Holiday Shenanigans.
Feb. 24th, 2008 01:36 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
helblingSo, actual holiday antics. Meaning the one time I actually got onto the slopes, and wasn't doing the 'walk sideways up a mountain, then ski back down very, very slowly while your instructor shouts that you haven't got enough triangle at you (I'm not kidding here)'.
For those who are not familiar with skiing (I'm sure many of you *are*, but I wasn't, so allow me to show off my new found knowledge, miniscule though it may be), 'not enough triangle' in instructor speak, actually equates to ‘your snowplough isn’t wide enough, you’re gaining too much speed’.
A snowplough is where you arrange your skis so they are in a point in front of you, and thus the friction accumulated slows you down. It’s a good way for new skiers to learn to control their speed while they are on slopes that are flat enough for the snowplough to work. Skiers also learn how to turn in snowplough style, meaning they can then progress to slopes that are steep enough that a basic snowplough will not work to slow them down, but turning so they are facing against the mountain will.
There are (or at least, there are in the resort we went to) 6 grades of skiing. Grade one is learning the snowplough, and snowplough turns by the end of the week. Two is snowplough turns and basic parallel turns. Three is faster parallel turns. Four is carving and ‘moguls’ (I have no idea what they are, or how you spell it, but my brother, who was in grade four, spoke about them a lot). Five is doing everything you did in the previous four grades faster and while going backwards, and from what I could see, six involves basic levitation and telekinetic manipulation of your ambient environment.
There are also two main types of lift to get you up the slope (at the resort I went to; I’m sure there are others elsewhere). The first is the T-bar, which is does indeed look like an inverted ‘T’; you and your partner sit on either side of the bar, it cups you underneath your posterior, and off you go. If you’re a very secure skier, you can take a T-bar on your own, because there apparently is a way to hold it so you offset your own body weight, but I was never told how. My parents liked taking this one together as they didn’t have to worry about finding a partner and the lift queue went faster. That is, until my father had a little too much tipple at lunchtime, then fell asleep on the damn thing and fell off, causing my mother to also be dumped into the snow. After that, they took the button lift.
Ah, the button lift. It does indeed look like a button, which has been speared through the middle by a long piece of elastic which is attached to the lift, so when you release your ‘button’, it retracts – at a fair old speed – back to it’s minimum length. You do NOT sit on a button lift, but rather, stand, slap the button as close as you can to your centre of gravity – that is, between your legs (methinks evolution was trying to tell us something) – and let it pull you up. Eventually, it will pull you over a flat section with a wall in front of it, which is your cue to wiggle the button out from your groin, release it, and then ski off on your way.
There is a good reason my mother was not taking the button lift previously – because she’s crap at it. Now, I may also class myself as crap at taking the button lift, for the entire time I am on it, I will spend staring at my feet as if they were locked in a life-or-death struggle as I try to keep my skis parallel. Damn all that ballet; unless I concentrate, my feet will turn out of their own accord, and that way lies pain, and lots of it.
My mother, however, is in an entirely new class of ‘crap’. Last year, she managed to fall off the button lift at a point where both sides were surrounded by fresh snow. So every time she moved, trying to reach her skis, she sunk into the drift. In desperation, thinking should she move anymore she might disappear beneath the surface and vanish, her frozen corpse discovered only in the spring when the snow finally thaws, she lay still, in much the same position as a frog would if you strapped a cocktail stick to each of its feet and then threw it hard against a flat surface. And then lay there for a good ten minutes while all the other lift users went past staring at her, until her instructor noticed she was missing and came to dig her out.
This one, however was spectacular. It didn’t exactly start well, as she failed to secure the button initially, so a couple of meters out, came loose and slid back down again – into me, who was waiting for the next button after hers.
So, the instructor slapped the next one on her (and I do mean ‘slapped’, I heard the ‘ooof’ as the pole connected) and off she went. I took the one behind her, following up.
All seemed well…until we got to the very top. As I’ve mentioned, you get *off* the button lift when it reaches a plateau, normally one that has an extra steep bump just before it.
And, of course, my mother lets go *before* she has cleared the plateau. I – staring at my skis – suddenly hear ‘Ah-ooooh-woooo!’ and look up to see her sliding towards me.
I let out a similarly incoherent yell and did my best to steer around her, her voice doing the rise and fall bit that racing cars do as they pass the stand as she went backwards past me.
