| The Warky Report: Plymouth, England and Tel (all A) 11:50 - Sep 28 with 1049 views | Warkystache |
Swimming with pigs. That's what Tel's been doing in Nassau. Briefly, mind you. He's also been "sunbavin' a lot". He spent good dollars telling me this, in a sort of breathless cockney wheeze that brought to mind Reggie Kray on his deathbed, recanting his jollies.
Yes, welcome back. Sorry for the delay. I did mean to post last Sunday but, after watching the Plymouth game in the pub and being forced to endure the jeers and endless witticisms of non-Town regulars, I felt a bit disillusioned. So I stayed until P came back from work and then meandered my way home, with more than enough drink inside me, the cooler September air steaming around my head, the nights slowly drawing in to dark.
I have two days off, today and tomorrow, courtesy of an excess of flexitime and a big hospital appointment this afternoon. Plus Tel rang on Saturday, at 2pm, finally, the modern equivalent of a postcard from Yarmouth with the usual banalities and the funny-ish story losing something in translation. The hospital appointment was due in 2020 but cancelled, endlessly. It's a mere check-up, with extras which require me to provide samples of bodily fluids. Lovely.
Plymouth first. The pub was three-quarters full of people having their sunday lunch. They do quite a passable one in our local. You pay the most part of £22 and get a choice of soup du jour (homemade carrot and coriander), prawn cocktail in marie rose sauce, pinker than Peppa Pig and possibly not as tasty or frittata with salsa verde, which is basically an omelette filled with cheese and odds of chopped veg and served with a green chilli sauce which provides plenty of sweetness but minimal heat. I skipped the starters. You can. You hand over £15 and get your main, a choice of foil-wrapped, hand-carved roasted meats, a yorkie the size of a football and a chance to plunder the myriad of stoneware dishes holding roast spuds, overcooked cauliflower florets in cheese sauce, pliable carrots, bullet-hard peas, whole roasted onions, something green and floppy that boasted the badly written label 'Spinnach' and a choice of sauces in jars which include horseradish, Colmans, redcurrant jelly, mint sauce, ketchup (yes, and people used it! I know....) and something in a stainless steel sauce boat that looked like it was slowly forming a crust like the pit in Quatermass, but was labelled 'Bread sauce'.
Once piled high, you can return to re-pillage the veggies, but you're not allowed another bit of meat or a yorkshire football. Most people don't. They return first time with a replica of Kilimanjaro sculpted from veg and meat. It's like a convention of "Close Encounters" fans. They leave scraggly scraps of veg and peruse the dessert menu with reborn enthusiasm. The old adage of 'clear your plate' doesn't apply if you've paid for it.
I didn't have a dessert. I was allowed one. My payment meant I could choose two courses. One of them was coffee so I had that with a brandy, which wasn't in the deal but tasted better than the unctuous-looking layers of cream, ice cream and chocolate that people were being waitered. I watched the game as I ate. We scored before half-time. Barely a cheer. The people in the saloon, families, kids chewing open-mouthed, parents head bent hoovering, grandparents picking and keeping a stolid conversation prattling didn't have the footy on. We had to sit and watch in the pool table bit. I say 'we'. It was four of us. Me, two friends and a bloke I'd never seen before who wandered in with his plate and took the table near the bogs and watched with one eye on the screen and the other on his cutlery skills as he cut his roast beef.
Tel hates having Sunday lunch in the local because of the above. Plus he claims that Jamie the Landlord, despite his protestations to the contrary, buys the meat from the cash'n'carry and it's about as 'local' (a boast they make in print on the menu) as Scarborough. Why he says Scarborough is a mystery. He could've picked Whitby.
