December came in with high winds, torrential rain, and heavy colds for us both. The first weekend of the month was so wild, weather-wise, that Misty got too excited, and was bouncing about the camper-van shrieking at every squally gust.
“What if we got flooded out again?” he said “Just before Christmas and all!”
“That wouldn’t be very nice”, I said (which was something of an understatement!).
“Imagine what Xanthe would say!” he wailed.
“Well she’d be alright”, I said “She’s up on top of a bloody cliff … mind you, it could start to crumble away I suppose”.
Had a downright sinister e-mail from some guy in Los Angeles, who said he had been told about me by somebody who knew me (WHO???), and would I like to become his friend on MySpace. If I liked I could follow the link and watch his videos. Had a feeling that, in my weakened state, I simply wouldn’t be able to cope with this dubious pleasure. Wished I had the balls to do the aristocratic response of “Lord Gray thanks you for your kind offer, but regrets that he already has enough friends”. In the meantime I left him loitering in cyber space, because I simply couldn’t think of anything to say.
We watched a documentary about the floods, which enraged me so much I’m amazed the telly was still in one piece at the end of it. It didn’t help that the presenter was one of those gormless up-himself ones who thinks he’s telling you something you don’t already know, and likes to intone in a forbidding voice about How Very Serious all this is. He even put on fishermen’s waders and went to stand in a raging river, just to show us all how difficult walking in water could be! (I bet the media luvvies in their wine-bar were agog to hear all about this dangerous assignment!). Worse was to come when he interviewed some androgynous government tapeworm, who spoke like a robot about Limited Resources, and said she couldn’t possibly tell us where the high-risk reservoirs are as it’s A Matter Of National Security. So much so that even the gormless presenter was soon able to track them down via Google! (Somebody please tell our politicians that we’re not living in the 1940s anymore!).
This is not to mention the family in Yorkshire, who STILL haven’t received their insurance payout! All the whole farrago did was to prove once again that we can expect no help and support from the authorities whatsoever. I already knew that, I really didn’t need telling it again.
“I knew we shouldn’t have watched that”, said Misty “I knew it would only upset you. We should have watched that programme on the monarchy on the other side. They were interviewing Prince Charles!”
I never thought the day would come when I would regret missing an interview with Prince Charles, life’s a funny old thing sometimes. Went to bed haunted by images of that poor guy who died after getting trapped in a storm-drain in Catterick, and the people desperately trying to hold his head out of the water.
There was more bloody torrential rain after this. It was so violent at times that I was praying in my head for it to stop, and was frantically scanning the sky for even the merest glimpse of blue. My daily horoscope told me I would be feeling an intense upsurge of emotion, but with nowhere to direct it. I don’t think I’ve ever read such an accurate horoscope! All I know is that the rain was deeply unsettling me. I felt as taut with tension as a violin string. I even found it was affecting my work. I had got an idea for a Jack Vettriano-style picture of a man waking up on the first morning of his holiday, with the sun shining through his seaside bedroom window. But the idea of painting something so full of contentment seemed beyond my capabilities at the moment.
We went and bought a Christmas tree, and I put it up in the empty living-room in ’Barnacles’, (and then wondered if I should submit it to the Tate Modern, as an interesting bit of Surrealism!). Misty instantly set to work decorating it, and over the next few days he methodically placed baubles and lights on it. I don’t think any Christmas tree had ever been so painstakingly decorated.
One evening we had strong winds to add to the fun, and I lay awake half the night, listening to the recycling boxes getting shuffled about outside. Eventually Misty got up and made a cup of tea.
“How do you stay calm all the time, Misty?” I asked him.
“Well I don’t”, he said “You should know that, the amount of times you’ve had to calm me down!”
“No that’s different”, I said “That’s just bursts of temper. You don’t seem to have any deep anger inside”.
“I do”, he said “But when I feel it welling up inside me, I do those breathing exercises you once told me about, and I visualise it all whooshing out of me”.
“Like a great big fart?” I joked.
“Something like that”, he said “What makes you most angry?”
“God knows, I scarcely know where to begin”, I said “Things like that flood meeting back in October. There were people in that hall, apart from us, who had been through absolute shit”.
“Some literally”, he said, meaning the burst sewage they had had in some areas.
“Exactly”, I said “And yet we had to sit there, as though we were all on the naughty step, whilst a bunch of pompous, arrogant prats lectured us and patronised us, told us not to be rude and outspoken, as though we were naughty children who needed bringing back into line. And we sat there, and took it, just grumbled a bit afterwards. In a more civilised country they would have been lynched!”
“The only reason I don’t get angry with that lot”, he said “Is perhaps because I’m more cynical than you. I don’t expect anything from them, I never have. I know they’re all only out to cover their own backsides. The difference between you and me is that I don’t expect Authority to care”.
