Health and beauty

I have told myself that the rather timid and ineffectual illumination of the peacock was due more to its placement than to any basic design flaw.  By the night it will have been moved into a more prominent position and its alignment adjusted so that it can be seen better from the house.

Our Sunday morning is accompanied by the usual moronic barking of one of the damned canine souls in bondage next door.  Ever time the jailer (aka Owner) leaves the dog, its own doggie version of the Stockholm Syndrome kicks in and it barks its deprivation until its captor returns.

In spite of it being a somewhat overcast day I have had an “early” morning swim; so early indeed, that it was not even accompanied by the shouts and screams of the local children having their usual conversations. 

I am convinced that the habitual listening to iPods and the like at high settings have destroyed the hearing of the last few generations of children which would account for their always having to communicate at the sort of volume that can drown out passing aircraft!

The peacock is now on a small plinth at the end of the garden and looking, if I am truthful, a little odd.  Still, if it blazes forth in a coruscating display of light and colour tonight it will have justified its purchase.

Today one of my major irritants is a direct consequence of the birthday party.

The present we bought was one of the spin-off products from the cartoon film “Cars”: a talking truck pulling a container which opened out in three directions to form a track on which three small cars could be catapulted by use of a small accelerator device.  A perfectly ordinary offering to a three year old!

Although shoddily made of flimsy plastic, it looked good in the box and made a satisfyingly large, gaudily wrapped gift. 

And in my view that is how the gifts should stay until well after the givers have left. 

Taking the wrapping paper off presents merely encourages the recipient to want to take the gift out of the packaging and nowadays, no child can disentangle the object from the fiendish prison in which it is encased.

The first major problem is opening the box.  Even (or especially) when there are clearly tucked in tabs which should be un-tucked to facilitate easy opening this will never be the case.  Sellotape of evil transparency will stymie any attempts to get to stage one in the releasing of the contents of the box.

The tape used to lock up the box is not only of crystal transparency but also of a composition that melds it to the very cardboard on which it is supposed to be just stuck.  Broken nails and shattered spirits are the inevitable result of trying to peel off the tape so there is recourse to The Knife.

A new rule now makes its presence felt: how ever many pieces of tape you slice through there will always be one that you have missed that keeps the box structure secure and impenetrable.

It is at this point that one resorts to brute force to rip, rend and tear the box to pieces and one also discovers just how lethal cardboard can be as, in my case, fingers are effortlessly sliced open.  And why is it that the cuts are always in the most inconvenient places: on the right side of the nail of the index finger of the right hand.  A place where a cut makes itself noticed every few seconds!  Yet another price I pay to keep children happy!

Of course opening the box turns out to be the simple part of the dislodgement of the present – which by this point one has learned to loathe.

All the contents of the box are securely attached to a backing card with plastic ties and sharp-ended twists of wire.  I have always assumed that this was the revenge of under-paid Chinese workers on the soft, exploitative western capitalists buying the results of their labour.

I sawed through the plastic and after innumerable pinprick reminders of how lethal wire can be the contents were free.

Then the full horror of “some assembly necessary” comes into play.  The instructions were only discovered much later, having slipped unnoticed onto the floor and been swept under a table, so all I had to go on was a picture on the ripped front of the box.

All things considered I did quite well and by the time I finally gave up in infuriated exasperation there was the appearance of something like the front picture – or at least what one could make of it from the fragments left after the fury of opening. 

The finer details I left to the parents who accepted my partially completed construction with eyes that gleamed with what I can only describe as naked resentment.

My job “done” I retreated to a part of the room as far away as possible from the “playing” area of kids and doting relatives – and there I stayed and, apart from a fairly long sword fight with the nephews, in relatively safely.

Roll on the time that we can give money and have done with the present thing entirely!