“Dorset Cream Tease is where you’ll find the relaxing, maddening, hilarious and bewildering stories, gossip and rants that help all of us to cope with life in Dorset. Everything you read here will be 90% true (almost). So get yourself hooked by visiting every week, and feel free to comment or add your thoughts by emailing me at [email protected]”
The Tea Maker
Why is everyone getting so worked up about the rain we’re having? We should be enjoying it. In another six months we could be looking at a drought and a hosepipe ban and, instead of the Environment Agency getting it in the neck because of the flooding, we’ll all be going after the water companies and demanding to know what the fuck they did with all that water the Gods provided at the start of the year.
It doesn’t matter what we’re faced with in the UK, we love to moan. It’s a fucking myth that we face every challenge with a stiff upper lip and a smile on our face. The reality is we moan about everything. I’m the exception of course. I don’t actually moan, I only report on ‘moanable incidents’ and on what other people moan about.
We’ve been moaning about the rain and we’ll moan about the sunshine if there’s a drought. Moaning is one of our defining characteristics. It comes naturally to us. Well, it comes naturally to the rest of you – I have to work at it. Every time we’re asked how we are we use it as an opportunity to offload our miseries onto someone else. Why not just say, “Fine, thanks!” and cheer someone up? I’ll tell you why, because it won’t cheer them up. They’ll be thoroughly pissed off that you’re feeling fine while they have a hundred things they want to moan about.
If you say you’re fine, people will even start an argument with you because of it. I was sitting in my doctor’s waiting room a few weeks ago with some other patients. A guy walked in and recognised one of his friends in the waiting area. He sat beside him and asked quite casually, “Hi Brian, how are you?”
“Fine!” said Brian. That’s when the argument began. Brian’s friend then started to go on about Brian taking up the doctor’s time when he was actually feeling ‘fine’. Brian on the other hand tried to explain that he was just giving a casual response to what he thought was a friendly, rhetorical question.
We moan about absolutely everything. The weather, prices, the state of the roads, our health, young people, our spouses. We even moan about the Government. It doesn’t matter which Government it is, we all moan about it. I don’t know why we even bother having a Government but we all seem happy enough to go out voting for one bunch of pricks as opposed to the other bunch of pricks. Maybe it’s just to give us a different bunch of pricks to moan about every so often.
So instead of moaning about everything, do something about it yourself. Get a couple of buckets, pots and pans and save some rain water. You’re going to need it later in the year because you’re probably going to find that half of our reservoirs are leaking like fuck.
The Tea Maker
PS: You can comment on this story by emailing me at [email protected] and I’ll respond to your emails in next week’s column. We’ll never publish your email address.
