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Vile Poetry

The electrician was here at 10am, to see if he could discover why the downstairs power kept blowing. Four or five times in the last two weeks, all the electrics for downstairs have blown out, each time when we were right in the middle of cooking dinner. As this hasn’t happened before in all the time we’ve lived here, we figured we had better call in an expert to take a look at it. There are some things you just don’t mess with unless you really, genuinely know what you’re doing. An electrical power supply is one of these.

So the electrician deduced that too much power was going through one fuse. How come it hadn’t blown before now? Well, the only thing we can think of is that we have a new deep fat fryer which is more powerful than previous types. Each time the electrics had blown, we’d been using that – at the same time as using the oven, hob rings, kettle, two lots of ceiling lights, the electric fire and running the DVD player and TV, plus the music system which the TV speakers work through so everything sounds better. And there's other stuff which runs all the time, which tends to be forgotten about, like the fridge/freezer, telephone answer machine and door bell light, etc. So what he’d done is to put the lights through a different fuse from the other downstairs stuff. Hopefully that will fix the problem.

He told us he’d gone self-employed when he was sixty, and the electrical engineering company which had employed him for the last thirty years had folded. He found it impossible to find fresh employment, seemingly because of his age. Yet he was slim as a whistle, looked healthy and was full of life. He didn’t want to retire yet. Crazy, isn’t it?
 
***
 
My neighbours have possibly been wondering what's so funny. Maybe they've even checked their TVs in case they're missing a good show, as they've been treated to explosions of laughter from my side of the party wall.

Not polite, elegant te he he's, but the genuine rib-breaking, eye-watering, table-thumping BWAAA-HA-HAaaaa-Bwaaa-haaaa haaaa!!! type of laughing.

The cause is somewhat humbling. I've been reading the poetry I wrote when I was a teenager.

For example:-

Silence
I have yet to hear silence.
Though the house is still and empty save for myself,
The sound of life yet fills this room from floor to shelf;
A clock's metallic tick beats out a regular rythmn, while
The electric light bulb greets the fridge in a harmonising
Hum of eternal song... A sudden wail
Erupts from a cat's intense emotional regail...

It goes on, but I'll be merciful.
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