by Guy Browning
Or communication.
Clothing accounts for remarkably little. It may be time for new pants.
Why Shared Showers Are Not Like They Appear in the Movies
Once you’re both in you can hardly move.
You can’t agree on a comfortable temperature.
One person’s wet, the other person’s dry.
You have to be double-jointed to reach the soap.
You get sad hippy hair within seconds.
The shower door is continually barged open.
You bang your collarbone on the soap dish.
If you drop something it’s gone forever.
You’re too close to see Andrea’s beautiful body.
Sexual stuff is difficult and dangerous. But extremely clean.
The Most Frightened and Powerful and Relieved I’ve Ever Feltfn1
Ron told me there was an urgent job in the Caribbean. Excellent.
A supertanker was stranded in Curaçao. Completely powerless. Fine.
I had to fly out there and fix it. By myself. Immediately. Gulp.
I rang someone who knows all about ship electrics and why they go pop.
He gave me something fat to read on the plane. With pictures.
Their Chief Engineer said ‘thank God you’re here’ and rushed me below.
The generator room was hotter than a bath you wouldn’t get into.
Opened the big metal box marked ‘Do Not Open’. Saw fault right away.
Felt huge waves of relief. Prodded other random stuff and sucked teeth.
Pointed out fault, ordered part, shook hands, lay on beach, went home.
fn1 Aside from losing my virginity to Becky Hatton.
Why I Don’t Like Ron’s Boss and Neither Does Ron
Ron’s boss looks like Henry VIII, with a fat neck and a ginger beard.
He stands with his feet apart and his codpiece thrust forward.
He gets through a lot of Personal Assistants.
He is very keen on budgets, KPIs,fn1 project reporting and big wins.
90% of what he says is some kind of management jargon.
He is happiest when he is pushing the envelope out of the box.
But I don’t think he could wire a plug without blowing himself up.
He was brought in specifically to manage Ron. But Ron is unmanageable.
They have long meetings behind glass where he circles Ron shouting.
Ron looks completely unconcerned as if he’s watching TV.
fn1 An advanced form of peanut, I believe.
My Cousin Bella’s Amazing Wedding
My cousin Bella is a wild-child free spirit with a large Mohican.
Confusingly she also has the most perfect peaches and cream complexion.
She married Torc, a tattoo artist and biker and all-round lovely guy.
Bella got married in her mum’s white dress with knee-high Doc Martens.
Torc was in a Teddy boy suit with only the tats on his face visible.
They left the church on a massive chopper and sidecar with 30 bikers.
The reception was in a field with the catering done by the Brownies.fn1
We had sandwiches on paper plates and fairy cakes with tea.
It was agreed that things would turn ugly at 8pm when the Brownies left.
My mum and dad left shortly before the Brownies.
fn1 My Aunt Pat is the Great White Barn Owl* of the local Brownies.
* Very high-ranking Brownie rank equivalent to Squadron Leader in RAF.
My First Visit to the Eastern Bloc
My friend Tom got himself an acting job in Prague in a low-budget film.
He plays an inept policeman who is forever spilling his coffee.
That’s where studying philosophy gets you, I told him.
He was quite philosophical about it.
Maybe because he has the most beautiful Czech girlfriend I’ve ever seen.
Tom says she’s a little bit volatile and often tries to stab him.
I warned him once about dating women who are too highly strung.fn1
Czech women generally are friendly and independent and gorgeous.
They also seem to have a refreshing respect for electrical engineers.
I drank a lot of beer, ate a lot of cabbage and decided to move to Prague.
fn1 He ignored me. His next girlfriend was a totally unhinged concert violinist.
How I Instantly Changed My Mind About Moving to Prague
I met Sabah at a Heathrow baggage carousel. She had beautiful luggage.
She is a cross between Sophia Loren and Queen Nefertiti.
She is training to be a gynaecologist and is insanely bright.
She has the deepest brown eyes of unfathomable beauty.
When she laughs you feel you have been given a priceless gift.
She comes from a completely alien and mysterious Middle Eastern culture.
She has the longest finest fingers. Her nails are like polished acorns.
The thought of them on any part of me gives me the screaming abdabs.
I have nearly crashed my car three times from sheer excitement.
I’m not sure Englishmen are built for this kind of passion. But here goes.
As Far As I Know What Happened to Sabah
Her father discovered she was seeing an English electrical engineer.
He flew over to London and took her back to Cairo.
She won’t be finishing her studies. Not in London anyway.
I believe she is now engaged to an Egyptian army officer.
My letters to her have been sent back unopened.
The photos of us have also been returned. With her cut out.
Her flatmate said she sobbed uncontrollably when she left.
It is the only thing I cling on to. She didn’t want to go.
I thought about going to Cairo. But my will is broken.