“Strange, because neither do I really”, I sighed “It’s just I keep on expecting that one day they might pleasantly surprise us instead!”
Kristy went out on the razzle for half the night the following Saturday, and left her dog locked up in the garden shed. He barked non-stop the whole time. At one point (sometime after midnight) we went out to try and see if we could calm him down. I tried the shed door, but it was locked, and we were left with making soothing shushing noises at him through the door, which only seemed to make him worse. Misty kept going on about calling out the RSPCA, but (and I’m not remotely proud of this fact) I simply didn’t want the hassle. I’m fed up to the back teeth with getting involved in other people’s problems. For the last frigging time, I am not my neighbour’s keeper!!! He then suggested that we offer to adopt him, and I had to go through the age-old rigmarole of pointing out the exorbitant cost of vet’s bills to him, yet again.
When I did eventually get some sleep I dreamt that I was yanking out all my own teeth. This dream was so vivid and so thoroughly unpleasant, that I was very pleasantly surprised when I woke up to find them all still in place!
As I knew that Misty wouldn’t give me any peace until I had done so, I went round to see Kristy at the nearest opportunity. It turned out that her son had locked the poor mutt in the shed. This was dismaying news to hear that this total waste of space was back in the neighbourhood. Kristy has so many daughters flung around the countryside that I sometimes think of her as The Old Woman Who Lived In A Shoe, but she only has one son, Sam, and what a fine, upstanding specimen of manhood he is to be sure! Even as a kid he had had to have social workers forcibly escorting him to school. Since then he’s either been sectioned (sometimes I think that the whole country has been sectioned or served with an ASBO - or in Tara Mitchell’s case, both), or has done a number of dead end jobs that have usually ended in disaster of some kind. I do recall one memorable occasion, when he was doing night-work in a supermarket warehouse, and a pile of frozen chickens had fallen on his head. Kristy had been very worried at the time, although I had felt like telling her that anything falling on that part of his anatomy shouldn’t cause any serious damage!
Anyway, last Saturday night Kristy had gone out for dinner with friends, and had (with to my mind, almost lunatic abandon) left Sam in the house on his own. At about 9 o’clock he had decided to go into Fobbington, and he says that he was halfway there on the bus (fortunately he’s had his driving licence taken away) when he remembered that he had accidentally locked the dog in the shed. I do not know how the fuck you can accidentally lock a dog in the shed, particularly a noisy dog like that one, who would have made his displeasure clear very quickly indeed! I couldn’t be bothered to try and work out what really had happened, instead I suggested that next time she go out for the evening, that she leave the dog with us.
“Was he very noisy?” she asked.
“He barked solidly for 3-and-a-half hours”, I said, which sent her into such a violent spasm of guilt and contrition that I felt a complete interfering bastard.
“I did wonder why he was a bit grumpy when I got home”, she said (presumably she didn’t wonder what the hell he was doing locked up in the shed!).
Just to add to life’s endless carousel of pleasure and fun, Mr Beresford informed me that he was thinking of selling up and retiring. This was highly disturbing news to say the least. He hastened to reassure me that he wouldn’t be making a decision on this until next year, but as there was only 2 chuffing weeks left of this year, that hardly cushioned the blow! Suddenly the grim spectre of Office Work was looming larger than ever. And that’s even if someone would be mad enough to employ me, considering I’ve spent several years out of the loop, thoroughly enjoying myself in La-La Land!
When I got home I talked over the prospect with Misty, who said that perhaps moving wouldn’t be such a bad thing, really, and that we could go back on the road again. Part of me wasn’t too keen on the idea of going travelling again quite so soon after the last bout, but then again, settling back into ’Barnacles’ didn’t feel real either. I knew that I could hardly spend the rest of my life acting like a complete basket case every time we had heavy rain, and I was also heartily sick of having Kristy’s chaotic lifestyle (and all that that entails) in the nearby vicinity.
Heard some absolutely atrocious carol-singing on the radio. By atrocious I mean it was simply TOO perfect. It’s the sort where the singers enunciate each word absolutely correctly, even rolling their r’s like a bunch of overly-prissy choir-boys. Switched on the television instead and heard Victoria Wood, in one of her stand-up routines, say that she’d hate to be a gay man because of “all that ironing!” which got a tremendous laugh from the audience … and which completely baffled me. Can only assume it was way above my head (most things are).
Irritatingly, I kept mulling over it for hours afterwards though. Was she (in some roundabout way) being incredibly filthy, like Rik Mayall and his crinkly hanky stuff, or … no I can’t think what else it can be. For the record, I virtually NEVER do any ironing (as the state of my clothes would no doubt testify). About once a month Misty very noisily sets up the ironing-board, then buggers off and leaves it for a couple of hours to its own devices. When he finally gets back to it, he runs the iron in a desultory fashion over a t-shirt or a pair of trousers, and then nosily dismantles it again.
