Thursday 10 October 2013

Where can I grab you?


My German mates should head off down to the South Coast today from Gloucestershire, in the little Ford Fiesta with only 20K on the clock.

This car is immaculate and boring, but for 1000 Euros, he could not turn the offer down from the little old lady who sold it to him. There is some dispute as to how to describe the colour of it, though.

He insists that it is 'blue', and everyone else calls it 'violet'. Well, both he and the rest of Germany are wrong, because it is obviously a particularly hideous and disturbing shade of purple. I am told there is no word 'purple' in the German language.

The main advantage of being a passenger in this car is that you do not have to look at it's colour - especially since he has covered the seating inside with black, hiding the swirly orange and purple scheme which used to compliment the vomit so well. You would not want to ride in it beforehand, even if you didn't suffer from epilepsy.

They both made themselves useful while they were here, by helping me to move a massive lump of Italian marble into my workshop. After we had completed this task, I treated them to lunch at the Bridge Tea Rooms in Bradford on Avon.

I knew this would be a surreal experience, but could not have guessed quite how surreal it would be, even for an Englishman.

We went from an industrial environment involving fork-lifts and hard-hats, straight to the tea rooms, and this further enhanced the strangeness of it all.

The area in which we chose to sit was a sort of shrine to Queen Victoria, with a little bust of her sitting on a bed of greenery in a niche in the wall. Thomas observed that she looked as though she was sitting on an egg.

The whole time we were there, ethereal harp music played vaguely familiar melodies from hidden speakers, and Tobias commented that harp music was 'a kind of torture'.

The walls were covered with original, faded sepia Victorian photos depicting men and girls standing outside houses covered in ivy, or next to horses and carts in agricultural settings. If I owned the cafe, I would have strategically placed some of those Victorian police mug-shots of well-known murderers, holding prison numbers on white cards - just to add to the ambience.

A huge and strangely beautiful young woman clad in a long black dress and white lace bonnet came up to us, and asked with a slightly forced smile, "What can I grab you?"

"Don't you mean, 'where' can I grab you?" was the response I wished I had given her, but I just opted for the Welsh Rarebit instead.

13 comments:

  1. OOo errrr.

    I had a very purple Missan Micra in the late nineties which I believe was described euphemistically as 'Blackberry' at the time. Disgusting.

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    1. I can beat that. I once owned a bright orange Volvo 240 Estate. This was the model they had to - when new - reduce the price by about £3000 because nobody would buy them.

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    2. Power for the course
      I had a shit brown Austin 1300

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    3. Sorry to be pedantic, John, but it's 'par' for the course - as in golf (and I'm not talking Golf GTI).

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  2. And when your order arrived, and you asked for an extra bit of Worcestershire on the side, she said "No problem."

    The Queen may be more dismayed over the language than the seating arrangement.

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    1. "Not a problem!" is how it has evolved over here. 'Not a problem for you, maybe...' is what I end up mumbling.

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  3. My least favourite colour for cars (and most other things) is orange. However, I've managed to own TWO orange cars.

    Did the Welsh Rarebit arrive with grab marks?

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  4. Being German I was baffled at the claim that there is no word 'purple' in the German language. Violet translates into 'Veilchenblau' and purple into 'Purpur'. I have never used either word. Anything from the shade of lavender to the color of aubergines has always been 'lila'.

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    1. Then if you have never used the word, 'purpur', then it cannot exist?

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    2. I am so delighted that you see that the world revolved around me! hehe

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    3. Secretly, my world has always revolved around you... or people like you.

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