Sightings and the Simian Predilection.

When I was a mere slip of a 17-year-old I took a temporary job as a warehouseman and shelf filler in a supermarket. One of my young colleagues was persuaded into a dalliance with one of the girls working there, and one night they went out together and ended up at his place.

‘How was it?’ I asked the next morning.

‘Horrible.’

‘Horrible? Why?’

‘Er jumped on me like a bloody monkey and wouldn’t let go. I had to push her off the bed eventually.’

I sympathised actually because I had noticed that the girl in question had probably the worst teeth I’d ever seen. There was a lot of black visible, and I remember wondering why she hadn’t engaged the services of a dentist with a lot of spare time on his hands.

And there was another girl working there who took a shine to me. Her teeth were fine, but she had red blotches on various parts of her skin which I found disconcerting. I still took her out one night, but maintained sufficient distance as to obviate any possibility of a simian predilection becoming manifest. And then I joined the navy.

My time before the mast was relatively brief, but it did lead to very pleasant encounters with Jeannie in St Johns, Newfoundland, and Ruth in Halifax, Nova Scotia. Both had perfect teeth and neither showed the slightest inclination to engage in monkey malpractice.

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And talking of encounters, I had three rare ones this week – the Lady B driving past me in her car, the incomparable Ms Medeea shopping in Sainsbury’s, and two stoats crossing the tarmac in Church Lane. It must be nearly twenty years since I last saw a stoat in these parts. And there’s a huge spider currently standing on the carpet outside my bedroom door. Despite its overall size, its head isn’t quite big enough to assess the state of its teeth.

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Some good news today though: it seems I’m to keep the car for a while longer after all. Considering the fact that the nearest town – and therefore the nearest supermarket, the nearest doctor’s, the nearest dentist, and the nearest municipal tip – is over seven miles away, and the nearest hospital twenty miles away, being without a car would be inconvenient.