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MR WU

Our bed has received the feng shui treatment again. The woman who had talked The Trouble into going along with all this feng shui nonsense had offered to come to our house and bring along with her the Chinaman who had talked her into going along with all this feng shui nonsense, the object being to check whether The Trouble had placed various items of our furniture in the most conducive positions according to the dictates of feng shui.
     I wish The Trouble had warned me of their visit beforehand as it would have saved me the embarrassment of walking in on them in just my boxer shorts on my return to the bedroom after my daily shower.
     "This is Mr Wu," said The Trouble, indicating the Chinaman, presumably in case I might be thinking that the woman was called Mr Wu.
     "Shouldn't he be outside cleaning the windows?" I said.
     "Cleaning the windows?" said the woman. "Why should he be cleaning the windows?"
     I gave her a quick burst of George Formby's Chinese Laundry Blues, accompanying myself on air banjo: "Oh Mr Wu, what shall I do, I'm feeling kind of Limehouse Chinese Laundry Blues."
     "Take no notice of him," said The Trouble, then, to me: "Mr Wu is a feng shui expert."
     Mr Wu smiled at me. "Nice underpants."
     "You're not moving them," I said, my hands going involuntarily to the waistband.
     "Mr Wu has come along to check if your bed is in the correct position for optimum happiness," explained the woman who had never heard of George Formby.
     "I can save him the bother then," I said. "It is in the right place. In the bedroom. Where else would you put a bed for optimum happiness, in the greenhouse?"
     "You're embarrassing me," said The Trouble, giving me a look that could have frozen Birds Eye's annual production of peas.
     "I'm embarrassing "you?" I said. "I walk into our bedroom in just my boxers to find you and your barmy mate and a Chinaman who looks suspiciously to me like the one who keeps the Chinese chippy on Market St and"I'm embarrassing "you?
    The woman immediately leapt to the Chinaman's defence. "He doesn't look suspiciously like the one who keeps the Chinese chippy," she glowered. "He is the one who keeps the Chinese chippy. He's multi-talented."
    "He is not," I said, "he can't cook chips for a start, he's fucking hopeless at it."
    I had overstepped the mark, of course. Although the f-word now seems to be more or less compulsory in conversation between the sexes when spoken by the young it is still taboo for people of my generation to use it when in the company of women. (Except in London of course, or when you are in the company of your wife only and no other word will do) My choice was simple. I could apologise or face the silent treatment for God knows how long. I apologised.
    After much deliberation and tit-titting, which seems to be the Chinese for tut-tutting, Mr Wu moved the bed about two degrees to the north. I can't say I felt any happier any it. However The Trouble said she felt much happier in it and that the two degrees had made all the difference. I said that if the Three Degrees were in it I would probably be happier, but if she was prepared to black-up that would do, but she just turned over and went to sleep, probably because she'd have had a job getting hold of some burnt cork at eleven-o-clock at night.