Amazingly, I did actually manage to miss her, although I reached the top of the slope going at a bit of a funny angle. Hearing the continuing sounds of yells – now more than just hers – from behind me, I didn’t pay…perhaps as much attention as I should have done when I released myself form the button lift.
My button, once released, went swinging backwards towards its cradle, it’s trajectory taking it on a route that meant it looked like it was going to collide with sister#1’s head.
“Oh fuck, shit, bollocks,” I thought. “If she gets hit, I’m going to spend the rest of the holiday knowing about it.”
My sister, who is long suffering and seems to be able to psychically predict my little mishaps, ducked.
I heaved a sigh of relief.
Then the button, of course, swung onwards unimpeded and struck a small girl who’d been standing slightly up the slope from sister#1 on the forehead. Thankfully she was wearing a helmet, but the impact was enough to knock her over backwards.
[I say backwards – I mean backwards from the knees up, because below that point, the body is held vertical by the ski boots. So imagine taking a jointed doll, gluing its feet to a table, and then letting it collapse. *That* is the position she ended up in.]
“Oh god!” I cried, as two of the adults standing nearby practically teleported to her side. “I’m so sorry!”
I will admit, I didn’t know at this point whether an apology was more owed to the girl or to the person who’d been behind me on the lift who had not managed to miss my mother, and had resultantly been KO’ed by my matriarch. Then, the horrific possibility struck me that the girl and parents might be American.
“Please don’t sue!”
Meanwhile the lift finally ground to a halt as someone at the bottom realised All Was Not Well At This End. I turned just in time to see that my mother, having collided with 2 other lift users, had skidded to a halt just short of her hat-trick.
The girl was, at this point, grinning at being the centre of attention, and brushing her parents off, her parents were alternating between checked their little darling over and directing what I presume was invective at me, although it was all in German, so I understood not a word, my mother was untangling herself from people and equipment, our instructor was attempting to collate what my mother had scattered on her reverse passage down the slopes (I estimated at a glace it was both poles, both gloves, her goggles, one ski and – weirdly, because she hadn’t lost either boot – a sock) I was standing around like a lemon not knowing what to do, and my sister looked like she might off herself there and then to escape the embarrassment of being associated with either my mother or myself.
Our instructor made it to the top of the slopes and looked at the chaos.
“Er,” he muttered, “let’s try somewhere quieter.”
I will say now that from my vastly limited experience of it, I dislike skiing on snow; not the actual activity itself, but the environment in which it occurs. Why?
Well, imagine you are placed in a car and asked to drive it. Only...the car has some 'quirks'. Like the fact the accelerator pedal is magnetically attracted to the floor. Or that the breaks are mostly shot, so to get any reaction from them at all you have to pump them repeatedly until your leg feels like it's going to fall off. And sometimes even that fails to get any response.
And the steering? Oh, despite this thing's phenomenal acceleration, the engineers copped out on the steering, so what you have to guide this vehicle with has essentially been ripped out of a dodgem car, but not quite installed correctly, so occasionally the wheel comes off in your hands.
Got all that? Right, so now you are asked to take this wreak of a car and drive it...on a motorway at a 30 degree decline. Where there is no speed limit. Where there are no road markings. Where there is crap loads of other traffic, all going at speeds that appear far from safe. And top it off? All of the Ferraris that are doing 100+ all seem to be driven by children under the age of eight...and not one of them is wearing a seatbelt.
Resultantly, thus far, I had yet to actually *ski*. I had shuffled a couple of meters before grinding to a halt in an effort not to do serious damage to the giggling toddler who, sans helmet, had just cut me up at a speed that would make a Lamborghini blush - and after the most recent button + child's cranium incident, I would have made faster progress down the slopes had I been walking. And my mother, sister#1 and instructor were all getting a little bit frustrated by this.
"Come on Em!" They'd cry, blithely and with an air of obliviousness, joining the fray, apparently unaware (or uncaring) of how close they were regularly coming to doing some major impact on either themselves or a passing pre-schooler.
"Coming," I'd reply through gritted teeth, doing my little-old-lady shuffle down the slopes, occasionally earning the odd bruise as children who hadn't quite got the hang of turning but loved this whole speed malarkey used me as a rebound-post. Honestly, from the rate some of them were throwing themselves off slopes, you'd think they were some sort of human-lemming hybrid.
So, we were summoned in desperation by our instructor to the top of their calmest, gentlest blue run - essentially a grown up nursery slope, in effect. A run that was far quieter and wider than the one we had been on previously, although it was still plagued with the occasional suicidal young-young person.
