Anticipation is aces!

I see you shiver with Antici... 

                                                            ...pation.

My favourite line from one of my favourite films; The Rocky Horror Picture Show.

Anticipation is aces! It’s, like well better than actually having that anticipation fulfilled. Sometimes. I’ve always been a catalogue browser, a window shopper, enjoying the ‘what ifs’ more than the ‘I’ve gots’. Right now I’m anticipating my Sunday dinner, I can smell chicken skin crisping up beautifully and the scent of garlic butter and hot herbs.

My sister once bought a brand new aniline leather suite for her living room. Prior to this, she had a knackered old brown and orange velour jobby that looked and smelt very bed sit-esque. Once she’d ordered the new suite, we’d sit on the old one and luxuriate in imagining how its replacement would look, how it would smell, how comfortable and wonderful it was going to be. When it arrived the reality was a bit poo to be honest. It was a nice suite, it still is, it was expensive and high quality and still looks great, but that first few days were dreadful, no one rested easy worrying if the rivets on their jeans would scratch it, shooing the cats away frantically in case they decided to sharpen their claws on it, you held a brew like something precious perched on it, terrified of spilling.

Yesterday I went to a friend’s house to celebrate Burn’s Night - well Day - well the Day Before actually and we had tattie and neep soup, haggis butties and whisky, her parents were there and her Dad mentioned that Burns was Jewish, I said, ‘Really?’ in a disbelieving voice, to be regaled with a hearty, ‘Yep, Rabbi Burns!’ Oh how we laughed, and I commented to my friend later how funny her Dad was, to which she answered, ‘Funny the first time you hear it, excruciating when he says it without fail, every single bloody year’. Turns out she’d been anticipating his joke all day, inwardly cringing and gritting her teeth.

Oh yep, anticipation is aces!

I’m gonna leave you with a poem about the Christmas I anticipated getting a doll’s pram, having dutifully folded down the edge of the catalogue at the right page and written the note to Father Christmas well in advance... 

Yvonne’s Pram

Mrs. Pill

liked mine more

I’d never seen one outside of the Grattan

the pram set high above the navy sheen

and shoved my head straight in to sniff the plastic novelty of Baby Born and Silvercross

she bounced it smartly, made me jump - chrome singing in the light of boxing day

with a shout from her mum to not go through puddles

(said with a curving smile)

those white walled wheels, the rattle of the tray

I found my own old pushchair corpse

mottled up with rust - pulled from its nest of sleeping thorns

set it up with two brown boxes that the ladies brought from Church

emptied now of tins and Fussell’s milk

in rough approximation of a base and hood

and nestled my doll on a folded towel so she’d sit up nice

her moulded hands in unreal pink grasping the cardboard

 

Rachel McGladdery