Recent Disasters Roundup

The lack of posts about personal disasters (wot no car crashes?) of late might have led you to believe that I am enjoying a quiet spell in life. Let me disabuse you of that charming notion:

I nearly died

When I was a kid I was allergic to – in no particular order – cats, dogs, feathers, pine trees, nuts, penicillin, eggs, dust mites and grass seeds. I blame my mum.

Over the years they’ve mostly got better. I still sneeze and stop breathing in the presence of cats but other than penicillin (typically enough the most widely used and effective antibiotic in the world, natch) and a bit of lingering reaction to dust and pine trees it doesn’t really affect my life much.

Oh – and nuts.

Nuts are my kryptonite. So when I go out for a meal I generally ask the proprietors about nuts. It’s either that or death, really. So it was a works night out and we went for a Chinese banquet. I diligently checked the menu and decided to get my own main course rather than share the banquet – which had satay and therefore peanuts.

But first… starters! Prawn toast, yum! Crispy seaweed… yum yum! Won Ton…. mmmmm! Spare ribs… oooo…. err…

Now. I have – as my waistline bears eloquent testimony – eaten many many hundreds of spare ribs in my time. It’s just not something that’s on my watchlist for peanut contamination. But evidently in Ripon they do things differently. My heart yammered madly in my chest and my fingers started to tingle. Worse, my lips and tongue were itching madly and my throat was rapidly closing.

Eventually it did close. Completely. But luckily below my windpipe. I could breathe, but I desperately desperately wanted to be sick. I just couldn’t. My stomach was like a ball of tightly compressed pain that I couldn’t relieve. A trip to hospital followed, accompanied by adrenalin shots, Piriton and a friendly nurse.

Current status: not only alive, but  made it back to the restaurant in time for ice cream

I have blood and brains on my carpet

I was working from home recently when I looked up and – unexpectedly – saw a mouse sitting in the middle of the floor. Hmm. Being the soft-hearted liberal nancy boy that I am, I went out and bought some nicey-nicey humane traps, baited them and put them around the house.

For two weeks, the mouse playfully nudged the trap shut and absconded with the bait somehow without ever getting caught. The little scamp. Eventually, my wife tired of the game and demanded that I bring fatal justice down on the little motherfuckah in retaliation for the little piles of droppings it was leaving behind the sofa.

Within 30 minutes of putting down a proper lethal trap, the mouse was squashed and the tale ended. Until a week later when I received a text from my wife while rehearsing with the band: “Oh my god. There’s a fucking mouse in the bedroom!”

When I arrived home, she was asleep on the sofa because – in the manner of girls everywhere – she wasn’t going to share her bedroom with anything with such a tiny cock. Or something. Anyway, in the meantime my dad had been down and put one of the traps in the bedroom. I wandered up to look and ‘see if it was safe’ for my wife to return to bed.

Sure enough, the mouse’s tiny little mouse head had been smashed to buggery by the trap. And his tiny little mouse brains had spurting out onto the carpet. And his tiny little mouse heart had evidently pumped all of his tiny little blood out of his ears onto the carpet also. Apparently the average mouse somehow contains 3 litres of blood. Who knew? Carpet = fuxored.

Status: currently looking for a mouseblood Stain Devil.

I nearly drowned the kids

About my favourite landscape feature in the world is Filey Brigg – a spur of rock that juts out around half a mile into the North Sea from Filey’s northern headland. It is a place of many moods, sometimes tossed by dramatic breakers that smash on the rocks. On Saturday it was stunned into calm by the sun… the mirror flat sea lapping gently at the timeworn stones as we frolicked with the kids, looking for crabs and other interesting rock pool denizens.

Now. When the tide comes in, the Brigg is quickly cut off from the beach. If you’re still on the Brigg when that happens, you can either wait there for 8 short hours until the tide retreats or you can scramble up the cliff face via some ancient and unsafe stairways that periodically tumble into the churning seas below.

So when you go out onto the Brigg, you’d better know when the tides are coming in. We did this the proper, official way: asking Some Woman We Just Passed. She assured us with some authority that the tide wouldn’t be high till 2:30. At 12:30 I decided we should start heading back. Her information, it transpired as we dragged the kids screaming through some foamy surf, was incorrect.

Status: avoiding drowning, had an adventure!

The car blew up

Me and cars don’t go that well. Which is unlucky as I have to drive around 400 miles minimum every week for work (40 miles from home), football (23 miles from home) and the band (9 miles from home).

Having had it for 5 years and several adventures the car will be paid off in a couple of weeks and I was very much looking forward to spending the £200 a month it costs on other stuff. Typically, it blew up just before it was going to be officially 100% mine – to the tune of £900.

Current status: I owe the bank nothing. I owe my dad £900

I put my phone through the wash

Arriving home from Filey my jeans were a disgrace. Full of sand, curry sauce stains, tide marks and the stench of anchovy. I dropped them messily on the floor as I undressed. Later I chucked them in the wash basket. And from there, into the washing machine.

“Oh. Hang on. How come I haven’t heard from anyone tonight? Where’s my phone come to think of it?”

Ah.

Current status: fucked.

Here endeth the news.