Hi, I’m Apple…
…and I’m Ginger.
We were just chatting to Chlorine Doreen. She works as a lifeguard at the swimming baths, Upton Splash. She’s the only person who can visit someone in hospital and not notice the funny smell because she smells the same.
She’s had a busy day. One swimming customer was a television director on a gardening series. the producer thought the programme needed “sexing up,” hate that expression, so next week they’re doing a programme where the Metropolitan Police will be giving a man’s garden a makeover as they look for the body of his wife and three children who went missing last year.
She was also chatting with someone who had emigrated to this country and had nothing but criticism about the people, the culture, the politics, the music, the history, the weather and everything else and who was living off benefits with his wife and eleven children and who said he couldn’t work because of post-traumatic stress disorder and didn’t want to go back to his former country because he was a witness to a massacre. He wasn’t typical of those who emigrate.
Well, Chlorine Doreen was so pissed off by his attitude that she told him straight that massacres happen in the western world as well, people suffer from post-traumatic stress disorder too and they don’t moan, they’re just pleased to be alive. No-one left New York after 9/11, no-one left London after the 2005 terrorist attacks, nor Scotland after Dunblane.
She told him one man’s leaving is another man’s running away, people involved in massacres in the western world haven’t run away, they haven’t given in to terrorists and maniacs and they don’t moan about it and he should get a grip and decide what he really expects out of life and whether he’s being realistic. As an immigrant herself, he upset her!
Chlorine Doreen is a very sensitive soul.
Well, aren’t we all?
But if she sees or hears anything or anyone being selfish, unfair, thoughtless, or bullying there’s no stopping her. She delights in bullying bullies. She’s firm, but fair, She doesn’t take any prisoners, ever. She also has a lot to deal with at home with her husband.
He’s not seriously ill in some way is he?
Worse! He’s a ‘Doctor Who’ fan and he’s just getting over concussion at the moment.
Do tell.
He hit his head on the car roof while he was looking for his David Tennant action figure, passed out in the hallway and when he came to he thought he’d regenerated. She tried to console him as he went over to the mirror and complained about his new face, then he went out into the garden and said the whole house and garden were bigger on the inside than the outside, said he “didn’t like it” and passed out again in the garden.
I think the only thing about him that’s bigger on the inside rather than the outside is his brain until the swelling goes down.
When he came to again he said “sorry about that, Brigadier, won’t happen again” and then told Chlorine Doreen to get down because there were two Daleks in the garden. She told him “they’re not Daleks, they’re dustbins” and she took him inside. she was just getting him to relax and stop calling her Brigadier when the phone rang. He answered it before she had chance to stop him and went very serious again and said “there’s a Cyberman on the phone.” She had a listen and told him “that’s not a Cyberman, that’s an automated sales call, just put the phone down.” She just got him setttled again and the doorbell rang. He answered it with his sonic screwdriver in his hand and shouted for her to take cover because there was a Sontaran at the door. She told him “that’s not a Sontaran, that’s a short, bald man selling something” and she closed the door.
Is he any better now?
No, at the moment he’s in the garage with the central console detached from the TARDIS trying to get it to work again because of the block the Time Lords have put on his memory of all the dematerialisation codes. Her mother called round and he accused her of being a Slitheen because she farts a lot because of her age and tried to unzip her head. He thought the wheelie bin was a Auton and the trampoline in the garden was Lady Cassandra.
Perhaps the best thing to do would be to knock him on the head again in the hope he’ll wake up normal again.
It would be the philosphical thing to do.
Ginger, what’s philosophy?
It’s when people talk a load of waffle because they don’t know the answer, like politicians and theologians wondering if there’s a God.
I think there’s a God, Ginger.
Well, that would be considered fundamentalism, whereas most philosophers tend to be existentialists.
Ginger, what is fundamentalism and existentialism?
Well, fundamentalism is where people say “I’m right and you’re wrong and if you disagree I’ll bomb your offices” and existentialism is where people say “I don’t know and because I don’t know you can’t know either and if you think you do know, you’re wrong.”
Ginger, what’s life about?
It’s about seventy years and then you’re buggered!
Where does it say that, Ginger?
In the Bible, in a roundabout sort of a way.
Is that what you believe, Ginger?
That’s my philosophy.
Ginger, what’s philosophy?
I think it’s time we philosophised ourselves to sleep. Goodnight folks. See you next Tuesday, philosophically speaking.
themaster1968 