Hymn

Fly Drive

I’ve not seen much of the our local vampire recently.  It might be the garlic orchards I’ve planted around my house.  Or the moat of Holy Water.  He might have had a cold.

Today, however, the Gothic Trumpeter was in the street.  In daylight.  This is not a good sign.  More worrying still, he is going to extraordinary lengths to blend in with mortals, or ‘Dinner’ as we’re also known. 

To disguise the fact he has hideous leathery wings under his faded Grind Death tee-shirt and is capable of swooping through the moonless night to devour his prey, he is learning to drive.  In a clapped-out Datsun Sunny.  Oh, the fiendish ingenuity of it.

He stalled the car three times before kangaroo-ing away.  Oh, his attention to detail.  Monstrously brilliant.

I think he waved, ‘Hello! Driving isn’t as easy as it looks is it?’ or he might have been saying ‘With this mechanical vehicle I will leap your puny defences and feast on your still-beating heart.’

Parking Offence

I’m fairly used to seeing odd things.  Sometimes I wonder if in front of me, but just out of sight, there isn’t a pixie setting up mischief to baffle and perplex me.

The car looked unremarkable enough.  Pretty standard small car.  Pretty typical road.  Pretty ordinary parking ticket under the windscreen wiper.

What surprised me, trudging harmlessly to the station, was the bra secured to the rear window.  I can understand the ticket - parking on double lines.  I get that.  Lines.  Ticket.  But what possible offence might result in the notification of a piece of under-wired underwear?

Chucking Sticks

He calls me from the car.

‘Alright, mate.  I’m outside.’
“You could ring the bell you know.”
‘Yes, but I don’t really want to leave the car.’
“What?”
‘I’d just prefer to stay here, if that’s okay.’
“Of course.  I’ll be out straight away.”
‘Careful.’ he warns, ‘There’s a bloke out here, dressed like a terrorist, balaclava over his head, swinging nunchuks about.  He looks really cross about something.’

Ah, the ten year old boy from next door.  Playing outside again.

Flaming Tyred

Motorways and fire are becoming a bit of a theme.  And I'm getting a bit tired of it.  I wish the things that keep cropping up in my life were a bit more pleasant or at least less life-threatening.  Why can’t I have recurring motifs like lottery tickets and winning numbers or female volleyball teams and hotel room mix-ups?

I suspected something might be afoot when the lorry two hundred metres in front started to weave erratically with smoke streaming from it.  I’m sharp like that.  I watched with some awe as the rear of the pantechnicon flipped back and forth like a fish’s tail.  “I never knew they could do that”, I thought to myself.  I’m not sure it was a design feature.

The driver wrestled the truck to the hard shoulder and as he did so there was a loud bang.  Now, in my limited combat/ childcare experience, bangs are rarely good sounds.  They rarely indicate calm, restful events.  This particular bang indicated the departure of a back wheel from the chassis.  I suspect this wasn’t a design feature either.

I’m sure there’s a mathematical equation that would describe the looping curve of the wheel as it rolled across the carriageway.  If only I’d had a Spirograph to hand, I think I could have drawn it.  And in pretty colours.  As it was, and as in all occasions of this sort, time very kindly slowed down.  It gave me an eternity to draw my own mental image.  It was curiously enchanting.  Maybe it was the elegant arc.  Maybe it was the furious orange blaze.  Maybe it was the plumes of black smoke.  Maybe it was the Angel of Death riding rodeo-style on the Catherine Wheel of Doom as it careered towards me.

Other cars, with drivers clearly panicking, took evasive action, peeling away like a Red Arrows display.  Losers.  I’m far too English/ stupefied to dilly-dally with such nonsense.  For me, it was business as usual.  I pay my road tax and that gives me more right to travel down the middle lane of the motorway than some flaming, unaccompanied, wheel, Goddamit.

I watched as the ball of fire rolled across my lane in front of me.  Ah-ha! I was saved!

I watched it curve back towards me.  Ah-ha!  I was doomed.

I assumed the foetal position.  By chance, I jabbed the accelerator as I curled up ready to die. 

When I opened my eyes the motorway was clear.  It had all been a dream.  Except when I looked in my rear view mirror.  It looked like an anarchist cub scout trip for cars - dozens of them arranged around a campfire of burning tyres.  And singing “Gin-gan-ghoulie,” I’ll wager.

Stab Proof

‘Die!  Die!  Die!’  came the voice from my neighbour’s garage.
‘I’m going to kill you.’  Along with the dull sounds of some object being battered and stabbed with something sharp.

Now, I’d just returned from buying some pot plants for my garden and while I was keen to perform my civic duty, I did have some petunias to deal with.  It was a tough call.  It’s not so much the blood that bothers me, it’s the same infernal questions afterwards - “Now, sir, could you explain exactly what you were doing being the disused gasworks on the evening of the incident?  And why the officer found you carrying eighteen punnets of strawberries?” 

But Baby was sleeping and I did worry that a road-full of blazing sirens might disturb her. 

I armed myself with a tray of marigolds.

I peered around the door. 

My neighbour’s ten year old son was mutilating a cardboard box while screaming obscenities at it. 

As his fury subsided, he looked up.  He saw me watching, utterly perplexed. 

‘Always helps to relieve a little stress’ he explained. 

I left him to it, double-locking my gate on the way.

Caught Out

Over drinks with friends tonight, I stumbled into a conversation about our relative ability to talk to strange women.  When I say ‘strange’, I don’t mean strange as in mad (never been any problem there) but strange as in stranger.  And when I say ‘talk to’ I obviously mean ‘chat up.’

