“Do a job and meck a job!”

 

“Do a job and meck a job!” my grandmother used to say scathingly in her thick Yorkshire accent, as she drank her tea and scowled at my grandfather.

He’d probably just brought into the kitchen a prize winning cabbage, but also unluckily a trail of muddy footprints.

My grandmother’s tongue lashings were famous.

Some days I hear my grandmother’s scathing words aimed at me.

Like today!

It was a simple job.

There was just a little bit of rubble trapped behind the radiator from when the new window was installed in the bathroom.

The plan was… I’d loosen it and then vacuum it up…simple. It was a two minute job…if that.

The vacuum cleaner seemed to be stuffed with pine needles. I’d have to empty it first.

I walked down the garden to the compost heap, successfully emptied it and was on my way back when I stepped into something; something soft and slimy, something foul smelling and evil, left by a cat.

I do the mad backward slow shuffle dance routine scraping my shoes on tussocks of grass, providing the afternoon’s bizarre entertainment for my curious neighbours.

Eventually, I returned inside…frozen.

I find a knife that I can use to free the trapped rubble; and then old wisdom kicks in.

There was a time I remembered when I’d once used a vacuum cleaner to sweep up similar broken pieces of plaster. The dust had choked the machine to death. I don’t want to make another expensive mistake.

I go off in search of a dust pan and brush.

Everything has to be taken out from underneath the sink. The plastic bags had been breeding again. I sort them out and put them all into just one bag. It takes ages.

Eventually, I carry everything upstairs; and set to work with the knife.

The plaster falls the very short distance from where it was trapped and sends up a suffocating mushroom cloud of fine dust right up to the ceiling. I open the window gasping for fresh air and the dust swirls even deeper into the room.

Wall paper then falls from the wall and I tear it free, creating new artistic triangles thankfully hidden behind the radiator.

I brush up 99.999% of the debris; and then vacuum up the rest.

Instantly, the vacuum cleaner’s filters block.

I have to disembowel the vacuum cleaner, take out the filters and wash them. Thick wet wads of dust now block the kitchen drain. I put the filters to dry on the radiator sending socks tumbling somewhere else.

I free the clog from the drain and make a mental note that I will now have to clean the sink.

I put the dustpan away and celebrate a job well done by making a cup of tea.

I take one just one sip of my tea, and put the mug back on the table… but instead the mug catches the corner of a thin book and tips over.

Time slows when something is about to fall and spill its contents all over the floor. You can see it all in hideous slow motion: the gradual tilt of the mug, its bright red colour catching the light; the tea falling in a small brown spreading waterfall; and slower than all the rest, a hand desperately trying to reach it across an infinity of space.

There is now a sea of steaming tea soaking into the carpet.

I pick up the unbroken mug, dash downstairs for a cloth and return to start scrubbing the carpet.

The cloth now needs to be washed; I put it into the washing machine, I’ll have to sort that out later.

Of course, somehow, I manage to step into the wet patch. I now need dry socks.

I peel off the wet ones, pull on dry ones and take the wet ones into the bathroom to place into the basket. Ill have to wash them later.

At least I’ve done the job I congratulate myself

And that’s when I see a new small pile of plaster heaped beneath the radiator from god knows where!

And all I can hear are my grandmother’s words.

“Do a job and meck a job,” she mocks from beyond the grave. “Do a job and meck a job,”

And I, with my grandfather’s genes, slink out of the bathroom defeated.

No Longer a God

 

We’ve just been watching the inauguration.

We were big Obama fans. We’d been looking forward to it for weeks. Even timing our completion of watching the entire seven series of the West Wing to just the night before. So we were sitting there with great excitement.

We didn’t want to miss a minute.

I got tense and worried when the timings started going wrong.

And then I was worried when Obama seemed to get the giggles just before taking his oath of office, seven minutes late.

