Sign of the Times

Today, I am standing in a frill-free, foreign-owned supermarket, peering at the Schnitzeblibil herself has found at a bargain price.

"What is a Schnitzeblibl?" I ask, innocently. It's been a long week.

Herself looks down her nose at the foreign label on the plastic bottle.

"It's either a shampoo... or a salad dressing. I'm not sure."

"Ah."

I lift up a green net bag.

"And the Defergaumin?"

"Six for the price of four," she says.

"Do you think," I ask. "Do you think the Defergaumin could be served with the Schnitzeblibl?"

"Don't be silly," she says. "Look, give me that trolley and go and look at the Man stuff."

I examine the rotary motor mower; poke briefly at the energy-saving L.E.D. work lamp; try on then put back the protective chainsaw boots. I meet Herself in the next aisle, where she is wrestling another woman to the ground, growling menacingly.

"MY....! I said MY Liebenhaffabudenschtiffel!"

In the car park, a man is tentatively cutting off a shopping trolley wheel with a brand new plasma rig.

"Only nine-ninty nine in the third aisle," he says, grinning.

I pack the groceries into the car and we drive away.

Online clothes shopping for fat men

When you weigh an ounce or two more than 20 stones (that's 280 pounds for our Western neighbours... or nearly 128 kilos for our Eastern ones), you eventually come around to the conclusion that the local Dunnes Stores just isn't going to have a good supply of summer clothing that covers your beer belly.

The "smallest" size I can wear these days in tops or teeshirts is XXXL. Now, either the news reports about the slobbering spread of obesity in the Western world isn't getting through to the store buyers, or there are a heck of a lot of slightly built, fit building workers still roaming about. I say this because any given day there is hardly room to manoeuvre around displays of S, M and L sizes in the Menswear departments.

It's like finding a Willy Wonka Golden Ticket to see an XXXL label on a teeshirt in our local shopping centres. I almost knocked Herself over a couple of weeks ago on seeing two (count them!) at the bottom of a pile of polo shirts.

So I've turned to the Internet for summer clothes. Lately I visited a UK-based site, bigteeshirt.co.uk, where I purchased the above classy number. I'll be wearing it this June Bank Holiday weekend as I tend the barbeque and no doubt shall be the life and soul of the party in it for.... oh.... two whole minutes, maybe.

Apart from the printed tees, the site supplies various coloured styles and other clothes up to 13XL sizes. (I'd like to see a label that says XXXXXXXXXXXXXL....!)

The "Anorexia" tee is available at £12.99 (€16.54) with postage and packing extra. In all I chose 5 items: "Anorexia"; the Duke Spirit Linen Mix, the Espionage Cotton tee, and two Izod Cotton Polo Shirts. The whole came to £72.95 (€93.00) inclusive of postage and packing.

By the way, €93.00 would purchase fifteen and a half summer tee shirts of good quality in my local Dunnes Stores outlet. Money sent abroad because they don't cater for my size. Think on, Department Store owners!

Everything came through in good time and good order, with the slight exception of the Izod shirts. The Website also caters for the TALL man as well as the wide, and Herself has been looking askance at me in my brightly coloured cotton dresses. I show her the maker's label and say:

"This is the style in Pakistan!"

But she isn't persuaded. So the moral of the story is to read the Sizing charts provided on the site and do as much online examination of the product as possible before placing an order. I'll definitely be shopping there again.

One might well ask why it is I'm paying for UK Sterling-priced products given the weakness of the US Dollar against the Euro. Well, the US-based sites I visited seem not to be aware of the rest of the world as a potential market. "There is no postal rate for your area" one online ordering system told me. "You'll be contacted with the details of the additional cost once your order is placed."

"One pig in a poke, please!"

Or, if they do, they equate the distance travelled in the post to be roughly equivalent to a trip from Earth to Mars, making the postage and packing rates wildly expensive.

If anyone locates a reasonably-priced US site that sells tees to places outside the USA, please let me know.

E-Bay is another place I've looked, again with mixed results. One guy had an offer of six teeshirts from his online shop for £40 Sterling and wanted another £40 p&p to send it 100 miles to Ireland!

We're not getting thinner, only poorer, it seems. I'm off now to get the garden into order for Sunday's barbie.

Have a great weekend!

Silent Running

So the plumber announces he has had a job letdown which means he's starting to install the new central heating next week. That's despite the fact that Bord Gáis haven't found a shovel yet and connected us to the yellow fuse... I mean the gas supply. We also haven't mentioned that a bank loan we've not even applied for yet will pay for the central heating, so that should be good.

Tomorrow, I need to demolish a built-in wardrobe and manhandle the whole lot out the window, fix a no-go attic space, uncover a wall in the dining room presently hidden by would-be kitcheny bits, and generally do the plumbing equivalent of cleaning up before the cleaning lady arrives. Bugger me.

Tonight, the house was so cold and damp that I started up two electric radiators in the hall and in the living room. I had to fix the cat's food by the light of a side lamp and leave the computer off. We're church-mouse poor ahead of these renovations and can't afford the electricity, at least at never more than partially-completed showhouse level. All fur coat and no knickers -- that's us.

Hopefully won't need them when the heating goes in though....

Did I say, Bugger me...?

So, this man goes to the doctor....

Amazing how quickly your six-month duration prescription runs out, especially when you dodged the hard questions about weight and blood pressure the last time because a Locum doctor was on duty.

I gave up drinking alcohol about four or five weeks ago, following my stomach upset, and have lost around a stone and a half (21 pounds, for our American friends; 9.55 Kilos for our Euro pals) since going off the liquid bread. My face has only two chins now instead of three. And bones in it. And I appear to have only one back now.

