O mackerel, Where art thou?

A wise man once said, ‘Always empty your shopping bags the moment you get home, especially if you’ve bought fish.’

Oh, that I’d listened to him!  But how difficult it can be to sort the prophet from the madman when in the queue at the CO-OP! And in the horns of that dilemma, lie the roots of my salty tale.

Unusually for me, I’d bought fish – a smoked mackerel to be precise. Now, I don’t normally buy anything that looks vaguely animal-like, and generally eyes are a big no-no, but I’d been reading an article about how eating fish could improve brain power and felt that, perhaps, my grey matter could do with a bit of a boost! Years of problem solving (why do I have to work?) and heavy drinking (see ‘fling zee fromage’) had left some of my brain cells rather wizened; I reasoned that one plate of kedgeree was all that stood between me and intellectual superiority.

With a spring in my step, and a mackerel in my bag, I headed back to my humble home.

Who knows what was going through my mind (probably a big zero) as, instead of immediately putting the aforementioned brain-fuelling sea creature into the fridge, I slung the bag to one side and slumped in front of the tele. Who can explain how, when I moved from the sofa hours later, I had completely forgotten the whole fish-purchasing incident and chucked the bag on to the top of my wardrobe?

That night, I had pizza for tea.

Returning from work the next day, a sulphuric-acid type stench seemed to encircle my home. Wading through the stinking fog, I headed straight to the bin and gingerly took it outside. On re-entering the flat, I opened all the windows, vigorously flapped a newspaper, smiled inwardly at my efficiency in a crisis situation, and waited for the pong to dissipate.

It didn’t.

When it became apparent that the source of the smell was not the bin, I was dumb-founded; I checked the usual places – behind the fridge, next to the cooker, under the sofa – and, although I found any manner of useful, presumed-missing items, I could not locate the pongy parcel. Ironically, because I had not yet boosted my brain power by eating fish, it was some time before I recollected my purchase of the previous day – and then it came to me in a fishy flash: ‘Good Lord! Where did I put that mackerel?!’

I tried to retrace my steps from the day before (the flat being small, this did not take long). Bit by bit, like an amateur sleuth, I pieced together the parts of the jigsaw – the bag, the sofa, the bedroom, and lots of tricky sky bits  – and remembered at last (Praise the Lord) that I had flung the bag on to the wardrobe. With an enormous sense of impending relief, I stretched up to retrieve it - only to discover that the bag had fallen down the back of the wardrobe.

In the end, the retrieval operation took a good half hour – the gap between the wardrobe and the wall being very narrow, the wardrobe being almost impossible to shift, and the overpowering smell of the foulsome fish making the working conditions virtually impossible. However, I didn’t get where I am today by buckling in a crisis, and, thus, the offending article was eventually retrieved and the fish-in-a-bag (a nice hippy hessian one) ceremoniously dumped in the outside bin.

It took several days for the flat to lose its fishy scent, people sniffed at me suspiciously when they passed me in the street, and I never did get that brain-boost that might have meant my life would take a different path.

And sadly, the sorry tale doesn’t end there! Prior to dumping the fish-fumed bag, I retrieved my chequebook from its folds, and a few days later was in the bike shop making a purchase; my only source of payment, was, embarrassingly, a fish oil-stained cheque. Now, you can’t really hand someone an oily, mackerelly-reeking cheque without some sort of explanation and it was actually with some relief that I was able to share the trauma of my last few fish-filled days with the assembled shop assistants. I felt that behind their guffaws lay a degree of sympathy for my plight.

This did not last. The next time I went in the shop there were shouts of ‘You were the one who gave us that fishy cheque!’ I tried to escape from my accusers but my bike had a puncture. I was trapped. Apparently in the days following my last visit, the cheque had stunk out the till, the safe, the shop and all those who handled the poisoned paper! I can only deduce that it went on to contaminate an entire bank and its staff.

Being labelled ‘fishy-cheque woman’ is a demoralizing experience (for I am welcomed as such whenever I go in the bike shop) and one I would not wish on any EASYPEASY readers, particularly the male ones. To pre-empt future embarrassments of this nature, I took the rather drastic step of never buying fish again but my advice to EASYPEASY readers is this: never trust anything you read.

Big Al