The Teenager was horrified when Barrack Obama stumbled over his words whilst taking the oath of office. We were sitting there with nice cosy socks and chocolate crunchy thingys to eat, watching every moment. We both cringed when he got befuddled.

The Teenager was horrified that the leader of the free world couldn’t repeat six words. He was so disappointed he couldn’t listen to the  inaugural speech.

I was also disappointed. I felt he missed a lot of opportunities to connect. He didn’t look directly into the camera when he was speaking; and worse he had nothing to say on a warm friendly personal level to all those people who’d been waiting to hear him speak in the icy cold for hours.

I also didn’t like the preacher he chose to speak. We were amused by Aretha Franklin singing different words to the British National Anthem though and wondered if it was a hint that America wanted to come back into the fold.

I was annoyed by the BBC commentator speaking through half of the music recital.

Then there were the two huge microphones that obscured the face of who ever it was giving the benediction.

And though the BBC laudably did the spin and found chilled dry-eyed black Americans to ask how they felt about the moment; the lack of good long loud applause during Obama’s speech, and the diminished applause at the end of his speech compared to the enthusiastic applause when he first appeared was the stronger memory.

I think when Obama walked onto the stage we thought very highly of him. He had god like status. When he left we were less impressed. He was no longer a god; instead he was Santa Claus leaving us with the wrong present.

The Lights are Going Out.

 

I needed a book for the next day. It was a children’s book. I rang the bookshop that was closest to me, and was surprised when both numbers listed in the phone book did not work.

I jumped into my car; there was only an hour before the shops closed. I figured I had enough time to quickly get there and buy the book. I knew just where to look on their shelves.

I drove towards the bookshop, and saw to my great sorrow that it had closed down.

I negotiated the one way system I was trapped in, winding my way back through narrow streets in order to return to the main road.

There was no choice, I’d have to drive into town and try Waterstones.

Things didn’t look promising in Waterstones. I couldn’t even find the author’s name on the shelf, or any of the author’s other books. A kind assistant checked the computer, and no, the book wasn’t in stock. She didn’t think she could order it either as it seemed to be out of print.

I was on my way back to my car when I remembered the library.

I hadn’t been to the library in the centre of Northampton for years. I used to go every week and borrow at least ten children’s books when I had a pre-schooler in tow. You could once park for free just outside the library’s doors, which was brilliant when there was a tot in the car. Once the street became pedestrianised, and the nearby free parking spots became metered, I stopped popping into town to go to the library. It was logistics and expense. I used a smaller local library instead.

I hadn’t got my library card, but I figured that if I could find the book then at least I could sit and read the book until the library closed.

I was shocked when I first entered the library; the hustle and bustle had gone. The strict librarians who announced fines and used to look curtly at their customers were gone too. Even the check out desks had gone. Instead there was a vast open space with a single computer screen flickering away in a corner. There was a table with a book sale; and squatting on the floor in one of the corners was a small crowd of gossiping young people.

The place looked neglected and shabby. The floor was dirty. There was a terrible air of neglect. I had the feeling that nobody would dare challenge the young people who had claimed a corner of the library as their own.

I went quickly towards the children’s shelves.

The shelves that were once crowded and packed with books had been thinned to make the area look more open. Books that had once been carefully stacked on shelves were in disarray. The first shelf I approached was offering more books for sale.

I searched the shelves for the book that I wanted. It wasn’t there, but with all the disorder I wondered if it might still be somewhere in the library. I tried to check for myself using the library’s computer system, but I couldn’t get it to work.

A helpful librarian tried the search on my behalf using a different machine.

‘No,’ she said. ‘It’s not in the library.’

‘Thanks anyway,’ I said.

‘Just a minute,’ she said. ‘I’ll see where it is.’

‘Oh no, don’t worry,’ I said. ‘I needed it for the next day.’

But she had already begun a search.

‘No,’ she said. ‘It’s not in this library. In fact it’s not even in the county.’

I was shocked. ‘Not even in the county?’

