmony were dispelled in an instant. Here was a classic case of Spam Man. Just like junk mail, guys like this are ubiquitous, popping up all the time in singles clubs, internet dating rooms, newspaper lonely heart columns and on blind dates. Your hopes get raised in anticipation only to have them dashed to the ground when you see what’s on offer.
Beer in one hand, he raised his arms above his head and moved like a circular saw through the tightly packed crowds which melted apart like the Red Sea for the children of Israel, as his sweaty armpits passed them uncomfortably close by at sniffing range.
“Pleased to meet you Rebecca,” he said, as he executed a final turn to stop directly in front of me, extending his free hand and enveloping mine in a flabby, sweaty grip. Definitely no sexual frisson there, it was like shaking hands with a dead haddock.
“You too,” I lied as I bleakly assessed the merchandise at close quarters with ‘bargain basement big time’ registering instantly in my mind.
Every atom in his body had gone south including his stomach and moustache. His hair, apart from the bald patch, was so frizzy it looked as if it had been wired up to the National Grid. Delia whispered in my ear: “He’s got nice eyes,” and I replied through stiff lips: “Yes - for a walrus.”
Laughing, she sauntered off and attached herself around Toy Boy like a boa constrictor and left me to it. We managed to find two spare seats in a dingy corner. Realising my chances of coming into snogging range of anyone half decent was virtually nil, I tucked into a massive ‘Big Bag’ of cheese and onion crisps and resigned myself to my fate over half of Guinness.
“And how do you know Delia?” asked Mervin politely.
“We met on an Access Course at Broadmarket College of FE,” I explained. I took a sip of Guinness, hoping to go on and tell him how it had transformed our lives from bored, depressed housewives, to liberated, well educated women. But I never got the chance. As far as Mervin was concerned I’d had my say and now it was his turn.
I spent the whole evening hearing how loss adjusters use psychology to convince distraught housewives that their charred burnt-out kitchens will brush up as good as new with a squirt of Mr Sheen and a bit of elbow grease.
I said witheringly: “ I never get taken in by cheap sales routines,” only to realise later that I ended up buying all his drinks.
He then proceeded to deliver a character assassination on his ex-wife, who it transpired had a shoe shopping habit that made Imelda Marcos seem frugal by comparison, and she was heavily into tantric sex - with her personal trainer. Finishing my bag of crisps I managed to stifle a yawn only to sniff vestiges of Mervin’s earwax on my fingers. I thought the crisps had tasted extra spicy. I felt sick, not only at the thought of earwax flavoured crisps, but also with envy at Delia as she disentangled herself from Toy Boy and sauntered over to skewer my foot with her Jimmy Choo stiletto to say they’d love to meet back at my place for coffee. I poked her viciously in the ribs as we left and hissed: “Don’t you dare abandon me with Merv.”
Smiling she arched one perfectly plucked eyebrow and said half reprovingly: “Now would I?”
“Yes,” I replied through gritted teeth.
I got home first with Mervin. And, as I had suspected, minutes turned to hours. No Delia and no Toy Boy. Mervin decided to elaborate further on his ex-wife’s foibles and when he’d put her thoroughly through the metaphorical mincer moved on to her mother, then a daughter by her first marriage and a menagerie of pet dogs and cats who were all part of a conspiracy to part him from his wallet. Fat chance, I thought, as I reached for the duty-free in despair to stop my brain from turning into a cabbage as he droned on and on and on ad nauseum.
I never, for one nanosecond, thought Delia and Toy Boy had got lost or been mangled in some gruesome pile-up as Spam Man kept fretting on and on about at various intervals in his narrative about Mervin versus the rest of the bloody world. No. They’d probably found a convenient lay-by and Delia was being deliciously and vigourously rogered by Toy Boy. And here I sat in a sex-free zone with a lump of worried lard - with bristles.
