A Stretch In Limousin – RSVP

Friday October 21st, 15:35
Yesterday morning at 7.15 and the windows of Heidi’s car were covered in a layer of frosted ice. Here, chez moi, today, sometime between 11 and noon the spaces and shallows around the garden that normally slop about with rainwater were stiff and brittle with unyielding bastard cold. The woodburner is no longer too hot for my living room. Yesterday I turned off the gas that fuels the fridge, as the fridge is outside and I figure the cooling agent circulated by the gas is no longer necessary. And when I turned it off, I swear it got colder. My yoghurts were marbled with ice.

And yet, I am told, it still isn’t winter. It’s only autumn, and this – apparently – is nothing.

The treacherous drive is currently more treacherous still, its perilous potholes and axle-snapping lurches hidden from view by fallen leaves, yet Heidi still hurtles up and down it with the slightly demented zeal of an out-of-work rally driver. The snow will stop her though, when it comes. I’m not looking forward to it, but as a friend of Heidi’s once said, ‘You have to open yourself to the cold.’

I’m trying. But it’s fucking cold.

Winter has to exist, of course, so that we may truly appreciate summer. Just as death has to exist, so that we may truly appreciate life; so that we may cherish it and make as much of it as we possibly can. People in perpetually hot countries might look happy with their wallety skin and their self-satisfied cocktail smiles, but they’re not really. They don’t know what life is all about. Life is all about the harsh, horrible, but absolutely necessary lessons of winter and death.

Speaking of which, I would like to say goodbye to Rex, a cat I knew, although not very well, in London. Rex was a handsome cat, and a fine cat, even though he always kept his distance from me a little. But this is not about me. I knew him when he was getting on, and probably a little set in his ways. He didn’t have much time for me, when he wasn’t hungry. But I swear, this is not about me. He had a lot of time for the humans who kept him close (it’s obviously wrong to use the word ‘owners’ with a cat), and they loved him very much. Especially Hortense, who had kept him close since he was a kitten. And Rex had a long life. Not long enough probably, but they so rarely are.

Farewell, Rex.

And lots of love to his bereft humans.

x

Thursday October 18th, 00:33 (19th)
I just realised I haven’t really mentioned the shed yet. How very remiss of me.

There is a shed in one corner of the land, just to the right of where the drive first becomes properly treacherous. Here it is…

Many years ago it was home to a family of wild cats. Prior to that, it was inhabited by a human man. This I deduced from the available evidence.

When I first explored the main living quarters of the shed, there was a cloth wardrobe in one corner with a zip up the side. Elsewhere a desk, a bookcase or two, various shelves and in the corner facing the wardrobe, a large cooking machine.

Out front was a sink with a mirror suspended above it.

No woman would live there. Not like that. I like to think the old man had the occasional visitor, maybe a special lady friend who sought relief and passion from a suffocating marriage and came to him once in a while, at all times of year, when he least expected it. In her own way, she loved him. Even though he lived in a shed. Maybe even because he lived in a shed. He was free in a way her husband never would be. In a way she never would be. He was like the Littlest Hobo. Only he didn’t go anywhere. And he didn’t solve crimes. He did once find a human nose in his chickenfeed, but he just pretended he hadn’t seen it. And then it was gone.

Ever since I first explored the shed, I imagined that the man who lived there was somehow ‘retained’ by the family who used the shack at the top of the hill (where I now live) as a holiday home. Not like a pet exactly, but something similar. Just a simple old fella who was happy, for a humble sum and a roof over his head, to tend the blind man’s garden – the people who used to stay here, a couple I think, the man was blind. If you look at the photograph of the house I posted before deciding to move here, he’s the one facing the wall, inadvertently. ‘Employee’ is probably a better word than ‘pet’. He was the gardener I reckon. I don’t know much of the year he’d have spent in the shed, but it was definitely an important base for him.

His kitchen cabinets are now in my kitchen.

