Monday
The AFSCA (Belgium’s federal agency for ensuring food supply chain safety – but of course you knew that) has been forced to issue a warning to the good people of Poirot’s homeland not to eat their Christmas trees. This is after the city of Ghent – an environmentalism hotspot in northern Flanders – posted tips on how to recycle their obsolete festive conifers into food, including using them to make pine-flavoured butter.
Non, strongly advises the AFSCA. And possibly nee and nein too, given the polyglottal nature of the place and the importance of the issue. Christmas tree needles are likely to be covered in pesticides, flame retardant and other things you wouldn’t want to be ingesting freely, especially now your relatives have all gone back home.
I offer you this story in the hope that it will encourage you to join me in following the one rule for life that has never yet let me down: trust no hippy, nowhere. You will die if you do.
Tuesday
A friend asked me if I wanted to go out for lunch with her this week sometime.
“I can’t,” I said. “I’m already seeing someone this week.”
“What?” she said. It was then I remembered that she is quite a new friend – we have only known each other about a year – and she has yet to be fully inducted into the magic that is me.
“I can only do one thing, see one person a week,” I explained. “It used to be two. But that’s too much now.”
“Are you serious?” she said, which was when I remembered she is also 15 years younger than me.
“Yes,” I said. “You will understand in time.”
“But you work at home alone all day, every day,” she said.
“You will understand in time,” I said.
I’m just glad I had enough sense to lie. It’s actually one a month. I can do two at a push, but they need to be with very special people under very specialised circumstances, and I need three months’ warning. Otherwise I become wholly peopled out halfway through the second event and have to be taken home in a wheelbarrow, tipped on to a sofa in a darkened room and left until next season. She will understand in time.
Wednesday
There is a push, apparently, on TikTok towards the return of pubic hair. For many of us, of course, through feminist principle, sloth or deep antipathy towards the searing pain of having your hootenanny treated with anything other than the greatest circumspection and gentleness instead of HOT WAX, it never went away. But for others it did. But now it’s back. I am very glad, as my default position when confronted by a man affrighted by the sight of the thing au naturel is to assume he is either porn-addicted, a paedophile or – if you’re really lucky – both.
But I just hope the young women who are growing theirs properly for the first time are prepared. Ladies, don’t panic when it doesn’t stay in the triangle you have been told about. It will stop eventually. Maybe near your knees and you will have to buy longer shorts from now on, maybe near your belly button (bigger knickers), maybe something more modest and requiring no wardrobe modifications. But it will keep you warm, you will be more comfortable without the HOT WAX applications that you will soon come to appreciate for the insanity they are, and you will have more money to spend on nice things instead. I wish you a very hirsute and happy new year.
Thursday
Our parked car was smashed into and written off by a random driver just before Christmas and replacing it has been the bane of my existence ever since. I have no life skills, you see. I don’t know what to do when your car gets written off. Claim this, claim that, send off this form, send off that form – no, not that form, the other form – find another car without knowing anything about cars or what good value in one looks like, and then get it taxed and insured. It was the last bit that nearly broke me.
“How many years’ no claims bonus have you got?”
“Eleven,” I say, because a previous phone call walked me through how to find this.
“And when did you earn that?”
“What do you mean?”
“When did you earn your no claims bonus?”
“Over … the last 11 years?”
“But when did you earn it?”
“We’ve had the car for 11 years and never made a claim. So – 11 years?”
We’re actually still having this conversation as I type. He can’t couch his question any other way and I do not understand. I hope someone comes and rescues us soon.
Friday
Amid all the foofaraw about Facebook binning off the three and a half moderators they have in favour of a biscuit tin full of crumbs or whatever they’re proposing, my mind has snagged on an essentially irrelevant detail, but one it cannot seem to get past.
In the announcement, CEO/Lord King Metagod Mark Zuckerberg is wearing a $900,000 watch. I know he is worth $211bn, but the human mind cannot truly understand a number so large. But now I know that it is large enough to cause you to wear a nearly million-dollar watch. And I can’t get over it. It’s even more effective than all those other ways people try to convey the vastness of wealth disparity in the world. If you had a million dollars and spent it at the rate of $1 a second, it would be gone in 11.5 days. If you had a billion it would take more than 31 years to spend it all, for example. Or there’s a very good one involving grains of rice doing the rounds at the moment – one grain represents the median net worth of an American citizen, and the camera pulls out to reveal the increasingly sprawling mountains that represent the average CEO’s fortune, Donald Trump’s and finally Elon Musk’s. It’s great – do look it up.
But somehow the watch thing has got under my skin like nothing else. “I need a watch. I shall pay a million dollars for it.” I can no more compute this thinking than I can work out when I earned this NCD. But we need someone to rescue us from all of it, I think.
Article by:Source Lucy Mangan
