Amanda Spots A Bargain

Ah, me …
I love being in my office, especially on days when the Dadaist Fairy has sprinkled its twisted magic dust everywhere.

Do you remember Amanda?
For any newbies, Amanda endeared herself to us shortly after she joined the company earlier this year.
I burned her an interactive CAD training DVD which she took home to study and when Caroline and Andy started work here a short time later I asked if she would bring it back in for them to use.

She told me the DVD was still in her laptop drive at her house but that she would definitely bring it in on Monday.

So …
That Friday night, she goes home, presses eject, stuffs the DVD into an envelope and puts it in her bag.
First thing Monday morning she hands it to Caroline who loads it up onto her computer and - with the rest of us sitting around watching, proceeds to entertain us with a DVD of hardcore lesbian action …

Amanda learns a valuable lesson about labelling DVDs and keeping them in the correct cases and we all learn a lot about Amanda.

Since that … er … ice-breaker, Amanda's workstation has gradually become more of a trashy floordrobe for her binge-drinking forays into the nether world of London's less salubrious twilight establishments; currently there are a number of sparkly dresses, skirts and tops in a state of disarray on her chairs and shelves and seventeen (count 'em) assorted pairs of "fuck me" high heeled shoes under her desk.

And this morning she has found a new way to entertain us.
This morning she has become a yoghurt-pusher.

She appears - as usual after a night out - still in her party gear with make-up smeared all over her face and hair like a rats' nest.
Before heading up to the shower to clean up and change into her work suit she wafts over to me in a cloud of stale fag-breath.
"Would you like a yoghurt?" is her innocent opener.
This is followed by the opening of a huge bag full of cartons.
"I bought a hundred and ten cartons."

Yup … That's what she said. A hundred and ten cartons of yoghurt.

I express some bafflement and she explains:
"They were on special in Tesco. I bought fifty pounds worth for twenty pounds. That's a bargain!"

I ponder the word "bargain" …

"And they're my favourite flavour: banana choc-o-flakes … though I'm a bit bored with them now. I ate too many last night."

One of the things in this world that I least want to put in my mouth is banana choc-o-flakes yoghurt so I enquire:
"Will you be able to eat them all before their expiry date?"

Amanda looks even blanker than usual …
"Expiry date?"
Having checked the first dozen or so she has a moment of clarity.

"Shit! I'm going away next week and they all expire before I come back!"
There are twenty-seven cartons in her carrier bags; the rest - bar the six she managed to eat last night before going out - completely fill her fridge (she shows me a photo she had taken with her phone … there is NOTHING but yoghurt in her fridge).

She is currently wandering around the office, forlornly pushing yoghurt.
People seem initially enthusiastic … until they see that the only flavour on offer is banana choc-o-flakes.

Does anyone want to go to a yoghurt party at Amanda's house this weekend?

Front-Bottoms

As Jules reminded me in yesterday's comments, no matter how innocent my posts may be, not many days go by without someone bringing up the subject of genitalia in the comments box.
For those who missed the discussion, a wall of vaginas (and the opportunity to have your own vagina immortalised), together with my own perfect penis are available to the grubby-minded on Joy's "I, Woman" blog: http://iwoman.me.uk/ (not somewhere I tend to hang around a lot, I confess … I feel inadequate enough as it is without all that girl power talk).
Look for "The Perfect Vagina" post.

As I've now brought up the subject in my post, perhaps my comments box will remain unsullied and genitalia-free today.

Some hope …

…

Oh … Addendum (on a related matter):

This was on Engrish.com today.
Is it just me or is this tragic magazine funny in one too many ways?


Oh, and the small, yappy-type dogs' names (フイフイ&ロメオ) translate phonetically as "Fifi" and "Romeo".
Sick puppies …

Okay, Maude; Fetch The Shovels From The Trunk

Sorry, Katie, but I couldn't resist it.

As any fule kno, I'm a sucker for postwar American kitsch.
And Katie's wonderful vintage postcard blog, Katiefornia, is my opium den of choice whenever I need to feed my habit for "noir" era Americana.

