But She Knows It

I love having Christian around.

Christian is Jim's 11-year-old son. He follows me around, wearing a cardboard box over his head and making penis jokes. In fact, this kid is pretty obsessed with penises, possibly because of having just discovered that he owns one.

So Ismat had a blast in Melbourne. Sally had a blast in Byron Bay. Renata had a blast god-knows-where but this was her second holiday of the month. I had a blast filling in for all of them.

Some time today Jim found Christian running around with a mini Christmas-stocking between his legs.

"Christian what are you doing?"
"It's a condom, dad."
"Stop that or I'm calling your mother."

Ismat told me that the Westpac man and a couple of boys from IGA have been asking about me while I was away at Kirribilli. Westpac man has my (fake) number but I've never served or spoken to a single IGA employee except for the portly lady who serves me whenever I buy melon salad.

The IGA guys haven't any balls and the IGA girls haven't any life, so as a result the women have been grilling Ismat and Harsha about the "new girl". They've started talking to me too. Actually that was a bit of an understatement. When one of them happened to find me in the toilet she actually talked to me from inside her cubicle. There's an unspoken rule that the toilet cubicle is a private sanctuary. A totally separate world. You don't cross that line. You don't ask me what I'm studying at uni if I'm concentrating on taking a massive dump.

Then I came out to find Harsha and her IGA friend talking about me.

And Christian, who on the way to Easyway with me said in a low tone that dripped seriousness, "there are two men from the supermarket who are always perving at you. You have to be very careful."

It turns out that Indian men love me. Because one of the guys is Indian. The other one that one of the IGA girls tried to introduce me to was a scrawny little Asian guy with a dirty mullet. I'd probably rather date Harsha.

And that's saying something because the woman is driving me mad.

To escape from her endless requests I spent some time sitting by the deodrant section sniffing the products that made me feel nostalgic. Then I bought some time by staging a yawn-studded discussion with Jason about why antihistamines should not be taken by asthmatics. In the end we decided to accept it as fact.