A bee in one's bonnet

Can you imagine my revulsion when the door-bell rings incessantly on this sleet-lashed Sunday afternoon, sounding like some naughty schoolboy is trying to pull my bell-ring off, and I meekly open the door in my pink French lace dressing-gown only to find Gladys Grove standing there, her blue eye-shadow running down her cheeks.  A grotesque spectre on such a Satanic afternoon.

Gladys Grove was a famous transvestite back in her hey-day - the 1980s - but has since faded into glorious obscurity owing to her unintentional drunken act of impaling herself onto a giant-sized aubergine on live children's television.  Never a friend of mine, more of a gossip-monger and hanger-on.  

Only Gladys Grove could turn an ordinary, inanimate
object -- such as this oversized aubergine -- into a sexual object.

As soon as I saw Gladys there, I had the temptation to violently slam the door in her face.  However, she'd placed the heel of her indestructible red leather boot over my threshold and I couldn't get the door closed quick enough.  I thought about setting the dogs on her, but Mr P, my poodle, was downstairs having an ear-massage, and Brenda, my Doberman Pinscher, was at the pooch grooming parlour in London's Mayfair.  As most of my compliment of staff were either serving time in Borstal or receiving psychiatric treatment, I was, on this rare occasion, home alone.

"You owe me, Fanny" she said, "can I stay over for the night, please?  My car broke down in the lane and my credit card stopped working".

So I felt obliged to allow her in, despite the litany of paper-thin excuses spoken by her forked tongue.  

She's been making demands all afternoon, ringing the servants' bell, first asking for lemon-scented bath-bombs, then a cup of tea, then a glass of my finest whiskey, followed by an endless list of wants, the most insulting of which was a request for some "posh grub, some of those funny fish balls you eat" (I believe she means caviar). 

I don't suffer fools or faded drag queens gladly, so I cooked up a fried egg for her.   I also found an old packet of Safeway Faggots that had inadvertently slipped down the back of the fridge-freezer.  Not sure how long they'd actually been lying there, in the dust and grime.  Couldn't make out the 'Eat By' date on the packet in the dim light.  I washed all the fluff, mould and rat droppings of the faggots and cooked some up for her personally.   Fried egg and faggots... surely food she'd understand.   I thought she'd be grateful.  

Haute cuisine for the glam-trash: I wouldn't feed this cheap, nasty shit even to my pet snails.  Therefore, it made an ideal hearty meal for unexpected visitor, motor-mouth Gladys Grove, who dropped by today.

Instead, the disgusting bint - all pale and pudgy after her hot bath and wearing an unsightly shade of lipstick that could only be described as pig-pink - stubbed out a half-smoked Menthol vapour ciggie in the fried egg I served her.  She gobbled down the faggots, though, in a split second, the strange-smelling, greenish-brown gravy oozing down her chin.


As you may well know, Fanny is well versed in dispatching hoi polloi in the harshest possible way.  Whilst it may not be de rigueur to ask such an uncouth guest to leave immediately by the tradesmen's entrance, Fanny often employs subtle techniques to reach the desired effect without a single word being spoken.

The weather has been cold recently, hasn't it, and I've been worried about my bees to the extent that I moved them indoors.  You didn't know I was a bee-keeper?  Oh, I love my bees!  I've had hives for years and I often take a gramophone player out into the garden and play all sorts of calming music to them to keep them happy - Shostakovich, Brahms, Debussy, Marilyn Manson, Cradle of Filth, etc.  I don't like to personally handle the bees though, so as the weather has been so bitter, I went out and inserted the vacuum cleaner pipe into the bee-hive, switched the machine on and sucked them all safely inside the dust-bag.

I then moved the empty bee-hive inside the house up to the second-floor airing cupboard, a nice warm place for them.  I only had to switch the vacuum cleaner on reverse to spit all the bees at high speed out of the dust-bag into their hive and slam the airing-cupboard door.

Meanwhile, much to my annoyance, Gladys traipsed about the sitting room in her cheap, scratchy, polyester ballgown, with a huge tri-star brooch, looking like a proverbial scrap of mutton-dressed-as-lamb, putting her enormous feet on the antique Louis Quatorze table, and breaking into bouts of pestilential belching equal in resonance to an orchestra of Amazonian bullfrogs.  She demanded a plate of chips, saying "ta, mate" and then asked if I had any White Lightning Cider, a beverage I've never heard of.

 Disturbing: a photo taken from Gladys's website

"Where's the bogs?" she spluttered, "I need a piss".

Coughing back bile, I managed to utter "Oh you need the toilet, dear? Up the stairs, second door on the right, just walk straight in, do lift the lid before you tinkle".

Off she tottered, her elephantine bulk groaning up the stairs, right into the airing cupboard where the bees are currently being kept.

I think the following picture sums up what happened next.

  

Gladys Grove... last seen covered from head to toe in bees, screaming at the top of her lungs, running at high speed across the pitch-black Buckinghamshire countryside, making a bee-line for Long Crendon village.   Good night, Gladys!