I have a friend called Dave. That’s not his name but it’s what I call him. When I first met him he was in a group where everyone was called Dave. Easy to remember I thought, except that he was called something else. I completely missed that but, by the time I had realised, it was too late to change.
Anyway, Dave, by his own omission, is a little bit Asperger. That’s probably why I like him immensely. One day, we decided to visit a castle together whilst our wives were… Actually, I have no idea what our wives were doing but they weren’t with us.
As we walked up to the castle, Dave was troubled. I knew this, not because of some subtle cue I picked up on instinctively, but because he turned to me and said ‘Mike, I’m troubled’. What a top bloke.
I asked what the problem was. He pointed out that it was a hot day. It was. Good observation. I moved on, but Dave still lingered. Clearly there was something else.
"The girls will all be in short things and skimpy tops", he groaned. I agreed but, knowing my friend like I do, I couldn’t see why this was troubling him.
"It’s just that, if there are lots of them in there", he said, gesturing to the castle, "I’m not going to be able to concentrate".
He went on to explain how frustrating it is when a pretty girl moved into view and he has to choose between looking at her and looking at the Norman masonry that had absorbed him up until that point. "I can’t do two things at once", he reasoned.
Good point. So we came up with a plan. We would first tour the castle looking at the girls in the short things and skimpy tops. This would be our sole aim and the sole point of our attention; the castle would be ignored. We would give this task twenty minutes. (We also agreed on a certain degree of subtlety and tact so we didn’t thunder round the castle like two bull elephants in musth). After that, we would ignore the girls - including any new arrivals - and concentrate solely on the castle.
We did just that. We paid our money and, for twenty minutes, enjoyed the, er…what was on offer. We then ceased that activity entirely, opened our guidebook, and viewed the magnificence of the castle.
Some thirty minutes after that, whilst Dave was still examining the outer entrance to the monument - there was a lot of masonry on the approach - a stunning blonde sashayed towards the castle and into Dave’s view. If you took the sum total of the clothes she wore, my underpants were bigger. He legs were long and her chest…well; let’s just say it reached the castle some time before she did. I looked at Dave. He was beaming.
"Mike, Mike", he called in a state of near ecstasy and positively swooning at the sight before him. "I think I’ve found the portcullis mechanism". And, having checked, I do believe he was right.
