The Food Fight!

I entered my office for the first time in nearly a year having completed my secondment in Geneva. I was welcomed back with the excitement and dependable lack of humility that could only be expected from my old secret flame - my admin girl.

She is now the ownership of another so when I say old, this is not in the physical sense. In fact, tasting her forbidden fruit was not likely a legal issue (only just) but may have been a moral one. Luckily, I had left my morals in a grubby pub toilet in Southend with Sheila Tamworthy 20 years earlier.

Jenny had raced towards me in full view of all and sundry and given me a big squeezing ‘welcome home’ hug. I had forgotten how wonderful she looked, how great she smelled and how easily my ego could be massaged.

I gave her a fake kiss on the cheek and held my arms astride until she reluctantly let go. Frankly, it would have been more appropriate to have hung a ‘I used to shag this bloke’ banner outside our office building.

Anyhow, I walked on and raised my eyebrows at the world, shook my head in almost authentic surprise and proceeded to my desk as if the incident had never even occurred.
Immediately, I felt a huge disappointment and complete despondency as I sat down at my desk seeing the same corporate bullied faces sat around me.

I had spent almost a year in the sunny backdrop of snow-topped mountains and spent late evenings with wealthy frustrated women of leisure. My weekends were filled with skiing trips to the Alps with the single task of preposterous posing with my pals. This was not Geneva.

I was back in Blighty and as much as I loved England, it meant full-time exposure to my wife. Her unbreakable frigidity would mean such exposure would not involve any kind of sexual intimacy, just the usual unforgiving verbal diarrhoea.

Later that day a text was delivered to my mobile. It was from Jenny. It read, ‘IMU meet me2nite got a ?4U’.

At first, I assumed she had fallen over a disposable waste sack and landed fingers first on her mobile keypad, but this was some sort of teenage text code not understood by anyone over the age of 30.


To hell with it. I arranged to meet her later that evening. We had a drink. We talked. We laughed. It was surprisingly pleasant and no word of exchanging bodily fluids was mentioned. It was just a ‘how do you do’ with a young woman who loved wearing copious amounts of war-paint and looked like she had had a terrible misadventure with a vat of industrial make up.

Later, I offered to take her home and we jumped into my car. I inadvertently stopped in a disused business car park. Aghast, I promised to drive straight to the car dealers in the morning to complain as both front seats gave way. We fell into the back of my car entangled with my show of middle-aged athleticism disguised as an awkward, fumbling 40something oaf.

As the windows steamed up and things became a little warm under the collar I had this bizarre sensation that her face was beginning to melt on me. True enough, as we broke away for a breath, I looked at my collar and then at her. I noticed that one side of her face looked as though she had been involved in a close-up paint ball fight and I had suffered the debris of her injuries. The heat and passion of the moment was literally dissolving her face before my eyes. I was caked in more make up than Boy George.

I jumped up banging my head on the car roof causing an immediate erectile dysfunction and called an end to the food fight. I considered telling my wife that I had popped into Boots on my way home for a make-over but it sounded far-fetched.

Now, how shall I explain this……..