Saturday morning and all was well. Little Miss Manuel had offed herself to work for some some generously paid overtime and I was living the good life of the modern chap and doing the shopping. Not that I was anywhere near a Tesco’s I should add. No for me there is nothing nicer than a good wander round the market at St. Georges on a Saturday morning. We had gone to the Friday Variety market the day before but found it, how should I put this, a bit too real for my liking. Going to a market should be about drinking espresso and getting all misty eyed over organic carrots and turnips. It’s not meant to be an austere 1950’s experience. I expect to pay more not less thank you very much.

And what variety there was at the Friday Variety market! Amongst the action pants and fluorescent jackets there was a chap selling a gold plated bust of old murderchops himself, Adolf ‘don’t call me bad’ Hitler! How delightfully fascist and objectionable is that amongst the potatoes and carrots?! But where were all the lovely people? The people with hemp trousers and Guardian’s tucked under their arms? What had they done with the charming chumps who have kids called Daisy and Jack and Toby? Had they buried them under the massive pallets of socks? Where was the quiche lady with her ever so fancy side range of angel cakes? Where was the jolly butcher man who gives me free pudding? This was horribly disorientating! It was like walking into your own home to find it has been redecorated in a vaguely similar but different way and instead of you sitting on the couch eating a sausage roll it was someone sort of like you but who sounds slightly different and had brown sauce on the roll and not ketchup. Needless to say I left without buying any of the meat parcels or 10 pairs of socks for £3.00.

But Saturday saw me back at St. Georges for the Farmers market. They were all there, the Poppys and the Calebs and the dogs on strings. The quiche lady was there too with her fancy buns and the jolly butcher was laughing and rubbing the heads of terrified children. Ah bliss. I sampled my way, as you do, round the market making purchases as I wandered, a few olives here some cheese there, a big bag of mutton for stew and a small bag of scallops just for me. I chatted about government energy policy with the coffee lady and football with the bacon man. (Mmmmmmm bacon man, the tastiest and best smelling superhero ever.) It was, in a word, delightful. And frightfully middle class. But I like to pretend I own a Volvo with a bike rack on it and a Greenpeace sticker on the window. If my working class was to be exposed I would be shunned by all and sundry because lets be honest most of the Saturday Market folks have nothing more than a employer/employee relationship with the working class.

And with everything safely packaged into my recycled shopping bags I headed off. Obviously I went for a nosey at the giant hole that appeared in the road beside the market. It would have been rude not to. And it was everything you would expect from a giant hole; big, odd, dark and peculiar. Much like yer man Nikolai Valuev the sometime boxer and full time children’s cartoon character. But unlike the small group of gawkers I found it dull and wandered off to get the bus home. For god sake it’s a hole, in the road, it’s not that interesting. I was thinking about the black hole of Belfast on the way home and wondering if anything came out of the hole. I was thinking some sort of Cloverfield type moster. That would sharpen a few minds.

The bus was fairly busy and I took my usual pew upstairs away from the young mother avec pushchairs and old people avec colds and flus and disparaging looks. There were three other chaps upstairs with me. They began chatting about the hole in the road. Seriously so very little happens in Belfast these days that a hole in the road can now captivate the imagination of the citizens.

“See that hole wha?”

“Seen yer ma’s hole”, came the entirely predictable response followed by much guffawing. This went on for a bit, much mention was made of their mother’s bottoms and ahem other things. I sat there bemoaning my luck at having forgot my headphones. Their conversation changed from the hole and holes to what they were doing the rest of the day.

“I’m going round to your ma’s”, came the entirely predictable response followed by much guffawing, again.

“Nah but seriously [really?] I’m going home for wank, balls is busting so they are.”

“Thought you were supposed to be painting today?”

“Aye…..I’ll do it after wah”

Procrasturbating bastard, thought I.

I set the organic carrots that I had been inspecting down. They had, all of a sudden, lost their wholesome appeal. This was not cool. I’m not going to go into details but there then followed a conversation about great wanks and great porn flicks they had enjoyed since they last caught up. I stumbled off the bus a few stops later feeling dirty and quite bemused by the whole sticky affair. Since when was masturbation and porn and that whole ghastly area a subject that people, by people I mean men, feel comfortable enough to talk about with chums let alone chums on the bus? Masturbation is as icky as a conversation piece as cleaning your ass. I mean what the fuck people?! It should be a shameful act carried out at dark and lonely times and then wiped up and never mentioned again. There is no place for discussing of technique and rating and comparing of previous wanks. None whatsoever.

My wholesome visit to the market had been sullied by these three brutes. And you know what got me the most? Thy weren’t horny teenagers with no volume controls but rather grown men probably in their forties. It was like a late night version of Last of the Summer Wine, except Compo and been replaced with a character called Wanko.

I had to chuck the carrots in the end.

Shame, I am very much pro-shame and carrots too, obviously.