My Cadbury’s Ball Is Broken

To a certain degree I am my own jailor.

Due to certain job parameters that I must fulfil I carry about me more ironmongery than Harold Steptoe. I am literally weighed down with keys. I am a prime candidate for curvature of the spine and a dowager’s hump.

I shouldn’t need so many keys because one of those in my possession in supposed to be a master key (one key to rule them all) but this is a conceit. It isn’t really a master key. It opens most but not all. There are facilities and security add-ons to the building suite that require their own especial keys. And that’s before you take into account building changes and random acts of locksmithery that have further seen the suite of keys that I haul about with me augmented to the point where I am carrying the combined weight of the Mir Space Station and Anne Widdecombe around with me at all times.

This is hard on the ol’ trouser pockets.

Every woman I meet thinks I am pleased to see them but really I’m just prepared to open a few doors.

I reckon I’ve gone through more trouser pockets then the Artful Dodger. In fact, I no longer have pockets. I have express elevators straight down to my shoes.

I dread to think what all this ironmongery is doing to my thighs. I’m amazed I am not black and blue at the very least or regularly splinted up in a hospital bed. Because any key-ring that I carry about with me tends to be obliterated within 6 months.

I had a Lego brick key-ring once. A perfect little red 2x4 Lego brick that could have been used within any building project and not looked out of place.

It is now a sorry sight indeed. It’s crisp corners have been bashed and rounded down. It’s perky little studs have been flattened and worn smooth; the “Lego” moniker utterly obliterated by the violent action of clashing keys. It looks like it has been half melted in a furnace.

I always knew my thighs were hot stuff.

The loss of this key-ring grieves me. But worse, much worse than this is the loss of my Cadbury’s Ball key-ring.

I say ball but actually it was a little silver and purple representation of the globe that span round inside a metal ring (not on the correct astronomical axis I have to say). I bought it at Cadbury World last year and was a much treasured possession (as indeed are all balls that I keep in my trouser pockets). It was doubly treasured because Karen and I took the kids back to Cadbury World a month or so ago and found that Cadbury’s are no longer marketing these little spinning globe key-rings.

I had something that one day could well have been a collector’s item.

More fool me then for allying it with the keys of Beelzebub. ‘Cos they’ve done for it good and proper. The rod on which it span like a spit roast (steady there, people) has been bent out of line. The globe no longer spins. This is the day the world stood still.

My keys have claimed another victim.

And this worries me. Because my keys spend the entire working day swinging about very close to another treasured possession of mine. A possession of a personal biological nature. A master key that I was born with and that has given me a good deal of pleasure over the years.

I really don’t want this to be the day that the earth never moved again.

I think it might be time to invest in a key chain.

Or at the very least stage a massive break-out.

P.S. I’m talking about abandoning the prison regime, not freeing my beloved master key from its trousery confines. Just in case you were wondering.