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Last Wednesday morning I made a couple of startling discoveries. The first gave me a headache but that soon went with a good cup of tea, the second was more complicated and in need of further investigation. And being as it was Wednesday I suppose I’d better tell you about them both.

Being as how it is Wednesday the place will be cluttered with stuff but don’t worry about it, there will be nothing gruesome. Just a few samples and maybe one or two, half forgotten, dissected things. I have to freeze the smaller ones in order to see them, even on this microscope, that’s why th……

Mind that slide, don’t get fingerprints on it. Heres a chair if you want to sit down. Be quick and stop faffing, I’ve had more than enough of that already, more than enough already for a Wednesday.

You know that in mammals and plants the process known as methylation has been widely observed in transposons, those mobile pieces of DNA which can cause mutations in the genome. I’d originally thought that the process functioned in order to keep transposons in check but recent studies of plants also identified methylation in the middle of active genes, which turned that idea on its head. Now the latest analysis extends these findings to other organisms, ranging from rice, teabags, the fungus Phycomyces, puffer fish and sea anemones.

The fact that methylation occurs within active genes in many organisms suggests that it is an ancient phenomenon. While DNA methylation in plants, fungi and vertebrates was concentrated in transposons, invertebrates probably showed the opposite pattern, with modifications occurring mainly in active genes.

What might explain that disparity is sex.

In organisms that reproduce sexually, transposons — essentially genomic parasites — tend to be more aggressive in moving about the genome, drinking tea and generally wreaking mutational havoc.

Exactly like many oversexed tea drinkers.

Conversely, in asexual organisms, transposons are generally quite tame, thinking no doubt that if they reduced the fitness of their host too much they’d probably becoming extinct.

You still there?

Ok! Don’t fidget. I’d been wondering if the common ancestor of plants, animals and fungi all carried enzymes that methylated both transposons and gene bodies. They must have done because when animals split off from fungi, they were probably single-celled, asexually reproducing organisms with no need for a mechanism to control their transposons, so the enzyme that methylated transposons was lost. Vertebrates re-evolved it, but invertebrates did not. They developed other mechanisms to deal with their transposons or hired teams of immigrants to do it for them.

All well and good then you might think but no, sadly, all was not. That was the second startling discovery, not the first as you were intentionally led to believe. The first startling discovery was much worse. It had a splitting headache, it said. A bad one. One which urged her to hurl glass bowls full of gazpacho onto the stone floor of the kitchen whilst screaming in C sharp at the cats. It did no good whatsoever, except to warm the gazpacho slightly, which made no difference to its overall consistency. She then seized her credit card in a stranglehold and rushed off for a days therapeutic shopping.

As a mere male what could I do? It was a cardboard door, as I discovered when I kicked it and that additional bit of knowledge, unwanted as it was, disgruntled me more than ever. Three startling discoveries in less than an hour was more than any mere man should have to endure. Now there’d be no point in programming a six hour delay into the dishwasher, no point even putting the dishes into it. In fact there’d probably be little point in not only not even putting the mugs in but no point in doing anything at all.

So I went upstairs, carefully climbing over the freshly strewn wardrobe on the landing, fetched my telescrope from its hiding place, then pulled down the little folding ladder and climbed up it into the attic.

………………

All grandma’s underclothes are up there in the attic, in a tin trunk with two padlocks on it and a dent in the lid where I usually stand on it in order to see out of the little attic window.

If you ignore the dust and cobwebs, which I can do easily, granny’s tin trunk is a good thing to stand on, adding as it does an extra two feet to your height. And like somebody once said, yes I do have a speech impediment, but only when I speak, granny’s tin trunk lends stature but only if you don’t want to walk around with it. I mean you’d fall off it if you did, probably bite your tongue on the way down, then you’d have a speech impediment too, to go with your sudden lack of height and disconcertingly sprained ankle.

