Monday:
As I go out to get my newspaper, I see Eugene and Sandy loading up their car with suitcases. I wish them a good morning and Eugene tells me that they are off to a gig in Newcastle. Sandy looks petulant.
‘The last time we played there, some arsehole ran off with my fez,’ Sandy says.
On my way to the minimarket, I speculate as to what might be involved in their “speciality dancing”.
After a fairly frugal supper, I listen to a concert on Radio Three. It’s Beethoven’s violin concerto which is sublime. I’m reminded of an occasion when I did a recording session for which I had written an arrangement for strings. The musicians, about ten in number, were led by a haughty woman violinist of ample proportions. She insisted that I conduct them, even though the piece was very simple. I agreed, but having no baton, I used a roller-ball pen. I quickly got into the spirit of things, flourishing the pen and imagining that I was conducting a symphony orchestra at the Albert Hall. After a couple of takes, during which the musicians hardly gave me a second glance, one of their number pointed to the haughty violinist.
‘You seem to have broken out in a serious rash, Daphne,’ he said.
Indeed she had. She was covered in black spots, all over her face and arms and her dress. The pen had leaked of course and while I was pretending to be Simon Rattle, I had been decorating her. She was not amused.
Tuesday:
I watch a television documentary about the benefits of fasting. Apparently, if one restricts calorie intake to around six hundred on alternate days, then this not only leads to weight loss, but also the generation of new brain cells . I’m having trouble coping with the cells that I’ve already got, which seem to fire off in all sorts of random directions. On a good day, I can feel like a titan and on others like a slug. Also, even a modest bottle of Merlot is around six hundred calories. To forego this small pleasure is a step too far. I think I’ll settle for fewer brain cells and the occasional Ryvita, as a nod to abstention. Who wants to be a brainy stick insect anyway?
Wednesday:
I’m awoken by a telephone call from somebody trying to sell me double glazing. I ask them if they’ve found God yet. The line goes dead. Pity, I was going to continue with a discussion of how crime, banditry and perplexity could be avoided.
Thursday:
I’m puzzled by why so many men these days have shaven heads. I imagine that some of them are perhaps prematurely bald and think that they might just as well remove what little hair remains. Whatever the reason, to me, it makes them look threatening and aggressive. Maybe that’s their intention.
In the days when a shaven head was a rarity, an old friend of mine, Dougo, had his head shaved to raise money for charity and he collected a sizeable sum from those who would never have dreamt of such a drastic and noble gesture. One evening, his infant son was in the bath. Dougo’s wife asked him to look after him while she prepared dinner. Dougo spotted a new toy floating in the bath. It was a little plastic monkey on a stick. At the base of the stick was a suction cap. Dougo stuck it to the side of the bath and tweaked the stick. The monkey ascended the stick and then juddered back to the base, it’s mouth rapidly opening and closing, like a ventriloquist’s dummy. His son was delighted and, encouraged by this success, Dougo, with some difficulty, removed the stick from the side of the bath and stuck it to his shaven head. Every time he shook his head, the monkey went through its routine, much to the amusement of his son. Bath time over, Dougo attempted to remove the toy from his head. He couldn’t. No amount of tugging by him and his wife, or the application of washing up liquid and cooking oil would budge it.
When they arrived at the casualty department of the local hospital, it was fairly crowded. Dougo tried his best to maintain some dignity as he sat with his wife and son, but every time he turned his head, the monkey would ascend and descend the stick with a mocking clacking of its jaws, much to the amusement of those waiting to be seen. To compound his embarrassment, the duty doctor, hardly able to stifle his mirth, paged some of his colleagues to witness the spectacle. Their merriment was shared by a gaggle of giggling nurses who had been similarly alerted. Eventually, the suction cap was incised with a scalpel and Dougo was parted from the monkey.
He was left with a purple lump on his bald head. It was roughly the size of a duck’s egg and took some weeks to shrink. During this time, old ladies on buses offered him their seats, enemies were conciliatory and policemen halted the traffic to let him cross the road. They all presumably thought that with no hair and an outsize purple lump on his head, he was undergoing chemotherapy for a brain tumour.
Friday:
I spend some time catching up with dirty dishes. I really should wash up once a day at least, rather than waiting until I’ve run out of clean pans, plates and cutlery. Some of the plates and pans that I’ve used earlier in the week seem to have developed a culture. A bit like the contents of Alexander Fleming’s petri dish when he discovered penicillin. This has me thinking.
If, as we’re told, time is relative, then what to us might be only a week could be eons to the microbes developing in my washing-up bowl. At a microscopic level they could have gone through their own versions of the Bronze and Iron Ages, had an Industrial Revolution, built great cities, founded empires and dynasties and fought pointless wars. They might also have spawned Messiahs and false prophets, philosophers, playwrights, poets, musicians and great scientists.
As I finish the washing up and flush out the sink, I begin to wonder if I might indiscriminately have exterminated the microbial counterparts of Genghis Kahn, Einstein, Galileo, Mother Teresa, Mozart, or Little Richard. And who’s to say that some indolent slouch like me in another universe or dimension won’t flush us all down the plughole someday? It’s a bizarre thought, but then as one of my wives once said to me,
‘You think too much.’
Saturday:
The usual crap in the mail. Touting estate agents, funeral plans, insurance, mobile phone offers and kitchen refurbishment. The insurance offer has a pre-paid reply envelope, so I stuff the all other guff, plus a couple of menus from the local tandoori and wood-fired pizza joint into it and post it off on my way to the shops. I don’t expect that this small of act of rebellion will lead to the downfall of capitalism, but if we all did the same, it might deter these pests and save a few trees.
Sunday:
A domestic day, wherein I start out with great resolve to sort out the flat. I can never remember the correct order of play. Does one dust first, then hoover? I decide to start on the ceiling cobwebs and work downwards to floor level. Then I’ll unleash the hoover to mop up all the crap. It’s some time since I’ve done this and I begin to notice that the tops of doors are covered in dust and dead flies. The louvred doors to the kitchen, probably considered stylish in the Sixties, are a particular worry as the slats seem to have an obstinate combination of dust and a patina of grease. I soldier on doing the best I can. A pretty moth takes flight from behind a radiator and flutters out of the balcony window. At least it won’t be eating my clothing. On the other hand, it might just have been resting after a prolonged and frenzied period of copulation and its progeny are already nibbling their way through my wardrobe.
Finally, I plug in the hoover. It sounds a bit wheezy and picks up next to nothing. I’ve reached this point so many times in my life with other appliances, cars, computers, official forms, people, relationships and self-assemble furniture I feel myself losing it, wanting just to give up, but I persevere. I open up the hoover and examine the bag that collects all the detritus. It’s completely full.
I can play the saxophone quite well, write scores for a whole orchestra, speak passable French and quote from Shakespeare and Chaucer. I attended a prestigious music academy, have an honours degree in history and I can sometimes complete The Times crossword, yet this bag of shite confounds me and almost sends me into catatonic despair. I can’t see how to remove it and I’m not sure if I have a replacement. After several tugs I manage to disengage it and chuck it in the waste bin. I check in the broom cupboard for the original box that the hoover came in and luckily it contains a spare bag. I spend the next hour trying to figure out how to fit it.
Sometimes, I think I need looking after. Maybe some independently wealthy woman with Marigolds, a tool kit, an engineering diploma and her own dishwasher. An appreciation for irony would be a bonus.
AGE OF BEWILDERMENT is now available as a book at www.bwildr.net or from Amazon/Kindle
© David Sherrington 2012 Davidsherrington@aol.com www.bwildr.net
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