I would like to find out a little more about him. I think that maybe, slowly, his spirit is seeping into my body and I am becoming one with this stout, spirited, self-sufficient potato of a man.

One time I tried to dismantle the oven to get at the concrete blocks under one corner. The hobs of the oven break down into heavy iron circles. They’re extremely sturdy, and kind of beautiful. I quickly lost heart in the dismantling process, piled up the pieces thinking one day I might clean them and make a glorious piece of art out of them, and went elsewhere for the blocks I required.

Whilst messing with the oven though, I did open the drawers and in one of them a dormouse was sitting in the space behind the drawer, sitting on its hindquarters and looking at me. We watched one another for a moment and we both nodded slowly. The dormouse smiled at me. I winked. Then I pushed the drawer slowly back into place. There was a moment. But nothing more was said about it.

Time passed.

I eventually tidied up the shed, reappropriating what I could, putting aside what I might later need and breaking up that which was beyond service. Now I store wood of various vintages and cuts in one room of the shed, and in the other I store my diamonds and rubies. No, just kidding, nothing valuable. Just my deck chairs. And my Banksys. And the oven of course, which  I decided was too characterful, and too heavy, to move.

Recently I was up to something in the oven room and the cats followed me in. They had been whinging for food so I pointing their snouts at the large collection of dormouse droppings on all available surfaces. ‘Go find some dormice if you’re really hungry,’ I told them.

Then I opened the door to the oven and saw a large dormouse doing what dormice do best. It didn’t move. The cats were oblivious. As it would have been unspeakably cruel to allow them to feast on a sleeping rodent, I slowly closed the drawer.

I’ve been back a few times since to check on it and it’s always there, always sleeping. Even around midnight one evening.

When it is not sleeping, it poops on my bicycle seat.

Today (Day 143) I took the drawer out of the oven and took this picture.

It didn’t stir, but I could see it breathing. It is a very heavy sleeper. I considered the fact that it might be hibernating but there is regular fresh poop on my bicycle seat, so I decided against it. It could of course be the poop of another rodent – but I think not.

I like my dormouse a lot. I would like to get to know it.

I would like to see what it does at night, how many friends it has, how similar we are in our habits and funny little ways.

Someone said I was self-obsessed a few weeks ago.

Well, dur.

See yourself in a grain of sand.

Or in a dormouse dropping.

Or in a dormouse.

Or in an old man who lives in a shed.

I am listening to Edith Piaf. It’s 2am. The rain is heavy enough to creep through Edith’s rather worrying emotional outbursts.

I have to go to bed.

To sleep.

Friday October 14th, 07:34
Heidi left for work about 15 minutes ago and you know what? I miss her. I know, I know, but it’s true. And it’s a wonderful feeling, so why should I deny it?

Outside it’s just about getting light but, surprisingly, there is still a bright full moon sitting up in the middle of the sky like it’s waiting to be fed. Or it’s forgotten to go to bed. It’s sitting right there in the place the sun – until recently – used to set.

I’m thinking about when I can see her again. It’s a long time since I’ve felt this. Of course, I should keep my thoughts to myself. So they say. I should be cagey with my emotions, tight-fisted with my compliments and downright mean with everything apart from my physical desire. I should let her know that I want her, but never that I care. For these are the rules of menfolk. To ensure that the power balance is forever tilted in our favour, we must give nothing away.

Because if you tell a woman she’s beautiful, if you tell you care for her or God forbid, that you love her, then you, my friend, are doing it all wrong. Treat her like you give a damn and she will become complacent. She will expect things. Aside from a basic level of respect, she will expect you a) to stay with her for all eternity, forsaking all others for as long as you both shall live, and b) to buy her things she doesn’t need (which you – doe-eyed fuckstruck sap that you are – have probably already begun to do). Then you will have nobody to blame but yourself when she loses all respect for you and starts an affair with someone who really knows how to treat a woman, i.e. like a dog.