Alright, alright, I know it is supposed to be an erotic story and it is, or will be very shortly. As soon as I can get my telescrope in position that is.

That’s Saint James’s House over there. Over there, see it? And Saint James’s House is famous, isn’t it? Not for methylation or mutation, not even for the growing of peculiar fungi but for something similarge, and loosely associated and that is for all things to do with……

Ah! There she is! Miss Honey in her birthday suit. Pink suits her don’t you think? Matches her……her……well matches her anyway. It’s a paler pink than I’ve observed heretofor but then I suppose its to do with living out there on that balcony all day. She may have faded. The bloke one floor above her has a periscrope, did I tell you? One he made out of plastic drainpipe and a broken shaving mirror. Oh how she screamed the first time he lowered it exploratively over the side of the building when his eyeball blinked at her from the end of it.

It ‘s supposed to be for looking at the stars, his telescrope is, all well and good, oh yes, except that it is usually too cloudy. Something to do with global warming, someone said but he did have a speech impediment when he spoke as well as being an eco-worrier in his own right.

If I told you it was an accident you wouldn’t believe me would you?

No, I didn’t think you would and I don’t care! I know it was and that all that mat……

Tricity has a bra on but nothing else. A red silk bra, otherwise not a stitch.

Did I ever tell you……

Did I?

Do you know I can’t see if she intends to get dressed or undressed. Whichever it is she’s a way to go yet.

………………

There is quite a dent in the lid of granny’s tin trunk and quite a lot of cobwebs all around it. Maybe, for a change, I’ll go and sit in granny’s scruffy settee in a minute. It smells of her, cremations scattered dust, feels like her, coarse and brittle like pale brown toffee with hazelnuts in it, it even looks like her, I think. Yes yes! Stuffed and bursting at the seams with all manner of disgusting things.

None of the girls at Saint James’s House look anything like granny. Most of them are nearly always naked and she never was. Not even when she bathed or so someone said. But they did have shampoo in their eyes at the time, which made them temporarily blind as well as emphasising their speech impediment.

Take Mirabelle for instance. She always hangs her washing out on a Wednesday and always washes everything she has. Even her hats by the look of them. I passed her in the street once and I could help but giggle. I knew she had a large purple birthmark on her left tit but how could I tell her?

Quite a dent and quite a bit of rust as well. In fact the lid of granny’s old tin trunk is beginning to resemble an essential part of my poor Ford Mondeo. Not only has it a leaky sunshine roof but also a leaky sunshine floor. That’s why it has no MOT and is also why, as an ineffective mere male without a motor, I am stranded.

Ah Jeannie and Jim! There they go! Doing it again in front of the telly! They must have one of them funny videos on, DVD’s is it? Those that the bent little man sells on the corner of the market. God’s whippets the lens nearly got steamed up all over again!

I’ve seen him in the pub you know. Talked to him. Honestly. But no, I never mentioned what I’d seen. He thinks he’s a good lover but she knows he isn’t. She just goes along with him for the sake of peace and quiet. Goes along with it with a brave face on, and a plastic apron when she fries sausages for him afterwards. Honestly, like I said, how can you delude yourself into thinking you’re a good lover with a little thing like that?

Looking at Jim as a typical specimen, some of us are of the opinion that, not only was it a bad idea to come down out of the trees but it was an even badder idea to come out of the oceans to begin with. Especially on a Wednesday. Primeaval soup is ok so long as you don’t drink too much of it. Rather like gazpacho I suppose, though probably not much. Especially not like the gazpacho currently melting my kitchen floor.

They go at it madly nonetheless, ineffectual missionary as usual, bang! bang! bang! with neither fluidity nor forethought, disturbing predatory pigeons and swooping crows and annoying the neighbours no end. Surprisingly they have no kids – thankfully I suppose, thankfully that particularge puddle in the gene pool is coming to an end.

