Are Your Macleans Showing?

I am blogging from my email account today, folks, so I can't guarantee the
layout that will result. But bear with me, because I do believe that the
following story needs telling.

I got a text message at 8am on Saturday from my friend Caro, who I thought
was still in New York but came back for the weekend while her IKEA kitchen
was being installed. And the first person she thought of that early in the
day, was me. Actually she thought of the coffee man first, and then ME as
her date to meet the coffee man. Fair enough.

Begging forgiveness for being still asleep at the time she texted, I
resolved to meet her at the more respectable time of 10.15 - when I could at
least semi-guarantee that both of my eyeballs would be open. And indeed
they were.

And they had to be, because I met a man at the bus stop who revealed to me
that I was, and I quote, "an exquisite addition to Chicago". The man had
about 5 teeth in his head, none of them his. Why does this always happen to
me?

But I was polite, indeed I politely gave him an alias, and when he declared
Olivia Newton John to be dead, I had to set him straight. "Oh no," says I,
"she is very much alive and only performed in LA a few months ago". He, not
to be outdone, declared her to be metaphorically and not categorically dead,
given that she hasn't really done anything in a while and all.

Despite our musical differences, and our diverse definitions of death (he
would have excelled at the Dead Parrot sketch), we conversed cordially for a
while. But then as he inched forward, I leapt backward, and when he hacked
a giant spitball into the gutter, I knew our relationship had reached an
impasse.

I could forgive the squint, the teeth, the shopping trolley, the trackpants,
and the confusion about our Livvy's professional pursuits to date, but I
cannot abide the hacking of loogies onto city streets. Talk about testing
limits! So I made sure he boarded the bus first, and then I seated myself
as geographically removed from him as I could, while still keeping my legs
and arms inside the vehicle at all times. And that, as they say, was that.

Okay so I never said the story was interesting, I just said it needed to be told.