"Now Emma, just stay calm, and collected," chided my mother. "You know half your problem is that you panic."
She then threw herself off the top with the sort of grace a swan crossed with an elephant might exhibit, my sister right behind her, both watched approvingly by the instructor.
"Now you!" I heard screamed at me, once they had reached their 'pause' position halfway down the slope. "And remember your triangle!"
“Calm and collected!” chimed in my mother.
"Yeah, right," I muttered, edging my way off the slope and beginning my descent at what I like to call a 'sedate' pace.
And, much to my surprise, it worked. I was skiing - slowly, carefully, cautiously...but skiing.
"Now turn," coached my instructor at evenly spaced intervals, interspersed with random cries of "Triangle!" And slowly, slowly, I made my way down the slope.
Until that is, some little bastard who was all of two feet tall, cut me up so viscously he actually ran over the top of my skis.
I wobbled. I wiggled. And then – sensibly – I tried to snow plough.
Nothing.
I don’t mean there was no decrease in speed. I mean, literally, my legs did not respond to the command. Looking back at it now, I can only assume it was due to a combination of the illness and not being quite adjusted to the altitude, but at the time, my feet just seemed to be giving me the finger (or is that toe?) and would not change position.
I tried to turn – nothing responded to that, either.
“Calm and collected, Emma!” warbled my mother from further down the slope, as I picked up speed dangerously fast.
“Help,” I said in a calm and collected manner to the instructor 15 seconds later, as I passed their little group at a speed that was approximately the terminal velocity of the human body.
“Triangle!” he shouted urgently after me.
“Calm!” shouted my mother.
“Turn?” added my sister, helpfully.
As it turned out, I did none of the above. My route took me not to the bottom of the slope (where there was an unfenced ravine – I swear, the reason the Swiss don’t get into wars is because all their stupid people have killed themselves off due to the lack of health and safety measures in place, anywhere in their country), but off to side of it a bit, and up a steep slope which provided sufficient deceleration that I rolled to a halt.
Now, picture this – I was standing on a steep slope, facing in an upwardly direction, with my skis entirely parallel. Can you guess what will happen next?
Well, I guessed, approximately 0.1s before I started to slide backwards.
“Help!” I shouted at the instructor, this time in a manner that was definitely not calm and collected. In fact, it may even have been called shrill, panicked, and with a definite undertone of ‘if I die here, I will spend eternity haunting you by pushing freshly boiled eggs into your puckered orifices’.
“Tri…er…” he shouted back, obviously suddenly realising that his precious snowplough was really not going to help me in this situation.
Thankfully, the situation was saved by my mother, who had followed me down on my runaway run, and managed to position herself at the bottom of the slope in such a way that she provided a roadblock and caught me.
“Sod this,” I muttered at her, “I am going back to the hotel.”
“Now Em, just stay calm and collected,” she muttered back. “But I don’t blame you.”
Meanwhile, over on the harder runs, the other half of my family – the more advanced skiers, which consisted of my father, brother and sister#2 – were having better luck. Sister#2 had managed to pick up how to ski on one foot, my brother was handily beginning to learn how to ski backwards (in a controlled manner, not like my mother and I’s earlier attempts) and my father was relearning everything he did last year, and sulking because he hadn’t managed either of the above. Their entire session went without incident…until they were on their way back.
Sister#2 was skiing in front, my father and brother skiing side by side behind her, when they hit a ‘bumpy bit’ (their collective powers of description are awesome, I tell you) and sister#2 took a fall.
Being good (relatively) family members, and not wanting to ski over her (at that precise moment in time) my father and brother immediately diverted their courses.
My father went to the right, and then back towards the centre, my brother went to the left, and then back towards the centre.
You can see what’s about to happen, yes?
Apparently there was quite a clash, but that is not the worst of it. My brother, as I have mentioned in previous entries, plays rugby rather religiously. Resultantly, he has…instincts about what to do when collided with by another person.
Namely, he grabs them.
Apparently, they were on their feet fairly quickly after the collision, but my father spent the next few minutes speaking with his voice an octave higher than it had been.
I got this story out of my brother when he suddenly appeared in my bedroom and began to rifle through my toiletry bag.
“It’s not that bad,” I consoled him, sliding the toilet bleach that had been in the bathroom under the bed and out of sight.
“I groped my father,” he growled back. “How the fuck could it get worse?”
“It was through two layers of gloves and three layers of trousers,” I pointed out.
