EL DIABLO

Do you ever wake up in the morning with the nagging sense that you might be dead already but you just haven’t realised it yet…? You find yourself going through the same, familiar routines, brushing your teeth, boiling a kettle and so on, but with a vague sense of “detachment”, a sort of vagueness, as if you’re not quite really there, but you’re somehow going through the motions and haunting your own life…?

Maybe it is just me then…

But the air was so hot and humid and dense when I got up on the morning I wrote this after a surprisingly warm couple of days, that it seemed to deaden all sound, and the air itself seemed heavy and impenetrable as if the whole world had slipped into some kind of limbo and just wasn’t really there any more.

Perhaps this state of mind had been brought about by my recent visit to the Practice Nurse at my local surgery to have my blood checked.

(I had wanted to have it tartan, but… Ah, you know…)

Anyway, amidst all the poking with needles and squeezing my arm with a collar to work out whether the blood was still actually pumping its way about my increasingly bizarre system, she weighed me (which came as rather a surprise – I’d never have thought I was that heavy or ever likely to be) and started asking me whether I was eating a “healthy” diet… Low fat, low salt, plenty of fresh fruit and vegetables, that kind of thing, because “I’ve got to that sort of age…”

Now I’ll grant you, that’s far better than NOT getting to that sort of age, but still…

Anyway, I lied.

After all, “everybody lies” as Uncle Sherlock’s late, lamented American cousin Dr House believes.

But my lies were mostly because, due to a certain amount of obfuscation and generally finding excuses not to see Doctor Dougie, I haven’t actually had that conversation with my G.P. yet, which means that I’m still free to pile the butter and the cream and the cheese down my gullet to my heart’s discontent and, until I’m “officially” told otherwise, I can’t see that changing.

Anyway, during the appointment, my packed lunch was already warming up in the back of the car, ready for my journey to work, and, if I had actually thought about it, my evening meal the night before had been one ham and cheese toasted sandwich, and I really wasn’t ready for the coroner to be examining my stomach contents and calling over his colleagues to have a good old laugh and a point just yet…

Gotta luvva toastie…

We’ve been together for about four Christmases now, my Diablo hot sandwich maker and me, the once “exciting new concept” in toasted sandwich making that basically involves constructing your sandwich as normal, squeezing it between two circular plates of metal and bunging it onto the hob to heat up, flipping it over and serving.

Voila, one hot and tasty snack, or, as in our case, occasional evening meal.

Take that, Gary Rhodes!

We’ve had one or two mishaps along the way with the occasional accidental “branding” when I forget that the metal plates are still hot, but what do you expect when your dealing with “El Diablo”…?

Cool breezes and balmy evenings…?

A stern talking to…?

They call it “hot as hell” because hell is supposed to be hot, if you choose to believe in such things. Anyway, it should be quite simple, and really shouldn’t confuse anybody really, except me, obviously, when I pick things up without thinking…

After all, the devil is in the detail.