If you want to live long, avoid women in pubs

BY TED MALANDA

Last Friday, I left the office late, worn out like a dog, and decided to take a detour to my local to ‘detox’ my weary bones with a stiff shot of whisky.

So there I was at the counter, pulling airs, my head buried in a copy of some British tabloid that I had pinched from the newsroom, when I noticed a 20-something-year- old woman saunter in.

Strangers

She made a beeline straight to where I sat and perched her pretty bottom on the next stool. I ignored her because I’m not particularly into chatting with strangers in pubs. Also being relatively tight-fisted, a gene that runs rampantly on my mother’s side of the family, I had no intention of being tempted to tell the barman, “Give her one.”

A more honest way of putting it is that I ignored her because the month was in a ‘corner’ and I couldn’t have afforded one miserable drink for her, even if the commander-in-chief of the armed forces had so decreed. But she wasn’t going to let me off the hook that easily.

“Can I keep you company?” she asked and I said hell no, lying shamelessly that I was almost leaving. “But you have not even finished a quarter of your drink,” she posed, eyebrows raised. “It’s not that I want you to buy me drinks — I just need your company.”

Strutted

I almost fell over my seat. What did she take me for? Of course she expected me to buy her drinks! “Will you please keep an eye on my handbag?” she changed tack.

I said I couldn’t be trusted with her handbag, saying, quite truthfully, that a thieving gene runs dangerously on my father’s side of the family.

Seeing as she wasn’t making headway,  she turned and strutted away, to her next victim. To keep the idiot ‘company’, an idiot that I can bet my last shirt woke up 48 hours later, lying in the gutter, dirty, drugged, phoneless and penniless.