Pastry Tales

On a miserable Wednesday daytime, during which I have been relatively productive, I thought I’d use the time available and my current motivation to write another post.

“Cripes!” I hear you (singular) shout, “You haven’t written anything for about 5 months!”. Well, don’t get too comfortable in that seat of yours, because this won’t take long (I am saying this without any knowledge of how long this post is going to be, so please feel free to call me a liar/deceiver/blaggard should this go on for too long….which it may already be).

Well, dear Reader (singular), follow me on this journey into the realms of my mind and hopefully we will both learn something….

The productivity that I grandly asserted was currently in my possession has involved the completion of a number of exciting jobs: Getting the rear passenger tyre on my car replaced with another (same shape), calling the landlord of the flat above us and getting him to agree to pay for the leaking ceiling we have in our boiler cupboard, washing the work shirts I need for the rest of the week, and dropping off some donations to the local charity shop, which have been hanging around the flat for far too long.

I can tell that you believe the excitement in my story is building.  Hey, keep reading and you’ll find an incredible punchline that will have you rolling around the floor with tears in your eyes, and possibly a little bit of urine in your pants. This dramatic reaction may come from the stark realisation that you have wasted a few minutes of your life (depending on how fast you read) in absorbing all the inanity that has come and all there is to follow.  You will never get those minutes back and I’m afraid there is no benefit whatsoever, to me or to you (singular).

Well, the main event of today was that, during the time in which my (offside rear) tyre was being replaced, I hit a baby.

Not on purpose, of course, but I thought that creating a new paragraph would increase the impact of that sentence.

And that one.  I thought I’d spend the 30 minutes that the mechanics were working on the car to have a coffee and read my book, or at least a few pages of it.  The problem with entering the café, was that the door was a one-way external-to-internal push door (in doorman’s jargon).  This in itself was not the problem, but the baby in question was standing up (OK, it was a toddler) staring out of the lower window pane, with its hands on the glass, seemingly mimicking Dustin Hoffman at the end of ‘The Graduate’, but with a little less gusto and/or power of speech.

Before you say anything, I didn’t just push the door and knock the child sprawling….I pushed the door, sent the child sprawling and knocked over the pushchair that it was supposed to be in, sending a clatter of plastic toys across the the parquet flooring.  No harm was done; the child was scooped up by its mother, who barely listened to my apologies, seeming to realise that her lack of concentration whilst choosing pastries had resulted in a potential situation that could have engendered in her the beginning of a feeling of life-long guilt.  Her penchant for pains-au-chocolat could have resulted in the maiming of her child and had I not been the meek, British, gentle door-opener that I am, afraid of imposing my presence as a customer to the nations shopkeepers, the situation could have been much worse.

As a brief aside, I would just like to mention that none of the above encounter is true.  The child was standing by the door window, but I didn’t open the door until the mother had scooped her up.  She apologised to me and I was the one that chose a baked good and sat down with a coffee.

I will have to ask myself why I feel that fabricating a not-that-amusing-and-frankly-a-bit-worrying story is a good thing to do.