A woman is like a dog in that she must be made to know who is her master. You, therefore, must remain at all times in control. Exercise your authority. In exactly the same way that you keep a hunting dog hungry, you must keep a woman hungry. Dripfeed compliments. Subtly breed insecurity. Have part of her believe that you might just get up and leave at any moment. Make her jealous. Push her away at least twice as much as you pull her towards you. Treat her mean. Keep her keen.

I know all this because I have read The Game. I know therefore, that this is how a canny man operates. These are the rules.

Unfortunately, I am not a canny man. I am a useless man. I tend to say and to show exactly what I’m thinking. If someone’s skin takes my breath away, I will tell them. If I miss someone as soon as they’ve left the room, I will tell them. Furthermore, if I feel the urge, which ideally I will, I will buy them gifts, and feed them ice cream, and cover them in oil. I will open myself like a spineless book, and lay myself bare like a brain in a bell-jar. In actual fact, I yearn to lose the control that is supposed to be so precious to me. I like feeling out of control. It’s exciting.

Also, something these masters of seduction tend to forget, or more probably never learn in the first place, is that the pleasure of giving pleasure cuts both ways. It’s not just for them that we tell them those things, that we do those things and feel those things; it’s for us too.

08:10
It was the first night, two Fridays ago, the night I boiled her an egg. That was the first night we took off our clothes and went to bed together and she told me, ‘You have a beautiful body.’ And then before I could respond, she added, ‘For your age.’

A classic neg.

I boiled her an egg. She boiled me a neg.

Like I say, I’ve read The Game. I know that I should be the one boiling the negs.

But, you know what? Fuck it.

The moon is still there, brighter than a baby’s smile and shows absolutely no sign of clearing off for the day. The rules, it seems, have gone out the window, but it looks so lovely up there, pinned to the sky like a blob of candlewax on a watery blue tablecloth, like its own reflection in a vast unrippling pool…

10:30
Oops. I nodded off. Now I’m up and dressed and heading into the field, workboots on.

The sun is up, the dawn fire is out and the morning moon, finally, has completely disappeared.

It’s OK though.

It’ll be back this afternoon.

Last week, I had a feature published in Living France. The editor wanted something along the same lines of the blog, but with less cussing, fewer references to my testicles and absolutely no mention of spending the winter in a haze of heroin and ketamine cocktails. Of course I was very happy to oblige. The finished piece is here (page 43). And also here but far too small to read…

Happily the editor then commissioned a follow-up, which is now done, dusted and awaiting similar treatment. All of which pleases me immeasurably and has me coughing up tiny furballs of hope.

Now I should really get round to pitching some other people. So I will. I’ll do that now.

Here I go.

Just before I came out here, I wondered if anyone I knew on Twitter had a couple of books they might want to give me – specific books I wanted, books I’d long wanted to read but never had the chance. They did, because when they’re not tearing one another’s hearts apart and pouring poison into one another’s ears, people are ceaselessly, heart-warmingly generous.

One person I had never met before said she didn’t have the books I wanted but she did have some other books that she’d be prepared to give me. So I arranged to meet her in Soho and out of the goodness of her heart, she gave me around 20 books, at least half of which were by Haruki Murakami, someone I’ve been meaning to read for some time, ever since various friends started going on and on (and on) about Kafka on the Sodding Shore.

So far I’ve read only one of the Murakami books, a collection of short stories called After the Quake, and the first four stories made me quite angry with their irritating habit of just.

You know?

But the last two I enjoyed very much. The last one in particular, which seemed also to be a comment on the preceding stories, I thought was wonderful. It made me weep. I like to be made to weep. By books, that is. Not by people. Although sometimes it’s necessary.

I’m going to start on the novels soon, when the evenings start to kick in before 6pm and the fire has to be on and blazing all day.

In the meantime, I am very grateful to Jackie Lee, who showed me kindness for no other reason than that she is kind, and now, because she has twice requested more kittens on this blog, here, for her, are some kittens…

This is Maddie. She is up a ladder. Isn't she crazy? You never know what she'll do next. In this case, however, you can be pretty sure, she'll come down the ladder.

