David Hadley's Blog, page 155

Faggots

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It was that sort of place… the kind of place where you kept a tight grip on your ladle and laughed scornfully at those who flaunted their desert spoons openly. Back in those days the Wild West Midlands was a lawless and – yes – a wild place. Everyone, of course, knows about the faggots and a few even witnessed the mushy peas, but there were other dangers for the unwary to fall into as they ventures into this wild, untamed wilderness in search of the fabled pork scratching, especially as it was so easy to fall out of a pub and into a canal.

Those were dark, damp, days, but being as this was Britain, it was all perfectly normal, except that the typical British drizzle fell with an unusual menace as the dwellers of the Black Country emerged from their dwelling hovels and strode manfully and/or womanfully from home to pub and back again, often spending equal amounts of time in both and often spending those equal amounts of time equally passed out on the floor as the darts players stepped over them in their haste to get hold of a precious bag of scratchings before the unholy wail of ‘Last orders’ terrified them all into fleeing for the sanctuary of their hovels where the mysterious faggots awaited their return.

At the Time

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If only I’d known at the time, which – with time these days being the way it is these days – was certainly possible, if not likely. However, with the new modern hand-held time machine taking over as the gadget of choice, supplanting the mere smartphone, we can see more and more of the problems it was intended to solve actually getting worse and worse. People are spending so much time leaping backwards and forwards in time, mostly to remind themselves to do things they forgot to do first time, or sometimes to stop themselves from what they did first time, that they have hardly any time left for the present.

When you do have the time to go out, you find everyone standing around – gadget in hand – searching for that point in their personal time stream where they can go back and change whatever it was they did wrong that enabled them to end up here and – more often than not – getting in your way as you yourself scroll back through this morning looking for the point where you can jump back to a point where you won’t be late for work because you spent most of the time, since getting out of bed, trying to find that point in last night’s argument that you spent the whole of the night sleeplessly thinking up some devastating put-down for.

Although, the last time you were late for work you found no-one there as they’d all gone back to the previous evening’s TV schedule to re-watch a crucial scene from the latest reality time-travel drama they’d all missed because they’d spent too long in the pub after work yesterday.

Activity Holidays and their Drawbacks

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All-in-all, then it was not a bad holiday, although touring a small caravan through some of the world’s most dangerous post-conflict minefields is not everybody’s idea of a relaxing fortnight. However, the occasional loud bang and rocking motion of the caravan does help to dispel that too-common holiday torpor that so often descends on holidaymakers on less fraught two-week breaks.

There is, also, something to be said for the intensity of the mine-detecting experience, especially when you are increasingly aware that the tour company has palmed you off with a dodgy mine-detector that has trouble detecting anything less than a loudly-ticking thermonuclear device, or – for some reason – any nearby Rottweiler bitch that is in season.

Anyway, the caravan cutlery draw did have a couple of serviceable desert spoons which did help in locating the mines much better than the supplied mine- detector, to be fair, though, it has to be admitted that the spoons were hopeless at detecting any dogs, let alone Rottweilers – in season or not.

The wife did say, though, that she had not paid all that money to crawl through war-ravaged scrubland on her stomach. Although, I did point out to her that the exercise – should she survive - would do wonders for her body-mass index. A remark that she seemed to find less reassuring and confidence-building than I’d hoped.

Still – after all is said and done – it was still better than a week in Blackpool with the wife and her mother. So – maybe – next year we’ll be back again – that is assuming we did manage to find all the bits of the caravan - after we’d taken that wrong turning on the last day - and we can get them all to fit back together before next year’s holiday season begins.

Putting the Spark Back

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Well, it is sometimes like that, although most of the time it isn’t. After all, something standing proud like that can be a bit awkward when trying to effortlessly manoeuvre one’s shopping trolley around the supermarket without inconveniencing too many other shoppers.

Although, it must be said that having the wife naked in the shopping trolley with her legs hanging out each side, does tend to attract more than the usual amount of attention, and not because of the special offer on the over-ready self-basting turkey crown she is clutching to her naked bosom as we career down the tinned goods aisle at a speed not normally associated with the weekly shopping trip.

The self-help books, though, do advise trying to come up with a few novel ideas to keep a long-term sex life from becoming dull and routine, and though it may – admittedly – veer towards the more unconventional, especially with the propensity for shopping trolleys to insists in going in every direction but the one you want them to so a bit of veering off-course is somewhat inevitable, we do believe we have – at last – discovered the ideal way to put the spark back into our love-life, especially when we use the cranberry sauce in a way not specifically shown in the ‘serving suggestion’ illustration on the label.

Natural Yogurt

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As they say: ‘Fine words butter no sexual-experimentalist’, but that doesn’t apply in this case… as we used natural yogurt instead of the butter.

However, a word of caution to anyone else considering experimenting in this fashion: steer well clear of the unnatural yogurt, unless – of course – your particular kink, fetish or political leanings are that way inclined and your actions are not going to case undue distress to the rest of the post office queue.

Of course, you will need a large paintbrush to apply the yogurt, although a smaller one may become necessary for all the crevices, creases and other places of interest, especially those around Ludlow… and the fold of the elbow. For those with a greater than average interest in pies, maybe some sort of automatic yogurt-spraying device may prove more useful for the increased surface area such an enthusiastic diet often brings about, especially if there is a chance of you missing something interesting on the telly. Although my experience of paint-spraying technology indicates that you are unlikely to miss anything in the vicinity of the operation.

Still, we did decide – in the end – that all the effort, expense and yogurt was well worth the effort, for – as she so wisely pointed out – the remainder of the natural yogurt does come in handy for the traditional post-coital kebab.

The Ikea Catalogue and its Discontents

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Anyway, there she was: standing there, naked and ready….

