I’m not very good at brevity. I also have a problem with preventing the mental artist who paints the mental pictures inside my head from embellishing them endlessly until what should be just a funny internal visualisation of an event, a tiny vignette perhaps, becomes a bloody trompe-l’oeil triptych behind my eyes.
I’ve long suspected that this might hamper any real-world activities or professions that I might otherwise enjoy and excel at. So I tried to practice brevity and simplicity in the comfort of my own home using a time-honoured method.
I tried my hand at being a home-brew bingo caller.
Not wishing to lessen the experience any I made a bingo machine from a hairdryer (on cool) blowing into the bottom of a Rainy Day Cricket box with a straw sticking out of the top of it. With a disk pen and a magnifying glass I marked polystyrene bean-bag balls with numbers in accordance with the Gaming Act of 1968.
I wore a waistcoat. A spangly one I found in the attic. I did not fasten it however, as I have somehow put on weight in the twenty years since I wore it last.
Then I had to fashion a long tube for the bottom of the Rainy Day Cricket box (from a vacuum cleaner hose that I still own despite throwing out the machine years ago. No, I don’t know why) so that the polystyrene balls would stop bouncing off the ceiling. Then I had to make a stand for the whole assembly from bent wire coat-hangers and blu-tack so that the hairdryer wouldn’t burn out or the box fall over. I considered giving up, but armed with the knowledge that my task was both onerous and completely fucking pointless I knuckled down. Magnifying glass at the ready, and thumb over the end of the straw I began.
Four seconds later (or thereabouts) the whole fucking shebang fell to bits. The Rainy Day Cricket box was seemingly unhappy with its new, dual role and flew apart at the seams - spewing my tiny balls everywhere.
So I emptied out (by which I mean ate) the contents of a box of miniature Coco Pops from a Kellogs Variety pack and tried again. Success! Hammering a lump of blu-tack flat on the desk as a bingo board that I could embed the balls in, I began to test my calling skills.
“Two identical positive pregnancy test pens that your youngest daughter has held up in front of her; at which she is looking back and forth in growing horror and panic – like a spectator at a tennis match being played by zombie strippers…eleven.”
Not good. I tried again.
“Sheila and Melanie over there by the bar – who between them have enough liquid grease surging through their veins to fry a thousand sausages and still have enough left over to lubricate all the moving parts of a fleet of ocean liners…eighty-eight.”
Hmmm. Okay, one more try.
“The act of coitus that involves you and your husbands lying top-to-tail and stimulating each others genitals orally…but lets face it ladies…they’re not getting any younger, so at some point you know you’re going to have to stick an unspecified number of fingers up their bums and stimulate the prostates within that have enlarged over the years - to the point where they now resemble a goat’s kneecap…sixty-nine.”
It was at this point that the realisation dawned that I wasn’t cut out for this line of work.
Next time: I’d be the world’s worst flotation device.
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