Yellow legs and red faces.

“There’s a chance of seeing the areola tonight.”

“Karen?”

“Yes.”

“Do you mean that?”

“Yes, it‘s in the atmosphere.”

“That will be great then.”

Chatting idly at lunch last Friday night with Karen I pondered again whether her malapropisms were really just accidental. Recently there’s been the giant hardon collider and tonight she asked Trevor if he was looking forward to seeing a beaver up close. He’s going to Canada to sleep in a tent; two weeks of living amongst bears and wolves protected only by that well known impenetrable barrier of 1mm thick nylon. Without making an undue fuss I think we should all say goodbye properly before he goes, maybe buy some cakes and spend some time reminiscing about the good times we‘ve shared in the office.

Here is another of my great-grandmother’s recently rediscovered illustrative cartoons. This one appeared in Woman’s Weekly in July 1937, directly below a knitting pattern for a ‘sports cardigan’, wherein there was an almost prescriptive requirement to ‘purl one right through the back loop‘. I have sometimes speculated on why people look askance at my sports cardigan, I thought it was okay, possibly even de rigueur, but I have never known a thing about clothes. Golf-Tony has been wearing startling canary yellow trousers this week, twice actually, I was quite surprised the first time but quietly sickened, revolted and disconcerted when they reappeared for an encore. Even I, who as I said knows nothing of couture or even what that means, knew instinctively that golf-Tony’s legs were wrong, badly wrong.

We had reached the fourteenth green with some jolting hesitancy, just three blokes trying vainly for some directional projectile accuracy, and a fourth making a statement with his flapping trouser flags. I sensed a distracted contemplative pessimism pervading us as we faced the last few holes, the skies had blackened which only served to highlight golf-Tony’s insensitivity and as the first drop of rain was positively identified three of us bolted for the clubhouse.

Golf-Tony is partially obese and incapable of moving very quickly, so it was with some feelings of almost remorse that I looked through the clubhouse window five minutes later to glimpse what seemed to be a flashing yellow distress beacon a hundred yards away and almost obscured by the grey driving rain. Golf-Tony’s legs moving as quickly as they could across the swell of the eighteenth rough; if I was a coastguard I would have gone out and helped him but I’m not, and it was, quite obviously, absolutely pissing down.