My own spectacular ability to go to pieces when confronted with an attractive female is reasonably well documented.  Indeed my dating misadventures are sustaining the traditional skills of oral storytelling among some of the more remote tribes along the Congo river.  I understand that a whole generation of Kisangani males have been taught how not to find a mate with the sobering tale of ‘C and the Two Scoops of Ice Cream.’

So, tonight, it was reassuring to hear that I am not entirely alone in my abject failure to woo women.  He said:

‘I was in the park with some mates one night and there were some girls there playing a ball game.  One of them was really gorgeous.  Really good looking.  You know pretty face, long hair, great figure.  But the really mesmerising thing about her was she could throw the ball further than anyone else I’ve ever seen.  It was amazing.  I fell in love with her at first sight.  No, really.

‘I really wanted to talk to her but couldn’t think of anything to say.  All I could come up with was “Do you play cricket?”  But I didn’t want to ask her that in case she thought I was calling her a lesbian.  So I didn’t say anything at all.’

He never saw her again.  Now, there’s a lesson for us all - if a girl's got balls that you want to play with, don’t stand Silly Mid-On.

Spring Lamb

It’s that time again: Nature goes a little barmy.  I watched young lambs skipping across meadows just because they were so surprised to be alive.  I know that neither attribute will last long.  I hope they enjoy it while it lasts.  Sheep are notoriously stupid but I’d like to believe that these youngsters were hopping over the buttercups for the sheer joy of it rather than being startled by the large hard thing underfoot and the big yellow thing in the sky.  There’s a lot to be said for blissful ignorance.

Chim-chim-chimenea

Marvellous thing Progress.  We’ve evolved from living outside and warming ourselves with fire to deliberately eschewing perfectly good homes mortgaged to the hilt in order to sit beside flaming heaters outside.  I suspect that if God had wanted us to sit in the garden on Spring evenings he would have given us more fur or provided extra socks.  Still, like air-conditioning in Florida, I like to think that with our little garden stove, we’re doing our bit for global warming.

It really is a terrific invention.  One simply throws in paper, wood and petrol before setting it all alight.  Not too sure about the petrol but it sure does help.  We have come a long way in these enlightened times.  When, as a child, I did the same thing with a neighbour’s shed, people were ever so upset.  Now, with sophisticated friends we laugh as the flames ignite my conifer hedge.  What progress.

Disposable Car

I don’t count anything practical or useful among my skills or abilities.  I am pretty good at being hopeless and I’m satisfied with that.  A man can’t be too greedy after all.  So while the situation isn’t completely desperate, the absence of any functional talent makes some things quite challenging.  Like decision-making. 

Don’t get me wrong: I don’t have any trouble making decisions.  Oh no.  I make decisions all the time, boldly, gaily, with abandon even.  Many people are surprised how easily I can make a decision, even in circumstances where I know nothing of the background, context or consequences.   I’ve never let qualification, experience, expertise or judgement stand in my way.  Just ask me to decide - happy to oblige.  No, I have no trouble making decisions, it’s making the right decision that I struggle with.

The death of our car a couple of weeks ago has had some unfortunate consequences: we have developed muscles the size of Popeye’s from carrying shopping and Baby has started to believe she is a marsupial from all her time in a papoose.  The final straw came when T broke her last pair of heels as we attempted to carry our broken fridge freezer to the municipal tip.

Ordinarily of course we’d have just bought another car straightaway. But these are uncertain times.  I have been quite reluctant to acquire more debt for an object that remains inactive for ninety percent of each day and when in use depreciates exponentially.  In a rare moment of lucidity, the whole idea of vehicle ownership looked like madness to me.  Confronted by the look of madness on T’s face and her reflections on my Bloody Stupid Ideas I am encouraged to turn that particular light bulb off and plunge back into blissfully ignorant darkness.

So we have a new car.  And when I say ‘new’ I don’t, of course, mean ‘new.’  Actually by ‘new’ I mean ‘old.’  Older, in fact, than the car that’s just died.  Almost done as many miles too.  So this is clearly another inspirational moment.  Against all of the obvious shortcomings of this decision, I have balanced the purchase price: a mere four hundred pounds.  So if it dies after six months, I reckon we’ve not lost anything.  It’s a disposal car.  And sold to us by our Smiling Mechanic so what can possibly go wrong?

Puss in Boot

My efforts to lower the tone of the street continue unabated.  This doesn’t take a great deal of energy because I’m a lazy arse so making the place look untidy tends to come naturally.  An example of my inactivity sits quietly outside.  My Old Car, so tenderly retrieved from storage, still squats forlornly on my drive; doing what old cars, as opposed to new cars, do so effectively - nothing.

Today however, I roused myself to Make An Effort.  Now this car hasn’t moved under its own power for close on seven years, nearly a quarter of its life but ever the wild fantasist, I thought I could just wire up a new battery and away we’d go.  We didn't.  We didn’t go anywhere.  It made some half-hearted noises but didn’t burst into life as I’d hoped.

However, there was some compensation.  It seems not everyone has suffered from having the car sat outside through the winter.  The seats were covered in fur.  Cat fur.  Not just one colour though, dozens.  White, grey, ginger, black, brown, you name it, somewhere within the interior there was fur.  In fact I think I could recognise the hairs of most of the neighbourhood cats.  Except, of course, my own.  As if it’s not enough that they sneak into the house to devour our Stupid Cat’s food, it now appears that they’ve turned my classic car into some kind of pussy brothel.  Bloody charming.  Like the scene from Titanic, the windows have erotic paw prints on them.  My old picnic blanket is passionately scrunched up in one corner.  Tufts of hair are scattered around.  Rather unpleasant smells hang in the air.  It’s been one helluva party.  That or a feline fight club.  Or maybe a combination of the two.  It doesn’t bear thinking about. 

At least it explains why those telltale cat calls have been quite so muffled over the last few months.