Things show no sign of livening up at work, though yesterday one of the higher-ups, whose PA was off sick, asked me where she could find some Post-It flags. “Well, if there aren’t any in the stationery cupboard we’ll have to order some more,” I said.
She looked at me blankly. “Sorry, where’s the stationery cupboard?”
I escorted her to the stationery cupboard – easy to overlook at a distance of six feet from her desk – then I opened the cupboard, withdrew a package of Post-It flags, and handed it to her. Later on I helped her cut up her food and go to the toilet.
Sigh.
Mostly I’ve been reading McSweeney’s lists all day. (“No YOU’RE the cutest ever!”)
This weekend SiC and I went to visit his dad in Wales. (Remember the rooster that woke me up last time? This time I blearily mistook it for an alarm clock and demanded that SiC turn it off.) SiC’s sister was visiting from California (this family seems to be big on marrying North Americans), and Sunday was her birthday, so on Saturday a whole gang of very nice folks came round to wish her well and neck lots of free booze. My kind of people, obviously. Well, except for one family friend, a barking mad middle-aged Frenchwoman who spent all her time blatantly fawning over SiC. This would have been merely amusing except that she was also borderline rude to me, as though I was deliberately ruining her chances. I’m very sorry that I’m MARRIED TO HIM, lady – obviously I should have let you have your turn first since you are old enough to be his mother and will die soon. You fucking lunatic.
SiC volunteered to barbeque an assload of food for the party, and he spent the whole day shopping and chopping and prepping while I lounged on the sofa reading The Bell Jar (God knows why – when will I learn?) and occasionally making pathetically insincere offers to help. (“Want me to put anything in the oven? Like my head?”)
Everything went fine until it came time to actually cook the food. SiC had lit the barbeque about an hour earlier and it still didn’t seem to be getting hot. By this time there were four or five men in the house, and just about all of them had been hitting the sauce; and following the call of nature, they all crowded around the barbeque, shook their heads knowingly and shouted conflicting instructions at each other. SiC, who had been drinking since 1.00, decided that the best way to go was to dump massive quantities of lighter fluid on the coals, and every once in a while I heard a giant ‘FWUMP!’ as another column of flames ascended to the heavens.
Eventually SiC sorted everything out (by borrowing a barbeque from a neighbour) and started putting meat on the grill. There were absolute acres of food, so I decided to actually help for a change and ferry it from the kitchen to the barbeque to the table. Madame Robinson also decided that her services would be invaluable at this juncture, and she helped things along wonderfully by hovering at SiC’s elbow and crowding me out every time I tried to do anything. I didn’t know whether to laugh or challenge her to a gladiatorial deathmatch with barbeque tongs.
Anyway, somehow everything got cooked and we all got loaded and everything was super. Dinner table conversation descended pretty quickly into dirty-joke territory, of course. Joke of the evening: A woman walks into a bar and asks the barman for a double entendre. So he gives her one.
Badum-bum CRASH!