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.

it's good to talk

Last night I went on a girls’ night. We talked about how much we talked. How men (generalising wildly) look to provide a basic solution to an issue. (Don’t like someone? Tell them. Or ignore them. Don’t agonise. No need to mention it again. Sit down and read the paper.) They don’t do the endless circling of waffle around a subject, niggling and needling and reassessing, which for us is the means of distillation and of arriving at a solution we probably knew was there all along.
Just as E will buy the first pair of shoes he sees, if they fit and he likes them whereas I feel an instinctive horror at not exhausting every possibility at least twice. Round and round the shops, in trudging indecisive horror, to arrive back where I started three hours later.
A waste of time, perhaps, but at least you know. He says he doesn’t need to ‘know’, or doesn’t need to prove that he already ‘knew’.
And then it gets complicated.

I don’t, though, have much trouble with service. My experience, as a kind and caring individual, tells me that it’s those who invite it who always get the surly waitress, the offhand Postie, the Bored Saturday Shop Girl.
Besides, I’ve worked in shops and bars and, God, does the time drag. So, if a reluctant menial is a bit arsey, I tend to be grateful that it’s mere disdain coming my way and not a session with an Uzi because, let’s face it, day after day folding jumpers or looking in the back for a “Capri” in “heather” in a size 5, and having it drilled into you that the poxy customer is always right must do your head in.

The florist, however, had perfected rude brevity; I was both shocked and impressed. The haiku would be a tedious epic poem to her. Her grudging articulations of sound, vowel-less txt spk, were wrapped in cushions of cross silence, pauses I felt obliged to pack with foolish guff.

“So you do make button-holes?” I was on the phone to her and had got nowhere.
“ …….ys …….”
“And, er, is it better to order them, or just turn up on the day and hope …”
“ ….rdr ….”
“OK, um, is there a book, or photos, I could look at, before I decide and …?”
“…. N ….. ‘s rss r c’nashns.”
Mr Ambassador, you spoil us.

I drove to the shop, giving her the benefit of the doubt, that she might be a phone-phobic princess, and also intrigued to see if she really was as bad in person as she was on the blower. She was.
I decided not to buy and felt quite rebellious. Normally I am so well-behaved that I feel obliged to stump up just because I’ve walked in.
I asked if she sold florists’ wire and tape.
“ ….n ….” And then, in an uncharacteristic splurge of speech but still hammering home the Can’t Sell Won’t Sell stance, “Tks p 2 mch rm.”

A sign saying “Keep the Village Alive, Support Your Local Traders” banged on the door on my way out.
So I took me to the Garden Centre and, between such horticultural necessities as puffy hot water bottles and ceramic hedgehogs in amusing poses, I encountered a little display (tkng p v ltl rm actually) boasting all that the amateur florist could need.
And then I did my Little Red Hen act and came up with these.





Being impecunious, and flushed with success having made some bizarre curtains for the sitting room in strips of silk (the lighting's a bit odd here),

I have decided to have a go at another set.
This time for the garage.
(“You must stop calling it the garage,” said my dog-walking friend, “you must call it the library.” This is a woman whose idea of fun is 3 fitness classes on the bounce, so ‘garage’ it is).
They need to be 12’ across, and since I can’t begin to compute what a professional would charge for such monstrous curtains, I took myself off to the fabric shops to spend a fortune in saving money and doing it myself.

Cheltenham soon proved itself to be pretty dire. The big place has a new boss which has resulted in all the old staff being near to tears and snippy with each other, indulging in a “me, sir, me sir” jostling of one upmanship.
“Carol!” said one guy loudly and reprovingly, “Rolls!” he indicated with a bony finger the endless rolls of fabric left behind by Carol in pursuit of furnishing me with various quarter metres (I have “ideas” for these garage curtains which is calling for much crossing of fingers and purchase of quarter metres).
“’m with a customer, Jonathan!” Carol pointed out tartly, ‘customer’ clearly scoring over abandoned rolls.
Jonathan pursed his lips and ostentatiously set about reducing the discard mountain in a ‘we’ll say no more about it’ sort of way.
Carol rolled her eyes and stabbed at the till buttons.

