So the big move has occurred and we have left our house of twenty-four years. Luckily, we have only had to move across the back lane to rent a friend’s house until the new-build is ready. The only issue is that the friend is still in the house and she is female, which means that I am now living with two women.
I am sure it is all part of the Grand Plan, of which I am still only sketchily aware, but I now have to moderate my behaviour. No longer can I walk naked down the hallway in the middle of the night in search of the bathroom nor during the day for that matter. An upside is that Her Indoors now has a shopping companion, which lets me focus on getting my pronouns right as it should now be Them Indoors. A downside is that I now have to pay attention when each of them asks me ‘does this make my bum look big?’
As it is a new house we have had to cast out the evil spirits. As with the previous house, a spiritual friend was asked to perform the Clearing, or was it as exorcism? Rather than turn up with a few joss sticks she used an old saucepan, which belched smoke, set off the fire alarm, spooked the cats and had me coughing. While we no longer have the ghost in the cellar you can only have so much Woo-Woo.
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The decline in standards continues unabated and unabashed. I recently heard of a performance of Hamlet where the actor was about to launch into ‘To be or not to be, that is the question’, when he looked up to see a member of the audience reading his laptop. You would like to think there is a joke here, but the behaviour is just too appalling to mock. Only complete derision and hanging is appropriate. Recently a convicted Albanian criminal successfully escaped deportation from the UK by saying his son prefers the chicken nuggets in in the UK compared to those in Albania. Deportation would have apparently deprived the son of his human rights. I say let him eat burgers. Problem solved.
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Recently a friend of mine was learning Spanish through an app. She was asked to repeat in Spanish ‘my cat has small teeth.’ This opens up a world of non-sequiturs: I have a big dentist, my doctor is small, my neighbour has green teeth, my cat speaks French and my wife needs more wine. Only one of these is at all useful. I will let you work out which one.