I have been ill
for a good few days now, since my birthday last Sunday, in fact. This has been rather unfortunate. I have a ‘viral infection’, which is a much
posher way of saying ‘a summer cold’.
The use of the posh phrase is designed to elicit more sympathy. The
symptoms have been sticky eyes, temporary loss of hearing, blocked nose and a
hacking cough. I am now totally deprived
of energy; even a walk to the newsagent’s leaves me collapsed on a heap on the
sofa.
Still feeling
groggy, I had to meet an ex-colleague yesterday for lunch. He got lost and
arrived 50 minutes late at the restaurant.
‘You have to
remember, I’m a stranger here,’ he wailed.
‘Have you never
heard of Google?’ I asked, pointedly.
The diners looked as if they had been dragged from the Darby and Joan
Club’s annual general meeting. In one
corner, an elderly nun sat alone, eating a quiche, her prayer-book parked neatly
beside her plate.
I ordered a
burger, my ex-colleague a smothered chicken.
‘The question
is’, I remarked feebly, ‘Who smothered it?’+
The food
came. My burger looked like the tongue
of a leather brogue covered in charcoal, but at least the French fries were fine. The smothered chicken looked to have been an
altogether better bet, though one could scarcely see the chicken for the
treacly beige-coloured sauce. It might
have been spam, for all we knew. We waited ages for coffee before being advised
by a needle-nosed waiter with fading acne that one had to serve oneself from a
machine in the next room. When lunch was over, I shook hands with my
ex-colleague in the car park and almost fell into my car with exhaustion.
In this
enfeebled state, I have also had to choose between two short stories I have
written for the local libraries’ annual 2000-word short story competition. Is it to be ‘The Viscountess’ or ‘The
Orlops Light?’ I read them
both back this morning, over a cup of Rosie Lee. The first contained some of the most clichéd dialogue
I have read since I last picked up a Jilly Cooper novel, and the latter,
written in a cod-Robert Louis Stevenson ‘Treasure
Island’ style, takes nautical melodrama to new depths, even below ’20,000 Leagues Under the Sea’ – what I
would give for somewhat like Ned Land to pop up and rescue the story. I have to face it, I have all the imagination
of a Vogon and the craft of Harry Worth’s body-double. It’s taken me many years to come to terms
with this and now that I have, it doesn’t make me feel any better. I chose ‘The
Viscountess’ on the grounds that the judge won’t discard it until he’s
read at least 300 words, whereas ‘Orlops’ will hit the bucket after the
first line. I may turn my attention to
poetry again, though my last effort: ‘Travelling
Hopefully’ could have been written by a deranged nine-year-old abandoned at
a branch-line railway station. As Bob
Dylan rasped in ‘Brownsville
