gullybogan

Dear Reader,

The last nights of winter have been so spitefully cold that Princess and me’ve been waking up to bedroom windows literally running with condensation.

Two warm-blooded mammals respiring all night long in a room surrounded by frozen air will do that to glass.

Being hyperconscientious, i decided to mop all the water up. Stop it mildewing the curtains, that sort of thing. To make it easier to mop the winder-window, i removed the flyscreen. Well, all the flies are frozen, so it couldn’t make any difference, right? I propped up the flywire in its rigid metal frame in the corner against the reading chair, and left it there. I figured just leaving it there was way easier than taking it off and putting it back on again every morning until the cold snap passed into spring in a few days’ time.

Tonight, as NCIS was about to come on, i was feeling a little cold, so i left the girls on the couch and went into the bedroom to put on a jumper. The curtains were still open, and i figured i’d better close them, to stop the little bit of heat left in the room from the day leaking out. So, pulling my jumper on over my head, i ambled over toward the curtain-pull in the dark.

I’ve been a little under the influence of the manfluenza the last few days, so my usual cat-burglar’s sense of my position in space and objects around me was a little off, i guess.

My hand popped out of the sleeve of the jumper just as my arm’s downward swooping arc brought my delicate fingers into a pointy reckoning with the savage steel corner of the flywire frame.

Yeah. Ouch.

You can tell it hurt by the number of adjectives i used to describe it happening.

When i got up the courage to let go of the place where all the hurt suddenly was and look at it in the light, there was torn skin and blood everywhere.

I presented it to the girls like a dog that’s just killed a possum presents the mangled corpse to his master. Princess didn’t pat me on the head, but she did start dressing it for me, and Sybylla started talking about it.

Sybylla: «So, if that was a Tai Chi move, what would it be called, smashing your hand on a flywire frame like that?»

Gully: «Um, ‘Swooping flamingo tears wing on metal rectangle’?»

Princess: «They don’t have flamingos in China, do they?»

Sybylla: «They have everything in China nowadays. It’s because of the Olympics.»

Gully: «’Mountain tiger futzes up paw’?»

Sybylla: «Close, but no. I think it’d be called the ‘Moulin Rouge’.»

Princess: «Because Nicole Kidman was in the movie and so therefore it was a bloody mess?»

Sybylla: «No, because of the red windmill. His arm was windmilling around, and now it’s all red.»

Princess: «You do know that ‘moulin rouge’ just means ‘red mill’, don’t you? It doesn’t have to be a windmill. Just a mill.»

Gully: «Have you seen the Moulin Rouge, Princess? It’s got this bloody great red windmill on the top.»

Princess: «Be that as it may, the words translate as ‘red mill’, not ‘red windmill’. ‘Windmill’ would be ‘moulin-vent’, or something.»

Sybylla: «Then why is there a windmill on top?»

Gully: «Better question: why ‘red mill’ at all? In fact, why ‘mill’ at all?»

Princess: «Maybe it’s … You know how the girls cancan? That would be the windmill, their legs going ’round. And it’s red because … they wear red underpants. You know, all sensual and erotic in red.»

Sybylla: «I thought they didn’t wear any underpants. That way it’d be certain to be red. Or a lovely deep shade of pink, at least.»

Gully: «But a mill is a machine to grind things up…»

Sybylla: «Maybe it’s some sort of a vagina dentata thing.»

Gully: «Somehow i can’t see a bunch of Paris dudes putting on tuxedoes and monocles and strutting off to a place that promises to grind their manhoods into bloody mincemeat for them.»

Sybylla: «I don’t think the Paris dudes ever expected to get their manhoods into the girls. I think they just wanted the thrill of what might happen if they did. Perves, but limpdick perves. You know, your basic strip club audience.»

Gully: «Paris dudes? *pfft* They’d be getting themselves organised, don’t you worry. French girls are, by general consensus, the most elegant, beautiful and sexually desirable females in the whole fricken world. Present company excepted, of course.»

Sybylla: «A girl i knew once a while back was going over to try out for the Moulin Rouge. They’re mostly Australian girls, apparently. From Dubbo, she was. Nice tits.»

And the discussion about the Moulin Rouge continued from there, but my L finger is too sore to type much more about it.

I will say, though, that Sybylla treated us to a cancan – with her underpants on, i hasten to add – using one of Princess’s old netball skirts, just to show us how good at fanning her vagina region an Aussie girl can be.

But we never solved the mystery of the red (wind)mill.

We tried wikipedia, but that didn’t help much.

Have you got any clues? We’re stumped.

Yours,
Gullybogan