Monk Quixote

Ah! Com­mut­ing. Let me count the ways I love thee! I’m sorry sir, this type of neg­a­tive equa­tion is not allowed in this life­time. On A Thurs­day. When there are cows out­side the window.

Yes. I am still ill. My bile is not as ver­dant as my gall. Or some­thing. One day, one day, this blog will be about writ­ing and Monk Quixote. But until then. Here’s a pic­ture of a squir­rel drink­ing Guin­ness. And a train tale to tell.…

Fifty. Fifty! Fifty unre­lent­ing min­utes of the mind­less tedium that is rural middle-age. It reminded me of dron­ing chores from school, where on the first day of a new year, the sixth form would attempt to per­suade inno­cent first years to write essays on the sex life of a ping pong ball, or the geog­ra­phy teacher would ask a par­tic­u­lar numpty to fetch the black chalk from the store cup­board. What larks! There’s a lot to be said for an Eng­lish edu­ca­tion. Actu­ally, on reflec­tion, there isn’t. There’s a mar­ket out there for twee­nie fic­tion and end­less tales of board­ing school hell, but noth­ing com­pa­ra­ble to the entire genre or high school fic that there is in the Usof­Prom. That’s what hav­ing Grange Hill on the tele­vi­sion does for you.

But I digress. Unlike this par­tic­u­lar woman on her way to a train­ing sem­i­nar or sim­i­lar. If only. A lit­tle digres­sion. Some gos­sip. Any kind of insight for me to squir­rel away in a note­book and vainly claim to have made up thirty years later. But no. Satan could use her to set cross­words. Twenty whole min­utes on the inner work­ings, set­tings and effi­cacy of her new boiler sys­tem. Stab­bing with bent spoons was too good for her. Sev­eral hours later, I can still recite the tem­per­a­ture of her bun­ga­low for any given point dur­ing the day. Her trav­el­ling com­pan­ion, on offer­ing advice (God help me but he had the SAME BOILER and ther­mo­stat. Wire­less appar­ently. Nat­u­rally — that’s to save their respec­tive spouses from stran­gling them with the wires) was rebuffed with the sim­ple yet deadly, ‘oh yes the man who installed it said that too’.

Hells’ teeth! What con­nivance was this? Not only is this woman killing me softly with her dial set­tings , but she’s also not tak­ing the advice of a qual­i­fied engi­neer. All male par­ti­cles in a three metre radius were begin­ning to oscil­late. ‘I sup­pose I should have read the instruc­tions.…’ Now. I’ve read enough Dil­bert and seen enough Scots mechan­ics in black and white WWII films to know that this is Never A Good Idea. Although I did just assume that the installer was qual­ifed. And we should never assume things. Assum­ing makes appoint­ments with dis­ap­point­ments. Or is that cheese?

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