Gluemy meditations

'What ho!' 'Pip pip!' 'Good show!' 'Whoopsa!' Just some of the many happy and cheerful calls that emanate from Plenty Road, the happy and cheerful little byway that runs happily and cheerfully behind our house. Well the calls are more like 'Arrrrrrrgh!' and 'Yeaaaaaaaaaaaarrrrgh!'*, but you get the idea. It's a happy and cheerful place to be all right, especially if you are doing, or rather being, on Plenty Road, at 1 or 2 or 3 o'clock on Saturday morning.

But the call that I just heard emanate from Plenty Road, about half an hour ago, took the cake, if the cake was made out of beer from the Plenty Road beer barn just down the, well, road.

'STUCK IN CLAG!'

Stuck in Clag, I thought? It is indeed concerning that you are stuck in Clag glue; I can certainly vouch for the fact that Plenty Road is not typically a place to feature Clag glue in copious quantities, certainly not enough to cause a grown woman to be stuck to the spot. Indeed it is a most curious, most anomalous incident, to be stuck in Clag glue on Plenty Road; I would tend to attribute the presence of Clag glue to a shopper, possibly a tram traveller who has dropped one or two of their glue-related items on the ground, doubtless while on their way home to begin an exciting craft project using glue. But enough Clag to cause you to be stuck in it? One would begin to suspect the presence of a sinister Clag factory, lurking in the background, waiting for you to perambulate by, whereupon said Clag factory would upend its contents onto you, the innocent passerby, thereby causing you to be riveted to the spot, as it were, and also, well, stuck. In Clag.

An obviously distressing incident, whatever it happened to be: so distressing, that, if I am not mistaken, I heard the unfortunate person whom this happening happened to happen to mispronounce her words, so that the 'ST' in 'STUCK' appeared to sound more like 'F' and the 'C' in 'CLAG' seemed to be said more like 'S', and the whole phrase, indeed, sounded less like 'STUCK IN CLAG' and more like...

Oh.

Following this embarrassing misapprehension, I let the goodly woman cheerfully walking down Plenty Road continue walking cheerfully down it, and turned instead to Beatrice and attempted to teach her how to miaow in Chinese. It was not easy.

*Or variations on that theme involving the letters 'a', 'r', 'g', 'h', and 'y', and on rare occasions, one of the standard Mongolian plosives.