Bored of excitement – The griefjunkie blog 

Dear Rachel

I have been looking at expanding our lavish kitchenware department recently, and I know a man who knows a man who knows a man who can cut toughened laminate glass. It isn’t his main line of business, but we are usually dealing with people who are doing things that aren’t their main line of business, or else their main line of business would be as ramshackle, haphazard and defined by endless grinding poverty as ours. Anyway. One of the properties I find most pleasing about toughened laminate glass is that, at a thickness of 40mm, it will stop a bullet. This appealed to me greatly, as I thought it would be a bit of a larf to produce a bulletproof chopping board.

Last week, I headed west to Acton to see the prototype. It had ‘Lovely Chopper’ on it, which I’m afraid was the best I could come up with design-wise at short notice, but otherwise it was very Anne Boleyn, which incidentally is London market slang for ‘well executed.’ It did look a bit on the thin side, though, and as the pair of us stood in a long and rather rusty open sided corregated iron shed, which I suppose at some point in the distant past was probably a repair depot for railway rolling stock, I said ‘Yeah it’s nice, but bollocks is it bulletproof’. My astonishment at what happened next – that our new kitchenware manufacturer took out a Glock automatic pistol and shot it, with a bored air more suited to someone examining a wine list in a restaurant they didn’t like but were resigned to eating in – was matched only by my astonishment that I had miraculously not shat myself.

The minutes that followed this remarkable turn of events were very good ones for freestyle swearing. I raised a number of key concerns, which I am not ashamed to admit that I conveyed at the top of my vocal range, in something approaching a scream. I am a gentleman who prides himself on a collected manner, I explained, but then I am also a gentleman who does not associate with fucking mentalists who fire live ammunition at kitchenware in order to answer questions of practical durability. He countered this by saying that it was a party trick he used to demonstrate stuff to clients, to which I responded with yeah, I’m lucky I snapped you up before Ikea did, and does your existing client base include Bonnie and fucking Clyde and Butch fucking Cassidy and the Sundance bastard Kid. Repeated sentiments in this general vein led to me being advised to keep my ‘fucking dress on’, as it was only meant as ‘a little surprise’, which in turn led to my exhortation to be given the ‘fucking shooter’ so that I could surprise his arse with it.

On the tube home I contemplated how unfortunate ‘Bollocks is it bulletproof’ would have been as a choice of last words, and tried not to reflect in quite so much detail what someone who habitually works with bulletproof glass and carries loaded firearms about their person actually does do for their main line of business. However, as I exchanged the Central Line for the Northern Line under Tottenham Court Road, I reflected that although I have a largely glamourless and disfabulous existance, I have at least seen a man shoot a chopping board in a dilapidated railway building in Acton, which is a proud claim that not many people can make.

Facebook: Several thousand visitors to the site searching for Glee Club references in the wake of our being ripped off by the writers of that otherwise very good hit show resulted in not a single new member, so we remain at 117. Facebook groups forming as a tribute to Dolphins Are Gay Sharks – the bit of our product range to which the Glee Club writers took a particular shine – typically have several thousand members and counting, none of whom have the faintest idea who we are.

Twitter: Mainly we use this as an uninstant Instant Messenger these days, like most people.