From the forties to the sixties, American design was a riot of wonderfully tacky, over-the-top signs with exuberantly joyous fonts, bright colours and sharp angles; there were big, handsome cars sporting acres of chrome trim and smart white-wall tyres; and the ladies … sigh … the dresses were fabulous, darling! Simply divine.

Today's postcard (stolen from Katie) just gave me a fit of the giggles.
Ostensibly a view of the Columbia River from Washington's Evergreen Highway, what we are actually witnessing is a gangland execution by the American equivalent of the W.I.

Not many people know of the Women's Institute's stranglehold on organised crime. The Mafia are bumbling amateurs in comparison (men can't multi-task for a start).
Sure, they still raise funds by making jam to sell at fêtes, but that's just a front.
Next time you spot 'em hawking chutney from a stall at your local church fundraiser try whispering to one of the little old dears that you'd "like to see the Godmother about a favour."

Anyhoo; what we have here is a W.I. "hit" on a client who hasn't ponied up.
This poor guy isn't taking a photo; he's praying for mercy …

"I promise ya. Just gimme one more day and I'll getcha money, Lady.
Please! I'm beggin' ya!"

"Sorry, Mo; we ain't a charity."

"Er … But I thought …"

"Okay, so technically we are a charity but that's not the point.
The point is: it's time to die, motherfucker."

BANG

A Heartless Bastard Writes …

Well, that's put a stop to that nonsense.
I got in this morning to find four more messages on my voicemail, including one drunken, late night sob-fest that went on for bloody ages.
IT have now blocked incoming calls from K___i's and Maz's phones and I'll be working from home for the next couple of days so hopefully they'll lose interest.

It's not that I'm a heartless bastard, it's more that I'm a big old softie and I'm scared shitless that I'd give in to the wheedling and the sobbing and the big-eyed pleading (and the young and still perky body) and get sucked in to The Village Of The Damned, never to emerge again.

I mean, K___i's young, and - underneath it all - she's very pretty, and yes, I look like a ticket out of Morlok Hell for her; but to me last Friday night, looking down into her eyes was like staring into a vast, sucking whirlpool leading down, down into the hideous stygian depths of madness and despair.

So that's it.
There will be no K___i and Dive.
For a start, she's dumber than a box of rocks. The conversations would not exactly be scintillating.
I'm a pretentious twat and a snob deluxe; I'm used to coming home from work, sticking on some Stravinsky, cooking something wonderful with nice fresh organic ingredients and settling down to read Virgil or listen to the Opera Quiz on Radio 3.
I'm NOT used to coming home from work to a trashed house full of screaming, hyperactive idiot children and a woman admittedly more attractive but slightly less intelligent than a blancmange, lounging drunk in the midst of the apocalyptic mess in a fucking shell suit or a Burberry hoodie with a lapful of deep-fried lard and "recovered meat product", chain-smoking and dribbling and screaming at the kids and watching fucking crap soaps and fucking crappier game shows and - God help us - imbecile fucking shit-brained "reality" shows on a stupid, twatty fucking television.

K___i also comes packed with unappealing accessories, like the tribe of inbred in-laws with thousands of vegetable kids ready to run riot in my life.
They say that before considering a relationship with a girl you should consider the worst case scenario and look at her mother and think twenty years ahead.
That's the clincher …
Holy fucking crapola. K___i's mum is younger than me but she looks like a bull walrus that's fallen onto Boots' make-up counter and thrashed about a bit. She has the personal habits of a drunken and particularly vicious sloth and she has more children than brain cells.

I'm forty-nine, for crying out loud. I can't spend the rest of my days living with a woman who can't spell "duh" and hiding from her family.
Sorry, K___I, but that's the way it is.
And let's face it; if you weren't stuck in the Morlok Village yourself, a girl as young and pretty as you certainly wouldn't be chasing after a fat, ugly, middle-aged bloke like me.

Hopefully, this will be the last post on this particularly grisly subject.

I've Never Murdered A Child … Yet …

A long time ago, in a galaxy far, far away, lived a happy, carefree, friendly and sociable little creature called Dive.

Happy, carefree Dive went along to his friend's birthday party last Friday (the "Village Of The Damned" one in the previous post), even though he knew that it would be a traumatic and trying affair, avoiding the attentions of the Morloks. He likes his friends that much.

