shudder

F12 was pointing and making gagging noises, the cause of which was hard to pinpoint since, although he had stuffed his face with a whole half muffin, the panicking horror was greater than a mere sudden aversion to peanut butter would suggest.

I frowned. Had he of a whim inherited his father’s freak-out over chicken and sausages? Listeria Hysteria? It was true that I was grappling with a punnet of chicken breasts and mashing them into a marinade – I can all but hear the noise of E fainting somewhere in cyber-space. If there’s one thing the man can’t abide it’s a spot of meat handling. Ideally, when it takes place, he should be in another county and under mild sedation. I should be clad in hairnet and latex, a floor length apron, and enter a sterilised zone via a holding cell where I would be whooshed with a big shower spray and doused with an antiseptic douche, preferably one not wildly available in this country due to its nuking capabilities. All instruments to be sterilised after use.
Lacking such facilities he has to make do with me wiping a cloth and wielding a disinfectant.

His repulsion used to be expressed in a mere facial tic, like a cat thinking of a dog, maybe, an involuntary spasm. Then the notion of sell-by dates, and my woeful inattention to same, upped the ante, upgrading the distaste to a revulsion. Now I have to explain and vindicate the welfare and housing arrangements of every piece of chicken that enters the house. It is always apartheid chicken, segregated into its personal wing of the fridge, on its individual Rule 45, kept apart for its own protection, and that of others as he all but hears the Salmonella cells doubling and quadrupling, breeding and breathing, thickening the air, calling to maggots and E coli, summoning its hellish cohorts, its partners in grime.

It makes the preparation of a normal meal into something quite other and his fear has begun to infect me. On tottering out to the bins with the packaging (no longer can it be slung in the kitchen bin, it must be outed and ousted to the great outdoors) I then panicked – had I touched the key of the lock of the door with a contaminated hand? Maybe I had. Totter back with the spray. And did I touch the handle …? spray to make sure. And use a bit of kitchen roll not the Normal Cloth. As it is, the Normal Cloth spends an abnormal amount of time in the washing machine glumly spinning round thinking, “What did I do to deserve this, this death by suds?”

Still, while incarcerating the marinating meat in an all but lockable Tupperware, prior to returning it to its isolation wing in the fridge, I have taken to developing this insane anxiety that I might just lick the raw meat, or smear it on my face. Do something wildly inappropriate just to make flesh the fear. I can see how madness develops.

Meanwhile F12 is still pointing. And spasming. Ah yes, his own private source of horror. A scrap of cling film casually tossed aside when I was in Busy Biddy in a Pinny mode yesterday, making pizza dough.
Cling film! His eyes go big, his hand gestures wildly. He looks dizzy. Hyperventilation is but a pace away. I roll my eyes and put it in the cupboard.
“The bin, the bin!” he wheezes.
What? The bin with the chicken gizzards? Our horrors meeting and mating, chatting and sharing ideas.
My own fear is of spiders. Which makes total sense. The random movement, the sudden dart. A fear for which the bin alone is not sufficient prison. But then I’m totally sensible with completely rationale phobias. Unlike them. Them’s mad.

yum

Mr and Mrs Very Rich were knocking back the wine, and chortling, so presumably it was in pleasure rather than mere search of oblivion.
I was still giving thanks that, on their arrival, I hadn’t bobbed a curtsey and mumbled, “welcome to my ‘umble abode, sirr.” Nor had I snatched, too greedily, the stunningly beautiful and enormous bunch of flowers and the 2 bottles of wine which aren’t the stuff of 3 for a tenner.

For, in a moment of temporary weakness (other alcoholic beverages are available), I had seen my hand straying towards the mobile and from there texting Mrs VR asking if they’d like to come to supper and, be careful what you wish for, with obscene haste, they were saying YES. Just like that, in full-on, shouty CAPS. Finally I understood Victorian ladies and their propensity for fits of the vapours.

“What should we bring?” she asked.
I understood; they weren’t used to consorting with proles and needed a clue to our primitive little ways. Or, God, perhaps she thought I needed help, that I needed courses bringing.
“At the risk of sounding like an Alcoholic Annie, just yourselves and a bottle of wine,” I said.

Round about now 2 more ‘yes’s pinged into my phone. Bugger. T12 (T13 since yesterday) was having little mates for a sleepover that night, too. I felt like the Buckeroo donkey with a couple of extra pans on my back.

