On Metal and Misapprehension.

I’m growing tired of this unpleasant metallic taste which I have in my mouth all the time. It won’t go and it’s spoiling the taste of everything I eat or drink, so I took to wondering whether there’s something in my stomach which I don’t know about.

Might it be that the surgeon had to go in there for some reason and left his steel wrist watch behind? Could it be a bag of those little metal clips they use to hold the wounds together (and which I thought of asking the district nurses to leave in situ so I could be cool without incurring the expense of a body piercer?) Or could it be a pair of tweezers dropped by one of the theatre nurses who had been plucking her eyebrows during an idle moment?

I don’t suppose I’ll ever know. I expect the mystery will be solved when I finally shuffle off this mortal coil and what’s left of me undergoes a post mortem.

‘What the devil is this?’ will exclaim the pathologist. ‘What sort of diet did this man have? Was he a circus performer or just a complete head case? Or could this incongruous object have been forced down there by a mad woman with long black hair and meeting eyebrows who he tripped over in a field one day? Could this be a murder case? He was only 97 after all.’

And then the surgeon and the theatre nurse will get off scot-free while some poor local woman with long black hair and meeting eyebrows is arrested on suspicion of second degree homicide. Life’s never fair, is it?