The Dangers of Custard Misuse

I too have seen the stilton cheese ghostly in the pale moonlight as you taunted the naked unicyclist of fate by stealing his A to Z of Bridlington and hiding it behind an unkempt privet hedge, before going on to speak of the dangers of custard misuse in fluent Portuguese.

Back then, though, we knew too much about Nuneaton, and never once considered the dangers of taking our banjos out onto the ring road before noon. I held the tennis racket and you, my little umpire, sat in the seat high above the proceedings and pronounced yourself dissatisfied with the way I tickled the groundsman with that mallet.

We were young then, and in love, but unfortunately not in love with each other, but that didn’t prevent us from putting the sauce of our choice on each other’s bacon sandwiches as we sat together in that small café of possibility.

I remember licking your stamps as you held the envelopes out to me as we hid from our fellow workers in the stationery cupboard of forgotten promises and superseded memo forms. Little did we realise then that our young hot passion would one day grow as stale and musty as those boxes of unused memos and we would forget each other, just as those unused boxes of stationery had been forgotten by far too many office supply audits.

Still, though, these days every time I see an A5 envelope in need of a stamp,  I think of you and smile.