Half a brain and an ounce of etiquette.

Monday, 9 July 2007

Don’t get me wrong, I love having people over to visit. I love having people in my home, it’s a good half of the reason that I’ll ever clean it or try to make it look pretty.

HOWEVER, you and I both know that some assholes will just snake their way into your house and start nosing around like an old incontinent Labrador, won’t they?

So this punk, and I use the term ‘punk’ with all the old-fogie bitterness that is associated therewith, rocks up to our house the other night and makes what I’m sure he thought was an absolute sterling gent of himself. The sad truth being that I was praying to God every second that he was in my house that he would just GET OUT. It wasn’t bad enough that this guy came over on some flimsy pretence of being this guy’s cousin who had dropped in to see my partner and to get back a hip flask that he had lent me once, but his cousin was a special kind of all-at-once offensive. His hair, his voice, his hideously offensive moustache and his tired and pathetic I-used-to-be-in-a-really-good-band-once spiel.

Now, if I have a rather expensive and shit-hot collection of Absinthe (and I’m talking about genuine, distilled, just how they used to drink it in France, Absinthe here, not some half-cocked mouth-wash distant cousin to absinthe that so often comes without the ‘e’ and essentially means a bottle of fluro green lighter fluid sold to you by some toothless hobo in Prague) then the reason I will put said collection on display is NOT so you can stumble into my abode, unwashed, unintroduced to me and half cut and start picking up and waving around bottles of alcohol that cost more than everything you’re wearing...

Moustache wearin’ freak: “Hey have you tried Cannabis Absinthe, buddy? It’s real smooth and it kinda glows.”

Me: “No.” Can I stab you in the face? Lots?

It’s these kinds of exchanges that I suppose make it all the more special to have a complete stranger and moron as a house guest. Needless to say I decided very quickly that I needed to take some drastic action before he started drinking my alcohol or looking at my CD collection (it’s a funny mode of collecting music that folks from the nineties will remember...). So there was only one option and I went for it with all the gusto of a public servant trying to avoid work:

“Well it’s lovely to see you guys, but Velvet & I were just on our way out.” I pick up my keys, I start turning off lights...

“Cool, we’ll come for a stroll”

The headache that is my life never fails to challenge me in new and painful ways every day. So Velvet and I make for the nearest club, The Norfolk Basement, in the hopes of losing the house guests from Hades.

I guess the most important thing to remember is this: Don’t let people you don’t know into your house. And in the case of most of the people I know, even then... think twice before opening the door. You’ve heard all of this before I’m sure, but at least not all of the experience was bad... About twenty minutes after we got to the club, they decided to go their own way and we could do nothing but cry a little and thank God for releasing us from the burden of their company.

To learn more about Absinthe, go here.

To learn more about getting rid of obnoxious house guests, join a gun club... Or a nudist colony... Or both.

Preferably both.

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