This is George. She is carrying a shrew in her mouth. The shrew is dead. I didn't see her kill it myself. It may have died of natural causes. George tossed it around for a while, then went off to do something else. What a senseless waste of rodent life.

Here Maddie is in the process of eating a very large grasshopper. Attempting to make it die actually caused her some considerable distress, but she got it in the end. Last night she ate a lizard and a couple of hours later she woke up from an early evening snooze making strange noises, like she was having an asthma attack. I don't know why, but I think it might have been a bad lizard.

Asleep on a chair in summer, and over-exposed. George is whispering sweet nothings to Maddie. Maddie is fast sleep and couldn't give a monkey's.

This is almost kitten soft porn. But not quite, thank God.

George trying to have a little snooze in a tomato tin tray which is probably just big enough for one.

No, my mistake: room for two. Maddie barges in and makes a face.

George, depressed at having had her perfectly comfortable sleeping tray ruined by Maddie, throws back her head and tosses a barbaric yawp to the heavens.

Maddie is sleeping on a book I was reading. It sounds like a self-help book, but it isn't. It's about why we human beings repeatedly make the wrong decisions and the same mistakes in our life over and over and over again. Maddie didn't finish it.

Here George is feeling guilty and attempting to give the dead shrew the kiss of life. Unfortunately, accidentally, she rips off its face instead.

That’s enough kittens for now. If indeed they are still kittens. Oh my God, when do they stop being kittens?

Monday 10th October, 22:00

So you remember that marrow that so excited your imagination a couple of weeks ago? Of courge you do. Well, I ate it.

September 2011

On the 19th of August, I received the following comment from one calling herself ‘gaininja’:

‘Please could you post some pictures of the house – where you cook, sleep, write on the walls, piss, shit, grow stuff etc.? Everything. If you have some before and afters, then even better. Am actually quite jealous of your life out there and would like to see more of how you’re living.’

In response to that, this.

This, when I’m not out in the field, up in the woods or staring into the fire thinking about death, is how I go about the daily business of life.*

In one corner of the room in which I spend the vast majority of my indoor time, I have a wooden table at which – with paper and pen – I record my thoughts, learn my French and become intoxicated with the idea of hard work and handsome reward.

In this picture here, I am wearing my funky nighttime trousers – which no one ever sees – and I am under the impression that I am searching desperately for the word ‘epouvantable’, when in actual fact I am searching for the word ‘epouvantail’. C’est la vie.

Oh, and I made that cat-toy. Have I mentioned that before? Cats won’t touch it. Sometimes I hate them.

In the opposite corner of the room – on the other side of the front doors with the windows, still unwashed, four months in – I chant to the universe, declaring my devotion to something I don’t really understand and requesting in return a somewhat oiled passage to goodness, contentment and almost unimaginably abundant literary success. I keep the chainsaw at my feet to remind me that I have long since severed the gossamer guy ropes which once tethered me to reality.

Although this photograph may look horribly posed, I am in fact caught completely off-guard. Improbably, I was so profoundly marinaded in the magic of the chant that I was able to set the camera up on timer completely without my noticing. That’s the power of the Buddha. And I’m not breathing in either.

My bed is situated diagonally across the room from the spiritual quarter. This is where I read and sleep and dream and, if your mind is inching in the direction of the carnal, which if it wasn’t, it is now, no, sadly, I pleasure myself rarely these days.

The reasons for this are twofold: firstly, I am creeping toward oblivion at an alarming rate – about 12 miles a year by my reckoning – and my libido is dishevelled to the brink of extinction; secondly, it is near impossible to masturbate with two kittens in the near vicinity, and late at night and just before I get out of bed in the morning – which were undoubtedly my preferred timeslots for conjuring flesh and friction from airy nothing – the cats are invariably nosing around the bed prised for action. And believe me, there is nothing like a full fist beneath a bedspread to turn a kitten’s mind to prancing and play. And if I try with the covers off, they just sit on my legs and watch. Which I don’t find inspires me at all. Not these days.

