The Tarmac People

We have new tarmac. The tarmac comes right up to the front of the house. It is the Irish rural look. A team of tarmac people swarmed around our house for a day, led by a very tall middle aged man with thick spectacles, who looked a little like Patrick Kavanagh, He seemed to do most of the work himself. His workers concentrated on eating sandwiches and smoking.

Our neighbours got tarmac the day after us but they don’t let other people drive on theirs. They have to get out of the car, take off their shoes and socks and walk barefoot to the house. As a result our neighbours’ tarmac looks fabulous. Our tarmac looks like it’s been there for around 15 years. It has boot marks from where my father in law walked over it. The tarmac people – let’s call them The Tarmac People – said not to walk on it for at least 3 or 4 hours but my father in law walked on it while it was still wet and while the tarmac people were still working on it.

“Your tarmac looks good” said my father in law, standing n the not quite dry tarmac.

“Is that it?”

“Well, yes. I just wanted to say it looks good. “

We’ll never be able to get rid of his boot marks. The other indeible mark is cat sick. A stray kitten turned up at our house a week or so ago and my wife saw it as an opportunity to get rid of some of our surplus Cornflakes. Cats don’t live on Cornflakes, I said, they live on tuna and caviar and little birdies and minced lobster. The cat agreed and puked* the cornflakes all over the drive, where it started to eat away at the new tarmac. The Tarmac People didn’t mention that cat vomit could neutralise the effects of tarmac.

If you didn’t know, you’d think that Tarmac was probably a village in the Dordogne.

* It’s a surprise that the arms industry hasn’t picked up on cat vomit for a new generation of armour piercing bombs. At some point the human race will have to accept that we aren’t going to survive unless we decide that wars can only be fought using less catastrophic weaponry – such as household pets. If we restricted it to one pet per country, then some of the smaller nations would get a chance to compete.