Boredom can lead to the most exciting things. More often than not, though, it leads to more boredom. Yesterday, of a kind that caused me for reasons beyond myself to trot down in heels to the shopping street in the moderate Western European heat, through throngs of tourists, fat people gobbling down burgers and slopping ketchup on the pavement, and fans of our version of ITV, who swamped the city centre to participate in an Ugly Betty look-alike contest. I am convinced that half of them didn’t even have to dress up. A perfect day. I decided to pass the time holed-up reading on my roof. Logically, I had to procure some reading material, but the 2006 Chinese calendar on our loo door had gotten a bit repetitive.
Ready for some excitement, I may have subconsciously embarked on a suicide mission going through the city centre on a Saturday, with more chance of success than actually strapping on a couple of pounds of Semtex, and giving the detonator to a Parkinson patient racing down a Polish secondary road in a ruddy wheelchair held together by the elastic of your ninety-four-year old neighbour’s panties.
I found myself in the English Literature department of a well-known retailer that sells anything from MacBooks to maps of Anantanarivo and Bin Laden’s hide-out. The place was crowded, the air was stuffy and whenever I turned myself in a particular direction I got a whiff of bad breath coming from a man perusing a Chuck Palahniuk book.
The world being quite discontent that it hadn’t yet peeved me off sufficiently so I would whack Guanobreath in the face with a tome of the collected works of William Shakespeare, it decided to make me realize that every single person in the English Literature department, apart from me, was male. And all men were sporting proud paunches from indulging in too much foie gras and Merlot, with puffy red faces and sweat stains that would have a pregnant woman stare in astonishment. It made the ‘chick-lit’ section completely redundant. Not that naming the section ‘chick-lit’ hadn’t already done so. Or the fact that the books on the shelf looked like a giant My Little Pony advertisement smattered with an extra dose of glitter and curly writing for good measure.
But back to the males inducing asexuality in an otherwise perfectly functioning young woman. I felt rather out of place, especially when two of them caught me looking at the Lee Child ‘Jack Reacher’ series. I felt like I was to be dragged out onto the town square after having my birth marks prodded with a hot needle and being declared a witch, to be burned at the stake for overstepping the boundaries of the flailing-testosterone section that English Literature seems to be. For God’s sake, it is a blooming thriller series, not a copy of Martin Luther’s manifesto.
His image is forever linked with the word ‘smorgasbord’.
Then I picked up the sequel to Jeremy Clarkson’s “The World According to Clarkson”. Guanobreath had noticed I was looking at the sequel, thus rightly deducing I had read the first one, his eyes going more bloodshot in wonderment, a trickle of sweat dangling from his nose. This had more men hearding around the Clarkson books. Maybe a collective “don’t let the woman near it” reaction. Just as we are not to go near cars, lawnmowers, barbecues and camping gas bottles. For fear we might set them afire with our oestrogen levels.
Or maybe I am seeing this all wrong and I had just barged in on “The Middle-class Gascony Lovers’ Secret and Inconspicuous Bi-weekly Meeting around the Clarkson Books”. It would be like crashing a Freemason’s lodge in nineteenth-century Belgium wearing nothing but a shawl emblazoned with ‘Capitalisme, Dieu et Roi’. Rather out of place.
I think I might have redeemed myself a little with picking up ‘On Chesil Beach’ – did you know that you are more likely to get ostracized for not reading anything by Ian McEwan than if you were a guest at a WI garden party in Somerset and mistook guava chutney for mango? I once accidentally did so, and I must say, Royal Doulton makes for bloody nice ostraca. That said, I do much prefer the Clarice Cliff; more practical and I would feel like I had actually contributed something to society – I would instantly have cured half of the UK’s pensioners of cataract caused by staring at ugly lumps of moulded, glazed and overpriced clay. It would also blow most bingo hall frequenters’ pension plan to smithereens, but I’d say you would be better off to keep going at bingo. You might not win enough money to pay for your plastic hip and Eau de Formaldehyde, but you will have fun dying at Harborne’s Gala Bingo.
But I digress. After another bad-breath dousing hitting me with the full force of a Cape Good Hope gale, I scurried past the guts of men ogling Will Self’s “The Butt” towards the check-outs – where I had to queue behind a bloke who most likely went by the name of Gazza, his chip shop smell somewhat covered by Jean-Paul Gaultier’s “Le Male”, buying a book on sex. Look here, mate, if you smell like fish fingers – and look like them, too – you are going to need more than a book. I’d say start with some kitchen roll to mop up the excess grease.
I did end up buying afore-mentioned Clarkson sequel, and I have just finished reading it. Now, if you would excuse me, I feel the sudden need to piss off some environmentalists and shoot up some wily foxes, preferably in Surrey.
