Day Nine:

Being confined 24 hours a day is difficult enough but if you’re also isolated with someone who brings out the worst in you, it can seriously impact on your emotional well-being.

My neighbour Mabel, a pleasant enough woman with a great deal to put up with from her boozy, bad-tempered husband,  had a visitor a few days ago.  Her nephew, Bruce.  

He leaned against her fence, some 8 metres away from her door and they had a shouted conversation, which of course, I heard.

I don’t usually eavesdrop on other people’s conversations but being confined to the house and away from the interesting minutiae of life has made me nosy.  
Besides, distance didn’t just lend enchantment, it forced them to bellow.

‘How are you, Auntie?’

‘All right I suppose. Apart from being stuck in here with Him all the time.’

I’m fairly sure she didn’t mean Jesus. 
Mabel has an awkward husband, who, at the best of times, doesn’t like visitors.

He once threw a cat at the postman. 

He's home all day now but for the odd sortie to the grog shop.

‘Is there anything you need?’  

Mabel listed a few essentials and I saw Bruce taking notes.  Then she added, ‘And some rat poison.’

‘Oh my god, don’t tell me you have rats.’

‘Just the one.’

She nodded backwards to the house where Himself was shouting at her to get back inside and stop gossiping.

She wasn’t serious about the poison of course, at leasat I hope not.  They’ve been married for over 50 years and despite, or perhaps because of their constant arguments, still occupy the same small unit.
They seem to thrive on being embattled, as many couples do.

He is normally at the RSA, the local social/drinking club during most of their opening hours;  Mabel is normally a volunteer, working in the local Thrift Shop. 
But these are not normal times.

‘Is Uncle playing up again?’ asked Bruce, trying to keep his voice down to a whispered yell.

‘He wet the bed last night.’

I tried to stop listening at this point, there's such a thing as too much information. However,  even though I was sitting in my own kitchen, all the doors and windows were open on this warm, sunny day, so it was inevitable I’d hear.

‘Oh, I’m sorry. I didn’t know he was incontinent.’

‘He’s not incontinent,  he’s  incompetent.   He’d came back from the liquor shop with a crate of beer,'  (Alcohol it seems, is an essential item).    'and by the time he came to bed last night he was so sozzled, he spilled  a whole can of Lion Red on the duvet.'

Lion Red beer is brewed in the North Island of New Zealand and has its avid devotees.  Mabel’s husband is one of them.  She often says they brewery will never go bankrupt as long as he’s around.

I spent many years in the South Island and though not much of a beer drinker (a cold glass on a very hot day is my limit)  I prefer Speight’s,  brewed in the beautiful, South Island city of Dunedin.

There’s a sort of rivalry between the two beer camps and this has given rise to a ditty, no doubt penned by the Lion Red adherents.  It uses the initial letters of Speight’s delicious brew.

Southern 

Pee

Everyone

Including

God

Hates 

The

Stuff 

Which is quite wrong.

I happen to know God is very partial to a sparkling glass of Speight's Gold.