Pissed

It was late one Saturday night. We had just returned to our red cabin deep in the woods of Ohio, in the countryside east of Cleveland, beyond Shaker Heights.

"God, I'm pissed!" I announced as I crawled into my bed.

Chris said nothing as he also hit the hay.

I had arrived at the summer camp just two days before. Somehow Chris and I had requisitioned a cabin all to ourselves, even though there would have been room for two other male counsellors.

We had been to "Skip & Ray's" bar by Route 87 - just a mile away and there we had consumed a couple of large glass pitchers of blonde American beer. That is why I was drunk or as English people will commonly say - "pissed". It doesn't mean that we are angry about anything. It just means we are inebriated.

If we are annoyed, irritated or angry about something we often  describe that state as being "pissed off". Adding the "off" is key to the changed meaning.

In the early summer of 1976, I had no idea that our colonial cousins in the USA used the term "pissed" differently. At some point during the week that followed, Chris and I laughed when we realised our linguistic misunderstanding.

Previously, I alluded to this same tale when I wrote a bunch of memoir blogposts concerning the two summers I spent as a camp counsellor in Ohio. Go here. Many of you will have never read that sequence.

Let me move on to the business of being "pissed off". I am writing the day after Mad Trump announced that he would be reversing Obama-era scientific rulings that underpin all federal actions on curbing planet-warming gases.

This is utterly crazy and flies in the face of solid scientific findings. It gives other hesitant governments the green light to rip up climate change legislation and carry on as ignorantly as before we truly realised the damage that mankind had done to this beautiful planet by burning fossil fuels. Yes I am definitely pissed off about this latest move by Orange Ignoramus but I guess it may have been just another card played as a way of deflecting continuing interest in  what we should start calling the Trump-Epstein Files. His farty name appears in those files over a million times.

As I am reflecting on the verb "to piss", I wish to report that it is still pissing it down here in South Yorkshire (i.e. it's raining) but tomorrow the weather people are predicting a day of blessed relief between meteorological systems. The sun will shine down upon St Valentine's Day and all will be well with the world as the intrepid Yorkshire Pudding walks out somewhere...anywhere to see Earth's colours revealed once more...

"Love comforteth like sunshine after rain" - William Shakespeare 

"Venus and Adonis" (1593)