Mr and Mrs V Rich's house is the one with 2 downstairs lavatories, both featuring fireplaces; with a laundry room; an ironing room; a food room; a boot room; a utility room; a room for the children; a 70’ kitchen; 3? 4? 5? receps; a conservatory – but not as we know it. 3 staircases. I've not been up any of them.
If they’re not just off to South Africa on holiday, it’s because they’re on their way to Australia. Or France, or Canada, or Switzerland, or Cyprus, or the Caribbean or Tunisia. And that’s just in the last year. They are delightful, but there is something about such disparity of wealth which unnerves. They wouldn’t see themselves as rich at all. The pecking order totters upwards ever unto Midas.

We’ve been shovelling friends through, you see, those to whom we owe dinner. Ten at a time for weeks. We’d let it slip. Never again, not in such industrial quantities. (Despite any gross churlishness exhibited here, let it be understood that I am extremely fond of my friends. I just wish cheese sandwiches was all it took. I doubt, please? that I'm alone in this.)

Since there was the requisite vegetarian due, I was settling for dinky little canapés (of which I am pathetically proud), then a fish curry and a prawn curry, followed by pavlova, and a chocolate/coffee/cardamom thing that I made up by chance which sounds disgusting but isn’t.
The idea being that the lot tastes really quite good, but looks effortless. In order to look effortless I had had to start deveining prawns at lunchtime, a grim task which makes my legs itch. But all in the name of looking just knocked up.
Just knocked up had gone on the week before, too, or rather it hadn’t.

Another 10 had shuffled through the portals. A celiac one of the crew that time, along with that weekend’s vegetarian. This always makes me fret – is wheat in rice? I find myself asking, in eggs? Will she be dead by midnight and us kept up late waiting for the ambulance.
All was going well until doling up time when Mr Veg sidled up and said, “You do realise that Mrs Veg is a vegetarian?”
“Yes, yes,” I said, waving a patronising and boastful paw over my old friend the fish and prawn curries.
“No,” he said, and, friends, never has a No been invested with such lashings of pity, scorn and embarrassment, a small word which can burst at the seams with meaning. “No,” he said with studied patience, “A vegetarian. Not a [mere] pescatarian.”
“Oh,” I said, hushed, “a real vegetarian?”
“Yes,” he said. “I should have said. I saw you ladling meat [meat??!] in and should have said.” Then, “I thought you knew? You’ve always got it right before.”
Got it right.

FUCK! What I thought I knew, from a summer’s long experience, was that all vegetarians ate fish these days, besides not being above a spot of bacon or even chicken if the mood or vino took them. But no, I’d found a purist; serendipity explaining away past success. Buggeration and bollocks to it all.
“Can you just knock up a risotto?” he asked.
I love that ‘just.’
“I’ve just ‘knocked up’ this,” I said, “No!” (Believe me, it takes something approaching skill to insert italics AND 'quote marks' and bold into one short sentence.)

Knocked up, my arse. But fortune, or rather my earlier ineptitude, forsook its smirk and momentarily smiled on me. I spotted the little pile of vegetables I’d prepared for the curries, and then duly forgotten to sling in, and chucked them hasty into a pan, and swirled them round with a spoon.
“A bit of garlic?” he suggested. “Some bouillon?”

Some bad-tempered garlic was produced. I pretended to study the label of something or other in a bottle to eliminate the evils of a stray percentage of anchovy, claw or hoof and then shook some of that, whatever it was, in as well, and tipped the lot onto the rice.

“Milla,” hailed Mrs Veg, oblivious to my panic and waving a pleased fork rather wildly, “this is lovely.”
'Lovely' clearly means different things in vegetarian-land. It means serviceable, functionable, edible. All the ‘-ble’s. Just no bull. Ho.

Spooling forward, the day following Mr and Mrs Very Rich’s dining experience chez nous, I bumped into her, out with the dogs.
“Thank you so much!” she trilled, grasping my wrist. “We had a marvellous time!”
I preened everso slightly and might have gone a little pink. It had gone well, tank feck and God knows one thing I am alive to is nuance of disaster. An over-cooked prawn can give me conniptions for weeks, living on cruelly in that grim tease, my memory.
In the distance, Mrs Gossip loomed near. I dreaded her knowing that she’d been left out of something. Well you would, with a name like that.

“Shh,” I hissed, edging my head in explanation. What a waste, I was in need of a wallow, some basking in praise, some run-throughs of how wonderful I was.
She swept on. “But I just must say, I had no idea Mr VR was so very drunk! He nearly fell in the stream on the way home.”
I laughed. It was funny. A pitch black field, a stile, a stream, a bottle suddenly regretted, a slither of an expensive loafer. Besides which I had barely being able to lift the clanking recycling box that morning.

