Simply Sue: Escaping the Cutlery Drawer
The delicious Sue Papworth escapes from the task of cleaning out the cutlery drawer, only to encounter a mystery involving bottled water and a bun shop.
The cutlery drawer looked liked there’d been a fight between a mad spider with a crochet hook and Uri Geller.
The battle probably wasn’t over, either.
It was worse than the heaving heap of wire coat hangers in the bottom of the airing cupboard that hooks the unwary traveller, and drags them in.
The left- handed corkscrew was locked in combat with that useful spiky thing for baking spuds on that we never use because it’s always knitted up with something else.
Clearly it was going to take a brave woman to go in there.
The UN was busy elsewhere, so Louise and I left Christine to it and legged it.
We went up to Emley mast - but when we got there, someone had bunged up our favourite gateway. There was a heap of brand new blue plastic drainpipe, and a great stack of bottled water, a fair bit taller than me.
The first bit of drainpipe was hooked over the top of that little reservoir they have up there. You didn’t need to be Sherlock Holmes to work out what was going on. The chap who was busy topping up the reservoir from the bottles wasn’t visible – and it was going to take him a really long time, doing it bottle by bottle – but clearly the good folk of Emley were going to be having designer water on tap.
I bet they don’t even get that in Knightsbridge.
A dog went past, towing his owner, and they both peered at the stack of bottles, and the funnel going down into the reservoir.
“I blame global warming,” the man said.
The dog didn’t comment.
And it seemed absolutely obvious, once somebody’d said it. The folk of Emley are sensibly keeping well ahead of the next drought.
No-one can ever make up things as good as stuff you overhear. (Except for Allan Bennett, and he doesn’t count.)
I was once in a posh bun-shop in Harrogate behind an elderly West Riding couple on a day out. Mr. – who was obviously a bit cloth-eared – bawled “Eh, look, Mother, they’ve got nugget!”
And Mrs. hissed back “Nay, Arthur, you’re in Harrogate now – it’s noogai!”
Which I always bear in mind.
I’ll bet he wasn’t related to the chap peering at a shearing frame in Halifax Cloth Hall’s textile museum who said in mystified tones “But what I don’t understand is, where d’you put the sheep?”
Arthur would have told him.
You can learn such a lot from passing snippets like these. My favourite of late was “He couldn’t come because he was oiling his yo-yo”, which is a line I have to remember next time I’m short of an excuse.
It could cover absolutely any occasion. Even avoiding mucking out the cutlery drawer. So when the bottom of the airing-cupboard starts looking like something out of Indiana Jones, I will reach for the yo-yo oil, and head for the hills.