Oh, hang on, now that I come to think about it, maybe it was over there, next to the table… or was it there, next to the okapi – as you probably know it is so easy to get the table and okapi confused, what with the hectic daily lives we all lead nowadays.

Anyway, I remember because she was holding the new Ikea catalogue in what she hoped was a provocative manner….

As an aside: she did discover some time ago, that the only way to get my attention – especially when I’m busy contemplating the eternal verities with my eyes shut (and definitely NOT snoring – whatever she claims) is to cough discretely while standing there naked. Admittedly, it does tend to raise a few questions in Tesco – but then as I often say to her: ‘you can’t have everything’, especially not when naked as you do not have anywhere near enough pockets.

Anyway, as I was saying about the nudity….

Actually, I perhaps ought to mention about the Ikea catalogue. Normally, I won’t go near the place as it outrages and frustrates the male approach to shopping, based around the commando raid: get in, do what you have to do and get out as quickly as possible with the minimum amount of casualties – especially to the wallet.

Hence the nudity….

Because she knows after however many years of happy (sic) marriage it has been, that the only way I find that shop and its catalogue interesting is through the use of nudity. Maybe it is something their marketing department should look into; after all, Scandinavians are rather partial to getting their kit off, if those magazines we saw back in the school playground all those years ago were to be believed.

We Long for a Sign

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It could have been a moment that took time in its grasp and turned everything back on itself; a time when time itself began again. Each moment hangs there, waiting and we wait too, as though expecting something, some sign to show us which way to turn.

These days though, there is not much left of the roads; sometimes they disappear altogether merging with the grass and the undergrowth. So when we come to a crossroads like this, there is no sign, no indication of which way leads where. It is then that time begins again. Each new turning is a new life, a new possibility, a chance for change and happenstance to take all we have and all we have known and replace it with something new.

We travel on, searching for some sign that goes beyond mere direction. We long for a sign that points towards the lives we have lost, left behind, long before each crossroads became a new beginning. We search for those lives we used to have before the disaster, before the catastrophe.

Each of us, deep down knows that there is no route, no road, that will lead us back, back beyond all these turnings we have taken, to our old lives, back to how it was before. Yet, even deeper down, there is a longing for those familiarities, those certainties, of the old life that even now we have trouble recalling or even naming to ourselves. We just hope that the next crossroads we stumble upon will be the one that has a sign pointing back to those old lives and a road to take us back there.

Distinctly Indistinct

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It was distinctly indistinct in a way the left everyone who thought they saw it absolutely positive about its haziness. Those who saw it were absolutely certain that it was so simply indescribable in the complexity of its simplicity, while those who had no idea about it wondered – often at great length – what all the fuss was about.

The fact that all the fuss was about the way its exactness could only be described in vague general terms while its precise details were plain for all to see, but not recount, meant that for those who knew nothing of it, they knew even less when they heard of it and the problems everyone who had seen it had in describing the thing itself.

Obviously enough, the exact dimensions of the thing itself were not very precise due to the uncertainty about where it began and ended and where the surroundings around it came up to. There were places where it was both – obviously – there and – at the same time – obviously not there, both of which were only explainable in precise general terms.

Of course, there came a time when it was not there, although there are still arguments to this day about exactly when it suddenly wasn’t there. There are even some who still visit the place where it was – and now isn’t – claiming that it is still there, but those of us unenlightened by its visit cannot see it. There are those of us though who doubt it was ever actually there at all, just that there were some who wanted it to be there, but even then they lacked the belief to make it certain, to make it solid… and in the end the uncertainty won out.

For Whom the Whistle Blows

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Well, if only she’d realised, then perhaps the unfortunate incident with the Member of Parliament and the elk could have been quietly forgotten about and we could have all gone about our business none the wiser.

However, she saw it as her duty to bring the matter to the attention of a public eager to salivate over the untoward doings of our elected representatives, especially when involving inappropriate conduct with wildlife. After all, everyone remembers the media feeding frenzy when the Undersecretary of State for Cabinet Meeting Biscuit Procurement was discovered in his local branch of Ikea with a zebra who later turned out not to be his wife. As for that local government councillor and the walrus, well… we all know about how that ended.

Anyway, the woman – who shall remain nameless, even though everyone knows she is Henrietta Shagruff – heiress to the title of Lady-in-Waiting to the third-in-line-to-the throne’s Official Trollop, a close personal friend of the elk in question.

Consequently, we can only hope that the MP resigns as soon as possible in order to prevent further embarrassment to a political party already languishing in the polls, with a leader less popular than some of the more disfiguring tropical fungal diseases, and that politics in this country can go back to being the usual tedious and inept farce we have come to expect from our political class.

You are My Lord

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Her hair was across my chest, she lifted her head and tucked the hair away, behind her and then rested her head against my chest. The skin of her face felt cool against me, possibly even damp.

She could have been crying.

‘My husband is dead,’ she said simply.

‘Yes,’ I agreed.

‘You killed him.’

It was not a question, but I answered it anyway. ‘Yes.’

Her hand stroked across my chest, a finger running along the scar that cut across it. I could se little more than the outline of her head in the low glow and flickering shadows cast by the fire, which was the only illumination in the room.

‘You are my husband now,’ she said, kissing my chest.

‘Yes.’ I agreed.

‘I am your wife.’

‘Hmmm….’ I said as she kissed more. ‘You are my lady, now. To me you are my wife; to everyone else you are Your Ladyship.’

‘You are my Lord,’ she muttered, her kisses moving down my stomach as her hand tightened its grip as her kisses moved lower. Her hand began to move slowly up and down as her mouth kissed down to meet it. ‘You are my Lord,’ she said, then she said no more as her tongue and lips became too busy to comment.