Revenge is a dish best served cold!

I got my own back on the Universe and the Internets last week, after my earlier, train-travel, unlocked door, embarrassing toilet-related incidents...

We called in at one of our village's Ye Olde English hostelries while we were waiting to pick up Grizz from the evening bus - (He'd travelled to the city after school to see his girlfriend, who's at University there).

I had my Demon Darts with me - My latest obsession. (...More laters). GJ ordered a drink of Lime and Soda (Water) for me from the bar, and I tootled off to the freezing-cold ladies' loos to 'spend a penny...' (I was day-dreaming about a Double Top, see LINK for the Darts Uninitiated), and I had elected to close firmly, and not actually lock, the door to the usually very deserted loos...

The pub has recently been taken over by a new landlady who is loud, lovely and very friendly, and I heard the main door to the ladies' open, and hurriedly squirrelled my vestments together, pulling the door firmly to, just as she reached forward for the Art Deco clear crystal door handle...

The scream she let out at finding there was a Ghoost already in there, rang throughout the Victorian former Coaching Inn, it's seventeenth century rustic sand-stones (probably pilfered from an earlier building - Well, it's the land of the Border Reivers after all!), and its 14 Bed and Breakfast rooms replete with of country walkers and Bird Twitterers... Ear-piercing, it was. Imagine Edvard Munch.



And how we laughed...

I explained away, wibbling hysterically - 'I'm sorry, but I never lock the door as the locks are a bit dodgy, and there's never anyone in here anyhoo, and I'm afraid that I'll get locked in and will never be able to climb out of the loos over the top of the shiny-tiled walls...'

Just then, the blonde bar-maid poked her head around the door, alerted by the Banshee Wail-like-scream of her new boss, believing we were all about to be murdered in front of her bar-nuts. And I scampered away, blushing red and shame-faced - Horrified that I'd terrified these kind folk...

And the landlady proffered, 'I think the locks are so old, that we'd have absolutely no problem getting you out, if you were ever locked in - So don't worry!' I remember that I complimented her on an awesome pair of lungs!

My life is just filled with wonder, n'est-ce pas? And I just know that I'm going to hell in a hand-cart at some point, non?!



Did you know?

To "Spend a penny - Meaning

To use a public lavatory.

Origin: This refers to the (former) use of coin operated locks on public toilets. It was used mostly in the UK and mostly by women (men's urinals were free of charge).

Such locks were first introduced, at a public toilet outside the Royal Exchange, London, in the 1850s. The term itself is later though. The first recorded citation of it is in H. Lewis's Strange Story, 1945:

"'Us girls,' she said, 'are going to spend a penny!'"

'Spend a penny' has now gone out of use, partly because charges have changed and partly because it was always a coy euphemism, which now seems rather dated. The writing was on the wall for this phrase, so to speak, from 1977, when the Daily Telegraph printed an article headed "2p to spend a penny"." SOURCE.