Incredulous Tone-r of Leek

She’s a girl who won’t work without her 2pm pilchards,

It’s 00’s cautionary tale, Denise “I saw Charlie Sheen and thought I want me some of that” Richards!

I’m sure she’s lovely.

Lo and the Lord says, let thee run around with a ball, sometimes with the kicking the ball, other times with the throwing the ball. Still other times, punching and slapping the ball. Everything short of blowing on it. And Lo, it shall be viewable on every glass surface in the land.

And it will be brilliant.

The world has obviously become drunk on sports. And if sports be the booze of life, I’m Oliver Reed.

Oliver Reed. A man who loved booze so much, he married it and had many children, then grandchildren with it.

Then his liver exploded like a pipe bomb.

On Saturday morning, myself and Meg got up nice and early and started off on the long and standing-room-only route to Cardiff for the third game of the 2015 Rugby World Cup. The well-oiled bone-grinding machine of Ireland versus the tits-on-a-bull of Canada. Meg had elected for the garb of her countrymen, a $1 red stetson and a faintly beer-stained red and white maple leaf top (both of which were actually mine). I had made the risky decision of donning my new Kerry top. The colours match up pretty well as a substitute for the national team if you’re unfamiliar, but the following day was the All Ireland final. So I spent the day either having to return insults to opposing Dublin fans or warmly congratulating anyone who declared “Fuck the Dubs.” It was about 60:40 in favour of the Dubs being copulated with, consent seemingly optional.

Are thoroughly high-brow stuff.

We arrived in time to get a few pints in as well as a slopshow burger. Everyone around us was dousing their ketchuped chips with plenty of mayo and using the larger chips to stir the whole goopy mess together. It couldn’t have felt more like home.

The trick is to really glob it on. You’re missing out.

On to the game, or at least the start of it. Meg is under the impression that the song played before Irish rugby games is the national anthem. It’s actually a little patriotic ditty designed to be apolitical enough that the lads from Ulster in the North who may be of the Protestant persuasion aren’t made to feel like turdburgers for singing it. You can tell the difference because the lyrics aren’t in Irish and aren’t so keen on murdering the British… like all our other songs are.

Nevertheless Meg like to belt out the two words she knows of it. “Shoulder… to SHOOOOOULDER!” For the mathematicians out there that`s three words, with one repeat. When the poor little tykes of Canada were compelled to belt out their anthem, there was relative silence, apart from row 26 seat 9 where Meg belted out the only national anthem in the world with a tone of disappointed surprise.

“Oh!? …Canada.”

I obviously joined in with the lines about hockey and dangerously cheap donuts but Meg so stole the show that the surrounding seats actually gave her a round of applause.

The game was not necessarily Ireland’s finest 2 hours (two disallowed tries for Canada) but after some spirited, “Please God, just not in the face” style resistance, Ireland eventually put a few execution-style rounds through the forehead of the maple menace and allowed us get back to our drinkdrankdrunkening. Once we had gotten outside the stadium we beelined for the first pub and while I was attempting to get deliverance from my terrible thirst, Meg made a little friend.

Some details about this guy. Well he was “Cahhdif, boan an bpred.” He had a picture of his daughter, who was older than Meg and frankly looked older than him. Good life decisions all around. And he had formulated the perfect joke. A song had broken out in the pub amongst the Irish claiming they were “Going to win the cup.” But Tricksy Magee had realised the song didn’t specify which cup. He just changed the cup we were going to win. So simple.

“We’re gonna win the cup”

<incredulous tone> “Yeah, the egg cup.”

See what he did there?

Meg was suitably worried about his interest in her and dragged me away from the bar to chaperone. He then suggested we all take a little photo, but was too drunk to get the camera to reverse and then as we held our rictus of awkward smiles, I noticed he was shakily but purposefully moving the camera to the side to effectively crop me out. His intentions were not pure. Then he told Meg she looked “miserable” and staggered off to revive his egg-cup routine.

Due to someone getting a smack of a train the previous night in Twickenham we were forced to stand outside the train station for two hours with no info, shelter or pee-bottles. Once we got in it was standing room only again, but now drunken-shouting edition. Someone beside us asked a waif-like Dublin girl how she was doing.

“I’M SHITFACED!” she responded demurely.

After a tough 2 hours we were back on the good old Tory-voting side of the country on a small train, close enough to the toilet that we could hear a belt clanking open. Meg had done a reccy previously and had to employ her emergency kitchenpaper, but this poor bastard had himself in a bind.

“Hells bells!!” he exclaimed several times to no-one in particular, as well as the rest of the carriage. After a little spell of silence he far more illustratively enquired,

“Where is it all coming from? There’s THOUSANDS of them!”

Smurfs with blue gold? A tiny train bee-hive? Succession of small turds? You be the judge.

In other news Meg has taken to fake-answering my phone. Usually, it’s just “Yes Mr President!” Todays was particularly… developed. She outed me to the imaginary tabloids.

“Hello? Yes he is gay. I AM a close personal friend.”

Starting to fear that one of these days I’m going to come home and she’s going to have made a friend out of a bag of onions and a broom. And then gone insane and murdered his children.

Incredulous Tone-r of Leek