On warm summer nights, I often sit in the garden drinking a glass of, er… water (yeah, that’s a good one; we’ll go with that – [snigger] water).
It’s so peaceful - seeing bats flitting around at dusk, hearing the occasional screech of an owl, observing foxes warily observing me and listening to the horses fart contentedly (sorry Mum, I meant to type ‘blow raspberries’, but fart slipped out instead) in the field next door, then listening to them relieve themselves (I reckon they must have bladders the size of a small pond).
(Mind you, you know when you’re on a night out and you’re drinking? After a while, you begin to feel the urge to pay a visit to the facilities, but you just know that if you go too soon you’ll be visiting those facilities A LOT after that. So you hold on and hold on until you feel you can’t hold it any longer. And then when you give in and go, you find you too have a bladder the size of a small pond. Which then shrinks to the size of an amoeba for the rest of the evening.)
When it gets dark enough and the skies are clear, I start to star gaze. Apart from The Plough, the only other constellation I recognize (and have bothered to look up) is Cassiopeia. It’s the one that looks like a ‘W’ (well, looking northwards it does from my part of the world, others may see it as an ‘M’ or perhaps a tilted ‘∑’).
Significant Other and I first became aware of Cassiopeia while on holiday in Cornwall one year. We didn’t have a clue what its real name was, so we dubbed it ‘The Big W’ (oh, how imaginative!). With a glass of… water each, we’d go down to the beach at night and look in awe at the amount of stars we could see.
Returning home after this particular holiday, we looked for and found The Big W. Its position in the sky made it look like it was over our neighbours house and garden.
Let me detour a little here.
Our next-door-neighbours on one side where we used to live were lovely. Salt of the earth and all that. The neighbours on the other side however, weren’t.
There was Mr Tosser, Mrs Tosser and their two daughters (got no idea what their names were, but I draw the line at calling innocent kids tossers – I do have some boundaries).
Amongst other things, both Mr and Mrs Tosser were very territorial about the parking space in front of their house. It didn’t matter to them that everybody else who owned a car had paid their road tax and was therefore entitled to park there. Oh no, as far as they were concerned, God had allotted them that space and plagues of locusts would be inflicted on anyone who left their car there.
Another neighbour further down the road had a visit from his elderly father once, who parked outside the Tosser house. When he ended his visit, he returned to his car to find an A4 sheet of paper had been glued to the windscreen on the driver’s side with the words ‘DO NOT PARK HERE’ written in black marker pen.
We never used to hear the children in the house. You’d expect to occasionally hear shouting, laughter, the noise of feet running up or down the stairs, but there wasn’t a peep.
We used to speculate about what they did with the kids to keep them so unnaturally quiet. It was decided that Mrs and Mrs Tosser put the kids into pods as soon as they walked through the front door.
Whenever I saw Mrs Tosser in the street, she had a face like a slapped cats arse. Come to think of it, in response, I may have too.
I was chatting to our other neighbour over the fence in the back garden once, when she lowered her voice and said, “Look. Up there. Look at Mrs Tosser’s bathroom window.”
When I turned and looked, Mrs Tosser was pressed up against the frosted glass, had one knee perched on the window sill and an ear up to the open fan light window. Obviously the frosted glass meant we couldn’t see her. Right?
To give her something worth listening to, my neighbour and I started talking about what we considered unusual sexual practices to be – “Nah, I’ve done that – it ain’t strange at all. You should try it.”
Back to Cassiopeia.
Our discovery that The Big W sat over their house was, as far as we were concerned, a sign.
In ‘honour’ of what we thought of our neighbours, The Big W thereafter became known as The Wanker Constellation.
I now sit in my garden at night, drinking my wi... water, say hello to Cassiopeia and think of Significant Other, hoping wherever he is now, he’s ok.
Therefore, in loving memory of Significant Other, I think I might request Cassiopeia be renamed The Wanker Constellation.
Hang on, something doesn’t feel right there, but I can’t quite put my finger on it.
The good thing about stars is that you can bullshit mercilessly. When a relative's child was visiting recently (with the relative, obviously, I don't have strange kids popping in), I just pointed randomly at various stars to show them Porkus the Pig. They loved it.
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