Firstly, Cedric is not my rubber duck. I mean seriously, what fully-grown adult names their rubber duck. Cedric is my plastic frog who is under the water (he’s a bit shy).
The reason for my displacement is that my wife has upped the ante and populated the bathroom and bathtub with increasingly large and menacing plants, bursting with obscene hairy protrusions.
I hopefully thought they might represent some sort of cancerous growth. However, when I asked her, without blushing or batting an eyelid, she told me they are coirs, fibre-covered sticks, designed to make the plants grow tall because “the taller they grow the bigger their leaves get.”
That is in your face brinkmanship!!! Her unabashed attitude, along with the threatening missile-like shape of the coirs reminds me of the Cuban missile crisis, which history.com helpfully summarises:
“During the Cuban Missile Crisis, leaders of the U.S. and the Soviet Union engaged in a tense, 13-day political and military standoff in October 1962 over the installation of nuclear-armed Soviet missiles on Cuba, just 90 miles from U.S. shores.”
I need to do some research on how Kennedy held his nerve against Krushchev (..don’t be silly I’m not going to read books, there’s a Kevin Costner movie, “Thirteen Days”), but first I need to phone the pool shop to see if bath bubbles will damage the pool pump, in the meantime.
Yours from the front line, or should I say, from the dark shadow of the curtain.
