Teashop Times

It was another windy day today and people outside the teashop were bending almost double in their attempts to cross the road. Railings were used like a horizontal ladder to maintain stability, puffer jackets ballooned and hats disappeared like frisbees to foreign parts.

In the middle of this, the old lady who owned the teashop slowly sauntered down the path utterly immune to the chaos around her, almost as if she existed on a different plane. Not for the first time, I wondered if we oversimplified the physical world with our schoolboy Newtonian assumptions.

Inside the teashop it was business as usual. A middle-aged couple came in and proceeded to cough and splutter in all directions for about ten minutes, apparently oblivious to all common sense and recent NHS advice. It occurred to me that the population was now evenly split between trembling neurotics walking in the middle of the road with masks on, and superspreading morons who were totally committed to the annilation of humankind.

Interestingly, the couple in question didn't exchange a single word during the remainder of their stay and I wondered whether the coughing had actually been a primitive form of communication. Perhaps, after thirty years of marital taciternity their voice boxes had atrophied, and their tongues were now shrunken to the size of pimples.

It didn't effect their appetites though, and large volumes of grease and tea disappeared down their gullets like solar systems being drawn into a black hole.

While the man finished off (apparently trying to slice the plate as well as the bacon) the women stared at him with the murderous venom of Caligula...

On a bad hair day.