A Breakfast Avalanche

Yesterday started badly and quickly became much worse after a sausage, egg, baked-beans and toast breakfast avalanche.

Being a thoughtful and intelligent chap, I decided to save time and improve my productivity by taking my modest breakfast, a platter of: Cumberland sausages, eggs, black pudding, liver sausage, hash browns, potato waffles, bacon, fried bread, fried tomatoes and butter-fried mushrooms (strictly for health reasons) and toast, into the study so that I could eat at my desk and work on my precious iMac.

Now, as you know, I am not by any stretch of the imagination a greedy man but we authors do need sustenance to keep the inspirational juices of literary artistry flowing so I deduced that this early morning (10:30am!) meal lacked sufficient carbohydrates.  An appropriate decision was made and hence on this particular morning, as I was in the crux of a particularly difficult twist in the plot of my forthcoming book ‘Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Oops!’ I succumbed to necessity and opted for a baked beans accompaniment to enhance the intellectual efficacy of the meal.  Baked beans are something that I rarely eat but on this occasion I needed fuel for the intellect, as it happened, with disastrous consequences.

I should clarify here… It was actually Beloved who kindly brought this heart-healthy snack on a tray into the study on my behalf, as I still use a walking stick to get around after the first of two hip replacements.  Beloved is a lovely, thoughtful girl, considering that she is also a wife.

The tray was passed and Beloved left the room, leaving me making appropriate noises of gratitude. “Thank you dearest.  Most kind of you.  How very thoughtful.  I shall place your name in the annals of authordom for this kindness…  You forgot the salt…”

It was then that a problem of logistics arrived and made its presence known.  The iMac is on a desk sitting next to our printer and a small mountain of what Beloved calls mess and I prefer to refer to as research material.  There was no room to place the tray and I reasoned that both the keyboard and my trackpad needed to be moved in order to make space for the platter of nosh whilst the tray could be filed away neatly on the floor.

I balanced said tray on a convenient stack of paperbacks atop the printer, as one does, and reached for the keyboard.  Sadly the platter got there before me.  A paperback slid from its appointed place on the printer causing the tray to adopt an unfortunate cant, resulting in the platter shooting from the tray.  It caught the front corner of the printer, adjusted its trajectory accordingly, rebounded off this author’s hand as it attempted a grab, adjusted its trajectory again, glanced against the screen of the iMac and deposited its precious cargo onto my keyboard and into my authorial lap.

I am able to report with some authority that the sausages were hot.  Very hot.  Extra very hot!  One even fell into an unmentionable place jammed between my thighs, emulating Little Bertram.  (Those of you who have read Amsterdam Weekend will know just who Little Bertram is).  This would have been hilarious if it had happened to someone else but the accompanying baked beans were so damned hot and by happen-chance, the scalding coffee was no friend to the the genitals of this particular author!

I howled with pain and Beloved rushed back into the study stopping only to rock with laughter and point, displaying just how jolly amusing all this was when it was indeed happening to someone else, before she proceeded to bollock me up-hill and down-dale for making such a damned mess and then informing me where the Sudocrem was kept.

The upshot of this fiasco is that I now have red and swollen boy’s bits and an intermittently dodgy Apple Bluetooth keyboard.  Baked bean tomato sauce, it transpires, does not improve the performance of Apple keyboards.  A previously little known fact!  The letter ‘A’ refuses to work properly, the Command key is a dud and the Shift key is a non-starter.  A new keyboard has now been ordered from John Lewis for the prince’s ransom of £60 including delivery.  That was the best deal that I could get in the UK without resorting to the robber-barons on ebay.

Now I have to sell a whole shitload of books just to catch up!  Woe is me…  Any help that you can offer would be gratefully received.