“I don’t care,” he replied, retreating to his bathroom with two bars of soap, some moisturiser, and my nail brush. “Ritual cleansing is required.”
For those who are not familiar with skiing (I'm sure many of you *are*, but I wasn't, so allow me to show off my new found knowledge, miniscule though it may be), 'not enough triangle' in instructor speak, actually equates to ‘your snowplough isn’t wide enough, you’re gaining too much speed’.
A snowplough is where you arrange your skis so they are in a point in front of you, and thus the friction accumulated slows you down. It’s a good way for new skiers to learn to control their speed while they are on slopes that are flat enough for the snowplough to work. Skiers also learn how to turn in snowplough style, meaning they can then progress to slopes that are steep enough that a basic snowplough will not work to slow them down, but turning so they are facing against the mountain will.
There are (or at least, there are in the resort we went to) 6 grades of skiing. Grade one is learning the snowplough, and snowplough turns by the end of the week. Two is snowplough turns and basic parallel turns. Three is faster parallel turns. Four is carving and ‘moguls’ (I have no idea what they are, or how you spell it, but my brother, who was in grade four, spoke about them a lot). Five is doing everything you did in the previous four grades faster and while going backwards, and from what I could see, six involves basic levitation and telekinetic manipulation of your ambient environment.
There are also two main types of lift to get you up the slope (at the resort I went to; I’m sure there are others elsewhere). The first is the T-bar, which is does indeed look like an inverted ‘T’; you and your partner sit on either side of the bar, it cups you underneath your posterior, and off you go. If you’re a very secure skier, you can take a T-bar on your own, because there apparently is a way to hold it so you offset your own body weight, but I was never told how. My parents liked taking this one together as they didn’t have to worry about finding a partner and the lift queue went faster. That is, until my father had a little too much tipple at lunchtime, then fell asleep on the damn thing and fell off, causing my mother to also be dumped into the snow. After that, they took the button lift.
Ah, the button lift. It does indeed look like a button, which has been speared through the middle by a long piece of elastic which is attached to the lift, so when you release your ‘button’, it retracts – at a fair old speed – back to it’s minimum length. You do NOT sit on a button lift, but rather, stand, slap the button as close as you can to your centre of gravity – that is, between your legs (methinks evolution was trying to tell us something) – and let it pull you up. Eventually, it will pull you over a flat section with a wall in front of it, which is your cue to wiggle the button out from your groin, release it, and then ski off on your way.
There is a good reason my mother was not taking the button lift previously – because she’s crap at it. Now, I may also class myself as crap at taking the button lift, for the entire time I am on it, I will spend staring at my feet as if they were locked in a life-or-death struggle as I try to keep my skis parallel. Damn all that ballet; unless I concentrate, my feet will turn out of their own accord, and that way lies pain, and lots of it.
My mother, however, is in an entirely new class of ‘crap’. Last year, she managed to fall off the button lift at a point where both sides were surrounded by fresh snow. So every time she moved, trying to reach her skis, she sunk into the drift. In desperation, thinking should she move anymore she might disappear beneath the surface and vanish, her frozen corpse discovered only in the spring when the snow finally thaws, she lay still, in much the same position as a frog would if you strapped a cocktail stick to each of its feet and then threw it hard against a flat surface. And then lay there for a good ten minutes while all the other lift users went past staring at her, until her instructor noticed she was missing and came to dig her out.
This one, however was spectacular. It didn’t exactly start well, as she failed to secure the button initially, so a couple of meters out, came loose and slid back down again – into me, who was waiting for the next button after hers.
So, the instructor slapped the next one on her (and I do mean ‘slapped’, I heard the ‘ooof’ as the pole connected) and off she went. I took the one behind her, following up.
All seemed well…until we got to the very top. As I’ve mentioned, you get *off* the button lift when it reaches a plateau, normally one that has an extra steep bump just before it.
And, of course, my mother lets go *before* she has cleared the plateau. I – staring at my skis – suddenly hear ‘Ah-ooooh-woooo!’ and look up to see her sliding towards me.
I let out a similarly incoherent yell and did my best to steer around her, her voice doing the rise and fall bit that racing cars do as they pass the stand as she went backwards past me.
Amazingly, I did actually manage to miss her, although I reached the top of the slope going at a bit of a funny angle. Hearing the continuing sounds of yells – now more than just hers – from behind me, I didn’t pay…perhaps as much attention as I should have done when I released myself form the button lift.
