Postal Distancing

It’s the postmen, isn’t it? [Isn’t what? – Ed.]

It just struck me the other morning when the local version knocked the door and ran. He does that to indicate that he has left on the granite doorstep a delivery that is too big for the letterbox. The letterbox, although on the door, is in the wrong place, but that is because the front door was purchased without the requisite consultation with me first. It is way down at the bottom of the door, meaning the postman, or woman if he is a woman, has to bend way down to stuff letters through our door. I blame the designer of the door, obviously, who, equally obviously, must have some long-standing grudge against postmen, even if they are women. But I also blame the person from my immediate household who, in what can only be termed an act of blatant disobedience, went and ordered the door without running it past me first. (The image of Part-Time Wife running past me carrying a front door has just flashed into what remains of my mind, and tickled it.)

She has done similar things in the past, and surely there comes a time when even the most slow-witted of creatures should be expected to glean something from experience? In the Irish language, you can actually buy such experience; it is called ciall cheannaithe, but no one ever tells you where the shop is that sells it; I suppose the point is that you have to find that out for  yourself. So there is a strimmer on wheels (wtf! is right) lying rusting in my shed, along with a toaster that was the ‘wrong’ colour (your guess is as good as mine) and a slow cooker (if I wanted my cooking done slowly, I would not have sacked the Venezuelan chef, whose idea of a quick fry-up had to be timed to be believed, and eaten about four hours after he started on the job). None of these are plugged in, by the way, as I do not permit electricity into the shed: it has enough free reign in the rest of the World without barging into my personal space. The toaster that was the ‘wrong’ colour was actually purchased by me, but apparently on this particular occasion I should have pre-OKayed [that is not word, never mind a verb! -Ed.] (Is it not? Look it up) that purchase with Part-Time Wife. It seems that there would have been some deficiency in the quality of the toast produced by said machine as it did not match her highly co-ordinated colour scheme for the country-kitchen-style country kitchen. The other items (purchased by her without my say-so) are bound for the dump whenever that chore gets to the top of my endless list of things to do, but the toaster is staying: it works perfectly well, and once your woman is out of my hair and heading for her peaty bed, I will whip it out immediately and plug it in beside the other one and they can fight it out between themselves for survival. There will be a lot of toast to make at that wake, and both of them will have their work cut out for them to satisfy demand.

Practically has always been my watchword when it comes to aesthetics and interior design, and as I am slightly colourblind, I would not give a fiddler’s were this keyboard bright pink so long as it worked. If you asked me now what colour the walls in my walk-in wardrobe are, any answer would only be a guess even though I left it not five minutes ago having dressed in my Superman Outfit for dress-down Friday, and the guess would only involve primary colours as they are the only ones that exist for men. Whatever the Hell shade taupe is will forever remain a mystery to half of the World’s population as the only colours available to us are those available in the rainbow.

Speaking of Horslips, I must give Barry Devlin a ring. [What is the point? You know by now what he is like – Ed.] In this here song, he has the line “ignorant of rainbows”, and I need at some point to contact him about it to a) ask his permission to use it as the title of my fourth novel, and b) find out what he was smoking at the time he came up with it and what he thought the line meant then. That fourth novel is proving tricky to pin down. Not only do I have neither characters nor plot for it – all I have is the title, really – I have not yet written novels two and three, so the fourth novel is, justifiably in its eyes, dragging its heels a bit and refusing to buckle down to work until the matter acquires a little more urgency in the temporal sphere. (Is Time actually a sphere? I must check with Toilets; I always assumed it was elliptical, or a double helix. I see the Brits are at it again in that link: what in bejaysus is an ‘American-English poet’? Someone who writes poetry in American English one would presume, which Toilets didn’t. Instead it is yet another pathetic attempt by The Empire to claim for itself people born in other countries.)

But, yeah, the postmen. It struck me [did you strike it back? – Ed.] like the end of all our wanderings that it’s the postmen who are the weakest link. More sinister still, it is the postmen, especially the female ones, who are actually distributing covid-19 throughout the community, along with the letters. Actually on the letters. The picture above shows one such postman in the very act of killing a cocooned pensioner. No one I know has been disinfecting their mail for the past 65 days (although some have been disinfecting their male, to give them their Jew) so it is glaringly, blindingly obvious that the postmen have been the super-spreaders. I will have to phone up Leo about this, and tell him to let everyone else out of solitary confinement but to lock up fir an phoist, go háirithe más mná iad.

The postmen definitely have the opportunity for this crime against the public. As for their motive … I will work on that for the next day. Surely they are not that angry about a couple of dog bites?