Reminiscences (Apropos Nothing)

(Photo credit: Wikipedia)

So we are taken from gin pahits to fags to reminiscing in general. It's been a strange week all round.

This memory hit me today as I chatted with the feared Grey Havens Gang - the first such convo in a while, actually...

For a long time, I worked with a deeply eccentric person, something of a savage genius.

Highly-strung, he was suing his dentist because of a bothersome crown cap and was at the time constantly fiddling with little wads of crown fixative, a latex-gel sort of substance. (He was highly litigious, as I'm sure we'll learn if he ever stumbles across this post).

We took an important client out to expensive lunch and our hero was portentously pontificating about the parlous state of technology in Saudi Arabia or some such when he stopped dead in mid-flow and turned puce, glaring at us as if he had just been hit in the groin by a high speed sea urchin. One of the spiny ones.

As we watched in horrified fascination, he slid down the banquette and disappeared under the table.

A short while later, as we were still gawping at each other, a pale hand flopped onto the other side of the table, a little like a scene from the film 'The Hand', if you've ever seen that. It clawed around for a time, eventually snared the client's bread basket, and whipped it away.

There was absolute silence during this entire performance. With much huffing and puffing, our man restored himself to his seat, looked around at the wide-eyed assembly and cheerily said, "Well! Dessert?"

It was only later we learned the errant tooth had flown out under the pressure of his oratory and landed square in the client's bread rolls.

(Channeling Somerset Maugham, the gin pahit* man, and so squaring the circle.)

*I find the fastest way to add links to the gin pahit post is to Google 'Gin pahit fake' which phrase I now Own The Internet for. As Frankie tells us: Search. Huh. What is it good for? ...