Sime says

The glob of goo shot out from the bottle. It missed my hand and left a tacky tail of liquid on my loafer. I grunted, like the guy in the cubicle beside me, and looked for a sheet of paper towel to remove the dribble. There was none. With little choice, I wiped my shoe on the back of my ankle and exited the public convenience.  I'm finding sanitising to be an unpredictable business. Venturing from the cafe to the butcher and onwards to the baker, I am obsessed with sourcing stable bottles of ethanol-infused lotion. A small bottle of sanitiser   hangs from a carabiner attached to my jeans. It's my backup accessory of choice in these COVID -laced times. Busy hands used to require Solvol and Geoffrey was once told to wash his mitts, so nothing has really changed except for fashion. Rubbing two hands together on approach to the pub is no longer a gesture of expectation, it's a race against time. With cupped palms cradling a puddle of germ-busting fluid, magician-like hand mov...

"Hello, Simon Dean speaking", I said. "Hello Dean, it's Simon speaking", he replied. Was it tinitus, a deaf ear or the fact that he worked in the miscommunications department of the same hotel as I did that caused confusion? His sloppy salutation infuriated me. We shared christian names, were supposed to be au fait with hospitality and yet he still couldn't wrap his tongue around a correct greeting. Meeting Simon in the lobby put the name to my face but the moniker was lost in translation via the phone. Without eye contact that either cements bona fide banter or feigns disinterest, speaking to a faceless being, a nobody, just a voice, can be risky business. That was the case for me in the 80s.   Talking on the now near extinct 'land line' filled me with fear. I prospected through a copy of the White Pages for business, selected a company at random and made a cold call in the hope that someone would buy what I was selling. Rejection...

We've been together for more than 35 years and letting go is something I cannot countenance. So I have decided to dismember her. You won't find a butchered body in a barrel or entrails stuffed in a suitcase in the attic, for my relationship has been more platonic than physical. I hold out hope that with the help of a plumber, discarding the bottom section and keeping her top half should be relatively straightforward. I'm a sentimental bloke who is about to rip the heart out of his home and in the process end a longstanding affair with a gas cooktop. The Cannon Rotisserie De-Luxe Gas Cooker is one sexy stove, not a horrible hob. This cordon bleu piece of machinery revolutionised the way my family cooked in the 1980s. It was a Masterchef moment. The installation was cataclysmic not catalytic, for it incorporated an eye-level gas griller/rotisserie that continues to burn brightly. None of this bend over business and sticking one's head in the oven to grill a c...