One particular downside to the credit crunch is that the smug middle-classes are choosing to stay in Blighty for their holidays, instead of being kind to the rest of us and taking themselves off to Tuscany or the South of France as they normally would.
There is something about this lot that gets right on my dick. Whether it be that they are completely oblivious to anyone who is not exactly like themselves, or the fact that they can’t even walk down the street without languidly draping themselves over on another like an old shawl, I don’t know. It wasn’t just me who was gritting his teeth at the sight, sound and smell of them though, Jason was in a right fume.
“They’re bloody everywhere!” he raged “There was a whole family of ’em clogging up the mini-mart this morning. Some great drip of a woman with a bunch of really miserable-looking teenage kids. All I could hear was her whining ’oh darling!’ at them. The little shits should be grateful they’re getting a holiday at all! We used to make do with a caravan in Weymouth, and it had no mains water!”
“I know”, I said “And at Christmas all you got was a Satsuma and a lump of coal in your stocking!”
“Oh come off it, Gray”, he said “You’ll be glad to see the back of ’em too”.
“My brother-in-law”, I said (aka the Fat Slob) “Has informed me that he’s going off on a golfing-holiday to Spain, this is after months of him whingeing about how he’s practically on the breadline. Clearly his definition of being broke is vastly different to mine!”
“Yeah”, he replied “Funny how they can always conveniently lay their hands on a few grand innit!”
We both felt much better after all this. But, to mis-quote Jesus, the middle-classes are always with us. That was brought home to me again a short while later when, on walking round the village, I saw signs posted at regular intervals saying: ’THIS WAY TO ROJE AND NICOLE’S PARTY’. None of the signs seemed to follow any special pattern, so I couldn’t work out exactly where this shindig from Hell was going to take place. Even so, I had images of (at best) hour upon hour of bland, forgettable music thumping across the village accompanied by shrieks and annoying laughter, or (at worst) some apocalyptic Facebook event ending in a massed brawl, riot police being brought in, and the whole village being trashed.
So I took Misty to Darklight Cove for the evening, and we spent a quiet time on the chilly beach there, with the nuclear reactor thrumming away in the background, and the forbidding grey sea stretching featurelessly ahead. It was wonderful. Not a loud, boring, braying voice anywhere to be heard.
After sunset we picked up some fish-and-chips in a nearby village and ate them in a layby on the long marsh road, not far from Purple Velvet Trousers’s house. When we went to go home, we drove past there,, avid with a sort of macabre curiosity. The house was lit up like a beacon, and in one of the upstairs windows we could see himself,, standing there looking out. As we drove past, he reached up and seemed to mime putting a gun to his head.
I have no idea what all that was about at all. And I don’t much care in all honesty.