I am hard

For some reason, I couldn't rustle up any interest amongst my friends for a dark, visceral Belgian film, Bullhead, about a man who is violently sexually assaulted in his childhood, who then spends many years planning a revenge attack, whilst becoming addicted to steroids as a physical and psychological compensation. It ends with no redemption or justice.

It was screened the day after I ran the Belgian Beer Tasting, and it bolstered my attraction to Belgian culture. When I was being paid --paid!-- by that country's State to do my artistic cavorting in Brussels, I met a Belgian at a party and he said that he liked some forms of English conversation because we are ruthlessly aggressive in the humour we have only with very close friends. I understood what he was saying.

After that, it was jolly to hear the frivolous tinkle of the bells on the Lindt Easter bunnies' chokers (such an unfortunate name for such an attractive item of female adornment) that I had bought for my daughters, as they jogged along in my eco academic conference bag.

On the way to deliver them at Kirsty's, I bumped into her boyfriend on the street. We walked up together. "Ooh-ooh", I cooed, as we walked in. "It's your present and former boyfriends here." We're dead modern up here.

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This evening, I am having a little snoozle when I hear the door. "Ah-ha," I think, "this is the wanderering lodger returning." I am not pleased with Bill, for two reasons. One, the rent is late, as it has been every single week bar one for a year. Two, I recently had to clean a fat-drenched roasting tin which he had left in the kitchen for several days before I could make the roast potatoes to accompany the sextastic Gruyère, ricotta and red pepper quiche I made for Trina and I.

Preparing to approach these issues, I nip to the loo, and I see that a beautiful long, tilting dress mirror that Trina went all the way to fucking Thirsk to buy for me after I'd expressed an interest in owning one, which I have installed in the bathroom--is turned round to face the wall and is hanging off its somewhat temperamental hinge. WTF has he done that for?

I go into the kitchen to wait for him. He clomps downstairs. I say "Three requests Bill..." and outline 1) the rent to be paid on time; 2) dirty pans to be washed up; and 3) don't touch that fucking lovely mirror!

As ever, he is apologetic and polite; he makes a bit of a show of washing the dirty pan up. I realise now why people sometimes specify women in their ads for spare rooms. A woman would never turn a mirror to face the wall or leave a dirty pan out for days. I dislike having to make things that should be taken for granted explicit. I stay in the kitchen, pretending to work on the computer, to make him feel awkward as his punishment.

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Kim and I have been planning a weekend away. By away, I mean, away out of our heads, although in a bourgeois sense of imperialist cartographic localisation, we will be in Co. Durham. She was on the phone the other night talking about painting her toenails before she went out and I found it a bit of a turn-on and I stroked her into more detail about the shade of the nail varnish and the brush and how she had her foot as she was doing it.

In the middle of the night I was imagining her getting dressed and undressed, over and over again, easing her arse and long legs into a short skirt she said she might wear. Kim is the person I could rely on to help me if things went wrong, without panicking or gushing with useless sympathy. She's also sexy as fuck.