20/08/05 - Dog
Sometimes, not seeing is good. It allows you to do things that secretly everyone wants to do but wouldn't be able to get away with. Such as brushing against a nice stranger's hand, or kicking over a cup of coffee on some idiot's new cream carpet, or spearing with your heel the tail of tat man's neighbour's fluffy white dog.
This ridiculously wet creature has pricky-up ears that poke through two holes in a lacy bonnet, big, black, watery, 'love-me' eyes and a piece of grubby pink ribbon tied in a bow at the end of its waggedy tail. The dog's owner (who has a piece of similar ribbon tied around her ponytail) likes to push the pooch around in a pram inhabited by a menagerie of other fluffy white animals with vacuous faces, only these kind come from high-street card shops and garages, and clutch red satin hearts embroidered with 'I love you' in white joined-up writing. The baby/dog hybrid is evidently either too precious to put one booty-clad paw in front of the other and walk for itself, or its owner has failed to notice that, while all the other animals enjoying the ride are stuffed, the dog is real. Tat man says I'm unkind. 'It can't walk because it's very old,' he says. 'It doesn't walk because the owner is barking,' I reply.
When the dog's not in its pram, it sits (just out of my line of vision) yapping on a mat on the landing beside tat man's front door. I've trodden on its feeble little tail three times now.
27/08/05 - wedding
Last weekend my friend got married. The wedding was a predictable affair. The female guests did air kissing and shrill exclamations of 'I love your hat!' and 'You look fantastic! Have you lost weight?' Later, the same lipsticky mouths muttered about the same people: 'What was with the dead bird on her head?!' and 'Christ! Did you see her bulging out of that dreadful lilac outfit?' The male guests didn't notice/care who wore what, and instead did lots of back-slapping and called everyone 'mate'.
The bride was satisfied because her meringue moment had at last arrived. The groom was relieved because he'll never again have to look at the jewellery page in the Argos catalogue. The uncles were drunk, and the aunts finally stopped asking if wedding bells were on the horizon and started asking about the patter of tiny feet.
There was a recent dumpee who had to leave for a weep when the DJ played Angels and a bridesmaid who spent all day internally lamenting her lack of love, silently screaming, 'It should have been me!' and cursing the bride for putting her in an unflattering, egg-yellow, backless, strapless satin dress.
I shared a hotel room with the best man (a platonic friend from school) who had a hypothesis that weddings were good places to pull. He was right. I awoke next morning to find an egg-yellow dress on the bathroom floor and a naked bridesmaid lying dehydrated and panda-eyed in his arms.