Despite all the hassles of motor home electronics and oak beams containing nothing much more than sawdust, I have to say the weather is being extraordinarily kind to us down here at the moment. Yesterday afternoon, I took some respite from cutting the grass of my Forth Bridge of land because the heat was getting to me. 26 degrees in mid March is – even for the Lot – something slightly odd.
As a result of this, a chap was forced to drink a little more refreshing lager than normal. Sadly, this particular chap had forgotten where the opener was packed away.
You would be amazed at how many unlikely things can remove a beer-bottle top: overhanging radiator covers, shutter pins, cunning door closure, gas cooker tap ridges, and – once at last unearthed – Swiss Army apps. I call the bits on them apps because, well, it’s the only term any bugger under 35 might understand these days.
It’s amazing, isn’t it, how a Nation that has been steadfastly pacifist for over a century can have an army that never sees action, but nevertheless fabricate a knife of such eclectic purpose for its recruits that every designer junkie wants one. Were there to be a Swiss Comte von Osbornio in charge of austerity, there would be neither army nor knives. But this is why they’re disgustingly rich, and 97% of we declining Brits are disturbingly poor.
Anyway, on my way back from picking up some additional chilled beers, I stopped by to have…guess what – a beer – with my neighbours Jean-Pierre and Yvette. Jean-Pierre confided in me that I had arrived at exactly the right moment: he was feeling a little fatigued, and thus more than usually able to recognise his duty as a host to stop gardening and start drinking.
I’ve always liked this couple. Like me they display occasional fascist tendencies, but a passion for the fun of living on next to nothing. And like me they find it almost impossible to take anyone in public life seriously.
They go to the local prune factory once a month in summer – equipped with a towed container – and take away all the otherwise pointless stones that have been removed from the fruit. These they feed into their unique prune stone-fired boiler, and thus enjoy free average interior temperatures of around 34 degrees throughout the winter. The smell the boiler emits is at 570 on the 0-10 pongometer, but this they redirect through a series of informally arranged and recycled flexible drier pipes towards their neighbour’s cows. The cattle (Normandes and thus highly regarded) have been displaying welcome levels of fecundity since they started doing this. I sense that some digging would unearth a major scientific breakthrough re this one. But on the whole, I’d rather go down LeClerc and buy Krono 4.2 ‘driving lager’ with the amazing screw-top feature.
I did just that today, on the way back from another episode in the long-running dental soap Les implantes d’un étranger. So it is that I write to you tonight with the new miracle ingredient of bottom teeth. Not teeth in my bottom you understand, but rather new choppers in the lower half of the Sloggob. Yes, I am that man smiling at younger women without looking like a cross between Ben Gunn and Albert Steptoe.
The Gunnesque part of my persona stems from the fact that I haven’t had a haircut since July 2013. This is, I should point out, an opinion-leading fashion statement rather than the response of a poverty-stricken derelict. The length of my hair around 1970 was always the one I preferred, and so now that I alone am the arbiter of all things tonsorial, I really am enjoying this disgraceful eccentricity enormously.
Talking of Gunns, there is a great copywriter called Pete Gunn, whom I first encountered while working at Doyle Dane, and then latterly at Bates Dorland. Pete discovered one day that his bowel was riddled with cancer, which he then proceeded to defeat with quite staggering aplomb….following which he discovered the splendid Gail Parminter, with whom he had innumerable children. They are such nice people, it gladdens my heart to see such folks breeding like oversexed rabbits.
Truth be told, I was a bit miffed to once again discover the British contemporary penchant for Attention Deficit Disorder – the acronym for which is ADD, but should be minus. The trouble is, d’yer see, that when one blogs exclusive news about TORY FLOODPLAIN COCKUP, one gets 8,000 hits. But when, the following day, one posts (after brain-damaging research) about all the sleazy reasons WHY there’s been a cockup, the news junkies have moved on. They want only to know the who and what, not the why. In this manner are the bad guys winning hands down, when really they should be holding hands up.
Such is perhaps illustrated by the idea now gaining ground that fracking is soooo yesterday as a cause, daaahhhling. And it led my febrile noddle this afternoon towards an updated My Fair Lady lyric:
The Shale is stale and mainly in the snail mail (By George she’s got it, I think she’s got it)
By George Osborne: The rain on floodplain’s mainly in the Ebbsfleet. Look, don’t take a vote on it – it’s work in progress.
Tonight I shall be mainly drinking the Moroccan Cabsauvmerlot grown in and around Boulaouane. It is a jolly little plonk produced by the fine folks of that small commune, and it goes damned well with Lamb hotpot, a Lancastrian delicacy of which The Slog is (although I say so myself) the sole remaining credible producteur.
The Slog 