No wig relief was on offer for me there, I'm afraid.
After considerable absence I revisited the local* City Road today and popped into a few local** commercial establishments. I took a close look at three impressive guitars*** at the local**** Cash Generator establishment and then swung by the local***** Islamic Relief shop. Islamic Relief is a charity that helps people who have found themselves in emergencies such as war, a socialist government or some natural disaster******, allegedly regardless of their race or creed (I have been assured of this repeatedly, but don't quite buy that, contrary to the cheap stuff that's on offer locally; I mean really micro-locally, i.e. inside the shop).
Regardless of whom they help and whom they don't, I enthusiastically set about browsing through two shelf-fuls of books, selected half a ton******* of them and started making my way to the till. On it ********, I noticed a brand new cardigan with an mid/up-market label and practically identical (in the colloquial, not the ontological sense) with the one I'd seen, and looked into, at another local (9) commercial establishment - not at all of a charitable character, quite the contrary, I'd say - where it was offered to me for upwards of 30 units of the local currency; an offer which I declined after taking into consideration the (bloody high) level of excise on local beer. Here, however, the same product was on sale for mere 1.5 units of the local currency. Not being dumb, I snapped at the local bargain. Leaving the establishment, overburdened with encoded knowledge and satisfaction at the deal, I thought: I definitely don't need another stupid cardigan, but I'm not dumb, unlike the Muslims back there.
*yes, yes: I'm just being silly, but not to the degree those Muslims were.
**local, there; not local relative my place.
***yes: I haven't given up on my dream to become a rock star. Actually, as I'm going more and more senile it's becoming ever stronger. And ever more realistic.
****you may have guessed that, working on the premise - quite correct, by the way - that I don't move so fast as to end up in a place that wouldn't be local relative to any place within half a sentence, so I'm adding it just in case you're dumb (and - and this is the true reason - because 'local' and I have a thing going on, as you may have realised, unless you're dumb).
*****actually, never mind. I'm just being dumb.
******although for naturalists, materialists and all sorts of other confused people, wars are also natural disasters (well, actually, if they're naturalists or materialists the word 'disaster' doesn't apply at all: nature and matter don't know disasters; well, nature and matter don't know anything, so if people are 'natural' or 'material' they don't know - they can't know! - anything either; it's just by the way... you simply can't kill the philosopher in me, unless you're dumb: then you won't even realise he's there).
******* I need to start doing again those funny little numbers just outside top right-hand corners of words.
8: English bad, but shorty.
9: Now, this is a different, broader 'local', which encompasses the whole of the city, including Penarth.
P.S. To the fellow people of the Book: please don't blow me up, I'm just teasing you. Yes, you follow a false prophet, but it doesn't follow that you're dumb (except those women in that shop); you're merely dangerously mistaken.
P.S.2 When I did ******* I forgot to get to the point: one of them was Exploring Corporate Strategy, Text and Cases (7th edition) by Gerry Johnson, Kevan Scholes and Richard Whittington, published in 2005 by Prentice Hall/Financial Times, tips from which I'm going to use for a noble, un-dumb cause.
(Speaking of the book: "What's pink and hard and many men struggle with it in the morning?" Answer in the next post.)
