A petulant, juvenile old codger

I weighed 91.3kg fully clothed, after breakfast, which sounded a lot worse than anything Imperial to me. When asked why her scales had suddenly gone metric, the LTCB said that it made it easier to weigh the cat. It’s the sort of answer that puts one off from requesting a fuller explanation.

I got through 8.9 units of alcohol yesterday, and have 1,294 more days to get through; on this day I did not stir from Chester. In fact, I barely stirred from the LTCB’s house, where I frittered away several precious hours writing my weekly newspaper column and actually doing some work for a PR client; a rare event indeed. My hostess eventually returned from work positively glowing after a session on the treadmill at the gym, the positive effects of which had clearly not been undone even by a long wait in the checkout queue at Morrison’s. She cooked me a brilliant pork-based supper, which I used my extensive general knowledge to deduce was probably not authentically Iranian, and we then took the dog for a walk.

Like the dog, I am very much creature of habit, so was surprised to be wrenched from the tram tracks of the last few weeks and taken to inspect a series of new attractions including the ruins of an abbey which had allegedly been Chester’s first cathedral, the city’s Roman amphitheatre (which is frankly not worth a detour, particularly if you have seen the Colosseum) and a back street pub which had a long chalked list outside it of the sort of customers it could do without. This reminded me very much of the style of the late Kim de la Taste Tickell, who presided over a marvellously eccentric pub at Whittlesford in my Cambridge days. The Tickell Arms, though, was perennially busy, even when its host was not presiding over a candlelit, black tie dinner party in the middle of his crowded bar. At this pub, on the other hand, the landlord’s imprecations seemed to have had been so successful that a look through the window suggested that he had no customers at all. I expect that is just what he wanted.

One of the things he did allow was dogs in the bar, so the LTCB suggested we went in for a pint, but I did not fancy one on top of the half a bottle of white wine I had consumed with supper. Added to which, I had got myself into that frame of mind where nothing seems to please. The LTCB observed, with her usual astuteness, that I was trying very hard to pretend not to be interested in things in which she knows that I really am interested, and characterized my attitude as “petulant”. Another triumph of spot-on character analysis to rank alongside her earlier “juvenile old codger”. Given that I am so much older than she is, it seems strange that she is so much more mature, but suspect that is the biggest statement of the bleeding obvious that even I have managed to date.

Still, at least she had read this blog before she started going out with me, so she should have known roughly what to expect.

The tone was lightened a little when we got back, and I took one of my occasional looks at the sitemeter attached to this, which reveals how readers were referred. Searches for dogging, thigh-booted blondes and mini-skirted schoolgirls are a daily event, but today someone broke new ground by getting here through a search for “litre plastic bottle masturbator”. The mind boggles, (a) because I haven't the slightest clue what on earth I can ever have written that relates even tangentially to that, and (b) because I can’t even begin to imagine the thought processes that could have led to the initiation of that particular quest.

Still, having repeated the words above, I will at least be the top choice on Google if anyone tries looking for them again. It’s a small win, I know, but it is the best I managed today.