28 July 2011
My Summer Project
To keep me from alcoholism this summer holiday, l though l would spend the next five and a half weeks creating some sort of online journal of my activities. Which will hopefully make me do more than just shuffle up to the local supermarket for more Gin. It may not. One can only hope. Of course, if l happen to be swept of my feet by some handsome local farmer then l will be spending my summer in the haybarn and not posting in a drunken haze. In the meantime, you can read more here.
You call it a kiss, l call it treason.
Now, after a lengthy absence (moving house, birthdays, blah blah) l was all ready to regale you with tales of DIY fails (four fingers attached to a tube of Superglue instead of two wardrobe doors attached to the wardrobe), end of term antics (passing out head first into a kitchen sink), romance (trying to seduce the rather young and ginger telephone engineer with tea and consequently spilling it down his trousers. Unintentionally, of course.), and other random nuggets of that my entertain you (discovering a remarkable likeness of myself as a slavering sabre toothed dinasour in one of my pupils' sketchbooks). However, having had a few days free from standing at the front of a classroom and postulating on the theory of evolution (or, How You Can Spin An Owl's Head Until It Flies Like A Helicopter) and the like, l am feeling the need to clamber onto my soapbox for a short while.
The thing is, over the past year l have begun to lose my faith in humanity.
Maybe l still hanker after fairytale romance, perhaps it is my Christian upbringing, or indeed a fundamental inherited morality, but l truly believe in fidelity. However, l am beginning to feel like a Victorian virgin clutching onto her iron chastity belt whilst all her friends are testing out vibrators on their noses at an Anne Summers party. Gay or straight, married, affianced, with child or not, it appears that all around me are indulging in some extra curricular entertainment of the sexual kind. Without guilt or remorse.
Now, don't get me wrong, l have not been in some kind of bubble for the past 30-odd years, imagining that celebrities and royals were the only ones caught with their toes in someone else's mouths. My parent's divorce was due to a dalliance on my mother's behalf, l myself have swapped saliva with another's boyfriend, and my recent heartbreak had everything to do with a drunken misdemeanour of the naked kind. However, in each of these cases both inanimate and animate objects (the cat) were thrown, curses of leprosy, plague, and boils invoked, and many tears of remorse and pleas for forgiveness uttered. Thus the infidels acknowledge that their actions are heinous, and become the villains of the story. I like this kind of logic.
Where my brain starts to have a slight meltdown, other than trying to install a printer driver 12 times onto my laptop which then informs me of a 'Fatal Error' 98% of the way through which results in a 'Fatal Error' of the hammer-through-the-keyboard-type, is the view amongst my peers and other acquaintances that infidelity is another badge to be collected and worn, albeit invisibly, on their chest. That it is is somehow an accepted course of action when one is a little bored, or had a little too much to drink. Something that is to be laughed off. Something that is as inconsequential as throwing all your clothes off and swimming across a river to 'rescue' a gnome from a garden on the other side. Maybe not the best analogy, but you get the point. It seems that while lip service is paid to faithfulness, in reality the majority of people are grabbing a handful of forbidden flesh in the broom closet.
So, l remain disappointed and disillusioned. Maybe l have missed an important Public Announcement at some point in my life. Did the Prime Minister suddenly issue a White Paper for polygamy? Are we all allowed several partners at once? With no comeback? Do we need to start rewriting the fairytales? Is Prince Charming about to be found knocking one off over Skype to one of the Ugly Sisters? If so, l have one hell of a lot of catching up to do. Starting with that BT Engineer.
The thing is, over the past year l have begun to lose my faith in humanity.
Maybe l still hanker after fairytale romance, perhaps it is my Christian upbringing, or indeed a fundamental inherited morality, but l truly believe in fidelity. However, l am beginning to feel like a Victorian virgin clutching onto her iron chastity belt whilst all her friends are testing out vibrators on their noses at an Anne Summers party. Gay or straight, married, affianced, with child or not, it appears that all around me are indulging in some extra curricular entertainment of the sexual kind. Without guilt or remorse.
Now, don't get me wrong, l have not been in some kind of bubble for the past 30-odd years, imagining that celebrities and royals were the only ones caught with their toes in someone else's mouths. My parent's divorce was due to a dalliance on my mother's behalf, l myself have swapped saliva with another's boyfriend, and my recent heartbreak had everything to do with a drunken misdemeanour of the naked kind. However, in each of these cases both inanimate and animate objects (the cat) were thrown, curses of leprosy, plague, and boils invoked, and many tears of remorse and pleas for forgiveness uttered. Thus the infidels acknowledge that their actions are heinous, and become the villains of the story. I like this kind of logic.
Where my brain starts to have a slight meltdown, other than trying to install a printer driver 12 times onto my laptop which then informs me of a 'Fatal Error' 98% of the way through which results in a 'Fatal Error' of the hammer-through-the-keyboard-type, is the view amongst my peers and other acquaintances that infidelity is another badge to be collected and worn, albeit invisibly, on their chest. That it is is somehow an accepted course of action when one is a little bored, or had a little too much to drink. Something that is to be laughed off. Something that is as inconsequential as throwing all your clothes off and swimming across a river to 'rescue' a gnome from a garden on the other side. Maybe not the best analogy, but you get the point. It seems that while lip service is paid to faithfulness, in reality the majority of people are grabbing a handful of forbidden flesh in the broom closet.
So, l remain disappointed and disillusioned. Maybe l have missed an important Public Announcement at some point in my life. Did the Prime Minister suddenly issue a White Paper for polygamy? Are we all allowed several partners at once? With no comeback? Do we need to start rewriting the fairytales? Is Prince Charming about to be found knocking one off over Skype to one of the Ugly Sisters? If so, l have one hell of a lot of catching up to do. Starting with that BT Engineer.
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