I couldn’t tell him that Delia was married, could I? Metaphysics and ethics was never my strongest point, especially at 2am in the morning entertaining an emotional cretin. I’ll rephrase that - a completely sexless, physically amorphous, emotional cretin. Not even shaggable when utterly and irredeemably rat-arsed.
When Delia did eventually turn up with Toy Boy her face was so red it looked as if she'd had a close encounter with an industrial sander. Their excuse, was as far-fetched as it was ingenious. Delia, waving one hand airily while squeezing Toy Boy’s buttocks affectionately with the other, said blithely: “Oh, we took a two-hour detour to settle a dispute over whether a house in Adlesbourgh was roofed in Collyweston or Welsh slate.”
She relinquished her grip on Toy Boy’s arse for a split second, to slap him across the head for grinning and saying it actually turned out to be ’thatched.’
I eventually managed to get rid of them all after a heated and fantastical debate on genetic engineering. Delia and I thought it had potential, zapping out unsavoury male characteristics such as an inability to differentiate between the threat of World War III and England being knocked out of the rugby World Cup. Toy Boy thought it could revolutionise the mental health of the male population by eliminating unsightly chest and back hair and the trauma of de-fuzzing, while Mervin thought it could wipe-out an inbuilt default mechanism to mistrust men who built model railways. He’s got one as big as Clapham Junction in his shed apparently. Yawn.
Warning bells began to ring as they left and Mervin casually said: “I’ll call you.”
Throwing my arms theatrically wide above my head I slurred: “Well, why not when you’re such a nice spam?” Then I started to titter convulsively. Delia flashed me a warning look before Mervin bent to kiss me. I engaged the infallible trick of leaning forward to wipe a non-existent speck of dirt off the light switch. Even so, the whiskers of his moustache brushed past my ear - sufficient contact to shrivel my libido like a man’s bits suddenly being immersed in liquid nitrogen. Not nice.
I meandered my wobbly way back to the kitchen which looked like squatters had moved in and out while my back was turned. I put my hands over my eyes to blot out the devastation before making my way, with great difficulty, upstairs to bed. I only remembered to remove my hands from my eyes when my body made painful contact with the bedroom door.
The sheets were cold like my heart and my cheeks were hot like my fanny which suddenly revved into gear due to a combination of intoxicating liquor and neglect. One of these days, raced the thoughts in my fuddled mind, it will go into overdrive like the car and stall, never to start again without help from a nice AA man with a big spanner. And with that pleasant thought I fell soundly asleep like a baby.
Five hours later and I look like a raddled old hag, I’ve got a splitting headache and worse of all - stale onion breath. This is the price I’m paying for my altruistic gesture to a friend in need and my inability to deal decisively with a member of the opposite sex who can bore for England, Europe and the universe. Let’s face it, last night a man in my place faced with a female equivalent of Mervin would have yawned - said: “Sorry luv, I’m bushed,” and beetled off to bed leaving them alone with the TV remote control. But women haven’t yet mastered the fine art of bludgeoning other people’s feelings into a mash until the pips squeak while congratulating themselves on their magnanimity in condescending to speak to them in the first place. Except perhaps for Maggie Thatch. And Anne Robinson.
Well, all this musing and ruminating like a toothless camel isn’t going to get any housework done or the meal organised for my tête-à-tête with Charles. If I want to get more than the table laid tonight I’ve got to get motivated, sparkle, and sweep away the cobwebs of obfuscation and procrastination from my mind and then get my fat arse in gear. Yes. Just one more cuppa and then it’s action stations.
I woke up this morning feeling like a defrosted mammoth, looked in the mirror, saw the head of Medusa and recoiled in horror. Last night was a not-to-be-repeated event where a favour for a friend resulted in me soaking up enough duty free to compete with a trifle sponge.
