Strange doings in the charity shop
Two weeks ago I was waiting for a jumble sale to start with an assortment of men who looked like they smoked eighty a day and washed it down with a nice bottle of port at breakfast, lunch and dinner, and old ladies in plastic macs. They were all discussing someone called John who’d died the week before. With blissful ghoulish delight they dissected John’s life, and I quickly learned that he’d been an incurable hypochondriac who smoked like a chimney, drank like a thirsty school of mackerel, was so fat he could never do up his seatbelt in the car and drove his wife crazy although “she were a patient woman, religious, she’d never stick it down your throat”.
So I walked in to a charity shop today today and heard an old lady at the counter say “’E were only fifty-seven, used to sit in that very chair every week.”
“Oh,” I thought, “I wonder if they’re talking about John?”
“’E used to play chess wi’ me every week,” said another old-timer, “ and e’d say ‘oh, there’s something wrong wi’ me, there is,’ and there were never nothin’ wrong wi’ ‘im.”
“Enormous fat, ‘e was,” said another. “Big fat man.”
“And only fifty-seven,” said the woman. “Poor John.”
I tell you, I very nearly piped up and said “Do you know his wife had the funeral at the house? Folk think 'e were buried in the garden! And 'er a Catholic! Terrible strange, I call it.”
I am so starting to get the hang of Oxford.
I also got monumentally hit on by a voluble old man about the height of my waist who lavished me with such pearlers as “I moost say, very nice figure, I doo laike ‘em like that”, “If I werrre thirty years younger I’d be a chasin’ ye, I’ve got the money and the time!” and “Some men get all the luck, yer ‘usband has my blessin’s and good luck to ‘im.”
Nice to know that I’m catnip to the over-seventies.
So I walked in to a charity shop today today and heard an old lady at the counter say “’E were only fifty-seven, used to sit in that very chair every week.”
“Oh,” I thought, “I wonder if they’re talking about John?”
“’E used to play chess wi’ me every week,” said another old-timer, “ and e’d say ‘oh, there’s something wrong wi’ me, there is,’ and there were never nothin’ wrong wi’ ‘im.”
“Enormous fat, ‘e was,” said another. “Big fat man.”
“And only fifty-seven,” said the woman. “Poor John.”
I tell you, I very nearly piped up and said “Do you know his wife had the funeral at the house? Folk think 'e were buried in the garden! And 'er a Catholic! Terrible strange, I call it.”
I am so starting to get the hang of Oxford.
I also got monumentally hit on by a voluble old man about the height of my waist who lavished me with such pearlers as “I moost say, very nice figure, I doo laike ‘em like that”, “If I werrre thirty years younger I’d be a chasin’ ye, I’ve got the money and the time!” and “Some men get all the luck, yer ‘usband has my blessin’s and good luck to ‘im.”
Nice to know that I’m catnip to the over-seventies.