I was intending to garden this afternoon. However, on this scorching day, my enthusiasm for the task disappeared along with the garden thermometer’s mercury, after it overheated and blew its top.
Consequently, as I write, my lawnmower loiters lonely and unloved in the garage, while yours truly lounges at a patio table shaded by parasol. Currently, I’m contemplating refreshing my arid palate with a thirst quenching apple cider and ice.
This dryness of mouth contributed to during a recent meander to the store for essentials…… Well, to be honest, apple cider and ice.
Pedants, seeking flaws in my logic, may feel moved to comment my walking of a hilly 30 minute round trip is more exerting than a 15 minute mowing of a flat front lawn. An observation which is hard to refute.
However, I’d argue that, if I’d undertaken the less onerous lawn cutting, I’d not have been able to quench the consequent thirst with cider and ice……. So there was method in my madness; and that method went by the name of alcohol!
My soundscape as I add ink to parchment is provided by Rocker MC Amazon Alexa. The silk toned virtual DJ banging out tunes by Dutch jazz singer Caro Emerald. No one’s up dancing yet, but once I’ve finished drafting this I may shape a few moves, as we streetwise kids are fond of telling you coffin dodgers!
As my days of Argentinian tangoing around chez Strachan are long gone, of course, I won’t be up dancing later. That actuality also applying to innumerable other dances available. Actually, if truth be told, I’ve always endeavoured to avoid dancing in any venue. Cloddishness while in the throes of the pastime fuelling this indifference.
In my days of playing football and cricket I’d reasonably good balance. Put me under a glitter ball, though, and I became a caracoling Mr Bean like figure. A dancer as far removed from John Travolta’s accomplished swaggerer in ‘Saturday Night Fever’ as is possible to achieve.
I’ll get up and dance at discos/parties, however that journey into a domain of strutting only occurs if GJ Strachan’s suitably fuelled with vino. Without this wondrous grape infused potion, sending my inhibitions on hiatus, yours truly’s backside will remain glued to the dance floors peripheral partitions.
At a cricket presentation night during my late teens, after drinking excessively prior to and during the meal, I joined the dance floor of a Sunderland hotel in a ‘chirpy’ mood. After entering the fray, yours truly inexplicably elected to drunkenly gyrate solo. This particular dance one I was making up on the hoof, involving minimal arm movements and wild kicking out of my lower limbs.
As my legs tired from the vigorous effort I put into this idiosyncratic routine, my body lowered as my fatigued limbs struggled to maintain stability of my torso. To anyone watching these gravity defying gyrations, it must’ve looked like I was performing some sort of half-assed cossack dance.
Moves that would’ve took on an ever stranger sight with the fact they were being undertaken in accompaniment to Earth, Wind & Fire’s classic disco hit Boogie Wonderland.
On departing the venue at the end of the evening, my dad who was amongst the individuals representing our cricket club, admonished me for bringing shame upon the family.
On hearing this censure, I responded with an alcohol induced slur of “Whysh that, dadsh?!….. For getting too drunk?!”
“No!!….. For being the first Strachan to perform a cossack dance without wearing a papakha hat!…… You sicken me!’