‘No,’ she said smiling, ‘but it’s an old book isn’t it!’ as if this was reason enough for it to be struck from the catalogue.

I thanked her for her help, and walked out, past the book check-out desks where librarians chatted as they waited for someone to check out a book; past the table with books for sale; past the computer’s mocking screen; through the vast untidy empty hallway of a room; and past the young adults who now were engaged in pursuits that I’d never witnessed in a library before; and went home.

I went home feeling saddened to live in a town where bookshops were closing, and where the town library had been emptied of its most prized possessions: its books. I was devastated to discover that books in a library now seemed to be discarded once their ‘best before date’ had expired. That books with timeless stories, were being pulled from shelves and dumped like stinking vegetables on the book sale tables. And that the library was becoming nothing more than a public place to shelter from the rain and cold.

I’m sure that the library once had the book that I wanted to read. That it did not, and that there is now a gap on its shelves, and empty gaps where other books should be, is a tragedy. A library should hold all it can, and more, fit to bursting, shelves upon shelves, row upon row of books, of precious books; books from all times and all ages; books that we can by chance explore, and learn from, and enjoy.

With each missing book a precious light has gone out.

Soon, like those young people I saw sitting on the floor, everyone will be just groping in the dark.

Note

The book I’d been trying to find was The Ghost of Thomas Kempe a Carnegie Medal winner in 1973 written by Penelope Lively.

The Revenge of the Christmas Tree

 

There was a strange exotic spicy scent in the air when we got back home; a scent that tantalised and teased like faint incense from an Eastern temple.

The Christmas tree had been in the corner since the end of November. Its branches were now curling down, and its pine needles had lost their fat flashy shape and rich green colour and had instead become thin and pale.

I stripped it of its baubles and unwound the lights from its emaciated branches. It’s a terrible moment when a Christmas tree is left stripped and naked in the room.

Christmas trees though never leave without a fight.

I lifted it from the bucket, catching a whiff of that strange scent again, and then began to carry it outside. At every doorway its outstretched branches defiantly stretched out grabbing whatever it could.

There’s that awful sound when you hear pine needles showering to the ground and you know you are losing the battle.

Eventually, it's outside at the bottom of the garden looking cheated and betrayed.

Inside the house, there are desiccated pine needles pooling like green blood at the bottom of door frames. They are the rearguard army and have a fighting tactics of their own.

They flitter up the vacuum cleaner hose pipe with a wonderful beguiling sound; but within seconds they have netted together and blocked the hose.

The vacuum begins to overheat, and there’s nothing else to do except to spend the next two hours dissecting the vacuum cleaner, poking into its innards, in an attempt to loosen the stuffed net of pine needles.

There are now pine needles everywhere. They are needling me through my socks, and somehow they are now trailing down the stairs.

The last are eventually swept up, but the hidden ones have now changed tactics: they are now mounting a guerrilla campaign waiting for their moment.

I cook a pizza, slice and serve it up, and the Teenager comments on the pine needle that has somehow managed to lay down in the very centre of the plate like a martyr.

I know that from now on, for months, pine needles will sneak up and needle me.

The Christmas tree left a huge gap in the living room, and every time we open the door and see blank walls instead of colourful lights in the corner, we feel sad.

In an attempt to bring light, warmth and excitement back into our lives we prepare for our traditional ceremony. I march down to the bottom of the garden and light a fire under the tree. It catches alight very quickly. There is an amazing whoosh of fire that races high into the sky. The wind catches it and blows a jet of tumbling flame across both my garden and that of my neighbour's. It is an astonishing, frightening and awe inspiring sight.

Within seconds, it is all over and the flames die down; though I’m left with the chilling thought of what would have happened to us if something like that had happened inside the house.

There’s just the bucket left to carry out. That’s when I realise just where the strange exotic smell was coming from. What was once crystal clean water in the bucket is now a putrid green evil smelling liquid: an effluence of indescribable nastiness.

