Spotty-youths

I can’t work out whether having a bandage on my car is something I should do something about or not, what with your motor being that most obvious symbol of your psyche and all. I’m kind of hoping that people will see it as meaning I’m so confident in myself, that I don’t need to boost my self-esteem with a manhood-enhancing boy-toy. This might be self-defeating, of course, if they (rightly) guess that I’ve lost the will to be interested in what anybody thinks since we moved out here. Anyway, it needed two front tyres for its MOT, so I took it into town. The spotty-youth at KwikPhytt annoyed me so much with that all-encompassing "Urr?" that they all do in the motor trade when they’re asking you what you want, that I reversed into a post on the way out and smashed the bumper.

Well, apparently you aren’t allowed to have sharp edges showing, so it’s been covered over with gaffer-tape to be MO’d and looks like Pudsey Bear. Or a pair of broken specs held together by Sellotape. Sod it..... I could claim on the insurance but I’m still hoping somebody will run into me so that I can get the front bumper fixed as well to make it worthwhile. That’s also been bandaged since I stood on it to reach the windowsill one night when I’d locked myself out of the house. What I really need now is to be gently shunted from the rear into a tree by somebody not too worried about their No Claims Bonus.

Mme. is just back from the supermarket. She says the youth at the checkout got as far as a bag of chestnuts before ringing his bell and shouting, "what are these?" to the supervisor. Wonder he didn’t just hold them up and say, "Urr?". It’s lucky it was Mme. and not me – she would just have fixed him with the withering stare that freezes nitrogen. I’d have gone into a strop and reversed the trolley into a display of soup cans. I’m still spitting feathers since the girl at B&Q corrected me for putting an ‘r’ in the middle of February whilst writing a cheque. "Well that’s not how you say it", she said. I hadn’t realised how well I can roll my rrrrs until then, "Febrrrruary, Febrrrrrrrruary!" Never able to do it before or since.

But there we are. None of us knows everything. I’m buggered if I can understand, for example, how easyJet can charge me less than a tank of petrol for a return flight to Lisbon. They can, though, and I shall be reporting from there in a week or two, if relations between Britain and Portugal still permit it. Since Tony Parshole, in his Mirror column told their Ambassador to "shut his stupid sardine-munching mouth", they might have cooled a bit. You’d think somebody who sees himself as a bit of an intellectual could come up with a better one than that. But no. In the land of the Urrs, the half-baked thug is King.

(That last line isn’t too smartarsed, is it Tarkwith?)

(Very possibly, dear boy. TV)