Sunday 28 April 2019

I was painting last night and this suddenly occurred to me.

I don't know where this came from, although I do really since London has been beset with ranting protesters for over a fortnight.

    It might become a short story, or even a novel. I might not even carry on with it at all, but it amused me enough to wake she-who-must-not-be bugged from her slumber with my juvenile giggling.


Sometime during the night a whirlwind had swept through the kitchen. It must have been a very quiet tempest I thought to myself, wading through broken cups, scattered table cloths and the overturned table in order to make myself a cup of tea. Outside the broken window everything on the street looked normal. No signs of whatever had befallen my house. No mangled cars, or equally mangled bodies. No streetlamps inserted into other people’s houses; in fact nothing at all except the ground zero that was my kitchen.
    Finally, mug in hand, steam curling sideways from the frigid draft billowing through the windows, I waited. I knew what had happened of course; or more to the point, what was about to happen.
    And it did happen several seconds later after a muffled grunt and thud as something heavy and probably lethal was dragged from under the stairs preceding the form of my wife. I didn’t speak, and even if I had I knew whatever I’d have said would be brushed away in a torrent equal to, or even dwarfed by the mobile hurricane my wife had become. From the sweet, quiet and embarrassingly deferential woman to whom I’d been married these twelve years the virago now standing before me bristled with barely suppressed fury. 
    As always a fight was coming. Not because of my chagrin that another thousand pounds or so was about to be added to our monthly bills, but simply because I would neither attempt to stop her, or even worse, offer to accompany my former sweetness on this, her new crusade. I knew better than to ask her what it was about for that would just increase her rage to epic proportions.
    ‘Come on, come on,’ she stuttered, simultaneously stealing my tea and swiping every last vestige of makeup she might have missed before going to bed the night before. I noticed that she hadn't showered, either. Personal hygiene seemed to be an absolute no-no on one of these missions.‘We haven’t got long.’
    I was not going. This time my mind was made up. I had refused every single time over the last twelve years, but as always my strength had been unequal to hers and as a result I’d shivered, sweated, screeched slogans I’d never before heard and understood even less until being forced away by water cannon, set upon by snarling dogs, choked with pepper spray, tear gas and on one occasion arrested.
    Once, after spending twelve hours cooped up with uncountable sweating, swearing maniacs of both genders, I’d been let off with a caution, and an injunction to divorce, leave or slaughter the mad bitch who’d handcuffed herself to me and super-glued her left breast to the hand of the unfortunate copper who’d finally detached himself with a heroic shrug. To the piercing scream of my wife and combined baying for blood after a clear demonstration of police brutality among the thousand or so other maniacs assembled outside the nuclear power plant, that had already been decommissioned a year before we’d arrived.

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