Racked Off

Disembowelled might be just as good a title. Until this morning my new, simpler, life style has been mostly plain-sailing. Today I found the inevitable aerobatic member of the order insecta in the emolient grease. Oh! How bitterly did I lament as I fought my umbrella while battling the squally blasts of rain during my race up a street with the word green in its name, no doubt a reference to a bygone age before mister Macadam did his thing with tar and crushed stone thereby sealing the deal on the transition betwixt rural and post-industrial ....

Oh my gawd! This seasonally affective curmugeonliness is seriously unbecoming!

Not owning a car is such fun really. Driving is such a right royal pain in the arse, and I should know. This morning I ventured out of my little house to ride the lovely bus into town. I had a meeting to attend. Can't miss a meeting. Committees, eh ... what would we do without them? The weather was ... well pretty 'british'. The wall by the bus stop was wet; it's as good as a bench in more clement conditions, but this morning it was just a heap of wet bricks. There were a lot of locals waiting for the bus. It was that kind of morning: nobody in their right mind would be walking when conditions were as apt to change — for the worse, natch — as rapidly as the fortunes of the chief protagonist of a gritty northern soap. I wish I had been a passenger on the bus that duly arrived, ontime and visibly filled to capacity because then I would have been able to write at length on the subjects of schadenfreude, guilt and empathy because the damned thing didn't bother to stop. Worse it appeared that the driver slowed down as he approached we damp and dispirited mendicants for transportation the better to torture us. I am sure that I wasn't the only one who was thinking how nice it would be to spend a few minutes wedged in closed proximity to a lot of nice warm .... Cold does odd things to one's pleasabilitiness.

So being separated from my meeting by five miles or twenty minutes I was faced with a dilemna. Should I phone and feign illness? Maybe I could phone for a taxi ... but full buses do not a rapid taxi service make. This left me a single option. Phone a friend. OK the friend lives halfway between my house and the meeting so they'll have to double back but, hey! What are friends for? I'd do the same for them if I had a car .... Oh my god! I just turned into a sponger and what's worse I am making a truly terrible job of my attempt to gloss over this shameful shortcoming.

I did not have to worry about scoring a comfortable and fragrantly warm ride home. My friend had to leave early and that was why I ended up on the road with a green name and a greyer than soot character and fighting wind and rain with umbrella and mostly losing.

It was kind of par for the course that was today's eighteen holes of hell that the bus I was aiming for left the stand just recently enough that the nearest bystander was able to confirm that it had indeed just gone in spite of the fact that I was wet and windblown and had only missed seeing it go as I approached because I was hiding behind a quivering mass of multicoloured nylon and flimsy metal spars. If I wasn't already on anti-depressants I would have begun to feel a little depressed. Instead I chose to experience a little paranoia. Infamy! They've all got it in for me!

Plan B called for a bus of a different number. It was too bloody cold to hang around doing nothing but wait thirty minutes for the next scheduled useful bus. The smart traveller takes a setback and turns it into an opportunity. I waited a few minutes and leapt on the next bus that stops at my local mega-mall (that is closer to my home but a nicer place to be). I planned to hit a store that had some serious yardage of racks that were groaning with coats that ranged from the cheap and cheerful to the top of the range label. If the coming winter lives up to predictions then a good coat might be a sound investment.

I get racked off very easily. One thousand coats later I discovered that I am not as easily pleased as I am racked off. Too pale and easily soilable, too flimsy, too young, too old, too tight, too baggy, too dressy, too casual, too much decorative flim-flam, too plain. The only coat I found that I really wanted was a nice black wool coat that had been reduced from £300 to a mere £119. Nope that doesn't do it for me. I'd rather freeze ... besides it was a size too small, dammit. Worse I was experiencing pain of the urgent bowel movement variety.

Hey I can handle this. Clench and concentrate. Clench and concentrate. It makes a total nonsense of shopping. Of course everything looks like shit. It's all one can think about. I can hang on for ever. It isn't easy and it isn't at all pleasant in the sense of comfort and painlessness, but it is possible. I just have to avoid public toilets. My insides will obey my conscious control as long as they do not apporach the vicinity of a toilet bowl. I dare not enter the ladies room in case there is a queue; no way would my large plumbing comprehend the concept of waiting in line for a turn at ... [ahem] ... stool.

So I came home without a nice new coat and I am, as they first started saying in Australia, racked off —

— and it gets worse. Almost as if I had transformed into a barroom drunk who promises undying affilition to anything that doesn't run away (eg a hat stand) I now recall that I volunteered at the meeting to produce a script for a role-play exercise. If life can get worse I would really like to see it try ... on second thoughts I retract that wish.