Whats next after man has gone do you think? Animated cabbages? Cockroaches? Cats? Almost anything would be better than the current crop of convicts and cretins, the Jeannies and Jims and the imbecile who draws yiff on table napkins in the chipshop.

Whats next? You’ve noted the tinge of cynicism already have you? Yes! She’ll come back with eleven new bras, countless pairs of inscrutable knickers and several extra pounds in weight, culled from cream cakes and dubious Macdonalds lunches. I wouldn’t mind so much if she thought about me for a minute. Carless, not careless, spying in an attic with a telescope and an erection, one eye watering furiously from the dust it can’t blink away quickly enough. There’ll be no Meccano gearboxes for me to play with, no Thorntons chocolates, no evening meal and certainly no gazpacho. Instead if she brings me anything at all it will be a well thumbed copy of Flight International or the Fortean Times as stolen from the foyer of the hotel she’ll have stayed in.

I know the place well enough, even took her there once. Before we were married that is. It was supposed to be a dirty weekend but it didn’t turn out like that, falling as it did on the top of the meteorological equator, where the winds of the hemispheres collide.

She was younger then and sexier, not that she isn’t sexy now. Now she is sexy in a different way. I was working on a particularly annoying theory even then, which I suppose went some way towards me being distracted and not paying her the attentions she deserved. The hotel had got to me, no a whole mixture of things had got to me; her sexiness not the least. But the hotel was a weird place, Fortean some might suggest. Wild and hair raising sometimes, electric enough to make newly shampooed pubic hairs bristle while on other days when the atmosphere dies the stillness can be transfixing.

Travellers and sailors in particular call the region the doldrums and, carless as I am doldrums is what I am in today. I know I have my telescrope but there are times when the winds whip together into a black anvil storm that blooms like a cauliflower right through the depths of the troposphere into my attic where it shakes me with a luminous violet glow. You may have experienced such phenomena yourself, around ships masts and airplane wings. Travellers and sailors call it St. Elmo’s Fire.

So there you have it. Two saints, one of book fame the other of fire and both of them fabulous in the extreme. A man in an attic and a woman in a hotel room, she shopped to exhaustion and he merely exhausted. There is a limit to the amount of masturbating a man can do in an attic, especially when he is standing on a rusty tin trunk which once belonged to his granny and has a brass telescrope clamped to his ear. Alright I turned round to write this down, what do you expect?

Both saints are dead so we won’t bother them. Transposons continue to methylate as they’ve always done and the woman in the hotel room wishes she had a man with her. I could oblige but I haven’t a motor and its too far away by far to walk. Besides wanking has worn me thin, made me smelly and wishing, now that its dark, that Saint James’s House would be quick and put the lights on in some of their rooms. I can see into them so much better then.

………………

What does it all mean you ask. And well you might. No sit still, I haven’t finished yet. Not enough of that greenery has wilted so wait if you can.

Mean? Ah yes! It means I had a funny turn, so funny I almost fell out of bed. She had a headache as you know so there was no chance of me pursuing anything. Worse it was a Wednesday and there are too many of them in a week to be good for anyone.

It means my keyboard needed succour and my mug needed refilling and, if the truth be known, at least one voluminous foreskin needed a good clean with a scrubbing brush.

It means I can no longer buy three hundred Watt heaters for my fishtanks or one hundred Watt lamps for my light fittings because a bunch of cunts in the eu have worked out yet another way or robbing the masses. I shall go back to candles, to smoky mutton fat roman lamps, to flaming torches made from pitch and feathers and damn them all with their pollution. Funny Turn? Gods Cummerbund what would my granny think? And her without no substance whatever to her name.

………………

When the light comes on in the top left hand window I know I am for something of a treat. Two girls have that room you see, lesbians I think.

Alright maybe they do just love each other, that’s ok, that all I want to see really. That’s all I shall see in fact and, remind me will you, before you go, to get a proper clamp for this damned telescrope. I can’t see a bloody thing when it jerks about like it does.

© Aahlu. 130511.