FEBRUARY 2009
“If you can keep your head whilst all about you are losing theirs and blaming it on you …” then you must be a wank … banker, my son.
Or perhaps:
“If you can keep your head whilst all about you are losing theirs” … then you clearly are NOT a British politician or journalist, because if you were you’d be running around wetting your knickers and screaming tearfully that all this is the end of civilisation as you know it.
What do all these people (wankers, politicians and journalists) have in common? Apart from being slightly brain dead I mean, and having no worthwhile life experiences behind them to speak of? Yes, they are all vastly over-paid. Meanwhile the rest of us, who don’t have much of an income worth getting remotely excited about, seem to just muddle along as normal. Some even still do crazy things like buying things in shops or on the Internet, a fact which stupefies the British media, who seem to think we should all be queuing up at soup kitchens instead.
Another thing that stupefies our media is the British weather. You wouldn’t think to hear our journalists speak that in the UK, year in year out, with monotonous regularity, we get bombarded with rain, high winds, and even the occasional drought. And now this Winter, we’ve had snow. Tons of it. Which is another pathetic excuse for them to make us a laughing-stock in the eyes of the world by going into overdrive about it.
I woke up early in the morning as usual to feel Misty stuffing a hot water bottle into the bottom of the bed. He’s been doing this since the end of November last year, when i began waking up with feet that were frozen solid. So the dear love has been getting up early to replenish the hot water we take to bed with us.
“I wonder if the bin-men will come today”, he said.
“I bloody hope so!” I said.
Since the worst of the Winter weather has hit us in earnest, we haven’t had a rubbish collection. Which is curious considering that everyone else (postmen, the recycling truck, pizza deliveries, and free newspapers) all manage to get through. We are now in a state of siege from marauding black bin bags, and looking depressingly like the Winter Of Discontent from my school-days. Plus ca change.
When my plates of meat had defrosted a bit, I went into the living-room, and saw that ridiculous monstrosity through the window again. Jason and Xanthe (second childhood obviously) had spent half the previous weekend building an 8 ft high snow sculpture of Garfield the cat on the bit of old scrubland over the way. Since then the bloody thing has become a major tourist attraction in our area, with hordes of people turning up at all hours of the day and night to gawp at it. On Saturday night some drunks decided to enhance it by nicking our neighbour Kristy’s dustbin and adding it to this work of art.
At night, lit up by any stray passing car headlights, it looks downright demonic, like the Satanic Goat of Mendes in ’The Devil Rides Out’. Strong winds last nigh had now robbed it of its ears and obliterated most of its facial features, apart from the tongue sticking out. So now it looks like some huge senile bald-headed old man drooling at us all. I am beginning to feel as haunted by it as Victor Meldrew was by his neighbour’s grinning television aerial!
A few days after this I got talked into giving dinner to Xanthe and her cousin, Susie, who was on a visit over here from Paris, where she has lived for some years now. Xanthe was prepared to give me some long heartbreaking whinge about how she couldn’t entertain Susie very well in her campervan, which I had to stop before I got earache.
I usually get a sort of nervous feeling around émigrés, as they tend to like to harp on about what a sorry state Britain is in, and what a Utopian paradise France/Spain/Australia/whatever is by comparison. Susie Walker is no different. Instead of being belligerent though, she took it upon herself to be Caring, banging on about how she felt sorry for us all, and how grateful she was to be living on the other side of the Channel.
“Over there”, she said “We don’t understand why the British have lost their bottle”.
“I didn’t know we had!” I said.
“Of course you have”, she said, sounding horribly like Margaret Thatcher “Why aren’t you protesting more at what’s happened here?”
“Two million of us protested against the Iraqi war”, I pointed out “It got us nowhere”.
“Because you didn’t follow through on it”, she blithered on “In France people would have barricaded Tony Blair into 10 Downing Street, and then blockaded the ports to stop our troops leaving”.
“What for?” said Jason “They flew out!”
Susie gave him a withering look of disdain, comparable to the one she had given the egg-stain on his jumper when she first arrived (on reflection, I’m surprised we didn’t receive a lecture on the impeccable dress sense of the French into the bargain).
“What would we have done with Tony Blair once we had barricaded him in?” asked Misty, innocently.
“Carted him off to the Tower”, said Jason.
