Pirate Olympics

I woke up one morning believing that I was on a pirate ship. I walked into the kitchen, and greeted Rachel with an 'Ahoy there'!! Won't Mick be surprised when he comes into work later to discover that he is now the captain of a ship, rather than a manager of a YHA hostel? (Amusingly, he didn't seem that surprised at all). We tried to cast Fiona in the roll of the parrot, but she was having none of it - "I'm a princess." I was offered the choice of being either the cabin boy or the ship's cat. I'm still having trouble deciding. 

I think the whole pirate thing was a subconscious decision of mine to steer clear of using normal vocabulary. The evening before Rachel had been taking the piss out of the way I say 'yesterday'. I'm not really sure what is so unusual or funny about it, but she has condemned me to a life of being reluctant to speak about events of the recent past. (Except for here). 

Unsurprisingly, we have all been gripped by Olympic fever. Even Fiona, who is not particularly fond of competitive things, was found deep in discussion with Rachel about the swimming trunks worn by male divers. Fiona commented that they were unnecessarily skimpy, and she just didn't know where to look. Rachel replied simply, "I do." She even gave Fiona an annotated picture the following day. Baseball might not be an Olympic sport, but Rachel and I did find time to play a quick innings after work one day. I had bought a £1.99 brightly coloured plastic bat and ball set from Home Bargains, which had by accident rather than design been stored behind the bar. We took to the field looking like pros, and what followed could have been mistaken for a Sports Illustrated photo shoot. The ball was so light that it kept getting taken by the wind, and when we did finally manage to hit the darn thing it got a massive dent in it (in no small part due to making contact with Fiona's head - I'm really sorry, again). 

A little while ago I sold my car and bought a small, third-hand van. It has plenty of room to sleep in the back, and when I got it home I discovered a Beatles album in the CD player. That's the kind of thing that needs to be in every car sales advert, whereas I discovered that AutoTrader will not allow you to use the word 'poop' (I reckoned that not having had a bird poop on your car in over three months was a definite selling point). I hit the charity shops of Whitehaven soon after in order to expand my CD collection with 50p bargains. I was troubled to discover that not a single store had a second hand Chris de Burgh album in stock. I told Rachel about this later - she looked at me surprised, and said, "well it's obvious why. No one in their right mind is going to want to give away their C de B albums to a charity shop. Those things are for keeps." She's right, of course. I have no idea why this never occurred to me.