‘Are you a Scouser?’ (For those who don’t know, a Scouser is
a person from Liverpool.)
‘No.’
‘Where do you come from?’
‘London.’
‘London?
So how do you manage to sound like a Scouser?’
‘I don’t know.’
And then she broke into giggles and Mel told me I’m far too
forward with young women in coffee shops. The mystery of both the accent and the giggles remains.
And then there was the conversation occasioned by my asking
the same question of the young woman on the calendar stall in the shopping mall
(because she had a Slavic accent) and she answered ‘Croatia.’ But I’d prefer not to go
into that.
By an odd, and somewhat perverse, coincidence, the accent of
the young Pakistani woman who runs the Asian tucker wagon (from which I get my
vegetable samosas) is becoming so thick that I have to keep saying ‘I’m sorry?’
I suspect it’s because she’s so used to seeing me that she no longer feels the
need to try too hard.
* * *
It occurred to me yet again that around 95% of what they
sell in shopping malls is of little, if any, real value. It’s all ephemeral
lifestyle stuff, and only there to persuade people to spend vast sums of money
on things they don’t actually need. The really valuable stuff is what they sell
in the old fashioned markets, like dishcloths, socks and potatoes, and the old
fashioned markets are nearly empty these days.
So here we have a bunch of people at the cutting edge of
science telling us that both individuality and the very fabric of the material
world are effectively illusions, and yet we continue to push the notion that image is the be all and end all. Has Bedlam become the new Eden, I wonder?
And I really can’t be bothered to explain why I suspect the material world
might bear analogy with the shadow, but Mel liked the idea. She generally
prefers my existential theories to my habit of being overly forward with young
women.
* * *
The nice thing about travelling by train is that it frees
your mind to wander into strange places, like today I wondered whether schools
still have buckets of sawdust stationed at regular intervals to throw onto the
vomit when a kid spews his guts up. And did you know that when you’ve cleared
vomit from a carpet but the smell remains, the way to neutralise it is to
sprinkle the area with soda water? It’s required knowledge for those working
schools matinees in theatres.
* * *
And here’s another little anecdote from when I was a kid at
school. I was around 10 when I got my finger trapped by a hinged wooden seat.
It shattered the nail and left my poor little digit spouting blood at a rate of
knots, so I was taken to the space between the headmaster’s office and the
staff common room and deposited on a chair to await transport home. I remember
looking down and being surprised that my feet and the chair legs were resting
in an ever-spreading pool of blood, and by the time I was taken to the
headmaster’s car I was all but gone. I suppose it was the combined effect of
pain, shock and loss of blood, but I could hardly stand without assistance. So
did I get taken for treatment? No. In those days and where I came from, you
either got better or you didn’t. No doubt it saved the NHS some money and also
prepared us for the possibility that we might be required to defend the Empire
against people carrying sharp things with malicious intent. This is odd because
we didn’t have an empire by then, but old habits die hard. So did I, nearly.
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