One doesn’t notice how nasty other people can be until they hit a certain age.

It is strange that this happens, but it has happened for as long as one can read history, if one is interested in such things.

Perhaps poor old Joan of Arc experienced early menopause. Who knows. There was certainly something that got her up and running with a sword in her hand.

Someone whispers to himself, ‘Oh dear, this is not the way we muster the sheep.’ He is now marked for a shearing shed and a pair of clippers. He begins to laugh, for his own wife would do the same thing. She would also have added, ‘This is why we can’t have nice things.’

‘You’re a bloody weirdo.’

‘I am aren’t I?’

‘Just remember who pays the bills.’

‘Well, dear, that would be me. I pay the bills. Fair enough, it is no longer with my money, but it was, before the “evil menopause” raised its head and stated loudly it “wasn’t doing this shite anymore”.’

So why do we pay, literally, for something that will happen? There is no doubt about it happening. It does, and it will. Why are we pulling money out of our bottoms for it, still, after all these eons of it being a fact?

‘I don’t know,’ whispered the fan of rubbing things from the heads of gravestones. ‘But one might assume, if one needs a medication to prevent this sort of thing from happening, one’s best bet is to offer it cheaply, even if one cannot offer it for free.’

‘My thoughts exactly,’ whispered yet another. Their names are never mentioned, for although it is fact not fiction, these things are often swept under the rug.

A brave gentleman raises his ugly fist. ‘Don’t forget the blue pills,’ he shouts with close to gay abandon. His voice is shut down with withering looks.

‘Don’t go there dude. You may not come back out again.’

‘Oh. Oh deary me by crikey pumpkin scones.’ And he stops, and thinks about that for a while, and realises he has just made a terrible mistake. He begins to run for the hills, his short and ridiculously fat legs pumping away, his too large head pounding with horror. He trips over a Maple Leaf (a designated friend or foe, who is defiantly a friend). This “man” knows how to shoot arrows, and he aims for a stout thigh.

The woman considers this lucky. If she had shot an arrow, William Tell’s son may never have lived to tell the story. ‘I have never shot an arrow in my life,’ she says, handing over the bow she had been keeping safely inside a backpack. Beside it sits a small velvet box, something she had never forgotten was there.

”She’s back,” the distant twerp shouts to his friends. “It is definitely her. We must all run away now, and hide under rocks, for it is definitely her, and I have been a terrible person in deed.”

‘What kind of coffee was it you liked,’ Harry asked, looking at the kettle sitting on the bench in his hotel room, for he had forgotten to turn it into a respite centre for the elderly.

‘Instant,’ came the reply. ‘No sugar. I’m sweet enough.’

He didn’t write anything else after that. Far too clever for his own good, some thought. Far too clever to get on the wrong side of someone who was very similar to his own wife, he thought, but he didn’t say it out loud, because he was far too clever for that too.