My button, once released, went swinging backwards towards its cradle, it’s trajectory taking it on a route that meant it looked like it was going to collide with sister#1’s head.
“Oh fuck, shit, bollocks,” I thought. “If she gets hit, I’m going to spend the rest of the holiday knowing about it.”
My sister, who is long suffering and seems to be able to psychically predict my little mishaps, ducked.
I heaved a sigh of relief.
Then the button, of course, swung onwards unimpeded and struck a small girl who’d been standing slightly up the slope from sister#1 on the forehead. Thankfully she was wearing a helmet, but the impact was enough to knock her over backwards.
[I say backwards – I mean backwards from the knees up, because below that point, the body is held vertical by the ski boots. So imagine taking a jointed doll, gluing its feet to a table, and then letting it collapse. *That* is the position she ended up in.]
“Oh god!” I cried, as two of the adults standing nearby practically teleported to her side. “I’m so sorry!”
I will admit, I didn’t know at this point whether an apology was more owed to the girl or to the person who’d been behind me on the lift who had not managed to miss my mother, and had resultantly been KO’ed by my matriarch. Then, the horrific possibility struck me that the girl and parents might be American.
“Please don’t sue!”
Meanwhile the lift finally ground to a halt as someone at the bottom realised All Was Not Well At This End. I turned just in time to see that my mother, having collided with 2 other lift users, had skidded to a halt just short of her hat-trick.
The girl was, at this point, grinning at being the centre of attention, and brushing her parents off, her parents were alternating between checked their little darling over and directing what I presume was invective at me, although it was all in German, so I understood not a word, my mother was untangling herself from people and equipment, our instructor was attempting to collate what my mother had scattered on her reverse passage down the slopes (I estimated at a glace it was both poles, both gloves, her goggles, one ski and – weirdly, because she hadn’t lost either boot – a sock) I was standing around like a lemon not knowing what to do, and my sister looked like she might off herself there and then to escape the embarrassment of being associated with either my mother or myself.
Our instructor made it to the top of the slopes and looked at the chaos.
“Er,” he muttered, “let’s try somewhere quieter.”
I will say now that from my vastly limited experience of it, I dislike skiing on snow; not the actual activity itself, but the environment in which it occurs. Why?
Well, imagine you are placed in a car and asked to drive it. Only...the car has some 'quirks'. Like the fact the accelerator pedal is magnetically attracted to the floor. Or that the breaks are mostly shot, so to get any reaction from them at all you have to pump them repeatedly until your leg feels like it's going to fall off. And sometimes even that fails to get any response.
And the steering? Oh, despite this thing's phenomenal acceleration, the engineers copped out on the steering, so what you have to guide this vehicle with has essentially been ripped out of a dodgem car, but not quite installed correctly, so occasionally the wheel comes off in your hands.
Got all that? Right, so now you are asked to take this wreak of a car and drive it...on a motorway at a 30 degree decline. Where there is no speed limit. Where there are no road markings. Where there is crap loads of other traffic, all going at speeds that appear far from safe. And top it off? All of the Ferraris that are doing 100+ all seem to be driven by children under the age of eight...and not one of them is wearing a seatbelt.
Resultantly, thus far, I had yet to actually *ski*. I had shuffled a couple of meters before grinding to a halt in an effort not to do serious damage to the giggling toddler who, sans helmet, had just cut me up at a speed that would make a Lamborghini blush - and after the most recent button + child's cranium incident, I would have made faster progress down the slopes had I been walking. And my mother, sister#1 and instructor were all getting a little bit frustrated by this.
"Come on Em!" They'd cry, blithely and with an air of obliviousness, joining the fray, apparently unaware (or uncaring) of how close they were regularly coming to doing some major impact on either themselves or a passing pre-schooler.
"Coming," I'd reply through gritted teeth, doing my little-old-lady shuffle down the slopes, occasionally earning the odd bruise as children who hadn't quite got the hang of turning but loved this whole speed malarkey used me as a rebound-post. Honestly, from the rate some of them were throwing themselves off slopes, you'd think they were some sort of human-lemming hybrid.
So, we were summoned in desperation by our instructor to the top of their calmest, gentlest blue run - essentially a grown up nursery slope, in effect. A run that was far quieter and wider than the one we had been on previously, although it was still plagued with the occasional suicidal young-young person.
"Now Emma, just stay calm, and collected," chided my mother. "You know half your problem is that you panic."
