ROSE COLOURED SUNGLASSES

In my early twenties I was bright and went to college. Only a little later I was making money hand over fist and dropped out, shortly after which the market for that particular set of skills nosedived because of computers, and being a stubborn sort I waited to see if it would come back. It didn't. And college became too expensive. So I never actually finished a degree.

But at heart I am still a college man. Gaily skipping around the quad with a jaunty briar pipe sticking out of my face, dunking underclassmen in the fountain, and having a glass of sherry before late dinner with the chums.

Actually, there were very few chums. Even then most university students were not habitués of the second hand bookstores, and even fewer would positively gloat over a book of myth and folktales with translations on the facing page in a tribal Malayo-Polynesian language. The closest they'd come to that is reading Tolkien. Whom I dislike.

I had gotten well into The Lord Of The Rings, when I realized it was a great heap of bollocks, and stopped.

Yes, I know he's an immortal ruddy genius and we all must worship the roseate clouds he walked upon. Also that he was a pipesmoker with a taste for Virginia flakes (except for his occasional forays into perversion, ie Erinmore Flake). Capstan in particular.
Presumably he also liked a spot of tea, like I do.

A prodigious writer of poofle.

And probably a longwinded conversationalist. The faculty club bore.



Smoked three pipefulls of fine flake during the afternoon while listening to the boys in the back cheering on the game, wailing with despair while the Forty Niners lost, and arguing over sex changes. I suggested at an opportune moment that Jeff would be much more loveable as a pudgy old lady than he presently is as a sour old goat with prostate problems, and one of the boys agreed that he IS huggable. So I think it's a thing now. Jeff should thank me.
His social life is bound to improve. Soon.
There's promise!


Sick hobbits.



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