“You couldn’t tell,” I said. “He seemed fine.”She took this for proof that I, too, had but a hazy recollection of the night before. Wrong. Fear sharpens the senses.
(Mrs Gossip was all but upon us.)

“Well,” she said, collapsing her hands with a slap on her thighs, “that’s a relief, because he was SO embarrassed at talking about … you know … money!”
“It was fine,” I said – it had been one hell of an eye-opener. Fascinating.
She looked appalled: I had remembered! Oh, yes. Someone else’s turn to don the hair jacket of The Night Before.
“Very interesting,” I said, but what does it matter? “I’ve never been so close to all those millions. So many noughts, and none of them mine.”
Mrs Gossip beamed the face of one alive to a nugget, a scrap of a story. Mrs VR just goldfish popped her mouth, widened her eyes in a silent scream, and smiled the tight smile of one exposed.

"What are you 2 chatting about?" asked Mrs Gossip, with a caring syrup I have grown to dread.
"Nothing," we both said. A little too loudly.

The Dentist's Chair Calleth

If you’re anything like me, and I don’t mean merely lite, shallow, venal, horrid and lazy, but stingy and cowardly too, then you’ll hate the dentist’s.
But having cracked a bit of tooth, I had to go. I mean, I Had To Go. I am not so totally stupid as to be able to brush that little one under the carpet.
Indeed, in the intervening 36 hours twixt crack on Saturday night and finding myself prone on a diddy up and downy chair yesterday, I had sufficiently enhanced and advanced my cracked tooth via the various stages of necrotising infection merrily through onto, er, death, for my vanity to take a kick up the bits and force me to book an appointment.
I popped a firm fist round my purse and dialled the number.

I remember my dentist fondly. Not so fondly that I ever really went but fond in the abstract: he was a jolly chap stepping in for a friend of his who had been “totalled” on his motorbike. I didn’t ask if he had qualifications because I didn’t want to hear the answers. He was nice and that was fine and he was steady on the equipment, with no wild gleam in the eye on snatching up the drill or revving the syringe.
I had been forced to move by some sort of warped principle, on the occasion of the callow swine at the place I had frequented since childhood forsaking their national health obligations. Hello, we trained the *astards: I was there handing out leaflets on buckle occludals and obfuscation by alphabetical dental naming – to be read as if reciting the football scores, with even rise and fall – even if you weren’t. So I wasn’t going to drive to Bristol, fail to park, and pay top prices when I could do all that here.
And lo, I found one at which I could park, a modern peril sorted, and, more, I was convinced by its shabbiness. Anywhere that can’t afford to change its door mat is my sort of place, I thought: money stays in the patient’s mouth (if not, sob, their wallet) and isn’t gleaming in the form of a shiny Jag slung outside, number plate: 1BITE.

But in the intervening years, things have changed. Just as irons have morphed, so has even the dowdiest dentist’s palace.
E has long sashayed through the doors of an upmarket establishment, mainly funded, thanks to his dental implants, by us. There, 3 dragons studiously ignore the poor ill-toothed, staying slave instead to their space-age headphones. They raise an importunate stilling finger at the luckless wretch hovering at the desk in favour of attending to the needs of the more important person on the other end of the phone. Needless to say when we are on the other end of that phone, we are put on hold. They battle with, supposedly, sub-standard computer programmes, charge a bomb, bugger off early and breathe fire. The children go there too, because there’s a train set and fish tank. We fiddle with the swishy coffee machine and read magazines smothered in suede covers. So I am used to Modern Dentists.

Things have not got so bad, or so typical, at my dentist’s. No fish. But they remain strangers to the idea of fear, they do not laugh in the face of clutched mouths.
We sat on leather armchairs and waited beneath an enormous decorated round mirror.
I considered moving the children here forthwith. Which was when the receptionist muttered something unpleasant about “most dental practices charging between £18 and £33 per child PER BLOODY MONTH.” The potentially dentally-expensive children did not so much as glance up, planning their scuba-diving trips to the Red Sea, “4 star hotel, I think’s best,” said T11; or, F9, busy besting a baby building toy.

Once in the dentist’s lair and semi-upside down, being pumped to the ceiling, like a butterfly sprawled against a pin, but free at least of the children and their strange ideas of amusement, I was forced to take in a most odd sight, being a television clamped to that same ceiling towards which I was jerking north fast. Bless. Entertainment. Pavarotti in silence, but a distracting focus from the suggestion that I get my teeth realigned, “£3,000 I think,” the dentist cooed. “Is good.”
I had dressed up in case I died on the chair, and I think that the hot chick Swedish dentist appreciated my efforts. She pretended that we were the same age, but this was clearly offensive. To her. She packed in some temporary gubbins and held my shoulder kindly.

