Blimey!!

‘Blimey!!’

I am standing in the bathroom peering in the mirror with a steri-strip thermometer plastered to my sweaty forehead. I am trying to read my temperature but it looks to me like I am in rigor mortis. Fuzzy and aching I find the magnifier and after a long and complicated thought process manage to turn the thing the right way around. I am not actually cold but boiling. I have a fever. I am sick.

‘Cripes.’

I still have to go into the BBC London to edit the radio pieces the next day and only notice the strange stuff I am saying when some silly woman refuses to accept that I DON’T need assistance and instead insists on guiding me onto the WRONG train so I, late and with cracking headache, go the WRONG way and get spewed out at Caledonian Road instead of Tottenham Court Road saying,

‘Goodness. Blimey. Lawks a-mercy’.

That is not me. I have a foul mouth. Not as foul as the Komodo dragon of couse, that poisons its prey with its saliva…well that and its knifing, tearing teeth. If you kick a komodo dragon in the shin (aww go on go on go on) the expletives it hisses will turn its mouth blue. When you kick a human..say the person who told you this was the right train..in the shin they also swear. Apparently swearing, like the gutteral noises we make when exhausted or when making love, come from the depths of our limbic system..from the ancient lizard part of our prehensile brain. We swear because in part we are all komodo dragon ..but without the poisonous saliva… (add in your own joke here…I am too knackered!)

Having possibly infected the entire BBC staff, including a very handsome voiced continuity man, with my mini flu I creep ill-ly off to a friends’ house.

‘Blimey – that was one doosey of a day!.’ say I, crawling up the stairs and collapsing jellyfishlike on their sofa.

‘You have an anti-Tourettes infection’, says my friend looking anxiously at his wife.

She kicks me in the shins.

‘Dang’, I say.

‘You are bad!’, says she ‘I haven’t seen it so bad. ‘

My friends confer, put Kinder and Dorfmeister on the sound system and begin feeding me take away curry and cider.

‘I have to go to bed,’ I whimper an hour or two later.

‘How badly?’ they chorus

‘A fuck of a lot,’ I say.

They nod smugly and release me to the futon.

‘She’s cured,’ I hear him say.

‘Blimey Moses..that was close..’, says she.