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Lead in your pencil
On Trina's narrowboat, from which the romance is ebbing as the days get colder, it is freezing; the spiders are hibernating. Our effluvia needs emptying, before our cup runneth over. The fuel tank needs filling with diesel, and we need a new gas bottle. At the garage, someone comes out to help us, unexpectedly. Such "help" sets off a series of difficulties which at this point are unforeseen.
I lug the can of diesel along the towpath to the boat. Trina holds the sawn-off pop bottle that we use as a funnel as I start pouring the fuel in. After a few seconds Trina realises that it's petrol, not diesel, and tells me to stop. I have no idea what either petrol or diesel look like and would have blithely tipped the whole thirty litres in.
Trina rang the boat repair man. I'm glad he can drain the tank without us being there, because in his presence I feel a bit ashamed, lacking Obvious Manly Knowledge.
We attempt to pour the petrol into the car, but it flows all over our hands and onto the road because there's a valve down the hole which remains closed. Whereas other men might produce a screwdriver or a Swiss Army knife to deal with such an emergency, I had something else, equally effective, tucked in my jacket pocket.
My tool of manly manliness
We poke my Rimmel Special Eyes Kohl eyeliner down the petrol hole and hold it there for our second attempt. The fuel gurgles into the tank, and I wipe my trusty eyeliner pencil down and tuck it back into my jacket, ready for any future valve-based action. I lug the new gas bottle back, fit it without blasting half of Garstang into Yorkshire, and put a gas ring on to defrost the place.
She builds up an ineffective fire as I cut the cherry tomatoes and arrange the salami, rocket salad and sourdough bread, wishing it was pie and chips instead, and open the Rioja. My hands are cold, I am cold, and I put on another jumper. She's still sexy though, even if she smells a bit of unleaded petrol. We kiss and kiss and I suggest we go to bed. Not to get warm, because I know the bed will be clammy, cold and damp, but because she's stroking my cock through the thick woolen old ladies' Scottish blanket that I've put over my lap, as I push it up to meet her hand, over and over again. "That's just what I was going to say," she says.
The following day we drive to Southport. I'm parked in a pub while she goes to catch up with a friend, then we're staying in a hotel overnight. The silly constumes of the staff--black tie embossed with the company logo, waistcoat and dark trousers--made them look like characters in a public information film about hygiene from the 1960s. The craic in the pub was excellent, with a political discussion that got just to the right temperature without boiling over. The locals are gently pisstaking towards lager drinkers. Someone comes in, looks at the ales, then orders a San Miguel. The ale drinkers all spontaneously rise in a chorus of mock-disapproval ooohing.
Back in the hotel, she's in the bath, looking gleaming and voluptuously strokable. At night she prowls around on the creaky floors, adjusting the window, cursing a drunk in the street below us. I know she's having a bad night because she only spends an hour or so broadcasting warnings for shipping in Lundy, Irish Sea, Malin.
In the cafe in the garden centre, a bezimmered, Daily Mail-reading clientele gently fork through scones. I am drifting as she tells me stories about her son's childhood, my attention depleted, as I am depleted of sleep. Sleeping together is the one thing we can't do. Otherwise, it's uncomplicated, unreflective, straightforwardly enjoyable. Lots of sex and drink and endless nattering. On Saturday week another essential brick will be added: dancing--assuming the bailiff doesn't show any interest in my going out shoes.
12 comments
I had to Google “effluvia,” Mr. Fancy Pants. It’s a pretty word for an unpleasant thing. And I love that Google is now a verb.
I couldn’t tell diesel from petrol, either. What a couple of poor excuses for men we turned out to be.
Googled “bezimmered” and came up empty handed.
It’s great that you can still perform the dirty deed with the Removal Notice Sword of Damocles hanging over your head. I’m so psychologically unsound that it would probably compromise my performance. Sadly, I’m not kidding.
We may not be traditional men in some ways UB, but our kind of intelligence is becoming more and more preeminent. Internal combustion engines of the future will run on art appreciation and kindness to stray dogs.
Bezimmered is a coining from zimmer [frame], those metal frames that the elderly use to walk with. Maybe you have a different word over there.
As to the sex, I think it’s a combination of it still being quite new and exciting with Trina, plenty of ale inside me, and being in a town where nobody knows us, in a hotel, a setting where everyone knows what’s going on.
what happens re-the baliffs….. if you are always ‘out’?? God luck!!!
i admire you ability to keep up with the romance through the joy-crushing day-to-day grindage…one reason i choose to remain single, and to live alone.
oh and regarding UB’s question – we refer to “zimmer frames” as “walkers".
YAH: Apparently the debt will eventually be returned to the Council. But I have another card up my sleeve, details of which will be revealed shortly.
DF: One must keep the fires of romance burning. I haven’t had something this good for donkey’s years, so no little bailiff is going to interfere with it.
I know I’ve been away from your fascinating blog for some weeks, but WTF did you have an eyebrow pencil in your pocket?
Or was it a special graffiti pencil to draw moustaches on politicians you dislike?Or even on posters of the politicians?
Just for your information for the future; diesel smells more like rotten cum dissolved in palm oil.
Well bloody Nora, here we go, it’s the Lesser Spotted avis rara newzealandis. I thought you’d fallen down the plughole or had some crisis of conscience about returning to “real life". Hurrah hurrah—I’m off to your blog in a minute.
I had a eyeliner pencil in my pocket because I went to a friend’s 50th and it was a glam rock night and I got gayed up. Silver scarf, tight black trousers, the lot. Would have got me head kicked in in Glasgae, but this was Ilkley.
I don’t know what rotten cum smells like? Can you help?
Lets get this right.. Trina re-enacts the Radio 4 Shipping Forecast in her sleep? Now she sounds like my kind of girl…
by the way, if my experience is anything to go by, the unforgiving Captcha comment test down there will be playing havoc with those elements of your Friday night readership who may or may not have come to you via steady consumption of four cans of strong European lager in the company of a keenly-contested televised UK snooker semifinal and a Newsnight Review debate on the questionable merits of the latest David Nobbs novel. I’m about to give it another go…
Rotten cum in Palm oil: Use empirical methodolgy. Next time you come back from a steamy session with Trina in the narrowboat, keep your underpants in a plastic bag for 4 weeks, add some palm oil and snif.
TSB: I might skip that practical, and use my imagination instead.
JC: I know it’s a bind with the captcha but last time I took it off it took 15 minutes for a spammer to wade in. Well done for battling through the difficult circumstances and persisting.
Trina broadcasts foghorn warnings to all shipping in St George’s Channel at ten second intervals at about 80dB (rising at times in the middle of the night, when conditions in the Irish Sea are at their worst, to 90dB) for about seven hours a night. She provides the service free and has saved numerous mariners from being grounded on the flats off Southport or dashed on the treacherous rocky inlets of the Isle of Man. Sleepless nights and ensuing exhausted days for her lover are a small price to pay for such a generosity of spirit.
Aren’t there speaker pillows or something for couples who have a basic ‘like being broadcast at’ / ’sleep like a normal person in quietude’ disjunct?
It’s not her needing music or the radio at night, it’s her snoring that’s the problem. It’d wake the dead. There isn’t a solution apart from separate rooms (and I can hear her through a stone wall).
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