In all, I was so entranced by the myriad toys, the, yes, artwork, the wooden floors, the travertine tiles in the loo and the French soap and hand cream pumps, all designed to lull you into thinking you’d fallen into some chi-chi little wine bar and might actually be enjoying yourself, that when the bill came, given the surroundings, it almost felt cheap at half the price. A mere couple of bottles of wine, I thought, handing over that poor battered thing, my credit card. T11 barely looked up from his Egypt holiday brochure and F9 sent the baby toy hurtling to the floor AGAIN, and I all but skipped out and bought myself a cheap Phlox as a recovery present.

I’m not saying I’m looking forward to next week’s visit replete with its smorgasbord of x-rays, deep cleaning and real filling, not to say more mention of how I could spend a spare £3,000 I might have hanging around, but let’s say a lot can happen in 168 hours. I could be bombed, or mugged or run over and if none of that lot happens, I’ll just study the artwork and stare at Pavarotti.

What Counts For Me As A Near Death Experience

Blimey, it was scary and it took a minute or two to realise that I hadn’t actually died on this glorious blue day, time in which, meanwhile, a couple of the other drivers kicked straight into useful action. Masculine and efficient, wannabe firemen, they pulled in their own cars to a lay-by and lent their weight to the back of my motor, realising the urgency of moving it ASAP, and actually doing something about that urgency rather than bouncing on the spot all twittery which I fear was my part in the adventure.

The man who had managed to brake, hard, directly behind me, was kindest of all. Trashing his tyres for his troubles, and landing scant inches behind me, while I stared, eyes stretched in impotent horror, at the rear view mirror while his car rammed towards me, bigger and bigger. Certain I was that it would never stop in time and that I was locked into witnessing what I took to be my last minutes on earth. I was wrong.

We were very polite to each other but I obsessed that the “Cotton Traders” logo on his check shirt was unraveling, and panicked that my hand might stray to it and pluck at the dangling length. Which would surely be Inappropriate. Depressingly, my snatch from death was marked by an instance of predictable trivia when couldn’t it have made a better, less random, person of me?

Most of the other drivers drove by, smug in their perfect cars, their passengers smugger still with maps on their laps, bearing small frowns, pursed lips and double chins. Rubber-necking, they slowed disapprovingly, all but mouthing “silly cow”, clearly thinking, “what’s that silly cow doing leaving her car in the middle of the road. Honestly!” Tut-tut, head-shake.

For what had the silly cow done? Why, had been driving her car to the garage because it was Making A Funny Noise, when it seized up, the brakes locked, the gear shift went baggy and the car died abruptly, violently stopping bang on the spot like only a cartoon car could. Only a cartoon car and mine.
The seat belt works, though.

But what were those sneering drivers thinking? That my actions were somehow recreational? Hey, let’s stop the car right here and annoy everyone and, if I pop dem ole clogs in the doing? Well, but a side-effect, a bauble of detail, it happens.

For naturally, my moment of excitement took place upon the most lethal stretch of road in the locality: the kind which many of us have too near to us, where the wall opposite is routinely smashed into (keeping local builders, at least, in semi-permanent employ), where bunches of flowers are left tied to telegraph posts, and where the police can drive to blindfold.
A long, fast A-road, motorway-like in aspiration, heaving with lorries, with a bend just before a cross roads, out of which I had just turned left. The most vulnerable spot on a frightening road, since you have to build up speed so fast before everything hurtling round the corner – which you couldn’t see when you turned out – flies up behind you all impatient.

Cars scream down this road at 80 or 90mph – which seems to be the new 60 – so I put my shaky feelings in my back pocket, armed myself with my pink straw basket, being the nearest thing to a sensible red triangle, and tottered towards the bend to flap my arm feebly, in hope that people didn’t plough into me, or cause the next pile-up at killer corner to make the Echo front page.

However, another side-effect of the perilous nature of this road is the siting of a garage (like the builders: one man’s crash is another’s livelihood) and a gorgeous mechanic did the manly thing with a big bad truck and another dear smiley chap drove me home while I jabbered as if drunk and now, I am shaking.
Armed with my friend black coffee, I am trying to still my wobbly fingers by making them type fast, because it’s now that the Thank Gods and What Ifs slide in.
I’m before the “Blimey, can we afford the £800 it’s bound to cost!” stage and well immersed in the re-living of a near car crash where the car behind did go into me, where all the on-coming cars failed to spot my weedy pink basket and where I am the next in a set of grim statistics.

Sorry for returning to blogging like this. But thought you’d be nice to me!