It’s no consolation that my malady is the result of an altruistic gesture and maybe, I have to concede, a teensy weensy little bit because I was lured out, against my better judgement, to meet a man. It’s not as if I indulged that much, but when you get to a certain age you have to grapple with the realisation that carnal sin is cumulative. Once, in the first flush of youth, you could stuff your face with chips, go from one year to the next without so much as a sliver of fruit or vegetable passing between your teeth, stay up till dawn and still operate like a human being. But, eventually, it all catches up with you. Hit forty and lick a biscuit, and your face breaks out in pustulating sores whilst a layer of fat in the shape of a rubber ring suddenly appears beneath your ribs. Sniff a whisky and you look as if you’ve spent a hard night hanging round King’s Cross touting for business.
That reminds me, I must remember to avoid going near a naked flame because one spark from a lighted match in a public place and I’d be turned into an incendiary device and a suspected suicide bomber. Am I crazy or what? I have within my sights one of the most eligible men in Ruddlesex who isn’t old, impotent or gay and I go and reduce my chances of success by helping a friend get their leg over, how ironic is that? I am offered a rare window of opportunity and I slam it shut on my own little paws. So ungrateful. Last night I should have been sorting out my slap and waxing my bikini line for a potentially steamy session with Charles Smythe-Bothum Wethem (pronounced Bottom Wettum) - he’s got 2,000 Rutland acres and a pied-à-terre in Hampstead and he’s coming here for dinner tonight - with moi!
Delia says he’s an awful snob and makes Prince Charles sound like an old lag off a sink estate. But she’s just jealous. He’s got everything a girl could want except hair and a chin, but let’s face it, at my age I can’t afford to be picky.
Or blasé for that matter. Goodness only knows what he’d think if he caught sight of me now, a sozzled slattern sitting at my kitchen table obscured by packets of Co-op own brand and the floor littered with tat. I must remember to push all the pot noodles to the back of the pantry, buy some sun dried tomatoes, avocados for the fruit bowl, put a few strategically placed country magazines around the place and sling some jodhpurs over the back of the sofa.
If only I didn’t feel quite so depressed that I feel the urge to eat an industrial supply of Smarties to raise my serotonin levels. It’s all the fault of Delia and her toy boy. Gorgeous Delia - fit, 50 and rich, asked me out on a blind date to amuse Toy Boy’s cousin Mervin, a loss adjuster from Leicester. She drools over Toy Boy. Says he’s the must-have accessory for every woman. He’s got low mileage, runs on one brain cell and comes complete with a 40-year guarantee. So how come I got Mervin?
We decided to meet in a pub in the nearby town of Broadmarket. I set off fired up with a sense of optimism, driving dreamily all the way there with romantic visions of Mervin in my head. I imagined our first encounter, eyes meeting across a crowded room, a frisson of sexual chemistry as our hands touched and the delightful discovery that we share common ground about music, politics, religion, child-rearing and the best way to save the world.
I parked the car in one of Broadmarket’s beautiful, ancient, tree-lined streets and headed for the Cock and Bull, a once venerable chapel recently converted into a trendy bar where hopeful people congregate, eager to meet potential partners for nocturnal fornication fests. I could hear the thump, thump, thump of house music 100 yards before I reached the door, which, on opening revealed a tightly packed throng bathed in a kaleidoscope of coloured lights which swirled swiftly around the room before leaping up and arching across the chapel’s lofty vaulted ceiling, visible through a haze of cigarette smoke.
My eyes expertly searched the crowds with more precision than a barcode scanner at a supermarket checkout, for any noticeably decent men. I immediately eliminated the usual native male crew of spotty teenagers, red necked invaders from the Fens and the gorgeous groups of fit, 20-something guys eyeing up equally gorgeous gaggles of strikingly pretty girls.
My eyes skimmed fleetingly over a solitary figure standing at the bar with one hand nursing a pint of beer while his other was vainly trying to block out the din by poking a fat finger very firmly inside one of his not inconsiderably-sized ears. I immediately thought of an elephant. My attention was riveted by a pair of gruesome ‘easy rider’ specs circa 1970 which shrieked ‘loser’ and his polyester clothes in various shades of drab, from beige shirt to dog-shit brown slacks confirmed that he was a stylistic dodo. Bless. My gaze drifted down his body until they reached his feet clad in those weird faux walking boots with eyelet holes that you see advertised in Sunday supplements. Sheer heresy in such a trendy joint. I almost instinctively genuflected at his complete crucifixion of decency and taste.
