When J and I were in the changing sheds at the beach yesterday, we got to talking about what skills we would have brought to the auction block if we'd been slaves in ancient Rome (don't ask how we got onto the subject because I can't remember).
"I can't cook," I said. "So cooking would be out. And I don't know a weed from a flower; I'd be a terrible gardener."
I suggested that I could perhaps clean the bath. Until I remembered that Roman baths were like Olympic-sized swimming pools, they held, oh, loads of people, and anyway, cleaning olympic-size Roman swimming baths just sounded like a lot of hard work.
We were too long in the tooth, we decided, to be pleasure slaves. We weren't manly enough to construct things, though it was agreed by both of us that J's husband sitting out there on the deck would probably rake in more money than us up there on the auction block. He' could help construct the collesium. J thought that maybe she and I could be thrown in as a job lot with whosoever did end up buying her husband for his ampitheatre-building skills.
"I could do some light dusting," I said.
"I could paint ... muriels," said J. She always had admired Hilda Ogden's pronunciation of "murals' in tv's "Coronation Street".
It was a go-er then. Any slave owner would be thrilled to buy us.
J sent me this picture later in the afternoon. I'm obviously on my way to dust a muriel.
I
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