Грілка Зеленського

Julian Barnes, English littérateur with an affinity for La Belle France, was short-listed for the 1984 Booker Prize with Flaubert's Parrot. I might have read it at the time, because it's a bit off-kilter and "post-modern". But I can't really remember the story of one man's obsession with the stuffed parrot(s) which may have sat on Gustav Flaubert's desk. Something set me to thinking about other left-field object-person associations: like Captain Danjou's artificial hand.

Грілка Зеленського [Hrilka Zelensʹkoho] = Zelenskyy's hot-water bottle might be a contemporary example. €4 hot-water bottles were on special in LIDL at the beginning of December. Dang! that was effectively two weeks too late because I'd already made my annual November pilgrimage to McCauley's pharmacy to buy a tuthree of their fleece-covered bed-warmers. For several years they were €5: less a 15% Black Friday discount if you're there on the right day. In 2022 they'd gone up to €6! and this year they're asking €7. I bought some anyway because they don't last forever: as a family we've had a few injuries sustained from water bottle failures.

We were passing through Waterford to put Dau.II on the train back to Dublin after a couple of days of driving lessons. She asked to stop in LIDL to see if they had more of their €4 hot-water bottles, they were sold out in Smithfield. And that's how I was persuaded to buy an olive drab hot-water bottle - not my first choice; my only choice. My McCauley hotties tend to shocking pink or polka dot. 

You can maybe see where this is going? We all know that 

• it's Winter in Kyiv and even more Baltic than, like, the Baltic
• there's disruption in the fuel supply
• President Zelenskyy eschews suits and power-ties, preferring olive drab T-shirts which don't show the dirt

I may be over-empathizing but I can imagine him sitting in the Pres Palace when the central heating is fritzed again. If only I had a Грілка he might muse. Although he has a sense of humour, hugging a pink polka dot hot-water bottle might be a bridge too far in the propaganda war. A LIDL olive drab number might supply some discrete core-body warmth.

You are at liberty to imagine Julian Barnes' grand-daughter writing a post-apocalypse memoir about her search for the authentic hot-water bottle with which Zelenskyy saw Ukraine to victory. Lionel Messi's world cup soccer shirts sell for $1 million each.