But this was only scraps. I needed more, the base material.
So I found a shop with my favourite word in the window, “Sale.”
Inside I was ignored, not even a flicker of boredom inched my way. This suited me fine. But what was passing amusing was, on drawing near the desk, to realise that I had been so roundly ignored because the two assistants were bitching about ‘the warehouse.’ Whatever THAT is.
“Costs nothing to say hello,” Big and Brunette was saying, wide-eyed, scarcely able to countenance the bad manners of others.
Old and Knackered Colleague shook her head in a would you believe it sort of way, “Manners don’t cost,” she agreed. “That Fiona! Honestly!”
“Just oils the wheels,” said B&B smugly, hoicking up her impressive busty substances. “Dun’t take much.”
I tried to fix them with a bit of a Look, but it wasn’t going to happen, not to a mere customer. Not when there was someone to slag off.

It was clear that I needed to go down the M5, batter the purse and kill a couple of hours in John Lewis.
I popped the dog in the boot and set off.
Upstairs I found more bits and pieces, and a woman in the queue, baffled by my random selection, asked what I was up to, so I explained, and she seemed interested, and then we discussed the pink and yellow bags she was making for her granddaughters. Twins of 4, very hard work. And then the till woman laughed that she couldn’t sew for tuppence, and stabbed herself on a pin-cushion as if in illustration and laughed again, only more manically and looking around anxiously for a plaster.

Downstairs, in what they call Fab F, I finally found my base material, not perfect (obviously) but it will do.
As the short and stout maiden, with the tape measure slung busily round her neck, made the shearing scissored cut – somewhere around 15 metres in – I said, “Not that I’m going to, but what would happen if I said I’d changed my mind?”
S&S frowned.
“I mean, would you call Security, or what?”
“We trust our customers,” S&S said bleakly. Then, despite herself, “Why d’you ask that?”
“I just wondered,” I said, “well, just making conversation.”
“We have all sorts of customers,” she said, “I’d put you in the patient category, I saw you standing there, waiting. You should see some of them. Men usually. Won’t wait when you’re measuring. Get cross, threaten to complain. I take no notice, but I tell them, I say, ‘I’m busy,’ I say, ‘you’ll have to wait.”
I felt unduly flattered at having secured her approval. You don’t get comment, let alone something one could fashion as praise, however dull, as an adult and it’s always strange to realise that you have been noticed and categorised.

A young lad staggered out to the car with my rolls of material. We chatted about his spider collection (27 glass cases; first one bought when 7; spiders cost £20 when small, £150 when big; they live for 9 years. He let one out. Once. )
“Have you got a girlfriend?” I asked.
“We’re about to move in together,” he said, “I’ve got to get rid of the spiders, re-home them.”
“Don’t look at me, I said, “In fact, I wouldn’t have let you even touch the material if I’d known where those hands have been.”
He gave me an empty ‘my girlfriend’s like that’ look. His long spider-lite life lay ahead of him.

I got home and smuggled the material in. E was there so I launched into a distraction chat, planning how I could pretend that the material had Always Been There. He cleared his throat, cranking his vocal chords into action.
“I haven’t talked to anyone all day,” he said.
“How come?” I said puzzled, wondering if he had a bit of florist in him, “It’s impossible not to.”
He shrugged. “No one came down my end of the office.”

Do You Want Any Help With That?

On Saturday, I was awoken at the ungodly hour of half past ten by a banging and a rasping sound.
E at play in the sitting room beneath, knocking off nasty coving.
His lack of consideration to my recovery needs following a friend’s 50th was really quite startling. No more Zzzzs for me.
I went downstairs to tell him so.
Finding him covered in dust and grim of mien, I thought better of it and pretended instead that I’d been Up For Hours and Doing Something, a line stolen from F9.
If he is not doing nuffin, he is doing sumfin’.
Either is as good as you'll ever get and possibly more than you need to know. If the door has been shut, the face red and there is the hasty slam of a drawer to boot, then the sense of foreboding is great. Whether it was Nuffin or Sumfin, it is as well to check the presence of credit cards in purse and fear for the knock on the door: Postie demanding a signature in exchange for an iPhone.

Instead, I went into the kitchen to meet the unpleasing sight of Lolly eating a spider.
I hate spiders, so this proclivity might be the one thin strand which that dog can use to tie herself to us, thereby avoiding a sticky end at the glue factory, but it’s not a thing you wish to see. Particularly when it’s a crunchy spider, or, actually, a bulbous, squadgy one, the kind to cling to a tooth and emit.
Indeed I’d go so far as not say that you haven’t lived if you've not been party to this particular gastro experience, which is preceded by a dim stare of intent, her muzzle mapping the ground as if drawn by a subterranean magnet, and finished with a busy pounce. And a rustle or a splodge, depending on type.

