Zambia World Wide

Let me try to describe this hairy, dried-out, mean-mouthed, raddled, wire-haired hag to you. Oops, job already done. She had instantly shown her distaste for lairy Scots lads on our first acquaintance, by affecting not to be able to understand me at all. Racism, I call it, but I’m sure she would have deployed a different interpretation and, based on my subsequent relationships with women of all shapes, sizes, ages and intellects, she probably had it bang on (I can be generous now, because, probably being dead, she'll never read this).

Whatever, we both knew that we could never be better than instinctive enemies, without there being any justifiable reason for the position. Stand on me, it wasn’t the first time that that has happened, nor the last. There are some odd people around is how I see it, because I know that I’m a highly personable human. Ask Mum (but not the missus).

We sat there, Sourpuss and I, her typing away with her talons and I trying to read upside down personnel files out of the corner of my eye, when something approaching a scene from Jesus Christ Superstar occurred. Not the crucifixion, they were saving that for me, but the one where He is lowered into the proscenium arch by wire, spectacularly lit and supported by delightful cherubs. Harps strummed, ethereal music drenched the office and a choral harmony completed the heavenly ambience: Roger Browning was with us and, verily, we did worship him from first acquaintanceship, His beauty to observe.

He strode among us tall (okay, I’ll admit that, next to your average Glaswegian, a crouching dwarf has height advantage) and tanned, with perfect teeth, so white they were like an advert for Tippex.  Not only that, when he turned his dazzling smile and full concentration onto a female victim, she was lost forever in his eyes and her sexual fantasies. Even the old bag appeared to be summoning up the necessary juices to have a last crack at a level of satisfaction that had not been visited on her for half a century, if ever.

Dream on, witch features, obviously an entire emergent nation of excited, trembling women were going to be awaiting Roger’s welcome grasp and I was determined to be his faithful follower. It was like a scene from Don Quixote, with me cast as a thick, faithful, corpulent, sexually frustrated Sancho Panza. Not exactly an edifying ambition, but I knew my best opportunity to cast off my burdensome nineteen years of virginity had just walked into the room and if I had to use a more elegant swordsman’s cast-offs to achieve it, I cared not for pride or hygiene.

The Bronzed Sun God had arrived and all was going to be well in the Land of Love & Livingstone, but what The Charlatans were going to make of it, I would have to discover later, hopefully from some distance away.

Copyright Gerry Hodes April 2012

Episode #7: The Scots Lad: Lassitude in Livingstone