Coffee Table Deliveries… and other stories

EAT ME, DRINK ME, READ ME…

New stock at the end.

I have been told that this newsletter is turning into my travels around the world in what appears to be far, far longer than 80 days… Pish, you’ve only just noticed!

However, I will have you know that I do work, despite your painless barbs. Painless? Yes, because of the vast amounts of time I have spent lazing around in the sun, I have the skin of a Rhino.

In my profession you do well to remember that a stitch in time saves nine…

And, as I sit here, I am gently warming the soles of my feet on Hades’s hot coals. Evidently a cushy life is not without its sacrifices; this also involves keeping you all entertained every day of the week. Yes, matinees and evensong! That candle is lit at both ends, and Lil’ Kim is holding the blue touch paper.

Those of you that have visited the crypt of Santa Maria della Concezione dei Cappuccini in Rome, will know where a great many of my skeletons are buried, they delightfully sculpted into works of art, perhaps depicting the events, but I say most, but not all.

Last weekend in Ibiza I was confronted with a problem, a dilemma, a cube of Rubik proportions, and, yes. Not for the first time!

Neil had ‘bought’ a coffee table.

As many of you may recall, Neil was also instrumental in tattooing many pairs of shoes over the years, bespoke designs, sometimes letting his creative juices flow, with a dexterity that mere mortals could only envy, a wild smile across his face, the gold tooth glittering in the moonlight… only the whine of the tattoo machine breaking the silence…

Apologies, my creative juices had started to flow. As I have matured these moments of dysfunction have become more common, and from time to time I have had to resort to chemical or homeopathic remedies to finish the newsletter. Apparently these are now available in most well-known chemists… You can’t walk past a window these days without these diamonds of delight being thrust in your face, and I only went in for party hats!

Back to the problem, or moving from one to another? Neil lives high up in Ibiza old town where the air is thin, beyond The Wall, surrounded by massive stone ramparts, and the closest we could get with a van was about 80 metres away. The table was a huge lump of wood, made from the trunk of a tree in the Whispering Wood, weighing in at nearly 250kgs it had to be transported up the last 40 medieval stone steps.

We stood around in the early morning sun, sipping a Kingslayer, a Red Priestess, enjoying the view of the Seven Kingdoms, as far as the White Harbour and the Bite, discussing our various wounds, aches and pains of battle, we evaluated the options. Should we use drugs, apologies… rugs, rollers, ties, a crane, hydraulic lifters, a pendulum, a YouTube tutorial, the infinite monkey theorem, aliens, dragons?

Without ‘The Mountain’, a Leonardo or a Galileo between us, we decided to apply the principle of Occam’s Razor, meaning; ‘that the simplest solutions are preferable to complex ones.’ So, we put down our cocktail glasses, picked a corner each and onwards and upwards we struggled. After a great deal of grunting, to meing, and to youing, your end up a bit, your end down a bit, we made it.

Thus, proving that logic, and a heuristic solution, not forgetting a little brawn and Mutual Aid are a match for Superficial Intelligence! Those on high would do well to listen…

Please forgive me, for I know what I am about to do… my apologies!

But that’s how on the second to last day of my weekend away, the motley crew that carried the coffee table up the steps of the old town, ended up sitting in a row at 10 in the morning sipping ice cold Bohemian style beer supplied by the hardest tattooist that ever stuck a needle in anyone’s arm. It lasted 20 minutes that beer-break, and for those twenty minutes we felt like free men.