Fat Rugby Coach

Felt inspired today, uplifted almost, swum a brisk 14 lengths in the local pool earlier before marching to the library. On the way picked up a cheese scone, prawn sandwich and some unsalted nuts, and I had an idea for a novel I wanted to flesh out. When I arrived I was disappointed to find most of the study desks were taken so I had to settle for a spot opposite the public toilet, munching into a prawn sandwich was not going to be an option, for a while at least. Vagrants use the public library toilet as well as toddlers and airport passengers stranded overnight. The toilet also boasts a permanently soggy towel and the toilet tissue is clamped so tight in its dispenser you struggle to extract one sheet unscathed at a time. Today Josef sat opposite me, to the right, he waved but I chose to ignore him, I need to start making it clear to him, and to me, that we are not friends. Besides, he was engrossed in a Japanese samurai slasher movie with plenty of gore and subtitles, whilst still playing backgammon and decimating a packet of stale, party size sausage rolls, stolen no doubt from the local Sainsbury’s.

I felt inspiration draining away as I stared at blank paper. My desperation was complete when I felt an earth tremor. Something had landed onto the chair and desk next to me. Hesitantly, I ripped out The Smashing Pumpkins from my ears and slowly twisted to take my first look at this monstrosity. I started from the feet, hobbit feet, without the hair, they were certainly flat and bloated, probably due to a water retention-related illness, then worked up. It’s knee, the one nearest to me, was scared, evidence of a recent operation and the thighs were designed to double up as shock absorbers. The thighs also resembled cured Parma ham joints, covered in a pair of yellow shorts. A grey T-shirt, stretched to capacity, failed to contain breasts and a stomach from spilling out. Perspiring heavily it snapped open a miniature notebook with sausage-like fingers and proceeded to settle. It was evident that he had recently enrolled on a distance-learning course, the end result being a Certificate in Rugby Coaching Level 3. His physique also suggested that he had a history of nestling his head and trunk between the buttocks of other rugby players. I then made the fatal mistake of assuming he was taking out his textbook, notebook, pen, pencil and calculator to study rugby coaching but I was mistaken. Within minutes he was logged onto Facebook and chatting to someone called Scarlett Princess, to discover the content of the chat I needed to have got a lot closer, this would have attracted unwanted attention. The Supremes’ ‘Baby Love’ shattered my concentration by breaking through onto the Fat Rugby Coach’s mobile, he fumbled around for a while, eventually locating the mobile, secreted between folds of fat somewhere between thigh and belly. He began to convince his ‘darling’ not to bother meeting him in the library because he ‘still had loads to do’, advised her to do the shopping, then pick up the kids from Gemma’s before picking him up at 4, it was barely 1 o’clock now, but she fell for it. Satisfied with a job well done, he left his Blackberry out, by his notebook, this time prepared for any further intrusions from Diana Ross and carried on chatting to Scarlett Princess. If only I could have got through to ‘darling’, maybe I could have encouraged her to sneak into the library, yep, that would certainly have made for an entertaining interaction.