There is no picture of my bed. It is too personal. Imagine a campbed and a man lying on it grimacing, scratching like a man with his skin on inside out.

Next up is the kitchen, complete with recent additions of work surface and gas stove, the latter of which was brought inside from outside to celebrate the arrival of the former. The boiler does not work. There is therefore, no hot running water. There is, however – as you can see – a kettle.

The kitchen is the only place that I absolutely insist the cats are not allowed. In this picture you can see precisely how much they respect my wishes…

There is no fridge in my kitchen. This is because my fridge is outside, under the gazebo, where the gas bottle upon which it relies will not suffocate me in the night. Here it is, complete with my amusing postcard of Oliver Reed, whose appearance on After Dark in 1991 has recently been haunting my dreams…

Speaking of Oliver Reed, this is my vegetable rack…

The bathroom is small. It has a bath in which currently I do not bathe. Occasionally I pour sun-hot water from plastic bottles over my naked, soapy self, but that is really not the same. I do, however, wash my clothes in it. This happens, as you can see, very very rarely…

As the weather is still pleasant (actually currently more consistently pleasant than it has been since I arrived), I shave –  when I shave – outside. Here I am shaving…

However, in the absence of drugs, sex and music, I am currently growing a big woodsman’s beard to get me through the winter. I’m about two weeks in at the moment and have been pleased to note that I seem to have outgrown the distastefully variegated mishmash of beards gone by. Now there’s very little red in amongst the brown and grey.

Actually, on further reflection, this is not actually such a pleasing thought. What it really means is that, like the elasticity of my skin and the carroty spring of my Johnson, my beard colour is fading into the past and I am inching ever closer to sensory collapse and lingering painful death.

Bugger.

And that, pretty much, is that.

Thank you for your attention.

*Most of this post was written quite a few weeks ago, since when, there have been some important and very welcome changes. Oh yes. Say no more.

 

The following post is bitty and without structure, like a windsock chewed by a llama.

Enjoy!

Wednesday 28th September, 19:14

I am in a very good mood. I can’t tell if it’s the fact that the woodburner has been fitted or the fact that I’ve been steadily drinking red wine for over six hours. Maybe it’s a delectable melange of the two. Or maybe it’s other things entirely.

Now it’s bread and brie and olives stuffed with peppers, although not whole peppers, and the sun slowly dipping behind the trees, peeking, streaming through the foliage. (I was tempted to write ‘streaming through the leafscape’ there, but I stopped myself, I think wisely.) It’s rather like there are stained glass windows in the distance and through them you can just make out the outline of 40 elves being burned alive. Doesn’t have to be elves, but in this case, on this particular evening, I rather think it is.

19:45

The sound of one donkey lustily braying makes me think that if I had as few as 38 donkeys and 12 angry hornets in a cast-iron echo chamber, I could easily recreate the sound of heavy industry that you might find in Eraserhead or some of the opening scenes of The Deer Hunter. Who’s with me?

22:30

I can’t use the wood burner for 48 hours by the way. This is because some stuff that I once knew the name of, which was used to hold sections of the flue in place, needs 48 hours to set, for optimum resistance. This is why I don’t have it on now. This is why I’m not sitting before it like Neanderthal man, roasting potatoes and experimenting with chestnuts.

A couple of days ago I changed my bedsheets. It was long overdue. Then I found myself itching and scratching like a man wearing a poisoned suit. Deduction pointed toward soap powder that for various reasons was not properly rinsed away. There is no laundrette for miles and miles and miles. Public transport is harrowingly limited. Private transport is insufficient. What is a chap to do? Scratch, I fear. Scratch, go to seed, putrefy.

I have not washed my hair in 12 days. How long does one have to wait before it cleans itself? Can that be true? Does it really clean itself? What about my sheets? Will my sheets clean themselves? What about my balls?

Coarse, I know. But pressing.

