In Pieces

  The Return

  (An excerpt from “A Diary of Two Brians”)

  January 1st

  I had quite an interesting time in town yesterday. I wasn’t there to purchase anything, merely to return the present I bought for my wife Kirsty. She wasn’t very pleased with the SuckMaster 450 Vibromatic Deluxe, but only when she found out it was a vacuum cleaner. As with all things purchased by yours truly, I was compelled to try it out. In my honest opinion, it failed to perform to the specifications of the one in the commercial. In short, it proved incapable of sucking up the pound of carpet tacks like the one in the ad.

  Here follows a transcript of the conversation between myself and Mrs. Verity Longton, (as it said on her name badge.)

  ‘Why on Earth would you want it to suck up a pound of carpet nails?’

  ‘Because your TV advertisement says it should. Have you not seen it Mrs. Longton? It has been on fairly frequently. In the aforementioned advertisement, the lady is dusting when she accidentally spills her husband’s jar of nails. Let us forget for the moment that the living room is hardly the place for a jar of nails, nevertheless they end up on her rug. She gives a heavy sigh and runs your cleaner over them. A stupid exercise I agree, but in one simple movement back and forth, and miraculously they are all gone.’

  ‘Firstly, it is not my advert or my cleaner, and secondly, couldn’t you have just picked them up with your hands? It would have only taken you a minute.’

  I reminded her most insistently, that the advertisement was boasting the fact that there should have been no need. The law clearly states that claiming that a product can perform in a way that it actually can’t, is in fact false advertisement. This is a clear breach of the Trades Description Act of 1972. I could have taken her and her defective sucking implement to the highest courts in the land and come out grinning.

  She asked me if I was “for real,” a term as yet unfamiliar to me and one to look up.

  In the end justice prevailed. Of course in retrospect, it was a shame to have had to hold up a queue of sixteen people waiting to buy a lottery ticket.

  I told Kirsty about this on my return. She was dashing about the place, applying various commercial products to her person, getting ready to go out again. She was wearing her sparkling black dress that goes too far above her knees, her stiletto shoes and her fish-nets. You could tell she’d had her hair done at the salon. When asked where she was off to, she replied that she was off to the gym. She is a tease that woman.

  Word

  There.

  Was.

  A.

  Man.

  Who.

  So.

  I've.

  Heard.

  Who's.

  Paragraphs.

  Were.

  Just.

  One.

  Word.

  He.

  Would.

  Not.

  Write.

  One.

  Whole.

  Line.

  Because.

  He.

  Was.

  An.

  Awkward.

  Swine.

  Bed

  It wasn’t that the floor was cold

  It wasn’t that we were too old.

  It’s just that she had said to me

  The first to wake up makes the tea

  Me- Subject To Change

  I wish that I could somehow be

  Someone else instead of me.

  Some other sod can have my tum,

  My split ends and my fat bum,

  Wear my shoes with massive holes

  And spend a lifetime on the dole.

  Jessica Ennis

  It just seems so wrong to me, Jessica Ennis

  That with a surname like yours, you’re not playing tennis.

  Snow

  I know

  That people like it when it snows,

  But I really think it might

  Rein-deer