There will be no tall lady from distant Ophir. Not for me.
My Iron-Willed Strategy to Get Over Sabah
For a start I won’t be writing any more lists. That’s got to stop.
I will write a very lengthy novel about doomed cross-cultural love.
I will run until exhaustion shuts down my mental faculties.
I will have mindless physical encounters with shorter women.
Failing that I will seek spiritual solace in my Rubik’s cube.
I will devote three years to cracking it. I will think of that alone.
I will make sure I don’t look at books about Tutankhamun or Egypt.
I won’t eat dates so that the Egyptian economy is paralysed.
My bitter cynicism will make weltschmerz look like mild indigestion.
I will get myself posted to a remote job in the far north.
My First Near-Death Experience
Sakhalin is a Russian island off the coast of Japan. Bizarre but true.
The Russians really hoped the island had lots of natural gas.
It doesn’t have much else to recommend it. I know because I went there.
They had an offshore drilling rig. I had to make sure the power worked.
We ate stew and drank vodka. It’s the only way to keep the stew down.
The drill operator gets a bonus for every 100ft of continuous drilling.
When the rig drill was 5,000ft down I accidentally turned the power off.
He wanted to do to me what the Russians did to the Germans in 1945.
I said it was Health and Safety. Sadly there’s no Russian translation.
To keep me alive I paid his bonus. It was the stew that nearly killed me.
Things I Missed in the Five Months I Was Going Out with Sabah
My mother wasn’t well. I didn’t speak to my parents once.
My running almost stopped. My times were rubbish.
I didn’t see any of my friends. I made pathetic excuses.
At work I missed out on a beautiful job in South Africa.
Which would have done my career n
o end of favours.
I think I stopped eating. I certainly don’t remember eating.
In fact I think I was actually completely off my chump.
A bad case of lovesickness. I’ll have to watch that in future.
I suspect my internal wiring might be slightly faulty.
Sudden emotional power surges which can lead to dangerous blackouts.
What I Learned about My Mother’s Mystery Illness
My dad called to say that my mother had gone into hospital.
He couldn’t explain exactly why even after extensive grilling by me.
The closest we got was unspecified ‘women’s problems’.
Dad lowered his voice when he said this.
‘The sort of thing that got you burnt as a witch in the Middle Ages.’
From this I deduced that it was unlikely to be a broken leg.
No man of my father’s generation has ever said ‘menopause’.
Not out loud anyway. And certainly not in the company of ladies.
I visited with a bunch of flowers and a box of chocolate ginger.
Which is a lot better than a ducking stool.
Complications Arising From My Mother’s Illness
My mother was in hospital for just under a week.
The twins Lucy and Charlotte didn’t visit once.
Even though the 74 bus virtually goes from door to door.
Mum was incandescent with rage.
My dad whispered that intermittent incandescence was part of the illness.
Between incandescences I talked to Mum about the twins.
Apparently she’s always felt excluded by the twins’ self-sufficiency.
She misses the close mother–daughter bond some women have.
I didn’t know whether this unusual candour was also part of the illness.
So I left most of the talking to my mum and the chocolate ginger.
How I Try to Make My Diet Seem More Sophisticated Than It Is
Delice de eggs on toast.
An Ioli of Rav served on a plated plate.
Toast à la toast.
Three Weetabix in a whole-milk jus. Partouffed with sugar.
Steak pie ennestled behind a beaver dam of chips.
Choppy wavelets of meringue in a golden bay of lemon pie.
Abignale of sausage, beans and chips with a pan-fried egg.
Chocolate Nobs of Hob.
Pied Cottage.
Demihemispheres of appled apple.
How Filling Up at Esso Prompted Recollections of my Collections
I started with stickers for the 1972 Munich Olympics from Esso.
Then miniature plaster heads of footballers in the 1974 World Cup.
I moved on to PG Tips cards. These are worth well into two figures now.
When I got the bus to school I collected bus numbers.
Which is why I had to sit at the front. I’ve never done train numbers.
I collected horse manure from a local park for my mum’s roses.
That wasn’t a permanent collection.
For a while I collected coins. Until I discovered that they were money.
I had Airfix models hanging from my ceiling. Except the ships obviously.
Now I collect air miles, John Lee Hooker albums and scars on my heart.
How My Humiliating Assessment at the Waste of Money Gym Went
My diet will kill me within the week according to Mr Motivator.
I basically need to lie face down in an allotment and graze.
My lung capacity is below average despite me doing £100 of not smoking.
Which means my dreams of being a world-class athlete are over.
My breaststroke kick is slightly asymmetrical. Like a lame frog.
In my front crawl too much energy is spent splashing apparently.
It’s the splashing that shows how fast I’m going. Cretin!
