“… there was blood and raw meat everywhere….”

I've always been pretty sure that the majority of women in late middle age are completely nuts. Those professional types, aged 40-50, that have a rather alarmingly good seat within the moral majority. The kind that are forever “up in arms” about the latest buzz issue.

My theory was given further weight at 7.30 this morning. I was on the bus to work, head buried deep in my Burroughs, reading a passage about young boys in rainbow coloured jock straps fucking each other in a penny arcade. Safe to say my shock threshold was fairly high already,  but this didn't prepare me for what was to come. My ears pricked up when, through the general hum of the morning commute, I heard the lady tell her travel companion that “there was blood and raw meat everywhere”. I started to take notice.

Seemingly her Cat had taken a piece of defrosting meat and dragged it around the house. Simple. I began to sink back to the text in front of me, but I was already tuned in, so the voices of my two characters refused to leave my consciousness.

“I think I'm going to get a tortoise” announced lady 1.

“A live one?” questioned her blonde pal.

???????“A live one”??????? Do I live in a world where deranged women make pets of dead shell dwelling creatures?

Lady 1: “Yes, I think I could really fancy it up.”

Lady 2 “Oh yes, there is so much you can do with them.”

Baffled. Well and truly. “Fancy it up”?

Public transport is the greatest place on earth for picking up the finer points of insane human nature. This particular episode is second only to the time I sat opposite a man with a small mouse in his top pocket. A situation made stranger when the gentleman then took one of his headphones out and fed it into his pocket, giving the mouse an opportunity to listen along. I preferred him though, he was proper piss your pants, sing to the pavement crazy, unashamedly so. I imagine the tortoise ladies probably see themselves as the most sensible folk on earth.

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