What I thought was a tantalising scent of Eastern promise was instead an evil glutinous liquid created by the Christmas tree.

And without the Christmas tree's branches and pine needles to filter it, I’m floored by this putrid smell, in this, the final act of revenge, of the Christmas tree.

And that was when...

 

A Victorian school always comes with antiquated heating.

There was a whimper of heat being emitted from a storage heater, which warmed a few centimetres of surrounding air, but did nothing against the cold air that seeped through the steep ceilings with a vertex that soared towards the icy stratosphere. Trapped coiled cold air swirled in the corners of the classroom.

The outside world was covered in ice and snow. I stood outside the school greeting children and their perished parents and telling them to go straight inside as it was too cold for them to stand about on the playground. The children talked of their walk across snowy fields on their way to school with their dogs bounding ahead of them. Then parents left quickly to return to the warmth of their cars and homes, whilst their children went inside quickly and I steadily froze as I waited to meet and greet the next group.

I was shivering by the time I finally got back inside.

And that was when someone gamely switched on a fan heater. Moments later a fuse blew and the heater was banned.

At the end of the school day, I was perished through to my bones.

I craved warmth.

The car heater took an age to warm up on the journey home, it wasn’t enough.

I yearned for a hot bath and lost no time in running one as soon as I got home.

Gradually, in the hot waters, the warmth slowly returned to my spine and I was no longer holding myself taut and hunched.

Relaxed and happy I stepped out of the bath.

I was warm and toasty.

I was warm and cosy.

I was warm and happy.

And that was when I heard the drips, ominous with their tapping repetition, coming from the combination boiler.

It was leaking.

A cushion on a chair directly below it was soaked through, as were the clothes in the clothes basket nearby.

I opened the bathroom window, letting freezing cold air into the room, in order to check on the outflow pipe for the combination boiler. The normal steady one drip of water every few seconds from this pipe outside had created a glacier of ice on the low sloping roof. The pipe was blocked with a thick icicle.

The water with nowhere to go through this frozen pipe must have somehow found a new outlet inside the boiler instead.

And that was when, after quickly positioning bowls to catch these drips, I found myself out on the roof pouring warm water over the frozen pipe; with glacial air  freezing my wet hair and holding my head in an icy grip.

I had the ingenious idea of  drooping hot water bottles over the pipe.

It worked.

Suddenly, there was a gush of cold water. I’d fixed it.

Perished and damp, I climbed back into the bathroom with its now Arctic air and closed the window.

I was cold and shivering

There were still drips coming from the boiler, so I didn’t dare run another bath.  I'd convinced myself that the boiler was probably now damaged and would probably in all likelihood explode if any further demands were made upon it.

There was only one thing to do… go under the duvet with hot water bottles.

And that was when ...

I remembered where the hot water bottles were…

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1) Slight of Coin…Slight of Name

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Way back in the seventies I lived on a kibbutz in Israel; the first country that I ever visited.

My kibbutz, Kibbutz Yiron, was situated on the Lebanese border.

When I first arrived I was startled and frightened to hear the sound of machine gun fire coming from the no man’s land between the two countries. At night flares were shot into the sky slowly illuminating the Lebanese rolling hills and the rat tattle of gun fire became my bed time story.

Being young and infinitely stupid I soon wasn’t too bothered by all this. The weather was warm and I would swim in the open air swimming pool at night enjoying the cool waters which were illuminated orange by the slowly falling flares in the sky. I swam and floated to the peppery sound of machine gun fire and before long I thought nothing of it.

There was one day when I travelled by bus into Safed. It was odd to be away from what I thought was the safety of the kibbutz and to find myself in a strange fascinating town.

