Forgive me. I’m listing a little to starboard tonight. An exhausting day at the hospital followed last night’s late trip home from Manchester where I enjoyed a meal with the crew from the production company. Not that I drank a thing given my duties this afternoon. In fact, my not drinking was possibly the talking point of the evening.
‘I don’t drink,’ I explained as I sat behind my tall glass of juice in a bar in central Manchester.
The crowd went silent, shuffled uneasily on their stools. A few looked to the ceiling and began to pom pom their way through some Benjamin Britten. Then, when the pom poms ran out and the silence became too much, Desperation elbowed its way for a seat at the table.
‘I think we need to get you a few sins,’ said one of the braver members of the production crew. I believe it was the director.
‘Oh, don’t worry about Richard,’ said my producer and the man I owe for this current gig. ‘Richard will have plenty of sins. I bet he’s the type of chap who likes to have bulldog clips attached to his nether regions.’
Bulldog clips?
This afternoon, I spent a quiet couple of hours sitting at a bedside beside a sleeping patient, reading my Wodehouse and otherwise pondering this strange statement. To be quite open about it: I’ve never had a single sexual thought about a bulldog clip in my life. Trips to Ryman The Stationer have never been carnal delights. I’m beginning to wonder what I’m missing given that there is no aspect of the bulldog clip that excites me in the slightest. Are there bulldog clip fetishists out there, holding bulldog clip parties? Do bulldog clips even have a single innocent usage? I know I’ve never bought one and, at the moment, I can’t think of reasons to do so.
