Mrs 3Du’s Christmas

 

I haven’t seen much of Mrs 3DU over the holiday as, once I’d done my Christmas shop, I parked the car up outside my house and left it there for a week. I did another small shop on the Saturday morning before the New Year but she had already dragged Mrs 4DU around the supermarket on the Friday, though she did get her to ‘nip out’ for a few last-minute bits for her on New Year’s Eve.

I have news about Mrs 3DU’s daughter’s car, but I’ll add that bit at the end.

As usual, I received all the news from the street gossip collective which includes, Mrs 4DU, Mrs 5DU, MRs 2DD and Mrs ATSADAB (Across The Street And Down A Bit.) Surprisingly, we have recently had a new member added to our ranks. I say surprisingly because she lives right down at the bottom of the street, so she has now become Mrs BOTS. I have no idea how she gets all the news as she’s miles away from the rest of us. We are all pretty much clustered together near the top end of the street. She must be getting the gossip via tom-tom drums or something… mind you, Mrs 4DU does have a log burner, so she might be sending out smoke signals.

Right, to the nitty gritty. As I have already stated, I haven’t seen much of the old battleaxe over the holidays but I did pick up on a few words that Mrs 4DU passed onto Mrs ATSADAB who couldn’t wait to usher me across the road when I was returning from my doctor’s appointment. (I won’t go into that here as it’s about my bowel movements.) Anyway, Mrs ATSADAB told me that Mrs 3DU has had a huge barney with her other half and she walked out on him just before the New Year. They had a big row about him being ‘as much use as a chocolate teapot,’ and how she’d have been better off marrying that Wilfred Scroggins instead of wasting her life on a fat, bone-idle lump like him. She followed her insults up by hurling a real teapot at him. It was a full one too. He’s got a lump on his forehead now. I wondered where that had come from. He was in the surgery waiting room when I went in for my appointment. It looked nasty. He was telling the poor old bugger sitting next to him, that he thinks he might have suffered a bit of brain damage following her unprovoked attack. That wouldn’t be news to Mrs 3DU as she’s always insisted that Mr 3DU’s mother must have dropped him on his head as a baby…. repeatedly.

Anyway, I’m getting ahead of myself.

On the Saturday before Christmas, the still carless Mrs 3DU coerced her elderly neighbour, Mrs 4DU into taking her to Mozza’s for her big Christmas shop. She told her that if she wanted to do her own big shop, she’d have to make another trip because she intended buying, ‘a frigging truck load,’ even though her daughter and ‘waste of space son-in-law aren’t coming over for Christmas dinner this year. She still isn’t speaking to them after they refused to put a new battery in THEIR BLOODY CAR.

Mrs 4DU claimed that Mrs 3DU was very nearly thrown out of Mozza’s for shouting at a supervisor who was trying to manage the till queues. As she opened a vacant till to ease the pressure on the miserly three that were open, Mrs 3DU hurtled from the middle of her own, long line, spreading chaos as she barged through the orderly queue of people standing between her and the newly opened till. Her trolley was overflowing with Christmas goodies and it was going to take an age for the young girl on the till to process it all, but she still wouldn’t allow a doddering old bugger with a walking stick who had just three items in his basket to go before her.

‘First up, best dressed,’ she told him, smugly.

‘Piss off and die, you selfish old bag,’ he replied, true to the Ilkeston Christmas spirit.

Mrs 3DU offloaded her bags into Mrs 4DU’s tiny boot, complaining all the time about how small, ‘this bloody biscuit tin on wheels, is.’  She could only fit four bags in, so three had to go on the back seat.

When they arrived home, they discovered that a pack of Ambrosia custard had leaked all over the back seat. Instead of offering to clean up the mess, Mrs 3DU announced that she expected Mrs 4DU to buy her a replacement pack when she went to do her own shopping. ‘Mr 3DU likes custard, not cream, on his Christmas pudding,’ she explained.

This, unsurprisingly, pissed the elderly Mrs 4DU off completely, and it took her nearly an hour to get the yellow slime off the back seat. ‘It would have stank to high heaven in a day or so if I’d left it.’

Because she was angry with Mrs 3DU, Mrs 4DU passed on a few of her neighbour’s closely guarded secrets to Mrs ATSADAB. Mrs 3DU has no grandchildren. Her son-in-law, that ‘impotent, empty bollocked tosser,’ is incapable of providing her with one. ‘He’s about as much use as a eunuch,’ she complained. ‘Why my daughter ever married him in the first place, I’ll never know. There was a bloke chasing her who used to work as a bouncer at a club in town. He’s got six kids littered across Ilkeston, so there’s nothing wrong with his gonads.’ She also admitted that her daughter has repeatedly said that she doesn’t want to have children, but Mrs 3DU reckons she’s just making excuses for Mr no nuts.

‘My daughter can’t possibly be infertile because she sprang from my loins.’

I bet Mr 3DU sprang from her loins, too. I would have, in his place.

Her son doesn’t have any offspring either, but that’s not because he can’t provide his live-in partner with them. It’s because ‘that selfish cow of a girlfriend’ thinks more about her career than she does about creating a proper family. She says her son is putting up with it because they are paying off a huge mortgage and he’d miss all the golfing holidays he takes in Spain. It’s not for the lack of trying on his part though, because they were going at it like rabbits all sodding night, the last time the 3DU’s stayed over at theirs.

