Tuesday 13 December 2011

Christmas and a Ha'porth of Slob.

I put the fairy lights up around the living room window today. It’s a job I never relish because, however carefully I put them away in a box on January 6th, come December and they’ve festered into a mare’s nest of cable and bits of plastic. Getting it all separated without treading on any of the delicate pieces of brightly coloured frailty is one of those things I have little patience with. Then again, the job of arranging a finite amount of cable neatly around a finite amount of window frame isn’t my sort of job either. I don’t have the patience or the application. Hanging pictures, yes, but not hanging bits of cable, for some reason.

I decided today that the job needs the woman’s touch. Unfortunately, there is no woman to touch them, and I could foresee another problem if there were.

I have a drop leaf table and chairs under the living room window, and they have to be pulled out to do the job. It’s an alien world behind there, a rather gruesome one composed of cobwebs, dust and various other bits of random detritus. And I’m familiar with women.

‘Don’t you ever clean behind here?’

‘Yeah, once a year when I hang the fairy lights.’

‘You’re a slob.’

‘OK.’

Actually, I’m not a slob, except when it comes to the table in front of the living room window. And you know what they say about spoiling the ship for a ha’porth of tar...

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