Then I spotted Delia who was waving in the general direction of this person and I realised with mounting horror that it could only be Mervin. My dreams of romantic harmony were dispelled in an instant. Here was a classic case of Spam Man. Just like junk mail, guys like this are ubiquitous, popping up all the time in singles clubs, internet dating rooms, newspaper lonely heart columns and on blind dates. Your hopes get raised in anticipation only to have them dashed to the ground when you see what’s on offer.
Beer in one hand, he raised his arms above his head and moved like a circular saw through the tightly packed crowds which melted apart like the Red Sea for the children of Israel, as his sweaty armpits passed them uncomfortably close by at sniffing range.
“Pleased to meet you Rebecca,” he said, as he executed a final turn to stop directly in front of me, extending his free hand and enveloping mine in a flabby, sweaty grip. Definitely no sexual frisson there, it was like shaking hands with a dead haddock.
“You too,” I lied as I bleakly assessed the merchandise at close quarters with ‘bargain basement big time’ registering instantly in my mind.
Every atom in his body had gone south including his stomach and moustache. His hair, apart from the bald patch, was so frizzy it looked as if it had been wired up to the National Grid. Delia whispered in my ear: “He’s got nice eyes,” and I replied through stiff lips: “Yes - for a walrus.”
Laughing, she sauntered off and attached herself around Toy Boy like a boa constrictor and left me to it. We managed to find two spare seats in a dingy corner. Realising my chances of coming into snogging range of anyone half decent was virtually nil, I tucked into a massive ‘Big Bag’ of cheese and onion crisps and resigned myself to my fate over half of Guinness.
“And how do you know Delia?” asked Mervin politely.
“We met on an Access Course at Broadmarket College of FE,” I explained. I took a sip of Guinness, hoping to go on and tell him how it had transformed our lives from bored, depressed housewives, to liberated, well educated women. But I never got the chance. As far as Mervin was concerned I’d had my say and now it was his turn.
I spent the whole evening hearing how loss adjusters use psychology to convince distraught housewives that their charred burnt-out kitchens will brush up as good as new with a squirt of Mr Sheen and a bit of elbow grease.
I said witheringly: “ I never get taken in by cheap sales routines,” only to realise later that I ended up buying all his drinks.
He then proceeded to deliver a character assassination on his ex-wife, who it transpired had a shoe shopping habit that made Imelda Marcos seem frugal by comparison, and she was heavily into tantric sex - with her personal trainer. Finishing my bag of crisps I managed to stifle a yawn only to sniff vestiges of Mervin’s earwax on my fingers. I thought the crisps had tasted extra spicy. I felt sick, not only at the thought of earwax flavoured crisps, but also with envy at Delia as she disentangled herself from Toy Boy and sauntered over to skewer my foot with her Jimmy Choo stiletto to say they’d love to meet back at my place for coffee. I poked her viciously in the ribs as we left and hissed: “Don’t you dare abandon me with Merv.”
Smiling she arched one perfectly plucked eyebrow and said half reprovingly: “Now would I?”
“Yes,” I replied through gritted teeth.
I got home first with Mervin. And, as I had suspected, minutes turned to hours. No Delia and no Toy Boy. Mervin decided to elaborate further on his ex-wife’s foibles and when he’d put her thoroughly through the metaphorical mincer moved on to her mother, then a daughter by her first marriage and a menagerie of pet dogs and cats who were all part of a conspiracy to part him from his wallet. Fat chance, I thought, as I reached for the duty-free in despair to stop my brain from turning into a cabbage as he droned on and on and on ad nauseum.
