It soothes me in my most savage hours (not that I'm particularly afflicted by savage hours, but sometimes I catch a glimpse of the spraycrete ceiling in my two-room rent-a-home, and the aesthetic shudder is so awesome it's a wonder I'm not immediately driven to excessive consumption of Pimm's No. 1 Cup; although, in fact, there's no need, because the carpet, as we've established, soothes me in my most savage hours).
Note: bottle of Pimm's unopened; your trusty correspondent looking, nonetheless, distinctly unsavage.
The carpet conjures up visions of Louis Bougainville, in a wig, with a frangipani behind one ear, of owls and pussycats, of limpets and barnacles, of Johnny Depp waxing piratical. It's as briney blue as carpets come, minus the brine. IT EVEN MATCHES MY SPECTACLES, which is a rare feat in a carpet indeed.
It has one flaw, and one flaw only. It harbours this.
La bête noir! The bane of ankles! The piercer of skins! The monger of plagues! The facilitator of John Donne's amorous adventures!
Yesterday I bought a rather smart vacuum cleaner from the Northcote K-mart-arama, and with it I rampaged the length and breadth of my abode. Against all my inclinations, note, which tend against buying boring things like vacuum cleaners and against doing boring things like vacuuming. What, then, do I reap from this tremendous labour? I wake up with a flea bite ON MY FACE. You can see it, just above my left eyebrow, in the photo above (not to be confused with the incipient pimples, which I blame on a prolonged adolescence and the joys of Haigh's chocolate frogs).
This is a serious matter. This is war. That Pimm's ain't gonna last out the week.
7 comments:
I don't know if this makes me very dopey, but I had to google "Pimm's No.1 Cup", because I had absolutely no idea what it was (although I did guess that it was some variety of alco-ma-hol). Is it like a gin and tonic?
So, you take the Pimm's (which is gin with fruit extracts) and you mix it with lashings of ginger beer (or lemonade) and you throw in cucumber and orange and mint, and then you drink it after a hard game of lawn tennis. An older friend of mine who's spent his fair share of time hanging about in English universities declares it "the drink of upper class English w*nkers", but I am reclaiming it on behalf of the guilty middle classes and the Christian Women's Temperance Union. Expect Padraic McGuinness any minute now to replace "Latte-Sippers" with "Pimm's Quaffers".
I will have to look out for it, as sadly, being a tea drinker, I missed out on getting to be a "latte-sipper". My poison of choice is muscat. I don't know how guilty or middle class that makes me!
Aha! You're one of them muscateers. Looks like the common theme in our preferred tipples is lots of sugar.
You know that means we probably don't really like alcohol at all! But dessert wine- Mmmmmmm, yes! Maybe we're just harking back to the red cordial and cough medicine days.
It took me a long time to find a tipple that didn't give me an almost instantaneous migraine.
Well, yes, this is the nice thing about Pimm's. It doesn't taste like alcohol so much as a rather fancy fruit and cucumber drink. Only it secretly contains enough fermented juniper berries for the Pimm's drinker to pass herself off legitimately as a hardcore boozehound.
You're certainly selling it well! I still don't know how I feel about cucumber with fruit, but I do like the idea of assuming the demeanour of a boozehound without actually being one- and without resorting to this
. (apologies if that doesn't work). I will acquire some (assuming it's freely available) and report back.
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