“Or had to listen to him whinging on at great length about how he had meant well”, I said “Look Susie, it seems to me the French seem to take to the streets and protest about ANYTHING, whereas we simply haven’t got to that stage here yet”.
“It’s not warm enough for a start”, said Jason, which - even if he hadn’t managed it before - must have earned him Susie’s undying contempt.
She threw her hands into the air and muttered darkly about “apathy”.
“We’re not really apathetic”, I said “We get angry just like everybody else, REALLY angry, but I for one am a strong believer in hubris, and when that strikes it can be severe. Tony Blair thinks he’s secured his place in history. He has, but not in the way he intended it. I suspect that’s hurting him a lot more deep own than he’s letting on”.
I could have added that I’ve got extremely angry in the past, but all it achieved was me hurting myself even more. I didn’t say that though because I could see this conversation was going nowhere.
Jason helped me to clear the table, and in the kitchen we talked about the recent UFO sighting in Somerset, which had (gulp) even made it onto Teletext’s main headline page!
Back in the living-room once more, I let Susie prattle on while I concentrated on staring at Misty’s arms, his sleeves rolled to his elbows, as he rested them on the table.
At the end of the evening, Susie prepared to go back to her hotel in Fobbington. As she left she kissed me on both cheeks (an irritating modern habit I abhor), and said, with deadly earnestness, “I’m going to make notes of our conversation this evening, and then when I get home, I’m going to type it up on my blog”.
“What for?” said Misty, bluntly.
“For future reference”, said Susie “So that in years to come people will be able to see to what a passive state Britain had sunk to!”
It was a relief to see the old misery-guts get into her taxi and leave. I was still none the wiser as to why the French should give a fiddler’s fuck how passive we are though!
Midnight back at the kitchen door (wasn’t that a line from an old David Bowie song?), and I was talking to Jason about our ’fun’ evening, whilst Misty had gone to bed.
“At least she wasn’t as annoying as she was the first time I met her”, said Jason, referring to Susie “She kept repeating everything I said, like a bloody parrot! I wanted to slap her”.
“Good job you didn’t”, I said “She’s already got a low enough opinion of us as it is! I don’t understand what she was getting so worked up about. If she’s nicely tucked up on the Continent, why should she give a damn about OUR economy?”
“Because it’s all about money, Gray, my old son”, said Jason “The pound’s weak against the euro, so the dear old ex-pats are feeling the pinch, for the first time, and they think we should be every bit as bothered about it as they are”.
“Silly me”, I said “I am quite spectacularly naïve at times”.
One good thing about the recession (for us at any rate) was that Mr Beresford had put on hold his plans to retire to Spain. This was a great help to us, and he put a brave face on it by telling me that Julie Sparrow (now suddenly Fobbington’s answer to Mystic Meg) had predicted that we were going to have a long hot Summer, and that, combined with the weak pound, would be a great boon to tourism. Normally I turn a deaf ear to anything that old fraud Julie Sparrow says, but this time I wanted to believe her.
A less welcome out-come of the recession was that Robbie had lost his job, with Woolworths going out of business, and had gone home to his family in Buckinghamshire. Before leaving he had said he would try and come back at Easter and get a Summer job here, but somehow I didn’t think it was going to happen. I suspected his family would do their best to scupper his dreams of a beach-comber lifestyle.
Jason of course was still with us, although it baffled me as to what he was living on, as he didn’t have anything that could remotely be called a job, unless you count the miniscule amount he makes flogging ’Entrance to Hell’ t-shirts and coffee-mugs on the Internet. Misty told me that he had recently seen an old Quality Street jar stuffed full of pound coins in Jason’s caravan.
“Bit dodgy leaving it in there isn’t it?” I said.
“He said it’s safer than a bank”, said Misty “And if it gets stolen, well at least the thief would have been honest about stealing it!”
Xanthe was almost completely unemployable. Al (God rest his soul) had once tried to find her a job, and it had been a complete disaster. I thought we going to have to call the SAS in! I know she takes in sewing and mending sometimes, and has a little deal going with the local dry-cleaners, whereby she takes in their surplus repair work. When I mentioned once that that couldn’t generate much loot, she airily replied “My tastes are very simple”, so I left it at that.
Both she and Jason seem happy little souls, in their own lunatic ways, and as I’m heartily sick of hearing people moaning about their savings accounts and the low interest rates, I am grateful for their lack of avarice. It’s quite restful sometimes.