The second half attracted a few interlopers, blokes in Stone Island picking their teeth with fingernails and clutching pints of Stella mainly. They snorted when they saw who was playing, but stayed and watched. One put two pound coins on the lip of the pool table as a portent of later ownership. Plymouth scored two. One was a foul but Sky hate us, so Chaplin 'walked into him' and therefore it wasn't. We ahhed when lanky Chris Walton hit the bar from a corner, but that was it. First defeat. "Ipswich ain't doin' much then" said the bloke sat near the bogs. The others either left or set up the pool table. My friends and I found a four-seater near the bar and wandered out to buy drinks and do the post-mortem. I stayed too long, chatting to Lisa, the new barmaid when it went quiet. Her boyfriend is an architect. He's building their new home in Bradfield. They applied to go on Grand Designs, but haven't heard back yet. He's building it out of wood and brick. It's got a wet-room with a jacuzzi. At least, it will have. They'll be paying back their loans until they're sixty. They're both 26. I admitted defeat and retired home.
Tel's call was a welcome distraction. Paula worked the whole weekend. She's been offered the Assistant Manager role in the Maldon store and has accepted. We might need to move nearer to Maldon eventually, although the drive isn't too far. She's looking online at houses around Maldon and Heybridge. I quite fancied Mersea, but we probably can't afford it. We definitely don't want Colchester, or Chelmsford. It's unsettling, a bit. I know this isn't her house, but it's been good to me, in spells. She's ambivalent. I suspect she'll want somewhere she can call ours, rather than mine. Still, I've got no mortgage and I had the house evaluated last year and it's worth £380k. Hmmm.
For now, we remain. And luckily we've got friends, one of whom is currently in Nassau, although he's getting ready to leave tomorrow for a flight back to Miami to meet up with his in-laws. Yep, the former newsagent came good at last and rang me, tinnily, from the Bahamas where's he's currently enjoying thunderstorms and high humidity. "Wotcher mate" said the voice, as though from deep in the grave. I said hello and asked how it was going. "Grate" said the voice. "Bin ter sum Aqua fing, done rides'n'that, wife's feelin' a load beddah, she's gone mad buying cloves an' stuff wiv Sandy in Miami' n that. Me and Tone went drinkin'. I've et too much bleedin' lobster'n prawns'n steak. Surf'nturf ev'ry night its been". He broke off to say something, an aside to Mrs Tel. Then she joined me.
"Allo darlin'" she said. She sounded a lot brighter. "We've been to this place called Exuma yesterdy, yer can swim wiv pigs on a beach! Tel din't wanna go in, obviously, reckoned 'e'd get summink off the pig muck in the wartah". Tel joined back. I got a mental image of him snatching the phone back off her. "Ignore 'er" he said laughing. "These pigs are quite friendly though, better than the ones me old grandad used ter keep, they were bleeders for bitin' an' that". They both had second spells on the mobile, him asking me to put bets on England losing to the Germans and also for horses he fancied. We lost on all counts. She blew me a sucking kiss down the phone. I didn't tell them we've been to their house once in the whole time they've been away. It was fine. No dead plants or mishaps. They didn't ask about it.
"See yer Sat'dee fer Pompey" said Tel as he went. They fly home on Friday morning. He said he's got "sum right nice treats' for Paula and I so we've cancelled Trongs on Saturday night in favour of a Chinese round theirs once Paula gets back from work. She doesn't mind. She's only working until four on Saturday.
And that's it. See you Sunday for the Pompey report. I must go. My hospital appointment is at two-fifteen and I need to get to the new M&S in Colchester after for dinner. We didn't go shopping last weekend and consequentially are running low on stores. Mainly wine and beer and finger food. And stuff for dinner. P fancies sausages and mash, and the only potatoes I've got have sprouted digits, so it looks like spuds are on the list.
Enjoy!!
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| The Warky Report: Plymouth, England and Tel (all A) on 13:11 - Sep 28 with 872 views | Meadowlark |
Excellent, as ever, but it should be
"He said he's got "sum right nice treats' for Paula and me......" Not "...and I.....". shouldn't it? |  | | |
| The Warky Report: Plymouth, England and Tel (all A) on 18:59 - Sep 30 with 519 views | BanksterDebtSlave |
Ooh hark at you with your M&S spuds. Hope hospital went ok. xxx |  |
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