However, I wasn’t of course very good at reading the Hebrew squiggles that said when the bus returned homeward; and despite asking and double checking I did somehow find myself on the wrong bus and alighting in an Arab village a long way from my kibbutz.
A family helped. They were warm and welcoming. I waited in their living room surrounded by smiling women as helpful telephone calls were made and somehow it was arranged that a car would be sent from the kibbutz to pick me up. I thanked the family for all their help and kindness once this car arrived. The kibbutznik who picked me up though was very tense and nervous and eyed all the villagers standing around smiling and watching with brittle fear.

All the way back I was castigated for being so stupid as to miss the bus and worse for being in an Arab village. Ashamed of causing so much trouble there was little I could say. I was left to sit in cold silence on the journey back through the low rolling hills.

That was the first time that I became aware of how fearful Israelis were and of their dissociation with their neighbours. And worse of their inability to even think about building bridges with those who were slight of name.
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2) Slight of Coin…Slight of Name

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A few months later in November the kibbutz was shelled by Russian missiles fired from across the Lebanese border.

They missed.

The orchards, where we picked apples, were also shelled.

They also missed.

But each time Israel responded with missiles that did not miss.

Jets tore through the skies in angry response. People living on the Lebanese side of the border were killed in retaliation.

Ordinary people picking apples on the Lebanese side of the border were killed in their orchards.

These deaths still haunt me.

Perhaps it was the folly of youth but I was not particularly worried by the sounds of machine gun fire, the orange dropping flares and rare missile attacks falling with such planned inaccuracy on my side of the border. On an intuitive level it was like children throwing stones at an adult they did not wish to hit. They were just trying to make a point is all.

But what did chill and frighten me was Israel’s hot blooded blind response. Their desire to obliterate. Their desire to kill. And their accusation that it was the perpetrators fault that they had suffered deaths.

That the stone throwers were responsible for their own annihilation.

I hear this same harsh word spin today. That the gruesome death count in Gaza is the fault of Hamas. That the brutal annihilation that is occurring in Gaza is happening not because Israel is raining bombs and explosives upon a starving people but because Hamas are still finding the strength to throw a few misaimed punches from their bolt holes towards their oppressor.

Tragically Israel with its economic success still can not find a way to speak and fails to think about building bridges with those who are slight of coin.

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3) Slight of Coin…Slight of Name

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I lived on Kibbutz Yiron for four months. Working in the vast communal kitchen in which I carried out such tasks as peeling a full box of onions everyday, imagine what that does to your eyes! Or cleaning the toilets in the children’s houses, while mean feral children laughed and teased me for doing what they saw as a menial task. Or picking apples in the orchard starting work at four in the morning and being conveyed there in the empty trailers that would return full of apples. Or working in the packing shed sitting in front of the conveyer belt and picking up the rotten apples to slip down the chute where they would become animal feed. Or ironing and folding all the underpants for all the male workers in the Kibbutz and placing each numbered garment on the correct shelf.

We worked hard.

We were volunteers and we received no pay, though we did have an allowance which I believe was £5 a month. We all tried to save this money so we could go on trips away from the kibbutz; which meant that we had little money left to buy toothpaste and other essentials from the volunteer shop.

In all that time no Israeli invited me into their home on the kibbutz. I discovered just the week before I was about to leave that there was a recreational building that somehow I never got to hear about. No one ever told me about it or invited me to join them there. And I never discovered it myself probably because at the end of the day after spending eight hours in the communal laundry ironing clothes I was too work weary to walk around the compound. We had also been warned not to walk around the compound. All around its perimeter inside the high perimeter fence were fierce dogs tied on long rattling chains that we had been told had been trained to tear a man to pieces should any dare to climb the fence.

As volunteers we were as a group mostly ignored. This did not matter much at the time. We were young people from all nations and there was excitement and fun to be had in our corner of the compound.

We produced a musical as an entertainment for the kibbutz. We chose Oliver and did our best to remember the words from memory and when we realised that we could not do that we then rewrote the words to make a light hearted skit about the kibbutz using what words we could remember from the musical.

