Wheelistically @ Claire.NU

Tues­day even­ing was spent at the “in-laws” on account of it being their birthday.

In truth, their birth­days are actu­ally a week apart, but what with their tend­ency to bicker like small chil­dren, we give them both their presents on the same day to curb any sulks that might ensue.

We gave J a set of fan­dangly Tefal sauce­pans, which she accep­ted with sur­pris­ingly more grace than I’d envis­aged. You see, she had spent the past however-many-weeks com­plain­ing that women only ever get house­hold goods and that no-one ever thinks about giv­ing a man a Hoover or kit­chen set as a present for his birth­day, how­ever, all this protest­ing was made after we’d com­pleted the pur­chase. Cue us bear­ing gifts with trepidation.

Before she could even get all 7 pans from the box, L in his usual fash­ion was already strug­gling to his feet, puff­ing, pant­ing and cuss­ing, reach­ing inside the box with the stead­fast con­cen­tra­tion and urgency of a sur­geon con­duct­ing an organ bypass and the agil­ity of a tin man set in jelly, to dis­pose of the poly­thene wrap­pers and card inserts.

They don’t call him “Old Busy­body” for noth­ing, you know.

Halfway through this cru­cial task, his mind must have wandered; as sev­eral wrap­pers remained crumpled and aban­doned on the kit­chen table for the dur­a­tion of our visit as he then began invest­ig­at­ing the pack­aging that encased the new door­bell we bought them.

L will read­ily inform any­one who’ll sit still long enough that he has “spent fuckin’ 30 quid on bells and not one ov ‘em ‘ave fuckin’ worked”. What with him now being a bit (read: very) Mutt ‘n’ Jeff, and being sans a work­ing door­bell, tem­pers have been fraught when the postie and milk­man come knock­ing. Well, if he doesn’t hear the new door­bell, then I’m afraid he’s just going to have to “stand guard” by the street door in future, and bloody well like it.

The new bell comes com­plete with 2 receiv­ers, one that you plug into a wall socket in your hall­way and another battery-powered ver­sion that is port­able and can be taken upstairs/out in the garden etc, to aid hear­ing. Great stuff. We stuck the push-button to the door cour­tesy of the sticky fix­tures provided (they also provided screws, but that’s just ask­ing for trouble with ol’ “Bob The Builder” [L] and their stand­ard Council-issue PVC front-door), and then soun­ded the siren bell.

I’d hoped for a mono­phonic rendi­tion of “Land of Hope and Glory”, what with L being so pat­ri­otic (read: a voter of the BNP). Instead, the instantly recog­nis­able chimes of “West­min­ster Quar­ters” rever­ber­ated through the house in full thun­der­ing sur­round sound, ren­der­ing the not-so-hard-hearing win­cing as the tin­nitus set in. Just to be sure that we had indeed pur­chased a Sonic Boom det­on­ator, the bell was soun­ded on sev­eral occa­sions, much to L’s delight: “Eh, even I can fuckin’ ‘ear that”.

When leav­ing, someone jok­ingly pressed the door­bell again, to which J roared with laughter when spot­ting a rather bemused man stand­ing on the front step of a house on the other side of the road, hav­ing been startled to near death and now look­ing frantic­ally for the source of his torment.

Aside from now becom­ing eli­gible for an ASBO, the afore-mentioned pack­aging of the door­bell was an end­less source of enter­tain­ment as each of the unused fix­tures and spare bat­ter­ies were hur­riedly filed away. “That’s use­ful that, go put that in one of my hidin’ places — might then find sum­ming else I bin look­ing for…”.

L has pleth­ora of “hid­ing places” in which he stores a whole load of little noth­ings for future ref­er­ence, in case they “come in handy one day”, obvi­ously. It’s not uncom­mon to find pack­ets of flat (worn-out) bat­ter­ies kept up by the ancient toi­let cistern in the down­stairs WC or an elec­trical appli­ance war­ranty circa 1975 behind the mir­ror in the hallway.

When dis­cuss­ing our visit that night, I was struck by an epi­phany. Sel­dom do I ever exper­i­ence such unblem­ished glimpses of Truth, when in a moment of shin­ing crys­tal clar­ity whilst sit­ting on the toi­let talk­ing loudly to K through the bath­room door about the events of that even­ing, it dawned on me: my “Father-in-law” is in fact, a Womble.

Yes, you read that right. With his mod­est stature, rotund build and patchy grey and white thatch, my “father-in-law” is the humanoid mani­fest­a­tion of Orinoco, com­plete with crafty dozes beneath the pages of a news­pa­per and sneaky nibbles on cake.

Hav­ing spent the even­ing tod­dling around the house (he’s had about half a dozen strokes, so now he even walks like a Womble) for­aging away at “things that the every­day folk leave behind…” (come on, you know the tune… )and then col­lapsing doz­ily on the sofa, ash­tray bal­anced on his shelf of a belly, its safe to say that Uncle Bul­garia, must indeed be a relation…