I was watching one of those terrifying documentaries that one sees these days on what now passes for television. It was something about the tonnes of space junk and asteroids, etc., and what they might do to the Earth.
It took a rather large medicinal martini for your Major to turn off the light and press up against his true love for comfort. Instinctually Kitty, my wife of some 50 years, tried to call 911 as she was in a deep sleep and not best pleased to be disturbed by what she claimed was a “second storey” man. All very confusing, but when the marital smoke cleared I was still very much rubbed the wrong way by what the TV had proffered.
Years ago as boys in a church basement we would be shown National Film Board of Canada documentaries about Wally the Moose and all his happy friends in the wild. A soothing voice would assure us that government was doing all it could for Wally’s kind and the surrounding forest.
Now Joe Somebody has produced a frightening doc in which the opening words are in the order of “Get down!” or “We are doomed!”
It is too hard on the nervous system for me. I preferred it when the NFB was renowned the world over for animals frolicking, canoeing adventures and glorious mountain ranges.
My ungrateful children now refer to those sorts of cinema as “travelogues” and think they are absolutely useless. They also say cruelly that in a chipmunk film I loved as a boy showing Jimmy and Harry Chipmunk playing amongst the branches, the producers had tied their feet to the boughs so they would stand in one spot and wave their little arms. And when they jumped happily amongst the branches, it was because the same mean producers were tossing them about the forest wrapped in cellophane making them more aerodynamic. Well, I won’t have it. Jimmy and Harry Chipmunk were real, and that’s an end to it.
In the same frightening late-night documentary I mentioned earlier, a learned professor pointed out that everything in the universe is moving at a high rate rate of speed, but he cannot have meant my club. I am almost sure that General What-Knot over by the library in the senior reading room has not moved for more than an hour. He is, as they say, at a “full stop.”
I could not help noticing at today’s luncheon that the octogenarian general put on quite a display of conspicuous consumption vis-a-vis the roast beef. I mean to say three helpings of the stuff? Steady on, old boy.
What was he thinking? I thought he should be put on the club suicide watch, as it was unusual for the old soldier to eat in that manner. He is rail thin and happily widowed, if you know what I mean.
Cherchez la femme, eh? I am almost sure someone told me the other day that Mrs.Hynde-Quarters had set her cap for him and now perhaps the poor chap was trying to take the club way out. I have seen it before, a fundamentally sound way of life disturbed in a manner unbecoming an officer and a gentleman.
When I queried the Brigadier over this matter he confirmed the worst. Mrs. HQ had thrown the general into a round of dances and cocktail parties that had his wiry neck stretched in anguish. With nowhere to turn the general had likely decided to deliberately “blow a bowel” and expire after lunch.
I decided he would not be a victim of club women. After all, he was a warrior. I jumped from my green wingback, pulled his paper from his face and, with my arm around his back, started dragging him up and down the carpet in an effort to get his system moving again while popping a few of my gas pills into his startled mouth.
After some confusion where I am almost sure he tried to strike me, he shouted that he was trying to put on weight on doctor’s orders and had no idea why I was babbling about Mrs. Hynde-Quarters as he barely knew the woman.
I should never have listened to the abnormal Brigadier.
Copyright 2014 Major’s Corner
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