11 DEC 09

Friday

I decided it was time to take the blagging on tour, first stop Reading. There wasn’t much blagging to be done on the train, but I tried out the ‘trick or deception’ criteria for a bit of harmless practice. The poor woman sat next to me now thinks she travelled to Reading with a trumpet-playing pet shop assistant who couldn’t think of one real pet shop in Cardiff to claim a link to. I blagged nothing from the conversation. I suppose I could really clutch at straws and say I blagged a glass of water at my brother’s house, but the fact that it was offered in a shot glass, as the only drinking receptacle without things growing in it, almost certainly nullifies any positive blag-points.

We were due to join a pirate pub crawl in the evening, but a friend of my brother had misplaced her ID card somewhere. I was just mulling over the blagging possibilities this presented for the evening, when I noticed that my brother had disappeared. Ten minutes later and he appeared at the doorway having knocked on various doors in the street and blagged a passport from a deluded and/or insane stranger a few houses down the road. He managed to do this dressed as a pirate. Amazing.

Misplacing forms of identification seemed to be one of the girl’s favoured hobbies and having rescued the passport from the floor of several bars I eventually pocketed it for safe keeping as a sort of second-hand blag.

I had a lovely chat with the girl behind one bar who agreed that I was proving to be a pretty poor blagger and offered to give me a lime and soda water. The retail price was only 15p, but beggars can’t be choosers. Sadly, the manager overheard and told me to go away. Another fail. I cheered myself up by blagging a drink from my brother, who probably owes me several anyway, and taking today’s newspaper with me. It didn’t appear to belong to anybody, and on the grounds that you can’t steal from nobody I figured it might be morally acceptable.

Our final destination was a quirky little club underneath a railway bridge. Determined to avoid the entry fee, I informed the bouncer that I’d just popped out and that the other guy said it would be fine to re-enter. It could have worked; I don’t have a particularly memorable face. It was another fail, probably not helped by the fact that the place was almost deserted on arrival, I was wielding a newspaper and dressed as a pirate.

10 DEC 09

Thursday

I confided to a friend about fears of my blagging inadequacies over a (fully paid for) coffee this afternoon. She cheered me up no end by reminding me of travelling blags we’d shared together over the years. The most successful being an evening at the Singapore Hard Rock Café. We’d only popped in to look at the guitars, but several hours later and the four of us had consumed the equivalent of over a hundred pounds worth of free drinks, and I’d sung my favourite U2 song on stage with the band that happened to be playing. The drinks came about after the bar staff discovered we could speak Bahasa Malaysia with them. The singing came about after the discovery that we weren’t paying for our drinks. Sadly, speaking Malay probably won’t help my blagging this week.

The postman delivered two small parcels whilst I was out. The first was a pretty dull, free, book entitled ‘Britain without the European Union’. The second was a waterproof book courtesy of another online offer, and is far more entertaining than the first. The author’s descriptive powers kept me amused for the rest of the afternoon. A quick example:
“I turned into a buxom nurse from a Benny Hill sketch. My breasts became two tethered zeppelins. My belly, a giant jellyfish”, Kathy Lette, ‘All Steamed Up’.
Priceless.