Canary in a Coalmine

I did a mean thing today.

I played the Canary in a Coalmine game.

And I got Ella to play along (Ella can be very suggestible after a bottle of Sancerre at Chapter Two in Blackheath).

I walked in and said: God, I get so dizzy even walking in a straight line.

I had hoped I’d get: You say you want to spend the winter in Firenza? in just the right speak-song lilt, but the butcher looked at me with narrowing eyes and all I got was a ‘Next please!’, but I didn’t risk a jolly first-to-fall-over-when-the-atmosphere-is-less-than-perfect so I pussied out and proceeded to order the Major’s usual of rump steak twice, twice mind you, through the mincer. Oh god, it can’t be once or thrice, no twice, always twice, so I said to the back of – admittedly – the butcher’s assistant or apprentice (am I a butcher’s coward?): My sensibilities are shaken by the slightest defect. He didn’t react. I took the mince and half a dozen eggs and we fled.

But by the strict rules of the Canary in a Coalmine game, you are not out of play until you have uttered every line (repeats disregarded) in a public and inappropriate place. 

Is the chemist an inappropriate place to say: I’m so afraid to catch a dose of influenza? Ella thought so. But the leaden eyelids of the assistant at Till no. 2 did not rise to the bait. Now if I tell you that I suffer from delusion...? The assistant looked up at Ella, non-plussed, attention held for a nanosecond, a fleeting light in a tunnel snuffed out by a gust of stale air, but gave her a receipt and change in one lump in that inconsiderate and soul-destroying way of the teenage shop assistant...

Ella giggled incessantly as we headed down the hill.

I don’t think the Major suspects my double life.