The routine morning shower awoke more than my sleep eyes one morning after my return to London from a refreshing Christmas break in Canada. As sybaritic as my student lifestyle is, neither my flat mates nor I have seen fit to expend any money on a bathmat. Consequently, I dutifully take the mop out of the bucket that sits in the corner of the bathroom and fulfil the admirable responsibility made necessary by common courtesy: I mop the floor after my shower.
Except this morning, in addition to my eyes, my curiosity was also awoken: for the mop was standing alone, with its friendly bucket nowhere in sight!
Having just watched a double-header of “The Return of Sherlock Holmes” at Ben’s the night before, I felt suitably prepared for the challenge ahead. I must admit, and I flatter myself, my abilities of deduction were quite quick to overcome this metaphorical speed bump in what should have been a natural morning progression!
The kitchen door wedge is another domestic item that occasionally goes missing. It usually is found hiding, in a secretive manner, under the fridge. Rest assured, I wasted no time on searching in the same location for the bucket! Indeed, all of my reasoning happened rather quickly, as I stood in my towel. The speed with which I construed the solution to this most hideous incident of the absent bucket is a testament to both my mental acuteness at 8:30 in the morning and the reasonable fact that there were only two suspects: one of whom I could imagine having no motive. ..which of course left only one suspect.
This reasoning left for poor Dave the consequence of returning last night from an evening that was both overflowing with undergraduate felicity and probably devoid of lasting educative value. Wait! Perhaps I am too harsh laying such a judgement on his complete abstinence from teetotalism. It might be more just, if his memory survives, to simply say that the bathroom bucket of flat 12, Claredale house, will no longer befriend a wanting luthier student so early in the morning when he remembers the lesson taught by surpassing the limits of whisky consumption!
As the homemade ginger contents of my Tupperware cookie container slowly get replaced by Tesco Value packs, I marvel at the small footnote on the back of Tesco’s packaging that reliably says, “Contains approximately 28 cookies.”…um…is Tesco mad?! Can’t they count? How can you have an approximation of a cookie? And if you could, wouldn’t that be the most undesirable insult? To be accused of only making an approximation of a cookie would indicate that your baking abilities had not even reached the stage where normal adjectives of “corking”, “rebarbative”, “smashing” and “swingeing” might be correctly applied. I admit these adjectives may never be correctly applied outside of Britain but I suppose it accounts for why Tesco Value packs are the least expensive!
With a major deadline met and passed, I suspect that the preceding levity naturally balances the intensity of my project proposal and the week spent finalizing it. But no more can be said now – I should go – Sherlock Holmes is on TV again.
Tags: humour, London