Mil's Mailing List Mail #37

The family is on holiday at the moment. While they're living it up as one can do only in Baden-Württemberg, I'm stuck here. I have too much work to do to take any time off. Margret phoned me the other night.
"We're having sex as soon as I get back," she says.
"OK," I reply, making a note in my diary to clip my toenails and cancel a meeting. There's no reasoning with her when she's made her mind up about things, but I do inwardly hope that she's more than usually flexible at least about the 'as soon as' - as Arrivals at Birmingham airport has cold stone floors and, in any case, I can't perform properly when worrying we might not make it to the car before the parking crosses over into a higher tariff period.
"Though..." she muses, "my sister is coming back to stay with us. So we might have to send her out." Beat. "For five minutes." On the other end of the phone I hear Margret collapse into a laughing fit that will surely leave her needing an oxygen tent. Ahh - just ten days in Germany and she's firing on all comedy cylinders again.

Moving on rapidly, I must mention something that came up after the last, proper, Mail - the one that included the Spanish questionnaire in all its impenetrable glory. Now, I don't want you to think I've got a thing against the Spanish: for a start, it would detract from the reality of my having a thing against the French. But it seems that the questionnaire wasn't an isolated example of the bizarre way in which the Spanish mind works. Someone at a radio station over there was due to be sent a copy of the Spanish translation of the TMGAIHAA novel. It didn't arrive. Later, however, he got a message from the Spanish postal service saying that they couldn't find the address: this notification was, of course, received by post.

This, by the way, nudgingly reminds me of a protracted argument I once had with a woman from the splendidly inept Deutsche Bundespost when I lived in Germany. I'd made my own envelope for a letter, and this woman said she couldn't send it, as - because it was constructed from a magazine photo of two semi-naked women wrestling in mud - it would be rejected as unacceptable by the postal service of the destination country. A position that falls down really pretty fatally when one considers that the country in question was Australia. Australia.

Right, before I leave you to get back to a pummelling excess of work, let me finish by demonstrating my brilliant social skills.

I was in London, partly for an acquaintance's book launch, the other week. Oh, by the way, call me wacky, but I'm on the 'against' side of the fence when it comes to blowing up innocent commuters. Being a devout atheist, I'm especially unreceptive to the line that you're murdering people on the basis of - as, self-evidently, all religions are - fairy stories. "Respect us: we are the military wing of Narnia." However, I'm rather obliged to the London bombers, as their desire to instil random, perpetual fear in us all means that I can now show my brimming contempt for them by the simple action of, say, getting on a bus, or walking along Warren Street, or catching the Tube. If they could find some way to arrange it so that, even dozing fitfully on the sofa, I was beaming out discernable waves, 'Chk - fuck you, you adolescent-brain bed wetters. Do you think that we don't all know that your entire psychology was formed by frantic masturbation under hugged duvets immediately followed by bleak, sweaty periods of constant self-loathing?' then I'd be forever grateful.

But anyway, back to the point. I was in London for the week, and during it I went to a book launch party. Before I'd gone down there, a chum had said, 'Oh, (Successful Novelist) is coming. You have to meet him - I know you'd really get on.' That's 'get on', I must stress for future reference, not 'get it on'. It turns out that Successful Novelist was detained and so he couldn't get there until later, by which time we were all in the tiniest bar in London. At this point, I was chatting to someone else about something, and, in doing so, swept my arm out to the side in a flourish of gesticulation. This occurred at precisely the moment that Successful Novelist came through the doorway of the microscopic bar. The result was that he walked in to the room to have my open hand placed perfectly and directly on his crotch. I stared at him wide-eyed: my body frozen in a stance of accidental, homoerotic distress. 'Ah, Successful Novelist, I've heard a lot about you,' I said suavely, to distract from the fact that I was cupping his testicles.

I left shortly afterwards, as conversation seemed a little tense.

Mil.