I snapped on her lead, too fragile to contemplate burst arachnid innards or bits of beast twitching in her mouth. She licked her lips lustily.
I walked and she bounced through buttercups and snarfed on horse shit.
On the way home, there was still the suspicion of spider about her chops – was it Lolly-whisker or spider-leg? Decisions, decisions. A girl needs a hobby: bored, she licked out strands of broken spider from between her teeth.
It reminded me of F9, when he was F2, glumly surveying a dead crackly tiny something in his hand. Possibly what had been happy to call itself a woodlouse in life. “Broken,” he’d said softly.

When I’d got in late the night before I’d kindly shared with E the details of my own gastro experience:
lots of champers
scallops
beef with foie gras
3 dainty puds, puddled on a plate, steeped in chocolat.
Servants, all dressed up and cooking in the birthday girl’s garage. I doubt that I could successfully open a packet of crisps in a garage, but these tux’d chaps not only did just that, but divvied it up to us whinnying old bags, and then took it all away again to wash up back at their gaff. Marvellous.
E was quite rude, however, somewhere around my fourth mention of “champagne” and “delicious,” and reminded me of the frozen Indian feast I’d hastily slapped in the oven for the 3 of them shortly before swanning off out.
“Never again,” he said. “Shit on a plate.”
Ingrate.

The morning passed subject to various degrees of frost, with many things and various subjects (spiders, champagne, husbands, wives and dogs) being ignored or unmentionable.
Later, two old people having a bop.
I said as much to E.
We were listening to Moby’s fantastic new CD. E was making bread, I was making a meal out of opening a box of under-bed drawers. (Wrong size, too big, we discovered an hour into putting them together.)
“That’s a bit offensive,” he said. His turn to borrow from F9.
“OK,” I said, “One old person, and his wife, having a bop.”
For sho’.

With redundant storage taking up excess room (an inverse result of its supposed function), there was no actual room for F9 in his room.
He lay on the floor writing a poem about Lolly, that her heart was like an apple sewn together and then remembered that he had a project to do for school, a half term project, the details of which he scanned impatiently. He declared the work finished in about 30 seconds, most of which was spent waiting for the printer to heat up.

“That was quick,” I said, before skimming it and saying, “Ah, no. No copying and pasting it, it’s got to be your words.”
“Thomas did it like that,” he said.
“I don’t care about that,” I said, “No, look, look here,” I dangled Mrs K’s bit of paper.
What she says goes, what I say is rubbish.
He went back upstairs.

After 40 minutes, I called to see if he needed any help. It was that or show interest in bashing off coving. Decisions, decisions.
“It’s just that I’m so slow at typing,” he said.
I went in. He was copy-typing all that he had previously printed out, word for word for word. Laborious. No gaps after full stops. What could one be but sad. Such industry, so pointless. Very drawers under the bed.
But sometimes I worry that he and Lolly share a brain. That they borrow it one from the other, wind it up and strap it tight, usually forgetting to switch it on.
“It said ‘… my … words…’,” he said, with elaborate explanation, stressing each word to aid dimwit mother’s comprehension. Being the reasonable interpretation of one who thought that that meant that he had to input the actual words himself, key by very slow key.

I explained what it did mean.
“What do you mean?” he said.
“Like this,” I said.

I started copying and pasting and changing internet-speak, not to F9-speak, apples and hearts and offensive, but to normal 9-year-old speak:
“with the emergence of …. “ to “when”
and phrases involving rape, mutilation and beating to “they were horrible to their wives.”
It was fascinating.
I could tell you many things about the Yanomami:
the 9 species of poisonous vine used in fishing
that 40% of their men have killed another human being
how they live, up to 400, in a big round house
how there are only 32.000 of them, but 40,000 miners intent upon their gold, trashing their rivers with mercury

I typed on until a sense of silence dawned on me.
I saved the work, being only part way through, and went downstairs.
E was reading with his eyes shut on the sofa. The coving defeated and waiting for the tip.
“F9?!?” I called.
“Goin’ to the park,” he bellowed from the hall, said in tones of one whose shoes were on and whose work was done.