chateauneuf du splat

One final Lake District holiday-related anecdote: during the trip we did a certain amount of sitting around drinking wine, as you'd expect, mostly after the kids were safely packed off to bed. During the course of one of these wine-facilitated conversations I made some expansive hand gesture, probably to illustrate the terrifyingly incisive political point I was making, and caught the rim of my wine glass in so doing, knocking it away from me and causing it to topple.

Now for most mere mortals that would be that: crash, splosh, tinkle, glass and wine everywhere and probably some unwelcome vinous tsunami with razor-sharp shards in it arriving in someone's lap. But because nature and years of ascetic self-denial and close study of the sacred texts have endowed me with the reflexes of a FREAKIN' NINJA, I was able to grab the glass with the same hand I'd nudged it with and attempt to right it before any wine was lost.

Sadly, a momentary loss of muscular co-ordination, a few extra foot-pounds of energy per second per second, and a slight misalignment of thumb and index finger on the stem of the glass resulted in a whiplash effect of startling speed and power whereby the base of the glass slid away from me across the table and the bowl of the glass swung towards me, ejecting about half the wine in a high-velocity spray into my face and onto the wall behind me, probably leaving a shadow in the wine splatter in the shape of a freakishly large human cranium. I was nonetheless able (ninja skills again) to keep hold of the glass and prevent it from either hitting the table and breaking or spilling the remainder of its contents. This is one of the few occasions where wearing glasses is a positive advantage, as I would otherwise have got an eyeful (possibly two) of red wine, which would probably have stung a bit.

This was all highly amusing, of course, and rightly so, to the other people around the table. But there comes a time when the laughing has to stop and the cleaning up has to begin. What I can tell you is that red wine on an emulsion-ed wall is a bit of a bitch to get off, and the standard bleach-enrichened surface cleaner sprays talk a good game but in practice only change red splodges and rivulets to dull grey splodges and rivulets. It was only a couple of days later when I found some actual honest-to-goodness concentrated bleach in a cupboard that I was able to don some Marigolds, return to the scene of the stain and get mediaeval on its ass with some proper caustic chemicals, with fairly miraculous results, which I assume saved us from having to make a shamefaced confession to the letting agents and have some of our deposit docked. One caveat: the wall in question was white; I can't vouch for the effects of applying neat bleach to a wall of any other colour.