She then threw herself off the top with the sort of grace a swan crossed with an elephant might exhibit, my sister right behind her, both watched approvingly by the instructor.
"Now you!" I heard screamed at me, once they had reached their 'pause' position halfway down the slope. "And remember your triangle!"
“Calm and collected!” chimed in my mother.
"Yeah, right," I muttered, edging my way off the slope and beginning my descent at what I like to call a 'sedate' pace.
And, much to my surprise, it worked. I was skiing - slowly, carefully, cautiously...but skiing.
"Now turn," coached my instructor at evenly spaced intervals, interspersed with random cries of "Triangle!" And slowly, slowly, I made my way down the slope.
Until that is, some little bastard who was all of two feet tall, cut me up so viscously he actually ran over the top of my skis.
I wobbled. I wiggled. And then – sensibly – I tried to snow plough.
Nothing.
I don’t mean there was no decrease in speed. I mean, literally, my legs did not respond to the command. Looking back at it now, I can only assume it was due to a combination of the illness and not being quite adjusted to the altitude, but at the time, my feet just seemed to be giving me the finger (or is that toe?) and would not change position.
I tried to turn – nothing responded to that, either.
“Calm and collected, Emma!” warbled my mother from further down the slope, as I picked up speed dangerously fast.
“Help,” I said in a calm and collected manner to the instructor 15 seconds later, as I passed their little group at a speed that was approximately the terminal velocity of the human body.
“Triangle!” he shouted urgently after me.
“Calm!” shouted my mother.
“Turn?” added my sister, helpfully.
As it turned out, I did none of the above. My route took me not to the bottom of the slope (where there was an unfenced ravine – I swear, the reason the Swiss don’t get into wars is because all their stupid people have killed themselves off due to the lack of health and safety measures in place, anywhere in their country), but off to side of it a bit, and up a steep slope which provided sufficient deceleration that I rolled to a halt.
Now, picture this – I was standing on a steep slope, facing in an upwardly direction, with my skis entirely parallel. Can you guess what will happen next?
Well, I guessed, approximately 0.1s before I started to slide backwards.
“Help!” I shouted at the instructor, this time in a manner that was definitely not calm and collected. In fact, it may even have been called shrill, panicked, and with a definite undertone of ‘if I die here, I will spend eternity haunting you by pushing freshly boiled eggs into your puckered orifices’.
“Tri…er…” he shouted back, obviously suddenly realising that his precious snowplough was really not going to help me in this situation.
Thankfully, the situation was saved by my mother, who had followed me down on my runaway run, and managed to position herself at the bottom of the slope in such a way that she provided a roadblock and caught me.
“Sod this,” I muttered at her, “I am going back to the hotel.”
“Now Em, just stay calm and collected,” she muttered back. “But I don’t blame you.”
Meanwhile, over on the harder runs, the other half of my family – the more advanced skiers, which consisted of my father, brother and sister#2 – were having better luck. Sister#2 had managed to pick up how to ski on one foot, my brother was handily beginning to learn how to ski backwards (in a controlled manner, not like my mother and I’s earlier attempts) and my father was relearning everything he did last year, and sulking because he hadn’t managed either of the above. Their entire session went without incident…until they were on their way back.
Sister#2 was skiing in front, my father and brother skiing side by side behind her, when they hit a ‘bumpy bit’ (their collective powers of description are awesome, I tell you) and sister#2 took a fall.
Being good (relatively) family members, and not wanting to ski over her (at that precise moment in time) my father and brother immediately diverted their courses.
My father went to the right, and then back towards the centre, my brother went to the left, and then back towards the centre.
You can see what’s about to happen, yes?
Apparently there was quite a clash, but that is not the worst of it. My brother, as I have mentioned in previous entries, plays rugby rather religiously. Resultantly, he has…instincts about what to do when collided with by another person.
Namely, he grabs them.
Apparently, they were on their feet fairly quickly after the collision, but my father spent the next few minutes speaking with his voice an octave higher than it had been.
I got this story out of my brother when he suddenly appeared in my bedroom and began to rifle through my toiletry bag.
“It’s not that bad,” I consoled him, sliding the toilet bleach that had been in the bathroom under the bed and out of sight.
“I groped my father,” he growled back. “How the fuck could it get worse?”
“It was through two layers of gloves and three layers of trousers,” I pointed out.
“I don’t care,” he replied, retreating to his bathroom with two bars of soap, some moisturiser, and my nail brush. “Ritual cleansing is required.”
