A Romantic Interlude

 Badger has mites and I'm getting the blame. Life is so unfair. Just because I came from a house at the bottom of the hill where the proletariat live. Honestly, my staff can be such snobs. Badger came from a nice. posh pet shop in Noosa, so the mites couldn't possibly have come with him. His bum is balding and scabby. My male staff took him to the vet the other day, and she scraped a bit off one of his bum scabs, took one look at it under the microscope and pronounced "mites." Apparently some piggies can carry mites and show no symptoms, while on other piggies their fur drops out and leaves them looking like Elton John before his hair transplant - only without the stupid spectacles of course.

 As I am the suspected carrier we both have to have this creamy stuff squirted on the back of our necks which is supposed to kill the mites. It nearly killed me. God! The smell of it! My male staff says it smells a lot like something he calls deep heat ointment. Apparently he became very familiar with the stuff when in his younger days he used to hang around men's football changing rooms. Yes I know that sounds a little suspect. That's why I didn't probe any further.

Still on the subject of football. or "saah-ker" as my many American friend prefer to call it. The English season kicked off this weekend, which means that my male staff has nine months of stress ahead of him. This is what you get for following a club like West Ham United. Last season they were relegated from the English Premier League to the second tier Championship. This means that instead of playing in front of seventy thousand screaming fans at Manchester United's Old Trafford stadium they will instead, be playing in front of a couple of kids on skateboards, an elderly couple out for a walk, a young unmarried mother with a snotty-nosed brat in a pushchair and an incontinent dog in a public park in Doncaster. West Ham are one of those teams who can beat Manchester United on their own turf one week and then lose to Saint Agatha's School for Partially Sighted Girls (2nd eleven) the next. Indeed even as I write this my male staff is in a foul mood because they've just lost their first game of the season at home to Cardiff.

For some reason he's been following them since he was eight years old, which believe me, is a long time. I think he liked the team colours to start with. He certainly never lived in the East End of London where the club is based. He can't even speak fluent Cockney, though he has managed to pick up a few useful phrases from when he used to go to see them play regularly. Here are a some of the most commonly heard Cockney phrases at a West Ham game.

  "Ya dir-ee fakking norvun kant."  (You are a naughty man from somewhere north of London.)

  "Oh ya stewpid fakking wanka! Ah va Fak dija miss that?" (Golly! You were unlucky to miss the goal from that range.)

 "Fak me ref! Yoora fakking chea-in fakking kant." (I don't really agree with that decision referee.)

 "Fak this! We're losin' free nil. I'm gonna fak off  'ome now an get away before all these fakking kants hit va street. Mite even givda bleedin' missus one arfta sapper"  (Since it appears that we are going to lose this particular game, I'm going to leave now and avoid the crowd. If I'm fortunate I might even have a romantic interlude with my wife after we've dined.)

I really hope that my male staff takes me and Badger to a West Ham game on our upcoming visit to England. I do love to learn new languages.