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Friday 29 June 2012

Buses and Jet-Ski's and Poop (Oh my!)

While I may suffer the boyish good looks of Justin Beiber, and the upper body physique of an Olympic pommel-horse gold medallist, pretty much everything from my thighs down is knackered. I’ve got connective tissue damage in my right foot, and an irritated ligament in my left knee.

When either of them flair up, I start to walk like Mr Tumnus. When both of them do, I just don't walk.

I’ve had the knee thing, on and off, since I was about 13, but because my Local Authority roll as 'Pointless Desk-based Pleb' has been temporarily superseded by another, much more active position (one that only causes me to consider injecting Cillit Bang directly into my eyeballs once every other day, rather than every hour, of every day, which was customary), this has recently caused the front of my left knee to swell up like walnut, and my right foot to sporadically and painfully relinquish some of it’s responsibility in keeping me upright.

Still, the new job is only a secondment for 3 months, one of which has passed already. Plus it’s such a welcome diversion from the norm that I’ll happily put up with hurty feet and gammy legs in the ongoing pursuit of job satisfaction.

Without going into specifics, the new role requires me to go out and about, roaming the streets of Brighton & Hove in a big hi-viz bomber jacket, which makes me feel like a Policeman, but makes me look like a Lollipop Lady.

The little green van I eluded to in my last post is only sometimes available to me so its more often the case that I have to grab my work-issued, free travel pass (thank you tax payer), and hop from bus to bus as I traverse our fine city.

As a way to pass the time aboard my diesel chariots, I often whip out my iPhone - other smart phones are available...but none of them are as good – and play one of the many thumb-swipey mini-games that I own. They generally cost about 69p a pop, and I’ve spent a cumulative fortune on them, and they’re all the same:
Aim ‘object thing’ in direction of ‘target thing’, swipe thumb back to increase power to propel ‘object thing’, release thumb and watch ‘object thing’ – be it a missile, rag-doll, screwed up ball of paper or disgruntled bird – as it shoots towards ‘target thing’ and yet another 5 seconds of ‘life thing’ slips, unnoticed, out the back door of existence.

Thousands of us are addicted to these little pieces of pointless software, and we continue to commit fragments of our souls to oblivion on a daily basis. Others may have even bettered my score on Save The Pencil (but I doubt it).

Take now for example. I'm currently sitting on a stony beach on a hot summer's day (I like stony beaches. They are a great leveller of people. You may be six and a half feet tall, with a rippling 6 pack and biceps the size of rugby balls, but on a stony beach in bare feet, everyone walks like a twat - with the exception of Joe Addison, who is a mentallist and does everything in bare feet.).

Anyway, here I am on a beautiful day in a beautiful place, and the only thing I'm considering is 'have I got enough time to complete my current level on 3D Mini-golf  before I go back to work'. The only reason I'm not doing it now is because I chose to write about it instead.

Bugger it, let's engage reality for a change. What's going on around me?

Well, there's someone zipping around on a jet-ski about a hundred yards out to sea. Jet-ski's look fun. If I ever get to have a go on one, I will of course review the experience here, although I can probably give you a bit of a preview now:

"....then I hit the water, face first, at 50mph...."

"....I screamed at the swimmers to move, but it was too late...."

"...they had to close the pier for 3 hours to cut me out of the wreckage..."

All I need now is someone with a jet-ski to facilitate my inevitable catastrophe. Any takers? No?

I realise that this post isn’t really going anywhere, which is why I’ll end it with the most fantastic anecdote I heard recently:

A friend recently hired a chalet in a resort in France. Both him and his Grandma were staying there – although he was only staying for a week, while his nan was staying on for longer. On his last day, he felt the urge to go to the toilet and subsequently had the most enormous poop; no doubt a result of the previous week’s gluttony and fine French dining. Upon pulling the chain he soon realised that the small chalet toilet was unable to cope with his transaction. He tried again, and again, and again. Each time the bowl would fill with water, but slowly drain away, leaving the mucky prize behind. This left him with 2 choices: He could either tell his Grandma and leave her to deal with it, or he could seek the assistance of someone who he would probably never see again in his life. So, faced with this lesser of two evils, he went to get one of the maids that serviced the chalets. He barely spoke a word of French but managed, through wild gesticulation, to get a maid to follow him back to his bathroom where he lifted the toilet seat, pointed at the offending item, and said in his best French accent “regard”, upon which he pulled the chain, and the whole thing just flushed away normally…….. Now imagine that you are the maid. What just happened?


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