Not A Phrase You Ever Expected To Read Today, Hmmm?
In fact it might not be a proper phrase in the first place, which has never stopped us in the past and I see no reason to do so now. Once again, whose blog is it?
Do forgive me if I keep you waiting to reveal exactly what today's obscurantist title really means, because I'm horrid that way*.
Let us now trip lightly into the past, specifically last night, when Your Humble Scribe rendezvoused with the lovely Anna, for the first face-to-face time in years. Or it seemed like that. Art!
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| Little Yang Sing from the inside |
We went there as it has such a good vegetarian menu, for the sake of Anna, as Conrad is a well-known omnivore (bar parsnips and pineapple). Art!
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| Anna. And yes, I DID get her permission |
Do you want to see everything that we had to eat? This seems to be de rigueur amongst users of social media - O go on then. The starters:
- and in fact the whole lot. There's no picture of my steamed Dim Sum as they were gobbled down pretty quickly. You can also witness Anna pretending to use chopsticks on her deep-fried seaweed, and our main course, neither of which I can remember the name of. Delicious and filling.
Conrad, because he is BAD, sneaked off to the front of house and paid for the whole lot before Anna knew what was going on. Heh!
Of course the journey home was untrammelled misery: the Metro and First Bus conspired between them to turn up late at Exchange Square, which meant the tram was sardine-room only. I had missed my connecting bus so I carried on to the taxi rank at town centre.
No taxis.
You must understand that this is all in miserable weather with a cold wind a-blowing round my bones. Okay! Off to the bus station, where the 21:57 didn't turn up either. A despairing text brought Degsy out in The Beast and I enjoyed a warm ride home with a podcast playing. Art!
This is Oldham Bus Station's satellite station. That's not fog on the lens, that's cloud inside the bus station, because filthy lowering diseased-looking clouds had been squatting on the hills upon hills all day long.
BAH!
Needless To Say ...
Conrad is, as ever, purple-faced with rage about the chronic transgressors who compile Codewords. I believe that, faced with a world-wide shortage of these pikers, who seem to vanish mysteriously in a puff of radioactive vapour**, editors and sub-editors have been recruiting people from only tangentially-related fields, such as MOT invigilators and Shakespearean text analysts. This is the only possible explanation for the abstruse solutions they require.
"AUBADE": This is so obviously a lively musical composition of the seventeenth century that - What? It's not? It's GOOD LORD ALOFT NO! NO! NO! <sweats profusely> a range of female lingerie?! Get out of here! Ah. What it is, is a 'morning poem' - DOG BUNS UND KREPLACH! They're coming at me from all sides here. Quick, Art, change the subject -
Hmmmm possible alternative to the Remote Nuclear Detonator?
"RAKEHELL": Hmmmmm not a word that people are familiar with nowadays, are they, really? It might have been bandied about in the eighteenth century when the Hellfire Club were taking applications for people who were wealthy and wicked (and possibly witless, too) - but COME ON! In the twenty-first century? IT'S JOLLY NOT ON! <ponders who might fit the bill at the moment> aha!
I think he's still alive. But cannot swear to it***.
"TOPAZ": Now we're getting to the meat of the matter. This was another solution to a question nobody was asking. ARE WE ALL JEWELLERS NOW?! No we are not, and consider Conrad's position, too, as he detests and avoids all self-adornment and knows little to nothing of gemstones. It's like expecting a cordon bleu chef to be intimate with servicing a Sidewinder anti-aircraft missile!
Plus, this is where today's title comes from, because that's what mineral family topaz comes under, which is a lesson for all of us today. Art!
Much More Of Misery And Murder!
Yes, back we go to "Tormentor" and yes, exactly more of the above THIS IS NOT OUR USUAL FROTHY NONSENSE!
TWO
Alone and utterly dejected, Louis tried to ring Angela, only to get the answerphone at the first ring.
I’m not surprised. Jesus, what she must be going through right
now! And here I am feeling sorry for
myself, all abject self-loathing. Get a
grip on yourself, you pathetic b******!
After leaving a shaky message for
Angela on the answering service he went to bed, not daring to drink any more in
his current state for fear of making himself suffer a night of vomiting and
stomach upsets.
Sleeping pills! he suddenly
realised. They’d do. Could he get an appointment with Doctor Kumar
and say that he’d been having nightmares and depression? Because with what had just happened, the
nightmares would come, he knew from experience.
‘Wait a minute, wait a minute,
Louis, use your head. Sleeping tablets.’
There was a supply in the kitchen
cupboard downstairs, where he kept the other medicines, at the back of the top
left hand cupboard. They had been unused
for the past eighteen months.
Stupidly, he didn’t bother to put
anything on his feet when he tiptoed downstairs in bare feet, which meant he
cut himself on a sliver of broken glass lying on the carpet. It was in an awkward place, the blood getting
between the toes on his left foot.
Still, there were plasters in the bathroom cupboard. He managed to stop the bleeding with a
convoluted plaster, whilst reading the instructions on the brown glass bottle
partly-full of tablets, as he sat on the toilet.
‘What the ****, who cares,’ he
told the room, taking two tablets with a glass of water. ‘What more harm can they do.’
For the next half hour he tried
not to think about that pathetic covered bundle brought out of that alleyway,
the stark implications of the dayglo bag encased in plastic. “A body has been found”. Samples for DNA. Which meant that there must be traces of the
assailant at the scene.
I’m a suspect of course, since Jen
was last seen with me. Hah! For what that’s worth. As if I’d harm her. What do they take me for, a complete raving loon?
Remembering the destroyed coffee
table, he groaned in anguish.
You might say things have gotten interesting. They are about to get stranger as well.
The Sands Of Time
Yes, a quick revisit to the BBC's display of historically-relevant photographs, and the next one is of two freight vessels that collided on the River Severn in 1960: the Wastdale H and the Arkendale H. Art!
Courtesy Ian McCallum
This one was taken with a drone, presumably because it's too difficult and dangerous to get out to the physical location. Truly a picture of Sic Transit Gloria Mundi. There's a lot more to this than a single photo - we shall be returning here again!
* And in a whole lot of other ways besides.
** 
Remote Nuclear Detonator!
*** And not especially bothered either way
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