Several weeks of living in a campervan was taking its toll. Not helped by the fact that it wasn’t just our home, but my working environment as well. We were getting under each other’s feet, sometimes literally. One evening I stepped on Misty’s foot, and from the hullabaloo he raised you’d think I’d tried sawing his leg off!
“That’s it”, I said “We’re going to go and buy some things for the house, and we’re going to start moving back into it properly, finished or not”.
“But the kitchen still hasn’t been fitted up”, he protested.
“Then we’ll come out here use this one!” I said “So what’s new? It seems stupid that we’re treading on each other in here, whilst the Christmas tree has the house all to itself!”
I drove us to the big out-of-town stores on the outskirts of Fobbington in the grim and certain knowledge that just about everything we would see would not meet with The Great One’s approval. This turned out to be true, until we came to a stack of oversized cushions, which got him quite excited, so I bought them. Our pleasure in these was slightly marred by the cocky shop assistant at the till, who insisted on putting on a camp, lisping voice and saying “ooh how nice!” when he was scanning them.
“Why do people always have to ruin things?” asked Misty, when we carried them out to the van.
“They TRY to ruin things”, I said “It’s up to us whether we let them or not”.
In the car-park I recognised an old lady from the other side of Shinglesea. Like us, her bungalow had been flooded out too, and for the past few weeks she’d been living in rented accommodation. She was trying to manhandle an enormous fold-up reclining chair into the back of her car. I stopped to give her a hand.
“It’s all been horrible”, she said, and I thought for a moment that she was going to cry.
I tried to jolly her up by saying that it would be like having a brand new house when everything was finished.
“I don’t want a brand new house”, she said, emotionally “I want my old cosy one back”.
I knew there was nothing I could say to make her feel better, and fortunately it was too damn cold to stand around talking for long.
We began moving things back into the house a few days before Christmas. At one point I went outside to get something from the shed, and noticed that there was a dreadful smell saturating the entire neighbourhood, a smell like rotten eggs. I just assumed that the farmers were putting some more of their foul-smelling muck on the fields.
Charmless Pillock was out there, putting the finishing touches to Kristy’s patio (a job which, for sheer longevity, makes the building of the pyramids seem like small potatoes by comparison!). Needless to say, Kristy was out there too, plus Charmless Pillock’s new assistant, a lad so utterly gormless you wonder if he cuts his food up by trying to smash the plate over his head!
“You’re to come here on Friday and do the very last bits”, C-P was instructing him.
“But Friday’s early finishing day”, the lad protested.
“Yeah, but Kristy wants to give you your Christmas kiss”, said C-P.
“I think I’ve just turned gay!” said the lad.
Oh pah-lease, credit us with SOME taste, I felt like saying. Kristy, poor old sod, just looked totally bemused by this little exchange. But I guess it’s a case of those who live by the sword die by the sword, and my sympathy was in short supply, as she’s spent the past few weeks trying to slow up progress on ‘Barnacles’ by keep inviting the workmen into her house for cups of tea!
Seemed to keep hearing Charmless Pillock’s foghorn leghorn voice for the rest of the morning.
Read on Teletext that a number of doctors are concerned about the high level of patients suffering from trauma as a result of last Summer’s floods. Couldn’t help thinking of the old lady in the car-park when I read this. I said to Misty that thank God we weren’t traumatised.
“You are though”, he said “Look what you’re like every time we have heavy rain!”
This was a rather chastening thought. I left him to put the sheets on the bed and went for a walk along the sea-wall. The tide was in, and it was going dark (at the moment it seems to go dark at about 20 past 2 in the afternoon!). Saw something bobbing about on the water, which for one horrible moment I thought was a body. Never did quite ascertain what it was, but I think it was a log or a tree trunk.
When I got home I found that the post had come. There was a dinky little Christmas card from Jason, and inside the message “BEST WISHES FOR 2008, AND AS FOR 2007 … OH WELL NEVER MIND”. He also enclosed a short letter on a scrap of paper, and I spent ages trying to decipher his handwriting. From what I could make out Al had a journalist friend staying with him for a few days.
“COUNT YOUR LUCKY STARS YOU HAVEN’T MET HIM”, wrote Jason “WHAT A PLANK! ACTUALLY HAD THE NERVE TO SAY TO OUR FACES THAT THE FLOODS WERE THE MOST BORING NATURAL DISASTER EVER. ROBBIE SAID WE’RE VERY SORRY AND WE’LL TRY AND MAKE IT MORE EXCITING FOR HIM NEXT TIME. AND THEN HE UPSET XANTHE BY SAYING THAT ABORTION WAS STATE-SPONSORED INFANTICIDE”.
