Hairy incidents

This morning I was munching down my coffee and chewing on my toast - no, wait, I was drinking down my toast and sipping on my coffee - no, I was doing both of the above and all three of the latter... ANYWAY: I was sitting with my coffee and toast on the couch clicking away on the internet. The toast, I should mention, had marmalade on it.

As I munched and sipped and clicked, I started noticing something out of the left-hand corner of my left eye. I moved my eye this way, and it disappeared. I moved my eye the other way, it seemed to come back. It was rather bright, and I concluded maybe a bit of marmalade had slipped into my moustache.

Now although I love Roald Dahl's books I have no particular wish to be like Mr Twit, who would catch food in his beard and days, weeks, and sometimes months later pluck it out again and munch thoughtfully upon it to see if it had got any tastier. So as you can imagine I immediately reached up to try to pluck out this bit of marmalade. Nothing doing; it didn't seem to be in my moustache at all. It was, in fact, somewhere else in my field of vision entirely. I thought maybe it might be a bit of marmalade on the plate and continued clicking and sipping and munching.

Trouble is, it wasn't on the plate, and it wouldn't go out of my field of vision. I moved my head this way and that and contorted my eye upwards and downwards in an attempt to get a better view of it. At the same time I started to worry at my beard with both of my hands (I suppose I looked a little strange) insistently. Finally, I produced the object in question: a small fluoro green one-third of a price tag off the back of a book: it had been dangling for - who knows how long, really? - off an obscure quadrant of my beard. I have no idea how that got there.

***

Lalor, I suppose, must previously have been populated by fairies, for the washing line hanging out the back of our house from the north-facing wall is over a head-length lower than me. Every time I go to hang out the washing, I have to poke my head up through the middle of the line, which neatly bisects my head from my body - I feel rather like I'm sticking my head into a horizontal guillotine. Considering a washing line should really be a comfortable distance above your head in order to allow you to lift and lower your arms without too much effort, and in order to minimise the risk of pegs and clothes getting in your face, I can only conclude that the quaint sylvan race who previously inhabited this suburb must have been very titchy indeed.

Well just earlier today I was hanging out the washing, which basically means I was sticking my head in and out of this horizontal guillotine repeatedly. I did most of the shirts and the pants, and then had got to the socks and underpants. As I was hanging these out, I heard a neat snip from behind, and as I lowered my head and went back to the basket, I felt a small but insistent tugging at the nape of my neck.

I grasped around there for a bit with my hands and found that a plastic clothes peg had neatly detached itself from the washing line (all by itself) and was now hanging happily from the hairs at the nape of my neck.

It was yet another hairy incident.