Sugar and Spice and All Things Nice? - Yeah, And My Nephew Is A Mid-Range Simian!

Ignite match, apply to blue touchpaper and withdraw. This is going to put the proverbial feline among the flying rats but it has to be done. Right, here goes.
There is a group of people on this planet who, by all the rules of Pitherdom and this blog, deserve more than any other to be exiled to Grantham. They are one of God's many little jokes. Perhaps HIS finest. They can be more venemous than the average Gila Monster, they are as rational as an Arab at an anti-USA protest, as verbally restrained as Dr Ian Paisley on speed, as infuriating as finding that batteries are not included and as logical as the instructions for an Ikea thermo-nuclear particle accelerator. There is a teeny problemette, however. I, and indeed most men, couldn't do without these unfathomable lunatics and so I am in somewhat of a quandary.
Deep breath. Ok - the offending group is...................WOMEN (and people who generalise?). There, I've said it. I can already smell the waves of oestrogen and outrage building all around me, hear the high-pitched shrieks and sharpening of stilletoe heels and positively taste the poison and passion in the air. To put the record straight, I am NOT a mysogynst. It could be argued, however, that I am occasionally compelled to help them out when they're busy.
This rant, probably my longest to date, comes to you courtesy of a visit made by Pither this morning to Small Town. I had to stop en-route to get money from the cashpoint. Yes, you know what's coming. It has been detailed many times before, by many others. The woman ahead of me in the queue approached the machine and then spent half an hour firking about in her voluminous handbag for her cashcard (why do women have handbags larger than the average Royal Marine's kitbag?). She then produced a card, put it in the hole-in-the-wall, only to discover that Lloyds TSB does not accept Sainsbury's reward cards. Another half-hour firk and in went another card - oops! Wrong way round. Out and then in again. Now the hardest bit of all - the on-screen instructions. Back into that fucking bag again, this time for her sodding glasses. She then peered closely at the screen and appeared to find "key in PIN, followed by 'enter', then service required and then amount" about as taxing as calculating pye to 3,456 figures. When she had finally worked it out and got her money - while all us men in the queue behind her were busy shaving - she spent another half an hour putting the notes in the correct little pockets in her purse. Phew! Thank Fuck! She's finished, we thought. Oh dear me no. She next wanted to check her balance on that and about four other accounts and so the whole episode was repeated and repeated. Us XY chromosome-types by now realised it would have been quicker to have gone away, manufactured sawn-off shotguns out of old baked bean cans and masks from discarded cottonwool buds and then returned and held up the fucking bank! It would probably have been just as quick for us to have dreamed up some winning idea, built up a worldwide business empire worth billions and then bought the bank!
On to the petrol station to top up the car (before it got dark!) and, horror of horrors, a woman pulled in to the two-pump place just ahead of me. She, of course, pulled up at the first pump, I couldn't pass her to get to the unused second pump, and so I had to wait for her to finish. I, of course, had to reverse almost immediately because she did so, having pulled up too far away from the pump for the hose to reach her tank. Back up to the pump again. More peering at the instructions. "Oh Christ! Kill me now! Take me, I am ready for you!" Petrol in, a similar handbag fiasco in the station shop as was witnessed outside the bank and then she went back out to the car where she spent a further half an hour applying another coat of make-up to her crazy-paved face using the rear-view mirror. Time for my third shave of the day.
I finally got into town to find it was very busy but the crowds would have been negotiable had it not been for the fact that most of the women there were apparently staging a fucking rolling roadblock protest with pushchairs, prams and shopping trollies. "Excuse me please, thank you, oops, sorry love, thank you, ooh, can I just get by, thanks, 'scuse me, etc." Those few women unarmed with wheeled weapons seemed to have rather too many genes from sloths and crabs in their chromosomal makeup for comfort. They walked - no, that is an exaggeration. They dithered along and as you adjusted your pace coming up behind them and attempted to go round they completely unexpectedly veered off momentarily to the side to block you. All this without them knowing that you were there. It was just pure instinct in action. You dodged round the other way and they veered off again in the opposite direction, again for no apparent reason other than to ruin your already pathetic life.
When I eventually got to the ONE FUCKING SHOP I wanted to visit, battered, bruised and with blood pressure at a level which could pump the average central heating system, what was left of my heart sank even further. It was packed with hordes of XX chromosome-types. The gentler sex? Don't you bloody believe it! And the Lord said: "And lo, wherever goods shall be offered up for sale, so, there to, shall my daughters gather in legion. They shall protrude elbows like Satan's knives and garner the strength of many oxen, together with the spacial awareness of a blind man on casters. Yey, and this shall be unto the 4 millionth generation." There were endless handbag fumblings a la the bank, only this time each sale was protracted by a seemingly endless fucking vacuous conversation along the lines of what the weather was like or what colour nail varnish the woman standing next to George Clooney was wearing in the latest edition of Hello magazine. AAaaaaarrrrrgggghhhhhhhhhh!!!!
By this time, encounters on the drive home with the mobile psychopaths which are women at the wheel of cars were unable to hurt me too much as I had suffered so deeply already - you know, the "indicating left and turning right" ploy, the "attempting to pull out into traffic while looking in the opposite direction to that in which the cars are coming" habit and the "vacantly admiring the pretty colour changes on the traffic lights but refusing to act on them" game.
A very wise man once told me that women are best summed up by the "two ties for Christmas" scenario. You know, she buys you two ties for Christmas, you run upstairs and put one on to please her and when you come back down she says: "What's the matter with the other one?"
I prefer to think that there are many days when women are much like Tasmania - there are one or two nice places down there but on the whole you don't want to go.
To Grantham or not? The problem is, it's those "one or two nice places" and the occasional lapses into sanity, optimism, sensitivity, softness, and general loveliness which keep you coming back for more. No, they shall not go - the whole gender will, however, be henceforth on double secret probation.
PS. If anyone knows why my marriage has crashed and I am now officially "separated" would they please write to me at the address on this blog?
PPS. In case you were wondering, Thatcher is not, in fact, a woman - she is a Krinod from the Planet Thwarg and so is excluded from my leniency.