Skip to main content

Beautiful - like a Brick


I suffer like Samantha Brick does.
Hardly a day goes by without someone saying to me “let me get you a cup of tea, you’re gorgeous”, me saying “Ta!” and them then saying “I wasn’t talking to you. And what are you doing in my kitchen anyway?”.
I can’t help being this stunning – you’ve seen the photo. I can wear two hats and look virile at the same time. Whilst wearing a scarf. That’s not an easy look to pull off.

Just the other day whilst in 1st class* on a flight** to America*** a beautiful woman**** offered me champagne***** just because “you look adorable”******

*2nd class

**train

***Manchester


****6 year old kid


***** a jelly baby


******”you’re funny looking”


Whilst I’m no Brad Pitt, I’m average height, a bit portly, balding, the bits that aren’t balding are greying, my ears are a bit big and my grin in wonky. Totally irresistible in other words. Yup – not Brad Pitt. More Arm Pit.

Because of my stunning appearance, I have regularly been overlooked by other men for promotion, with them using the thinly-veiled excuse that I’m actually an incompetent, lazy idiot, with very little aptitude and a casual disregard for timekeeping, hygiene and honesty, instead of admitting that they’re jealous of my looks.

I have to work hard to keep my looks. I regularly drink cider, eat a lot of Creme Eggs, drink an obscene amount of cappuccinos and take minimal exercise. You’d think more men would applaud me for this, but no. The athletic bunch I work with seem to shun me because of my physique.

Last week, one of my male neighbours completely blanked me, even though we’ve always been on nodding acquaintance before. I can only assume this is the green-eyed monster again. Or the fact than I ran his dog over.

One of my old bosses used to take me out for a pint now and again. He used to say it was because he felt sorry for me, but I know he was just basking in my reflected glory. When his wife came along and I said I liked The Nolans as well, he became insanely jealous, accusing her of liking crappy music and that I should be ashamed of myself for leading her on. And in a public place too.

During a particularly warm summer, one employer I worked for hauled me into the office for wearing clothes that were distracting female colleagues. It was ridiculous – there were other men in the office wearing light summer clothing, but apparently me in orange Speedos and flip-flops is just too sexy for some other men to handle.

Younger men do seem to feel threatened by me – just the other day one of them said “Yo. S’up, old man? Why you dressed like an old laydeez curtain, dude? You need to have some respeck, innit?”. Just because I was wearing one of my lovely shirts. The colours matched my eyes so well – purple and red. It’s such a shame too; younger men could learn so much from my dress sense. Funerals are too dull if you stick to black.

So now I’m 44, and waiting for my looks to being to go, as they surely must, so that I can fade into the background. It’s been hell looking this good.

Maybe then other men will let me join their club.

As long as I don’t ask about the offside rule again.

(Well done to Darren, for his very good post on the charming Ms. Brick. I wasn’t copying him, honest. And thanks to @onatrainagain and @BroughtonLass for suggesting I do this. Is this my first commission?! How much do I get paid? Oh. Right....)

This blog post appeared yesterday as an entry in the North West Evening Mail's "Big Blogger" competition. Do me a favour - click on this link to view it on their website, please? Thanks to your clicks, I've made it through to the final Blog Off. If you have any children you need to scare, show them this http://www.nwemail.co.uk/news/barrow-vs-arnside-as-big-bloggers-go-head-to-head-in-grand-final-1.941945?referrerPath=news it's the NWEM's article on the Big Blogger final. Even I was freaked out by the picture, and it's of me...

(Modern tunage for a Sunday afternoon... The Feeling's "Join With Us" album from 2008. Popadoodle-doo!)

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Making an exhibition of yourself

Now and again, it’s good to reaffirm that you’re a (relatively) normal human being. One excellent way of doing this is to go to a business exhibition. Despite what you might have surmised from reading my previous columns, I am employable, and even capable of acting like a regular person most of the time, even joining in the Monday morning conversation about the weather over the weekend, and why (insert name of footyballs manager here) should be fired immediately. The mug! True, there are times, often involving a caffeine deficiency, where it is like having the distilled essence of ten moody teenagers in the room, but I try and get that out of the way when people I genuinely like aren’t around to see it. As part of my ongoing experiment with what others call ‘working’, my ‘job’ involves me occasionally needing to go and see what some of my colleagues get up to outside the office, and what our competitors do to try and make sure that they do whatever my colleagues do better than ...

"It's all gone quiet..." said Roobarb

If, like me, you grew up (and I’m aware of the irony in that) in the ‘70s, February was a tough month, with the sad news that Richard Briers and Bob Godfrey had died. Briers had a distinguished acting career and is, quite rightly, fondly remembered most for his character in ‘The Good Life’. Amongst his many roles, both serious and comedic, he also lent his voice to a startling bit of animation that burst it’s wobbly way on to our wooden-box-surrounded screens in 1974. The 1970s seemed to be largely hued in varying shades of beige, with hints of mustard yellow and burnt orange, and colour TV was a relatively new experience still, so the animated adventures of a daft dog and caustic cat who were the shades of dayglo green and pink normally reserved for highlighter pens, must have been a bit of a shock to the eyes at the time. It caused mine to open very wide indeed. Roobarb was written by Grange Calveley, and brought vividly into life by Godfrey, whose strange, shaky-looking sty...

Suffering from natural obsolescence

You know you’re getting old when it dawns on you that you’re outliving technological breakthroughs. You know the sort of thing – something revolutionary, that heralds a seismic shift it the way the modern world operates. Clever, time-saving, breathtaking and life-changing (and featuring a circuit board). It’s the future, baby! Until it isn’t any more. I got to pondering this when we laughed heartily in the office about someone asking if our camcorder used “tape”. Tape? Get with the times, Daddy-o! If it ain’t digital then for-get-it! I then attempted to explain to an impossibly young colleague that video tape in a camcorder was indeed once a “thing”, requiring the carrying of something the size of a briefcase around on your shoulder, containing batteries normally reserved for a bus, and a start-up time from pressing ‘Record’ so lengthy, couples were already getting divorced by the time it was ready to record them saying “I do”. After explaining what tape was, I realised I’d ...