Between Christmas and the New Year, we had a violent electrical storm which, although only lasting a few minutes, caused the entire population of Ilkeston to suffer a major power cut. The lightning struck a telegraph pole at the top of our street, sending 50,000 volts through the phone lines, the result of which, blew my telephone socket off the wall and fried my Sky hub. Not before it managed to send a similar amount of volts down a connected ethernet cable and into the back of my precious all-in-one computer, frying the motherboard in the process. I do have surge protectors in place, but they only protect the machine if the excess charge is attempting to get in via the plug socket. All is well though. A local PC repair man salvaged my data and the insurance company are going to buy me a new machine. All 1100 quid’s worth of it.

I was lucky to get off as lightly as I did as my 65in 4k smart TV is connected via ethernet too. PHEW!

Other people on the street weren’t so lucky. I know of four people so far who have had their big-screen TVs blown off the wall. Thankfully, they all have insurance. Mrs 5DU was one of them. Mrs 4DU lost her mini phone network as well as her router. Mrs 3DU lost nothing as she religiously unplugs everything before she goes to bed. Even the router. She thinks British Gas will charge her the same tariff she pays in the daytime if she leaves them plugged in and she doesn’t want to subsidise those bone-idle bastards on Universal Credit more than she has to. The fact that she tried to claim Housing Benefit and a rebate on her council tax is a different thing altogether, it seems.

Not that she’s gloating about not losing anything in the storm. She’s furious that ‘half the bloody street’ will get brand new state of the art, 4k smart TVs while she has to put up with that poxy 21 inch bag of shit that she has on a table in the corner of her lounge. She’s been trying to talk Mr 3DU into buying a new, bigger one for years, but as he spends most of his evenings in the boozer and hardly watches it, he won’t fall into line.

Mr 2DU is a retired electrician, and he was telling me, (not in a gossipy way you understand, he’s a bloke after all,) that Mrs 3DU collared him when he was walking up to get his morning paper and asked him if he knew how to blow up a TV and make it look like the lightning had done it.

Mr 2DU doesn’t like Mrs 3DU or her ‘twat of a husband,’ and told her curtly to, ‘piss off.’

That sent Mrs 3DU into a rage and she gave the back of his head a gob full as he walked away from her. ‘I bet you blew your fucker up,’ she yelled after him. ‘I’ll report you to the insurance people when they come to assess it.’

She really doesn’t think it’s fair. She had a right go at Mrs 4DU, even though she’s not claiming on her insurance. Her son bought her a new mobile phone for Christmas, so she’s going to use that instead of the landline. Mr 4DU already has one.

I think this event might have had something to do with why Mrs 3DU left home suddenly on the Friday before the New Year.

Mrs 4DU said she could hear them arguing through the wall, even without having to use a tumbler to hear what was going on. Mrs 3DU was moaning about ‘every other lucky bugger on the street is getting a massive, new TV and I’m stuck with that tiny bastard.’ She said it was so small she couldn’t read all the possible answers that flashed up on her favourite quiz show, and she had no chance of reading the subtitles she has to use so she can understand what the actors are saying in Shetland. Mr 3DU was still unmoved, and he told her he wasn’t about to ‘accidentally drop the TV whilst moving it so that she could dust underneath. The teapot flew through the air a few moments later and within fifteen minutes she was out on the street with a small suitcase in her hand. She was still hurling abuse at him through the closed (and quickly locked and bolted) front door, )when Mrs 5DU nipped out to see if ‘everything was all right.’

Mrs 3DU gave her front door the middle finger before turning with a grimace of a smile to face Mrs 5DU. ‘I’m just off to spend a few days with my daughter…. It was all arranged months ago,’ she added quickly.

And that was that. She walked to the top of the street to wait for a taxi to take her to her daughters. She won’t get the bus, it’s beneath her. I doubt she was welcomed with open arms and cries of, ‘Oh mother, it’s so good to see you. You’ve made our New Year,’ though.

She was back home the following day. Two hours after her arrival, her son-in-law appeared with a new battery for the Citroen. I think a little blackmail took place there. Mind you. I’d have given her the whole bloody car if she had turned up at my house, expecting to stay for an unspecified amount of time. £90 for a battery? Well worth the price of not having their New Year ruined.

Mr 3DU was out when she got back. He was spending New Year’s Eve lunch at the pub so, as he had deadlocked the front door and she didn’t have a key with her for the back, she had to spend a couple of hours sitting in Mrs 4DU’s lounge as she jealously watched their 56in Smart TV.

Thankfully for Mr and Mrs 4DU, Mr 3DU came home in a good mood after winning a few quid at dominoes. She forced her way in as soon as he had, (after four drunken attempts,) managed to get the back door key in the lock.

He was out again a few short hours later, sporting a black eye to go with the lump. They’re getting a new TV by all accounts. He knows someone in the pub who can ‘supply’ one, cheap.

So, Mrs 3DU had a happy New Year, even if her old man didn’t. Mrs 4DU is delighted too. She’s got her car back, even though it stinks of manky custard still.