Getting the Hang of Lucy.

Remember Lucy, the ¼ Greek ex-dental nurse who now works in the coffee shop and distinguishes herself by remembering me? She was on the counter again today when I went in (she was wearing a multi-coloured bandana which looked quite splendid holding back her naturally dark hair…)

‘Hello Lucy,’ I said.

‘Hello Mr Beazley,’ she replied with half a hint of a smile.

‘I would rather you didn’t call me Mr Beazley, if you don’t mind. Mr Beazley was my stepfather and I wasn’t too keen on him.’

‘Oh, right… erm… Jeffrey, isn’t it?’

(Where does this woman come from? She even remembers my forename, for heaven’s sake. She just cemented her place in my good books.)

‘Jeffrey, Jeff, JJ, buggerlugs, monstink… anything other than Mr Beazley. But tell me: what persuaded you to abandon blue pyjamas and the medical profession for the mufti of middle England and the role of a serving wench?’

She said it was to do with going travelling and becoming stressed by the protocols and regulations of modern medical mania, but that isn’t the important point. The important point is that she was singularly unimpressed by my elegant and well constructed vernacular, despite the fact that I even managed to slip a bit of alliteration cleverly into the mix. I was hoping she might draw her hand across her brow and fall into a swoon, but she didn't. Instead I imagined her thinking ‘why doesn’t this guy stop being a pretentious jerk and speak proper English?’ Now, if she’d actually said that, I could have explained:

‘It’s because I’ve been writing for the last fifteen years and writers have to keep on finding new ways to say things which fall outside the parameters of normal English. And then we find ourselves doing it naturally as a matter of course and people write us off as pretentious jerks.’

But she didn’t, so neither did I. And since I wasn’t prompted to explain, I thought it better that I should shut up. So I did.

But then, guess what. I saw her again in Tesco, minus the multi-coloured bandana. I decided to keep it simple that time.

‘Hello again,’ I muttered with something approximating to a disinterested smile. (Was that simple enough?)

‘Hello Jeff.’

Mmm… She still remembers my name and uses the diminutive to boot. The air in Tesco turned a mild shade of cerise and then I went home.

The end.