A Promethean sparkle ...

In my time I've wandered the earth. Good times, bad times, y'know I've had my share. I've seen stuff and some of it caused me to moan and complain. I've dealt with rats in NY, cockroaches in Sydney, slime and filth in London. And sometimes the flats have been appalling too.

I have cleaned up after people, educated them about the right way to live and behave. I've been astonished at the crudity and ignorance of my fellow man. And now I face a unique irritation.

Sometimes when you come home from a hard day at work you just want to rip the top off a beer and drink it unmolested. Today I was invigilating the delivery of a supercar for a client. I had to wait around in a Lamborghini showroom for hours on end while the finance cleared and the condition reports were checked and sundry minions fucked around. Not particularly hard work, perfect in fact for a Friday afternoon. But the drive home was a bastard.

I get in and find that all four of my Czech beers have been drunk.

Tweedledumb is half cut and says something to me. "Hoe hun debt" is about as close as I can come with a keyboard. This phrase when spoken in English by a South African is just as impenetrable: "Aahwse-it?" Some sort of greeting, I know that much. It certainly can't be about the financial consequences to a German farmer of buying tilling equipment on hire purchase.

He's unsteady and speaks colloquially to me in a tongue I know he knows I don't know. The cretin has just confessed to one of the worst sins of share house living. Drinking another man's beer. But he's a mountainous rugby playing South African, so I decide to be careful and play this one cunning, like a fox.

"Some fucker's drunk my beer. Was it you?"

"Aah. Yah, bro. Sorry mun."

As though it was a fucking accident: "I was just walking past and you wouldn't fucking believe it - it was just there. Open. And then it happened three more times. I swear to God I'm telling the boys at Guinness. Just fucking incredible."

Anyway he tells me in halting broken English, as I stare up at him frowning in concentration and nodding my head from time to time to indicate my comprehension, that I should investigate what is happening aaht-saahd. The other mountebank is doing something noteworthy. He indicates with an empty can of beer that there may be something to my advantage.

Sure enough, there is cold beer in the back yard. There is also a tarpaulin covered ankle deep in razor sharp shards of spent Jagermeister bottles, about 15 yards long. And capering barefoot on this catastrophe is the Cretan cretin, can in hand. Who the fuck is going to clean that up? I can see for years to come, long after we've left this habitat, people getting lacerated at back yard BBQs. Blood staining the ground. Future archaeologists puzzling over this horrific scene.

Honestly. Sometimes I just shake my head and I say O tempora, O mores, and then I despair. I've been all day in the slightly surreal company of the super rich and their parasitic sycophants, all fawning over a car with a 6.5L v12 which is big and stupid and ugly as fuck and the sort of thing only a Liverpool footballer could like. A kind of metal porn. A community cock we can all wank, but the lesser of us only vicariously.

I come home to a pair of drunken primitives, one a guilty, crestfallen and shufflingly embarrassed giant of so few words that language itself is a novelty, only the third generation of his people to walk upright, and the other apparently having lost his senses entirely, resembles the bastard love-child of Oin, Gloin, Bifur, Bofur and Bombur and the Minotaur itself, wearing a disturbingly ecstatic expression usually associated with religious maniacs and lunatics, the goatee of a sex-predator hypnotist, prancing about on enough glass to mutilate a thousand emo children.

I just wanted a beer.

Now he wants me to join him for some bizarre homoerotic foot fetishism. Nevertheless I feel if I refuse then my masculinity is somehow less authentic. I open one of his beers. But there is the cold reality that I don't have his spatulate feet with their distinctive rhino hide. I will surely, reckless bravery or no, get slashed to buggery and require extensive expensive medical treatment and someone else's blood. What to do? What to say?

"Set it on fire, you pussy. I only walk on burning glass."