Mondayitis – When clothing attacks!

Clouds gather over Versailles the sense of foreboding I felt when I reached into my pocket.

Mondayitis – When clothing attacks!

Looking back on the terrible trauma I have suffered in the past few months, detailed at length in these heartrending posts…

Et Tu Toothipeg: my horrific toothache story 

and

Mondayitis – Man Flu: one man’s life and death struggle with that most horrific of diseases

I really wonder how I have the strength to write at all. But the creative urge is just too strong and so I sit here by the electric heater, dressed in a range of ridiculous clothes chosen for their warmth rather than their sartorial splendour, typing out my life with frostbitten fingers.

You may detect from the previous sentences that it is currently cold.

In fact it is (insert desired expletive here) freezing!

In the Australian classic poem by the bard Dorathea Mackellar are the words,

I love a sunburnt country,

A land of sweeping plains,

Of ragged mountain ranges,

Of droughts and flooding rains.

I love her far horizons,

I love her jewel-sea,

Her beauty and her terror –

The wide brown land for me!

Now I do not see here any reference to “bloody cold winter mornings”! We are supposed to be sunburnt! SUNBURNT!

Not only am I freezing but I have been anonymously insulted.

I went to the thrift store on Saturday and found a woollen pea jacket of a lovely dove grey and immense weight, the label on the internal pocket declaring it to be hand made in New York! I snapped it up intending it to be a vital part of my Parisian winter wardrobe. Little did I realise that I would need it so soon.

Awakening frozen, I grabbed it in the dark this morning, pulled it on over my jim jams and staggered forth to the coffee machine. While I waited for my brew to perc I admired my purchase.

I admired the fabric, the huge decorative buttons, the exquisite stitching and the pockets lined with corduroy.

I suddenly felt a crackling object deep inside the lining.

My heart leapt. Could I have discovered a wad of cash left by a careless New Yorker and missed by the thrift store staff?

I rummaged about in the inside pocket and drew out a neatly folded piece of old lined A4 paper.

Was it a poem by an avant-garde American poet?

Perhaps a sketch by Banksy?

I unfolded it with care.

There written in large black capitals filling the page were the simple words…

“F**K YOU”

So here I sit, insulted by my own jacket, cold, coffeeless (for my machine seems to be broken) and alone. If you should read of the tragic discovery of a brilliant author found frozen in his chair, fingers poised over the keyboard with one little frozen tear on his cheek, his last masterpiece shimmering on the screen before him,then you know who that brilliant author will be.

Oh Monday!