Happy, carefree Dive spent this morning in a happy, carefree (if somewhat tedious) meeting and then went to happy, carefree lunch, secure in the knowledge that he would be safe from the Morloks for a few more months.

Unhappy, fucking sweary Old Dive has just checked his voicemail …

Okay, Maz, I'm not blaming you until I'm certain who did it (though yes, I am glaring angrily at you), but some fucking imbecile bastard in The Village Of The Damned appears to have let slip to your older sister K___i a piece of information that I wanted kept out of Morlok hands; namely, where I work (and you're one of the only people there who knows).
On my office phone I now have three (count 'em) sappy messages from the micro-skirted, sparkly-nailed, peroxide-haired, fake-tanned, sprog-popping, stiletto-heeled, boob-tubed predatory womb on legs known to the world at large as K___i.

Now I am jumping a foot in the air whenever the phone rings and desperately scanning the incoming number for a north-east Norfolk prefix.

What the fuck am I supposed to say to her?
"Hi, K___i. I only danced with you so I'd have something funny to write in my blog?"
or,
"Yes, I'd love to see you again, but before I do, please scrape off the orange fake tan and the caked-on make-up, get your natural hair colour back, buy some decent clothes, get an education and dump your three idiot children at the local orphanage?"

I'm a coward. I'm just going to keep on ignoring her calls and hope she gets the hint.

And Maz, you are in such deep fucking shit, girl.

A Slow Dance With The Morlok

Brace yourselves; it's time to don protective clothing and go for another paddle in the gene puddle.

Yes, it's Sharon's fiftieth birthday party in The Village Of The Damned.
Actually, this time we are just up the coast from that evolutionary dead-end and are sequestered in a rather nice hotel on the verge of the real world, where people walk upright and punctuate their primitive grunts with the occasional intelligible word; all of which comes as a relief until I realise that there is no available kitchen for Rod and me to hide in; I am stuck in a large room with the Morloks.
My only hope is that they won't recognise me as new genetic material for their terrible breeding programme. That hope is dashed as soon as I walk in the door and realise Shazza forgot to tell me it was fancy dress. Dressed as Dive I stick out like a sore thumb … or more accurately like fresh DNA in Morlok territory.

For those that don't know about this inaccessible and inbred little community, just click the "Gene Puddle" link at the bottom of the post and read the lower posts to appreciate my sense of creeping dread as I enter that room.
I home in on Sharon, looking radiant in a gorgeous ball gown and easy to spot as one of the only two recognisably human life forms in the room other than myself.
We do the kissy, huggy, squealy thing and then Rod comes over, for some reason dressed in immaculate navy whites like he never cottoned on to the screaming gayness of Top Gun. Suitably protected by one on either arm I head to the bar to lube up and to anæsthetise my brain against the inevitable.

The musical entertainment for the evening is being provided - inexplicably - by a Meatloaf tribute band, the lead singer of which is fat, hairy, sweaty and actually astonishingly good.

As I turn to face the room things start to get scary.
Over the years I have come to know quite a few of the inbred denizens of The Village and they flock to me now.
You remember I first described these occasions as "Dawn Of The Dead with party dresses on"? I cannot possibly improve on that description as they slowly shuffle and lurch toward me with arms outstretched.
First up is lovely little Kimberley. She is dressed as a heavily pregnant nun and it is only when we are greeting one another that I discover the heavily pregnant bit is not part of the costume.
Kim is eighteen and this is her second sprog, which is very, VERY slow going for The Village.
Next to slobber over me is my beloved little friend Claire, who grew up overnight and is already on her second husband and tonight is a heavily pregnant Little Red Riding Hood, a very disturbing image for somebody I've known and loved since she was a little girl.
It doesn't take much glancing around to confirm that the theme for the evening (much as with any evening in this little anthropological nightmare) is the race to have as many babies as you can before you hit twenty and turn into your mother.