I know what my doctor is like, though, so I didn't put much faith in making an impression on him with this news.

"Hmmm," he said. I think doctors say that to make a nice noise in their own heads when the ear pieces of the stethoscope are in. "Your blood pressure is kind of okay in that arm anyway."

"I've lost a stone and a half to come here," I said, half-heartedly. "And I've given up booze."

"It's a good idea to cut down," he mumbled, looking at my computerised record.

"Given up entirely," I said. In a moment I would be giving him the paw for a Scooby snack.

"What weight are you now then?" he asked, absently.

I told him.

"How much is that in Kilos?"

"Ah. I don't know. Knew I meant to convert something to something else before I came out.."

We looked at the cheapo model weighing scales under the examination couch. On the dial the maximum it went to was about a stone less than I weigh.

"But I have lost a stone and a half," I tried, one last time.

"Have I ever given you diet pills?"

"What?"

"To lose weight. Have I ever tried you on something?"

"No... I'm losing weight... No beer... Walking..."

He "Hmmmm-ed" again and printed out a prescription for appetite suppressants.

"I'm not likely to use these...."

"Well, if you feel like you want to, you'll have them."

I was so caught on the back foot by all this I paid my €55 to the doctor's receptionist and next door I just handed the prescriptions to the pharmacist. While he filled them he started asking about whether or not I had a rebate card. Then he got me to fill in a form. Then he got me to sign something. Then the fucker asked me for eighty Euro.

"In the name of Jaysus the-most-fucking-merciful!"

I had to use my Laser card to pay for my usual medicine, a pill for my chesty cough, and a rub for my scabby leg. And for those bloody diet pills I now hear give you the droop and make you lick rusty nails.

I'm still not drinking and I'm still losing about four pounds in weight a week.

Bastard doctors.

My health appears to be someone else's wealth.

Dodging the bullet. Or not.

We were on the hunt for a bed for our teensy teeny guest bedroom today. A couple of weekends ago we went to a particular furniture showroom and picked one out. But we had to make sure of some measurements before we could put the cash on the nail as it were, so it took until today to pay for it and confirm an order. I'm sure the salesman thought "Yeah, right!" when we said we'd go away and come back, but we did! That's €375 we won't see again in a hurry. Nor, for that matter, will we see the bed because they haven't the colour we prefer in stock. I shall await their phone call of confirmation with bated breath.

The last time we went into the furniture store four doors up "just to have a look" we ended up buying a herd of leather furniture for €4,000. I should have known better than to look in there again today, but we need some refurbished dining room chairs. Of course "refurbished" can so easily turn into "replacement". And it's a teensy teeny step from "replacement chairs" to "whole new diningroom table and chairs". (I draw the line at "whole new diningroom table and chairs" and refuse absolutely the notion of "whole new diningroom suite, including chairs, table, sideboard and lamp.")

So, we're trying to find €1,500. And I only went into the store wanting six chairs.

Now it looks like those leather covered high-backed, sprung, diningroom chairs with the brown, distressed-effect diningroom table will just *have* to be bought.

My poor wage packet.

Lost Property and finding it

From The Dublin South-West Forum on February 1st 2005

I remember when I was in my late teens and the victim of a continual thirst I boarded the 54 bus for town and raced the bus conductor to a wad of banknotes lying in the middle of the upstairs aisle. I figured the powers that be had put some drinking money my way. The bus conductor thought the same as I handed him a share of the notes. At least he did until I said:

"I don't suppose they're yours to begin with?"

He looked aghast and started patting pockets. He seemed satisfied that his float was intact. Finally he rolled me a ticket and went on his way. Neither of us gave a thought to who might have lost the cash.

Once while walking through Firhouse late at night I found a small black faux leather purse which contained one moped key and a £20 note. My conscience about the earlier incident must have pricked, because I handed the whole thing into the Garda station in Tallaght the next day and thought no more about it. A statutory year and a day later I received a postcard to say it had been transferred in the interim to the Lost Property office in Kevin Street (I think) station. As non-one had claimed it, it was mine. Otherwise, it would go to charity. I suppose it must have done so, because I wasn't bothered to go look for it then.

The other evening one of our household lost his wallet, much to his chagrin as it contained a student pass and a bus ticket as well as the remainder of a week's money. After pulling the house apart he went for his bus and the driver, who knew him from coming and going, said "There you are", passed him the missing wallet. It had been handed up, liberated of its cash contents somewhere along the line. He was glad to get it even so.

This afternoon on another Tallaght bus I had just sat down when the man in front spied a brown leather wallet stuck down the edge of the seat. Someone had put it in their pocket, only it wasn't the pocket it had lodged in. I wondered what he'd do.

He was elderly, so I thought a little social experiment would prove the honesty of the older generation. I sat impassively a seat behind as he riffled through the contents. He nonchalantly put the wallet in his pocket.

You could almost *see* his conscience working. As the bus wound its way from The Square he came to a decision. (What was my experiement going to prove?) He reached into his pocket, pulled out maybe three €20 notes from the wallet (I was watching in the reflection of the window) and folded them neatly into the pocket of his coat. Then he approached the driver like a good citizen and handed up the remains of the lost property.

When the bus stopped outside the Technical College in Tallaght he obviously was struck again because he suddenly jumped up from his seat. Not to hand over the money though: he got off instead at the Village Green stop and the last I saw of him he was almost at the bookies. Maybe he was on his way to put a few bets on some horses -- his luck was in, after all -- or he could have walked on and gone into Molloys pub to do what I did with my luck: pour it down a drain.

Human nature, do you think?