My butterfly is still in the caterpillar stage. Oh ha ha ha.
I have above average stamina. Well above average, thank you.
They don’t call me Mister Ultra-go-all-night-lover-man for nothing.fn1
fn1 To be honest, no one’s actually called me that. But give it time.
Frank and Brutal Assessment of My Love Life
I fall in love too easily. It takes about four minutes on average.
Which is twice as long as my lovemaking. Only kidding.
I have mastered a range of powerful and exotic sexual techniques.
I just need a chance to try them out with someone properly.
Have slept with twelve women. Not all at once.
Can’t really do sex without love. Or at least deep-seated affection.
That’s one of my exotic positions – deep-seated affection.
Want a happy marriage like my parents but without the pointless rows.
Let’s face it, no one will ever compare to Sabah. Ever.
Which means other women don’t really get out of the starting gate.
What I Say When People Ask Me How I Met Abi
We knew each other at work. She was between my desk and the copier.
I copied a lot of stuff that didn’t need copying.
I worked in exotic far-flung sites. A bit like an electrical Indiana Jones.
I brought her witty souvenirs back from my trips. She loved that.
She was impressed that I ran the Bracknell 10k in 38:50.
She was going out with an absolute loser called Richard.
Who was some kind of good-looking rugby-playing rich City type.
But a nob.
We danced together at the office Christmas party (Abi not Richard).
Unlike most Englishmen, I involve my hips in dancing. She was toast.
What Abi Says When People Ask Her How She Met Me
I couldn’t work the photocopier. She sorted me.fn1
I was impressed that she was running the Bracknell 10k.
For some reason I brought her insulting gifts back from my travels.
When she’d clearly specified duty-free vodka.
My face was ‘curiously endearing’ (I’ll take that).
I had the same very basic sense of humour as her dad.
She was at a low ebb.
At the office party I found the Scottish dancing incredibly confusing.
Her heart was moved out of sheer pity. And one too many vodkas.
Richard made her cry. I made her laugh. But it was a close-run thing.
fn1 Her first and most repeated joke. And obviously not true or funny.
Lovely Romantic Things I Did During our Whirlwindfn1 Courtship
Put my last Rolo in an envelope and sent it to her recorded delivery.
Bought some incredibly dull postcards of Birmingham (her home town).
Posted them to her from Saudi Arabia, Oman, Kuwait and Kazakhstan.
Sent her a pizza at work with ‘I Love You’ picked out in pepperoni.
Created a 1,000-Malteser trail from her front door to her bed.
Where I placed beautiful new brushed-cotton PJs on her pillow.fn2
Took a three-week job in Venezuela. Sent her tickets to join me.
Painted a picture of some shoes she said she’d always wanted.
And then bought them for her on her birthday.fn3
Took her on the Orient Express to Venice. Best two days of my life.
fn1 More of a gentle breeze if we’re honest.
fn2 For use when I wasn’t there.
fn3 They had to go back for some technical reason.
Ten Things I’ll Always Remember About the New York Marathon
The fleet of yellow school buses taking us to the start on Staten Island.
Huge barrels of free donuts at the start. And people eating them!
Huge barrels of Vaseline. Applying lots of that to everything that moves.
Having a pee with a thousand other blokes in the world’s longest urinal.
Starting across the Verrazano Bridge with a view of the Twin Towe
rs.
Running across the Brooklyn Bridge into Manhattan. Feeling pretty good.
Hitting the Bronx and hitting the wall at around the same time.
Saved by a little girl in the crowd who gave me a packet of sweets.fn1
Turning into Fifth Avenue and seeing the Empire State five miles away.
Finishing in Central Park in a disappointing 3:51. Eating very large pizza.
fn1 It’s not often little girls give sweets to strangers.
Cool Dispassionate Analysis of Whether I Should Marry Abi
She is a good socio-economic cultural-heritage match for me.
She seems relatively healthy and is in good working order.
She has childbearing hips, as my grandmother would say.
Nan had seven children so she knows what she’s talking about.
Abi’s mother is a bit scary but not all women turn out like their mother.
Despite everything I do and say, Abi seems quite keen on me.
To be honest, she’s actually a bit of a catch.
Almost out of my league if it wasn’t for my lethal charm.
It’s time I settled down. Although I don’t actually feel unsettled now.
I love her. Which I think is probably quite important.
How I Meant to Propose to Abi
Amongst other things Abi has a very beautiful neck. Much like a swan.
Swans also mate for life. My pet name for her is Little Swan.fn1
She makes an odd noise and stretches her neck when she needs a drink.
I secretly found a chocolate sculptor who taught at a catering college.
I asked him to carve a beautiful swan from 20lb of chocolate.
The swan would be sitting next to a white chocolate egg.
