The sprinkler sprinkled

‘Lies are a social lubricant and I am a slippery customer.’ - Sockrates

I have a Lithuanian friend. Her sister came to visit. We went to buy some food for the evening.

I was getting the impression that the sister’s English was not as good as I’d been led to expect, when suddenly her face lit up as we were leaving the house.

‘You’ve got one of those!’ she pointed at the bunch of keys I’d just taken from the hook.

‘What, are Volvos the in thing in Lithuania?’

‘No, no, Tesco!’ she jiggled my Tesco clubcard key fob. It confounded me to think how someone who’d only been in the country for a few hours should have any idea of what Tesco was, or be excited by my clubcard loyalty (= sucker) card thingy.

‘Oh yeah, it’s just a … my… what, don’t you have one? But at the airport…you’re supposed to have been given one. It’s a government requirement!’

The innocent visitor looked at me with wide puppy eyes. I don’t know what she thought ‘Tesco’ was, but I thought she had the impression it was something pretty darned important. A secret police organisation, for example.

‘This is more important than your passport,’ I pressed on, ‘we’ll have to get you registered pretty soon.’

Then the puppy eyes narrowed. ‘Ahh ha. It’s true! It’s true!’

‘Well, of course it’s true.’

‘No!’ she went in for the kill, ‘It’s true, my sister told me - you are full of shit!’