Allow me to recap: The girls in The Village are uniformly gorgeous (Kimberley was a successful underwear model at fourteen) and from the ages of twelve to twenty they squirt out as many sprogs as is physically possible in some awful race to breed a bigger tribe than their next door neighbours.
At twenty - like butterflies in reverse - they emerge from their beautiful cocoons as saggy, haggard, embittered caterpillar women. A lot of them suddenly inflate like Americans yet they continue breeding at a prodigious rate; there are very few mothers here with less than six or seven kids haring round the dancefloor and shrieking.

Thousands of years of total isolation (the sea on one side and impenetrable marshes all around) has unfortunately resulted in a genetic apocalypse in The Village, and sat around the edges of the room are the sad results: the wheelchairs of the "vegetable kids".
The worst of these is S___'s youngest. This poor little boy has been in and out of hospital for all of his short life and has had every major organ replaced at least once; every one, that is, except the severely damaged brain that is his genetic inheritance. S___ie himself is the typical Village male; slow and heavy, yet remarkably cheerful for someone with seven kids, two of whom are little more than decorative plants. He used to roadie for me way back when and is a pretty good mechanic. Though his methods are his own … when the engine management computer went blooey on my car one night he simply nodded (slowly) and drove off to Grockle Hell (the tourist resorts down the coast), returning with a nice new part stolen from some poor sap's car. He's done the same with a wheel, when I got a puncture, and most of the band's bus was rebuilt with parts stolen from coach parks.

The tragedy of The Village is that the inbred denizens seem Hell-bent on producing as many children as they can. The room is full of them, screaming and fighting and bashing into tables and the parents sit around like blancmanges, idiot grins plastered across their faces. A frighteningly high proportion of the kids have genetic disorders, which is why the women are always so glad to see me with my fresh DNA.

The stream of Dive-greeters continues for some time and every one has either a new pregnancy or a new sprog to show me. It is truly heartbreaking as I have grown to like a lot of these people rather a lot over the years.
Scariest of all is little Maz. She is so happy to see me and kissy and cuddly and wriggly as any sixteen-year-old should be, yet she is pregnant with her third baby, by three different men in the Village. It is so awful I can barely stand it.

And then the Morloks move in for the kill; those allegedly female abominations belched forth from the gaping, sulphurous stinking maw of Gehenna and greedy to extract my genes from my jeans.

One of them from Maz's tribe, who goes by the name of K___i and who I know is in her twenties but who looks my age, drags me out onto the floor for a slow dance.
Brr … I'm shuddering even now as I recall the horror.
Let me describe her:
K___i is still pretty and was obviously once beautiful, yet the Morlok uniform does dreadful things to a girl.
She is dressed in the height of Morlok style and sophistication; the denim microskirt and strappy high heels worn with hideously long false nails with stupid sparkly scribbles on them (her fancy dress consists for some unfathomable reason of a fluffy boob-tube and matching rabbit ears). Her hair is platinum blonde, straight from the bottle, with an inch of mousy roots on display; she has caked enough make-up onto her fake-tanned orange face to delight a transvestite army, and she has been dipped in a fœtid, reeking "parfum", the stench of which burns my throat and makes my eyes water.
You know my views on the denim microskirt; the most disgusting and loathsome passion-killer in Satan's Spring Collection. Well K___i's is pressed hard against me in such an unerotic, grunting-animal fashion that I feel it would send even Bill Clinton running for the scissors to cut his cock off.

Oh, K___i … Where's the mystery? Where's the romance?

Like most of the Morlok women, K___i is an unmarried multiple-mother and now she's after more. All I can say is thank God for the Meatloaf tribute band. They know very few slow-dance numbers (and actually surprisingly few Meatloaf numbers) and I am rescued by their launching into a monstrously incompetent version of Motörhead's "Ace Of Spades".
K___i immediately starts to perform a bizarre bouncing "dance" that has her spilling out of her boob-tube in every direction at once. I make the universal sign of the drink and run for the bar where I can hide behind Rod and Sharon.

This goes on for some time. Morloks are pretty tenacious beasts and K___i makes several attempts to climb up me during the evening, the reeking result of which saw all of my clothes get flung straight into the washing bin as soon as I got home.

As soon as was socially acceptable (always look for the first family to take their kids home to bed and leave with them) I do the huggy, kissy with Rod and Sharon and head for the door, where one last horror awaits me.

