Living for Disco

Julia, our receptionist, walks into my office, and says the same thing she always says – pointlessly, because the answer does not matter one jot.

“Rachael, are you busy?”

“Er…”, I look at my screen, which is probably showing my email, or a blog, or occasionally the google home page, for when I am struck with an urgent need to know something obscure, like “contents tartare sauce”, or “dream of corpses significance”.

“Can you help me?” she asks.

“I don’t know. What’s up?”

“My friend had a dream last night when she had shit all over her hands”. She extends her hands to me as if to demonstrate where the shit was. “What does it mean?”

I’m stumped. “I have absolutely no idea.”

“No, it’s ok, I’m looking it up on the internet. But how do you spell shit? Is it s h i t?”

I pause, trying to work out whether she’s likely to find a dream interpretation website that uses the word ’shit’, and wonder whether to tell her to use an alternative, like ‘faeces’ or ‘excrement’, and decide against it.

“Yes” I reply. Succinct, if nothing else, that’s me.

She wanders off, wiping her hands absentmindedly on her skirt.

************

Some kind visitors from South Africa brought a copy of The Express international edition into the office. I fucking hate the tabloids, but it was a joy to see a British newspaper, even if it is crap. I leave it lying on my desk and Kennedy walks in and absentmindedly starts to leaf through it.

“Wow, that palace is big”, he says, showing me a picture of Buckingham Palace. “Where is that palace? Is it in Liverpool?”

I stare at him, confused. “Nooo, I don’t believe it’s in Liverpool,” I reply.

“But the Queen, she is from Liverpool, isn’t it?”

“Er, no. No, the queen isn’t from Liverpool.” I’m trying not to laugh, even though there is no earthly reason why he would know where the queen is from.

“But she supports Liverpool in the football.”

“Does she? I didn’t know that.” I’m struck with a mental image of our monarch sat in front of the TV in a Liverpool shirt with a can of Heineken, shouting “You’ll never walk alone” at the TV, while Prince Philip plays keepy uppy in the corner.

“So where is this palace? Do you have one in every city?”

“It’s in London. No, there’s just that one. And a castle in Windsor. I think that’s it.”

He goes back to the paper, looking thoughtful.

**************

This entry was posted on Friday, July 13th, 2007 at 9:15 am and is filed under Miscellanea, Under African Skies. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.