I went out with a member of the Sealed Knot once

The reason for exposing this hitherto undeclared piece of information is entirely due to having just watched the funny/infuriating period/modern day film ‘Tristram Shandy: A Cock and Bull Story’ of which more later; maybe.

The subtitle for this piece should be ‘Infuriation‘.

Insert parental advisory warning about possible strong language here.

I am bloody infuriated.

I’m reading ‘All Fun and Games until Someone Loses an Eye’ by Christopher Brookmyre.

And it’s infuriating.

How – no, go on, answer the bloody question f’crissake – how on bloody hell’s earth is it possible for Mr Brookmyre (a Scotsman, by all that is wholly! And yes, I deliberately used the ‘W’ word!) to be such a bloody good bloody good (I know I said it twice!) bloody writer?

Huh?

How is it possible?

Driving back from today’s combined training competition (of which perhaps more another time) I find my head full of Brookmyre-esque catch-phrases.

The trouble is he’s already bloody thought of them.

B’stard!

But the thing is…

He’s such a bloody clever writer.

Not in a devious, manipulative way (though he is a devious and manipulative writer, but just not on the same level of cleverness that his authorship inhabits because his authorship is on a whole higher level).

I mean an intelligently clever writer.

He has the gift of capturing the zeitgeist in effortless prose.

Anyway, as we drove back The Lovely S looked at me and said ‘Brookmyre’s really inspiring you isn’t he?’

Yes.

I don’t know why he’s inspiring me (I know I could never even get close to sharpening his pencils) but yes, yes, yes, yes, yes – he is.

So I declared, ‘What we need to do is come up with some Brookmyreish turns of phrase.’

Time passed – not much, but a little.

And we spoke similar thoughts aloud at the same time about – strangely – the same previously undiscussed topics.

I giggled and announced ‘We’re having a Bluetooth moment’.

Really zeitgeisty, eh?

I love that phrase – but you can’t have it.

I’ve copyrighted it, registered it and trademarked it – not the word Bluetooth, I mean the whole phrase, ok?

It’s mine.

Anyway since the groundbreakingly historical moment of me coining a phrase to sum up the here and now that our early 21st Century zeitgeist truly is…

Since then.

We did lots of things at the yard.

We stopped off at McDonalds drive-through for a milkshake and McFlurry each (what can I say? It’s hot and we were both very dehydrated).

Then we retired wickedly to bed (it was 18.00) where various things occurred – including the watching of the aforementioned ‘Tristram Shandy: A Cock and Bull Story’.

OK, now for that film.

I’m not going to do a full crit of it.

But it was funny.

And also infuriating.

But there was a scene in it in which a gang of period-costumed extras (led by the side-achingly funny Rob Brydon) charge across an open field in the dead of night while the dark is lit by coloured flares.

Flip back a number of years to the time I went out with a member of the Sealed Knot.

Should I add at this point that it was a girl? Or that we went out once before – at the end of the evening – we agreed upon a divorce based on historical incompatibilities?

I’ve only just realised that I’m wittering on about period pieces and the current photo in the header of this blog contains an image of me in a different kind of period costume!

Anyway, knowing just a little about the period I asked what activities the re-enactment females got up to while the re-enactment chaps all ran around pretending to be musketeers or pikemen or poachers or NCP car-park attendants or whatever.

‘Oh, we girls just stand around and gossip or sit around and knit and gather leaves and wood for fires. The more adventurous skin rabbits.’

Wow.

I wonder what the infuriatingly clever Christopher Brookmyre would have to say about such oddball behaviour?

He’d probably think about it for 2.48383325954 nanoseconds before making an acidly burning observation that compared yesteryear’s domestic drudgery with today’s slogging up and down aisles in Sainsbury looking for the right kind of toilet cleaner.

Infuriating.

B.