Friday 2 March 2012

Marriage Guidance

Since last Christmas, my neighbour has, after a lot of screaming and shouting, removed herself from her earlier relationship and shacked up with a new bloke. This bloke has about the same number of tattoos as - and a similarly limited vocabulary to that of - his predecessor (and the two before that). He also shares with them the noisy way in which he starts each day.

Around 10 or 11 each morning, he gets up and goes into the bathroom. There he spends 5 or 10 minutes, making a very loud sound - loud enough that I can hear it easily from the room I sometimes, always ironically, refer to as my study - that suggests he is slowly and painfully coughing up his lungs.

I don't know whether my neighbour picks her lovers precisely because she appreciates this odd variant on a dawn chorus, but, if I were her mother, I think I'd suggest she looked for other, more wholesome qualities in a man

7 comments:

  1. I wonder how Beethoven's Pastoral Symphony would have sounded if he'd woken to your local 'dawn chorus' instead of the bird-song and other bucolic sounds of the nineteenth-century Vienna Woods?
    There are some encouraging signs that tattoos may be losing the brief cachet they've enjoyed outside their traditional prisoner and more generally underclass demographic - http://www.news.com.au/national/sydney-hoteliers-move-to-ban-patrons-with-visible-tattoos/story-e6frfkvr-1226274997496; http://www.theaustralian.com.au/news/arts/actors-lead-the-tattoo-backlash/story-e6frg8n6-1226124013611. But my guess is that these encouraging trends haven't been noticed by your neighbours. Still, isn't it nice to live in a neighbourhood with an interesting social mix? Aren't neighbourhoods which are uniformly middle class in tastes and outlook a bit boring?

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    1. Well, I think they're a bit boring, Smiler, but I thought you'd always hankered for Grant Crescent.

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  2. I thought a classy tat was the one where the guy kept putting a line through each successive girlfriend's name and added the next below. On his arm, so plenty of space left. The current girlfriend must have felt flattered.

    I couldn't help wondering if she'd imagined how hers would look crossed out. Or if he'd added a few now and again after a breakup for effect.

    It also seemed to me a sensible pain reduction policy to fall in love with girls with short names.

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  3. Replies
    1. Although with Zoe you'd have to go through the extra pain of the two dots over the e

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    2. For a Zoe even with two dots, I think, for the sake of love, the pain would be well worth it.

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    3. But not for the sake of aesthetics, dots or not (I apologise for my anti tattooism)

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