As I cross the lobby I see Maz standing outside in the cold, sucking hard on a cigarette in the hope that the nicotine might damage the inbred cells of her unborn child and cause it to be born normal.
However, the doorway is barred by a gorgeous girl apparently in her late teens, dressed in what - had it been a foot longer - should have been a 1920's flapper dress but was in fact a teeshirt with frills on.
"Hiya Dive! You don't get out without a kiss."
I would gladly comply but for the fact that I recognise her.
"You're one of S___ie's girls, aren't you?"
"Yeah. So?"
"How old are you now? It doesn't seem ten minutes ago that you were toddling round the dancefloor."
"I'm twelve!" She thrusts her hip out defiantly as if twelve is above the age of consent. Which unfortunately in The Village Of The Damned it all too often is.
"Does your dad know you're out here?"
"Yeah."
Oh, well. She's not going to let me past so I lean down to give her a friendly peck on the cheek.
At which point she grabs my head and forces her slobbery tongue into my mouth.
I break free and back off quickly.
"God! You bloody kids grow up way too fast these days." I protest as she giggles and shrieks with mischievous glee.
At which point Maz reaches round from behind me and gives my balls a - mercifully - gentle squeeze, before laughing at me and pouting "You're no fun any more."
Fucking Hell!
This whole village is just one big rut.
I reach the safe cocoon of my car and look back to see the girls still giggling and waving and "flapper girl" lifts up her dress and flashes her knickers at me in farewell.
I just know that the next time I see her she will have joined her sisters in the race to make vegetable babies.

On the news as I drive away is yet another report on the evacuation of hundreds of women and children from a polygamous sect's compound in America, where pædophile allegations have been made against some filthy old perverts.
Come to rural Norfolk and live the dream.

Give me a couple of weeks and I'll be able to laugh and joke about The Village Of The Damned again. But right now I am shaken and somewhat disgusted and no amount of showering and hairwashing seems to be able shift the lingering reek of K___i.

Witchy

Brrrrrrrrr …
It's yesterday …
I pop in to Building Control; always a handy favourite when I fancy wasting an hour with obfuscation and obdurate bureaucracy; it is a truly marvellous sink-hole of incompetent fuckwits.

The woman at the desk looks up and beams.
"Gosh! Hello, J……." I say, "How are you? Long time no see."
It's always nice to bump into an old friend and J…… had been my secretary for years, way back during prohibition.
We get chatting and everything is fine and dandy. Then after a few minutes she starts talking about how she's divorced now. I make conciliatory noises. I quite liked her husband; we had all been quite chummy back then and I'd been round their house a lot. J……'s a few years younger than me and slim and pretty but she had always struck me as just the teeeeensiest bit psycho. I wasn't surprised he'd left her, just surprised he was still alive.

Then she says "Laurie tells me you and ……… broke up."

I know, I know. I should see these things coming but I'm a bloke, for fuck's sake. The default setting for my brain is "duh."

"Yes, a loooong time ago. I live in Brundall now." says I in all innocence.
All the bells go off and the lights flash in her eyes. She squeals.
"I live in Brundall!"

I'm still as ignorant as only a bloke can be and quite happily agree that we should meet up for coffee as we now live in the same village. After all, we're old pals and have a lot of gossiping and bitching to catch up on.
Then she lowers her eyes for a moment before hitting me with full beam and a cute smile and a suddenly quiet and conspiratorial voice …
"I never said anything when I was married but …"

Somehow I manage to get away with just her phone number and address which go straight in the shredder when I get home. I am too flabbergasted to tell her I actually have a girlfriend. Besides, that sort of information is likely to elicit a hissy fit and possibly some form of castration with an imaginatively wielded item of office equipment.

How the fuck do I tell the woman "No, I won't meet you for coffee and I won't call you and I am SO glad I didn't tell you my address because frankly you scare the living crap out of me."?
How the fuck do I walk through the village to the local shop?
I like my village. I don't want to move.
How the fuck do I go back to Building Control, which I need to do for my work?
Brrrrrrr …

Advice gratefully accepted.