I need to remove the cats’ ovaries. Hopefully by the time you read this, I will have been paid for the work I did in London in August and I can pay a professional to do it as opposed to muddling through myself with a Stanley knife and a couple of tent pegs. Maddie is six months’ old in October, which I’ve heard is age enough for impregnation. I really must have her spayed because I fear I am not man enough to dispose of her kittens, should she produce them. I have heard though, that if I wait till November, I can get a discount. Two sets of ovaries for the price of one. It would be much better to have them done together, I feel. Much less chance of one ripping out the other’s stitches and spilling what’s left of their guts on the living room floor. I must speak to the vet.

I think I have fleas by the way. Human fleas. I can feel them popping around on me and every day brings more half-bean spots that itch like pepper in all imaginable eyes. And the mosquitoes have buggered off. Fleas. Jesus.

I bet Jesus had fleas. I wonder if Jesus waited for his hair to clean itself or if he just waited till no one was looking and performed a quick miracle.

Anyway, I’m starting to smell too. Like something past its best.

I realise I’m not prime boyfriend material. Not this year. I’m like an expensive wine though. Disappointingly similar to a cheap wine and gone before you know it.

Maddie would make an excellent pair of gloves.

I am cold.

It’s a quiet road between two small French villages, unpavemented and generally unlittered, so where there is litter, especially if you’re passing slowly on your bicycle, grunting uphill with your muscles bleating like skinned moles, you tend to notice it. Mostly it’s cigarette packets and snack packaging, but not entirely. The more unusual items I have observed have included a discarded glasses case, a pristine barbecue fork, a small blue light-bulb and a wine glass.

Stranger still was this glass jar…

I stopped to examine it because I was curious. As it was close to a blabbing brook where I occasionally see old men with their rods out, my first thought was that it might be a jar of maggots, stored in whatever kind of powder it is in which old men store maggots. But when I picked it up and turned it over in my hands, there were no maggots to be found. Instead there was this very fine beige powder that reminded me of the kind of thing ladies and transsexuals apply to their pallid cheeks with an expensive brush.

It then briefly occurred to me that it might in fact be a jar of heroin.

I know the cats wouldn’t thank me, but a large jar of heroin would make the winter months simple fly by, so I brought it home.

I don’t think it is heroin though, because of the handwritten note I found inside. Here is the note…

‘Three soup spoons of powder to one litre of water’.

Hmmmmm.

I dabbed a little on my finger and tasted it. It didn’t taste like soup. Then I realised that simply because you measure something in soup spoons doesn’t make it soup. However, sadly, neither did it smack of heroin. Although I’ve never actually tasted heroin, I assume it would share the same nasty metallic bite of other powerful pharmaceuticals. This powder didn’t really taste of anything. If anything, it tasted exactly how it looked: beige. Purest beige.

Unsure what to do next, I mixed up a batch.

Unfortunately, this did not help. I was still none the wiser. Even the cats weren’t interested. So I gave up.

If anyone has any idea what it might be – which is extremely unlikely, I realise – do let me know.

Equally unusual, and not far away from the mysterious powder, I found a pair of ladies’ shoes. Here they are in lying in situ…

When I first saw these shoes six weeks, maybe two months ago, they were in a much better condition. They looked new in fact. Since then I’ve passed them three or four times a week and every time, I’ve wondered how they might have ended up there. Or rather, why. Why would anyone dump a perfectly decent pair of shoes by the side of a country road?

I have narrowed down the most likely scenarios to these three possibilities:

1. Murder

On his way back from burying his wife’s dead body deep in the guts of one of the countless forests here – and this is prime body-dumping terrain – a man notices that his wife’s shoes had slipped from her feet and landed in the passenger seat footwell, or maybe on the backseat, so in a moment of confused panic he stops the car and drops them out of the passenger window.