I never, for one nanosecond, thought Delia and Toy Boy had got lost or been mangled in some gruesome pile-up as Spam Man kept fretting on and on about at various intervals in his narrative about Mervin versus the rest of the bloody world. No. They’d probably found a convenient lay-by and Delia was being deliciously and vigourously rogered by Toy Boy. And here I sat in a sex-free zone with a lump of worried lard - with bristles.
I couldn’t tell him that Delia was married, could I? Metaphysics and ethics was never my strongest point, especially at 2am in the morning entertaining an emotional cretin. I’ll rephrase that - a completely sexless, physically amorphous, emotional cretin. Not even shaggable when utterly and irredeemably rat-arsed.
When Delia did eventually turn up with Toy Boy her face was so red it looked as if she'd had a close encounter with an industrial sander. Their excuse, was as far-fetched as it was ingenious. Delia, waving one hand airily while squeezing Toy Boy’s buttocks affectionately with the other, said blithely: “Oh, we took a two-hour detour to settle a dispute over whether a house in Adlesbourgh was roofed in Collyweston or Welsh slate.”
She relinquished her grip on Toy Boy’s arse for a split second, to slap him across the head for grinning and saying it actually turned out to be ’thatched.’
I eventually managed to get rid of them all after a heated and fantastical debate on genetic engineering. Delia and I thought it had potential, zapping out unsavoury male characteristics such as an inability to differentiate between the threat of World War III and England being knocked out of the rugby World Cup. Toy Boy thought it could revolutionise the mental health of the male population by eliminating unsightly chest and back hair and the trauma of de-fuzzing, while Mervin thought it could wipe-out an inbuilt default mechanism to mistrust men who built model railways. He’s got one as big as Clapham Junction in his shed apparently. Yawn.
Warning bells began to ring as they left and Mervin casually said: “I’ll call you.”
Throwing my arms theatrically wide above my head I slurred: “Well, why not when you’re such a nice spam?” Then I started to titter convulsively. Delia flashed me a warning look before Mervin bent to kiss me. I engaged the infallible trick of leaning forward to wipe a non-existent speck of dirt off the light switch. Even so, the whiskers of his moustache brushed past my ear - sufficient contact to shrivel my libido like a man’s bits suddenly being immersed in liquid nitrogen. Not nice.
I meandered my wobbly way back to the kitchen which looked like squatters had moved in and out while my back was turned. I put my hands over my eyes to blot out the devastation before making my way, with great difficulty, upstairs to bed. I only remembered to remove my hands from my eyes when my body made painful contact with the bedroom door.
The sheets were cold like my heart and my cheeks were hot like my fanny which suddenly revved into gear due to a combination of intoxicating liquor and neglect. One of these days, raced the thoughts in my fuddled mind, it will go into overdrive like the car and stall, never to start again without help from a nice AA man with a big spanner. And with that pleasant thought I fell soundly asleep like a baby.
Five hours later and I look like a raddled old hag, I’ve got a splitting headache and worse of all - stale onion breath. This is the price I’m paying for my altruistic gesture to a friend in need and my inability to deal decisively with a member of the opposite sex who can bore for England, Europe and the universe. Let’s face it, last night a man in my place faced with a female equivalent of Mervin would have yawned - said: “Sorry luv, I’m bushed,” and beetled off to bed leaving them alone with the TV remote control. But women haven’t yet mastered the fine art of bludgeoning other people’s feelings into a mash until the pips squeak while congratulating themselves on their magnanimity in condescending to speak to them in the first place. Except perhaps for Maggie Thatch. And Anne Robinson.
Well, all this musing and ruminating like a toothless camel isn’t going to get any housework done or the meal organised for my tête-à-tête with Charles. If I want to get more than the table laid tonight I’ve got to get motivated, sparkle, and sweep away the cobwebs of obfuscation and procrastination from my mind and then get my fat arse in gear. Yes. Just one more cuppa and then it’s action stations.
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