I do not think I want to meet this person.
Also in the post was a rather terse Christmas card from my sister. I suppose you can’t blame her really, she must sense that I can’t stand her or her boring bloody family. What made my blood run cold though was the short note on the inside of the card:
“ARTHUR GOING SKIING IN THE NEW YEAR. WOULD LIKE TO STOP OVER AT YOUR PLACE ON THE WAY HOME”.
And that was it, that was the note. Well for a start, Shinglesea Beach isn’t on the way home from ANYWHERE, and most particularly not an airport, or anywhere that does poncey old skiing! Absolutely no mention of the floods, or the sheer impossibility of putting up Arthur at the moment (although would not want to put that loathsome little tit up at any time, regardless of natural disasters).
Fumed about this for hours. Then heard on the news that the airports were going on strike in January. A pleasurable image of Arthur, complete with ski’s, woolly hat and goggles, stranded in a departure lounge with a bunch of other chinless wonders, skipped merrily across my mind.
Well we all need our dreams in our hours of darkness.
Had been hearing odd tales about Al recently. According to various sources (Mrs Jackson and Magda mainly) he had spent the past few weeks roaming about the neighbourhood, doling out proclamations of doom like John Laurie.
On Christmas Eve we actually received a card from him, which had an annoyingly cryptic message scrawled on the inside: “TREASURES ARE NOT FOUND IN THE SHALLOW, BUT MUCH DEEPER”.
I Read this several times, even turned it upside down, as though that was going to make it any clearer. It was as if he was impersonating the girl from the French Resistance on ‘Allo! Allo!’
“One of my hopes for next year”, I said to Misty “Is that people will stop talking in code all the time!”
Apart from a touch of absentmindedness on my part (like forgetting to serve up any spaghetti with the bolognaise at lunchtime), Christmas Day was quiet. All to the good. Magda had initially invited us up to The Shell House, but I simply didn’t feel like trying to engage in rational conversation all day long. It felt like too much of an effort.
Being back in ’Barnacles’ was a strange feeling. You wouldn’t think that a 4-roomed bungalow could feel huge, but it did. It felt enormous. We unwrapped our presents on Christmas morning in our near-empty living-room. Xanthe had given me a tie (of all things) in an Alan Partridge-style presentation box. I can‘t actually remember the last time I wore a tie, and certainly not a canary-yellow one with what appeared to be the footsteps of a drunken spider walking in ink scrawled all over it!
“I’ve never worn a tie”, said Misty, who was sitting stark butt-naked on the sofa “I don’t even know how to put one on”.
So I put it on him. Very fetching he looked in it too.
Christmas wouldn’t be Christmas without a visitation from that obnoxious old bitch Soo Ashton. She appeared in Kristy’s back garden, along with Mrs Jackson. I wanted to apologise to Mrs J for not having given her a Christmas card yet, but there simply hadn’t been time to write them out. I promised to give it to her in the New Year.
Ashton instantly launched into a lengthy speech of platitudes, about how anyone who could possibly object wasn’t worth knowing anyway. This was all said so aggressively thought that I had feeling she was getting at Mrs J. When she had finished this insufferably pious speech, she pointed her finger at me aggressively and said “you were lucky though”. (Technically, in the sense that nobody died, she was right, but I didn’t want to hear it at the present time).
To try and lighten the situation, Mrs Jackson asked me how my work was going. Before I had a chance to reply Ashton said: “I could be an artist. But of course I would paint really GOOD, interesting pictures”.
The chutzpah of this was breath-taking, and I fantasised about slapping her face. Later on I said to Misty that I really must learn to vanquish my inner anger next year. I’ve only ever hit someone in anger once. I socked a guy in the eye in a nightclub once, many years ago, when he implied I charged money for sexual favours (incidentally afterwards his friends came up to me and congratulated me, saying the he was such a cocky gobshite he had been asking for it for years!). Even so, I clearly do have a violent side to me, and it does need to be curbed (before someone gets hurt). It has helped that for years I’ve had to concentrate on curbing Misty’s temper, but, ironically, he has largely been the calm one lately, and I’ve been the hot-head.
Misty said I had done the right thing by not replying to Ashton. “That’s the right way to respond to a stupid idiot like that”, said my little philosopher. This turnabout in his personality was a source of endless fascination for me. It wasn’t that long ago that I would have been actively having to restrain him from doing her serious harm. Now of course it was me who probably needed restraining. The only thing that stopped me really was that I didn’t want to wreck everybody’s New Year.
I felt absolutely nothing when midnight chimed and 2008 dawned. For the very simple reason that I didn’t have any confidence that people would be any the less annoying this coming year than they had been in the last.