On Aliens and Odd Thoughts.

As I was standing outside Ashbourne Sainsbury’s today, an odd-looking woman bearing shopping bags came out of the store and walked past me. So what was odd about her?

Well, for a start she was very small – under 5ft I would say – and looked slim without being sleek, if you see what I mean. She was wearing tight leggings which displayed the contours of her legs where heavily muscled buttocks, thighs, and calves contrasted sharply with narrow knees and ankles, as though she’d borrowed them from a piece of Baroque furniture. Her midriff was bare in spite of the cold wind that was keeping everybody else in tightly fastened coats, and though it looked trim, tight, and firm, it displayed an unusual propensity for wrinkling. Her face was deathly white and her hair jet black. And after she’d passed me and was walking away, I noticed that her head seemed slightly too big for her body, and her hair rather too full for her head. Did I stare at her? Well… yes.

My first thought was that maybe here was one of those alien beings which some people claim to be walking among us. But why would she be shopping in Sainsbury’s? It seemed like an odd thing for an alien to do, but who knows? Maybe she had twenty bottles of pure virgin olive oil in her bags, and maybe pure virgin olive oil is a suitable alternative to the fuel alien spacecraft normally use. Maybe they’d run out of the proper stuff.

I suspect I might be entering the realm of fantasy here, but you never know. (I also noticed that there was an unusual number of very tall women in Ashbourne today. Curiouser and curiouser, eh? The plot thickens. Whatever.)

*  *  *

I visited my doctor while I was in Ashbourne, to get the ugly little keratosis on my cheek sprayed with liquid nitrogen. I arrived ten minutes early for the appointment – having got up in the middle of the night (8am) by my reckoning – and he was running half an hour late as usual. I got bored while I was waiting and started to notice what worries me when I go to the surgery:

People wearing masks.

‘What are they hiding?’ I ask myself. Do they have some sort of communicable condition? Should I move to a different seat because the man over there is only about ten feet away? Tonight I feel a little ill. Is it mere coincidence?

I’m still bored. That’s why I wrote this.