After the Party, the Hangover...

I only have the remains of two fingers on my left hand, the rest of it (it, the hand, not them the fingers) being only heat induced scar tissue, and my right is, since yesterday, pretty bloody useless so I really can’t type the usual 3,000 word missive that John Gray only reads when he is on night shift on the IT ward armed with a cup of hot cocoa and a spare underpaid decade or two.

Marcia, having slept in what will be the bar of the restaurant while I tried to sleep in what will be the kitchen of the restaurant has gone to town to get much needed stock for the shop. Before she left Alexander had his first lessons in all those skills necessary for a successful diplomatic career with the Foreign Office. All communications between Marcia, the Government and I, the filthy aggressor were this morning directed through him with all the frostiness and ambiguity one would expect from Whitehall Mandarins principally concerned with status and deniability.

‘Ask your father if he wants a cup of tea’

‘Ask your mother if she doesn’t feel that it would be better for her to swap the battery from her phone to mine, which is fully charged because I can plan ahead, as I can recharge hers while she is in town and still maintain effective communications’

Some yoghurt knitting tree huggers would suggest that I was overloading a three year old. I just felt that his evident lack of comprehension, inability to pass on a simple message, stupidity even, stemmed from his mother and that his finer attributes, being bigger than his peers and able to impress upon them his will in two languages and a couple of fists backed up by determination were confirmation that individual sperm are seldom as inebriated as their donor. Further justification, if any were needed, that I had made an awful mistake hooking up with a girl who, instead of planting laurels on my head and bandaging my hand, a hand damaged in the defence of reason, spent more time stopping the albeit pretty impressive nose bleed of some corrupt scumbag and telling the police I was an uncontrollable thug.

I hate that kind of disloyalty and my hand still hurts like hell.

So, like all so called ‘Hard Men’, I am being petty. At least that’s what women, all of them stupidly emotional and unreasonable would call it. So now every kid that comes by gets a free sweet. If they bag a sack of litter, they get a handful. Marcia is going to come back to two hectares of litter free country side and a few empty sweet jars.

And I am still going to build my clinic.

So there.

I’m off to put my hand in the river. I tried sticking it in one of the shop freezers but it kept coming out with a cold beer attached and Marcia gets really pissed with me if I drink the profits.