This week's top excuse for a piss up

Last night we had an unscheduled visit by Smelly Lady and her husband. She's in her seventies and he's at least 80. They're well spoken and, from a distance, can look very well turned out. Up close (if you dare) you can see that the clothes are worn and far from clean.

That isn't the problem

The problem is that this lady due to an unspecified medical condition smells astonishingly, appallingly awful. This smell puts this customer in a category of her own quite separate from the old men and woman who smell of stale urine - and we've quite enough of them, or the obese who smell as though they've got folds of flesh near their backside that haven't be properly cleaned out in years.

I've been told that this is gangrene but that doesn't make sense. Untreated, un-removed gangrene is lethal, so it has to be something else. What ever it is, and I've also been told it is some kind of chronic and untreatable bacterial skin problem, the result is a stench unlike anything else I've encountered. Pig shit has got nothing on it. She can be smelled aisles away. This stench hovers about her and walking into it is like walking into a wall of smell.

I was caught by her down the drink aisle last night. She has good days and bad days and happily she didn't hum to strongly. She wanted a bottle of our own-brand brandy that was out of stock on the shelves. I legged it to the booze warehouse in search of a bottle for her. No doing. Not in the 700ml or the 1 litre. The two kiddies up stairs shifting boxes of booze from one shelf to another in lieu of doing anything useful averred they'd not seen a box of the stuff anywhere on any of their cages of stock.

I had to go back and tell her no deal. By the time I found her she'd got tired and taken a seat on one of our kick stools. I'd rather hoped to make a quick get away but she wanted to talk. She explained why she wanted the brandy. What you do, she said, is take a small piece of Stilton (cheese) then a measure of brandy followed by a measure of port [I may have the order wrong, here]. The effect is mildly antibiotic, and should be dose should be repeated - presumably until either you're cured or you fall over insensate.

There may or may not be something in this, but I still have to say I think this the absolutely the finest excuse for getting pissed of this or perhaps any other week. Well done, ma'am.