Beautiful Women - Gift or Blight?

 

She had a body, sinuous like a wet question mark. The question being whether she’d let you gain erotic access to it? Her name was Gloria; G L O R IA, like the song and never was a woman so well named for she created more erections than McAlpine’s. He wondered if it was a good thing being a woman that good looking? Most men would be too tongue-tied to talk to her just as a normal human being. If they spoke to her at all they’d be just trying to impress her with all sorts of shite about cars and money and how they wrote songs and would she like to hear him on Soundcloud (actually, that last had been part of my own routine during which she’d looked as bored as an audience at a Theresa May speech).

O Gloria. O Glorious. Will you ever be mine?

Never in a month of Sunday’s!

If I was a beautiful, sexy woman I’d definitely get out a lot more.

I wonder what I’d look like in the bath?

And what about her woman friends who had come to the pub with her? What was it like for them sitting next to such a vision? They paled in her presence. Men only talked to them to get nearer to her. They talked louder than they normally would hoping that sultry Gloria would overhear and somehow be impressed.

She sure didn’t look too impressed. She wasn’t an ice-queen, but she didn’t laugh easily, not at what the men said anyway.

Did women like being pestered by men in this way? I suppose, perversely, they’d be upset if they weren’t. Chatting up, it used to be called back in my day (if there ever was a ‘my day’?). You gave them your chat and hoped that you’d ‘pulled’. Fishing terminology. Hooked up. Back in my auld da’s day you called it ‘getting a lumber’. Sounds more onerous than romantic. And, even if she lived way out in Yoker or somewhere in the back of beyond, you had to accompany the lassie home and maybe get a winch for your trouble. Winch. Lumber. Sounds like docker’s talk, and maybe it was.

In the ambulance later I was thinking about all of this and what I’d done. Life is such a fleeting thing (think of it a moment and now that moment is gone!) and one must make the best of opportunities (even if they weren’t opporchancities at all). You can’t be lying on your deathbed and suffering flashbacks at all the chances you missed or, more to the point in my case, made a mess of.

I remember women I could have had chances with but didn’t take them. Thon wee Asian barmaid in The Crown. Christ, she was cute. Played darts too. The pillow talk could have been sensational, not to mention staving off the old premature whadyamacallits by shouting out three-dart finishes.

“153? That’s treble twenty, treble ninetEEN, DOUBLE EIGHTEEN. CHRIIIIIST!!!”