This is relatively unlikely though, as it would have made a lot more sense for him to have simply taken the shoes home with him and put them with the rest of his wife’s belongings. For when he came to report his wife missing – which he surely must have done if he was to have any hope of appearing innocent when her body was eventually found – then the shoes by the side of the road could have provided the police with a vital, and as far as the husband was concerned, a completely unnecessary piece of evidence.

But then, who’s to say what goes on in the mind of a vicious wife-murderer? Not I, that’s for sure. Maybe in that case, I should report the shoes to the police. They might be the key that unlocks the door to a depraved, heroin-soup-fuelled underworld simmering away beneath the surface of this peaceful rural idyll – like the severed ear in Blue Velvet.

2. Infidelity

A man and a woman – for example – are having a torrid affair. One day, so eager are they to get down and make the beast with two backs that they go at it in his car, tearing at one another’s clothes the moment the engine is killed outside of the woman’s house on a deserted piece of land in the middle of nowhere. Before they get too involved, however, the man carries the woman indoors, her legs wrapped around his neck like a fleshy boa, her head somewhere round his unzipped nethers. It is much warmer in the house after all, and the woman has a vibrating lovestick with which she likes the man to tantalise her to a culmination.

The man only notices the shoes, in the passenger seat footwell, or maybe on the backseat, when he is a couple of minutes from his home (and his credulous gullible wretched wife) and in a moment of confused panic he stops the car and drops them out of the passenger window.

This – providing he also has a powerful in-car air freshener (maybe one of those Magic Trees) with which to cover the olfactory echoes of any saucy secretions – seems reasonably probable.

3. Lovers’ Tiff

Returning from a shopping trip in trendy Bellac – or Petit Paris as nobody calls it – a woman is trying on a new pair of shoes while her rich young fiancé drives them home.

‘What do you think?’ she says, turning her feet from one side to the other on the dashboard as her diaphanous summer dress rides up her thighs and falls in her lap like a bacon sandwich.

‘Fantastic,’ says her fiancé. ‘Just looking at you makes me want rip of her panties and cackle your Gladys.’

The woman laughs. ‘My what?’

‘You know,’ he says. ‘Your ladyhood.’

She smiles. ‘You’re silly,’ she says. ‘What do you think of the shoes?’

He shrugs. ‘Yeah, they’re nice,’ he says. ‘They’re shoes.’

She harrumphs, annoyed. ‘Yeah, but I just bought them.’

‘I just bought them,’ he corrects her.

‘Yes, but I chose them,’ she continues, ‘and therefore they are an extension of my personality and I want you to like them.’

‘I do like them,’ he says evenly, surprised that an argument seems to be developing from nowhere. He knows he should tell her what she wants to hear – it probably isn’t too late – but he just can’t help himself. ‘I said they’re nice,’ he repeats, ‘but I don’t see how they’re an extension of your personality. They’re just a pair of shoes.’

‘Just a pair of shoes?’ she says, unable to contain her anger. ‘Just a pair of shoes?! Fine.’ At which point she takes the shoes off her feet, rolls down the window of the car and tosses them away. They land on the grass verge as if they had been placed there deliberately, with the express purpose of annoying her fiancé. ‘What do you think of that?’ she says.

Her fiancé shrugs. He doesn’t slow the car. He has no intention of going back for them. ‘They were just a pair of shoes,’ he says, but of course inside he is hurt and angry and confused. Never get engaged to the mayor’s daughter, he is thinking. They think they own the universe and they have no sense of the value of anything. ‘I like your dress too,’ he says, in a doomed attempt to make the best of the situation, ‘but it’s just a dress.’

All things considered, I think it was probably number two: infidelity.

Update :: Aah. After I had written all of the above, I thought I’d better take a picture of the shoes, just to prove I wasn’t just making stuff up – because I know some of you are still very suspicious. Which was when I took the long shot above and the following close-up, which clearly shows that not only are the shoes not the recently bought designer beauties my imagination had decided they were, but a pair of rather grotty, well-past-their-best Lidl-creepers…

Probably nothing so exciting as the above then. Just some shit-for-brains litterbug.

Ah well.

Goodbye.