19th
I can only describe these as walnut encrusted scrumptious clumps of dark apricot delights.
The following is a rant about my acquisition of said clumps. Should the presence of colourful language cause anyone the slightest offense please place all blame on the excellent Mr Raynor Gaynan and my favourite eirmonger, Oswald.
Today, I speak very little Turkish, but I possess a vast vocabulary in the universal language of hand gestures*, and in Turkish I can reliably say “five”, “thank you” and “pardon me” with my mouth. And my mouth really likes these clumps. So this afternoon Little Ms Clump-Piggy went to market and bought 5 clumps in a transaction that was very low on the Lobcock Scale (the scale I use to consider how much of a blundering fool I am).
At this particular supermarket there are three long counters stretching end to end. Spread behind glass are a counter full of spices fit to celebrate kings, one full of nuts fit to celebrate even triacontaëterids and in the middle a cornucopia of mixed delights including the clumps. Unfortunately, the supermarket is understaffed, and one poor schlimazl mans all three sections, darting between the counters whenever someone salivates obviously. Then the schlimazl picks out the delight, weighs it and puts it in a paper bag WITH A STICKER.
Well, I gently nestled my paper bag of clumps amongst my groceries and sped off with my shopping kart under my ribs and feet dangling. I searched out other items that tickled my fancy, ordered 5 pastries and finally joined the crowd of a checkout queue. It was only when there were four other shopping carts behind me and I’d begun stacking my stuff on the conveyor belt that I noticed that THE CLUMP STICKER WAS GONE. Catching the eye of the whiskerandoed gentleman behind me, I pointed to the stickerless paper bag, mimed shock and enormous disappointment and ran off back to the clump counter. I spotted the schlimazl (he had just weighed someone else’s clumps) and I smiled as charmingly as possible and gestured that I needed a new ticket.
At this point the supermarket was full, but one woman and her array of Louis Vuitton accessories had managed to squeeze in and scowl by the spice counter. She was transclouted by Vuitton’s quatrefoils and LVs; her waist bent out of shape by the wrong kind of belt, all buckled by Vuitton. She began screaming from the spice counter. I looked nervously at the schlimazl and watched as he placidly pressed buttons on the clump weighing device with his plastic-gloved fingers. She approached, her Vuitton flats flapping at her heels with what appeared to be a henpecked husband and a teenage son. She stopped and stuck her left foot out to the side as if having her feet wide apart would make her more authoritative and dramatize her presence. Her right elbow was at a right angle and she had a practiced way of balancing her Vuitton pocketbook so that the strap balanced just above the back of her wrist while her right hand flopped down, dripping rings. She began verbally attacking the schlimazl with a few references to me. Her teenage son dug his hands into his hoodie and gave his Dad a look. Her husband gave me the universal gesture for “I’m sorry about my wife”, smiling apologetically and turning his palms up to the sky. This she saw. And then she lost it and started screaming all kinds of gyte-shite. I said “pardon me”. She then gestured to the spice counter and, I think, spoke of the sythe of her life and moments of tribulation waiting at the spice counter or wearing ill-fitting Vuitton or something related to a piece of paper that she kept almost puncturing with a tomato-red nail. Her teenage son mimed playing the world’s saddest song on the world’s tiniest violin (s’truth, it could have been a crwth!). The schlimazl stood his ground behind the counter and explained that he was just printing another sticker for me. She cast me a look suggesting I’d probably needed a sticker for pruno and then did something very sanguivorously aggressive. She strode between the counters and into his behind-the-counter-space. This smashed an unbroken, unspoken internationally understood law and the schlimazl moved quickly to grab the intrasupermarket phone and dial to effect some quia timet. My clump sticker was stuck to his glove.
But she wasn’t done. I noticed that her blonde roots were perfect and the flesh behind her triceps was trembling. I wondered what she thought about as she created herself each morning, whether a full character study could unearth agathokakological content buried beneath her face powder. I typed her as the kind of woman grasping at status in many a ville lumière, the kind who applies her make-up and clothes thinking that each addition of gilt product will predict victories in the day’s battles, as if lipstick were part of a catoptromancy kit. She told again of how the schlimazl had moved to serve me first and this time added a mockery of my charming smile and the schlimazl’s choice of me over her. This was getting personal and I was willing to abandon the clumps and go back to the checkout queue; I took a step back. She made a new point and flipped her wrist down on the metal surface behind the counter with a tinny smack and everyone jumped. Perhaps because this had been effective, or because she knew she could make more noise if she rearranged her Vuitton pocketbook, she said something that had the rhythm of a salty one-liner and slammed her hand down again.
Now, I’d had enough of this femme kill-cow-fray, and wanted out of the fray, I waved to the schlimazl and gestured that I was bailing out. He rolled his eyes, grabbed my clumps and couldn’t quite stick the sticker onto the paper bag. I yanked it off his fingers, said “thank you”, “pardon me” and a few other acrylogical improvisations and scurried past the husband and son (both all tenebrio behind the DVD section) back to the queue.
The whiskerandoed gentleman had begun loading my things onto the conveyor belt and I said “thank you” a lot and hoped Tragos would like the clumps. The incident gnawed at me all the way home and now, I feel all purged, thanks Raynor!
*Did you know that almost everyone, regardless of their native tongue, uses a subject, object, verb word order when they describe events with their hands?
