Today I've been thinking about bad breath. Specifically about a bad breath emanating from the bloke that has just sat diagonally opposite me at work. It stinks. It's not a smell I can define as such, and I couldn't offer any other notes than; rotten, lingering, and it put me off my sandwiches, but it certainly tainted what was already a very average day.
I found myself wondering just where it came from (other than his mouth). How does such a small, bearded man - and I'm not suggesting being small and having a beard has any connection to his condition, I'm just setting the scene - but how does such a small, bearded man produce such a large quantity of foul-smelling exhalatory gas for such a long time? Surely he'd run out of his reserves of bad breath eventually? Apparently not. And with every slight sigh, or short spell of speaking, he emitted a potent gust of halitosis across the, perhaps 2 or 3 metres between us, which settled comfortably around me. Like an unwanted extra colleague, impeding my personal space.
Now I don't know what was causing it (from the smell I could hazard a guess it was from a combination of not cleaning his teeth enough, and eating dog shit sandwiches for breakfast), but the thing that got me was that this guy seems be a massive attraction to some of the women at work. They flock to him. Like flies around a dog shit sandwich. Seemingly, having bad breath is no inhibiter to attracting the opposite sex, which I had never thought possible. It seems I may have wasted valuable time before almost every date I've ever been on, always taking care to spend ages cleaning and flossing my teeth, and even chewing gum, before setting out. This guys probably cleans them once a week and turns up to the meeting place chomping on a raw onion, and she can barely contain herself from mounting him there and then on a bar stool. It just doesn't seem right. I wonder if Sean Connery had bad breath in those Bond films?
Aside from practicing to see how long I could hold my breath for large periods of the day, the other noteworthy event today was voting. It's always a depressing sight every May when the local elections come along and I make my way down to the Polling Station at Lancing Parish Hall to cast my vote for whichever candidate isn't Conservative - which usually leaves me about 1 candidate to choose from. The miserable looks on all of the people who have to work there from 7am to 10pm to satisfy the needs of what can't actually be many people who bother turn out for it. But I quite like voting myself, and am quite proud that in the 8 years I've been eligible to vote I've never not made it down there. I always feel like if I haven't bothered to vote, then I don't really deserve the right to criticise those in Government, local or national, and criticising them is the only way we can really keep them in check.
Sadly, in the 8 years I've been voting - including 2 general elections, yearly local elections and european - I have never backed a winning candidate, since I live in probably the safest Conservative seat in the country. And I could never bring myself to vote Tory. Not unless they propose handing out free Listerine daily to small, bearded men in their next election manifesto.
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