The musical was a great success and we were applauded, but we had not become friends, there was still apartheid within the kibbutz.

I was told it was because we were living there temporarily. That we were temporary transient workers so there was not much point in getting to know us because we would soon be leaving. So we were ignored by the people we worked for; and at the time this did not matter much and we barely noticed as we had fellow volunteers for companionship from all nations, and we were young, happy and having fun.

But now I see that we were effectively willing slaves, working for nothing; tolerated because we were building up their strength and success, but remaining in their eyes a race apart, a people not being worthy of their notice.

I see now that they had an insularity, a ghetto mentality, an apartness that meant that only their own kind, those within their walls, received warmth, and all others, even the volunteers that were creating their success, received nothing.

Simple kindnesses such as allowing us to listen to the World Service as we ironed for eight hours in the ironing room were denied us.

When the day came, when a loud speaker yelled a short clipped warning message in Hebrew, the women in the laundry ran. They ran out instantly, leaving all the volunteers that were working there that day inside looking at each other in bewilderment.

Not one stopped to warn us, or even bothered to gesture in our direction.

We continued ironing until eventually the loud speaker warned us in English to go to the bomb shelters. We walked to the door of the prefabricated building, not comprehending the great danger we were in, and it was only then when we saw how the kibbutzniks were running like frightened rabbits and suddenly disappearing into holes in the ground that we also ran.

There were incoming missiles.

We were told as we hid in our bomb shelter that the incoming missiles were probably targeted on the largest building on the kibbutz. It was the same building in whose basement we were sheltering. We waited for the bomb blasts.

They missed.

I excused the laundry women afterwards, for the way they’d just run out of the building without warning us, the volunteers, who were working there.

They’d run out of the prefabricated building to be with their children in the children’s houses I was told. I bought the story at the time. But now I see that their insularity meant that they could only think about themselves: that the volunteers, with bright cheerful young faces from all nations, meant nothing to them; to the point where they did not even think about warning them about an incoming danger.

I see this same insularity in the walls that Israel builds with such specious excuses around the Palestinian citizens. Israel is thinking only of itself. The bright cheerful young faces of Palestinians with all their potential talent means nothing to them. They are left to face the incoming missiles not because Israel fears for the safety of its children but because Israel can not see that there are living souls beyond Israel’s concrete walls.

We volunteers were seen as being worthless, and we were building Israel! What is a Palestinian’s life worth on such a scale?

Nothing.

Because Israel’s insular walls has left it a blind nation.


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4) Slight of Coin…Slight of Name

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Israel impressed me.

I was impressed by their achievements.

The green grass growing where once there was nothing but dry barren land.
The orchards brimming with apples in an otherwise treeless landscape.
The brilliance of the hose down in the shiny kitchen when at the end of each day everything was hosed down and everything was left clean and shiny ready for the next.

I was impressed by the packing sheds, its conveyer belts, the sorting and grading of apples, and the way even bad apples were not wasted.

I was impressed by the way these people were using ingenuity to build a strong working system that met their needs.

I was foolishly impressed.

It is only now that I can see the worm at the heart of the apple when I revisit my memories of those days and see now what the nation has become.

Could I have run from a laundry about to be bombed leaving workers who did not understand the language behind?

No.

I would have somehow got them running too.

Could I have worked alongside someone for eight hours a day and not bothered to make eye contact or to even smile at them, or not bother to invite or even inform them about a building where there was chatter and music?

No. Of course not. I would have taken them there, and probably on the first day of my acquaintance.

The Arab family took me into their home when I was lost. They helped me to find my way back. Not one Israeli family ever invited me into their home when I was working amongst them.

I was shocked by the ferocity of Israel’s response to the attacks. The three rockets fired at the Kibbutz missed. They seemed to think it was because their skills with rockets were useless and that they could not aim a rocket properly. Perhaps it was so. But I saw the holes left by the rockets well to the south of the kibbutz. They looked to me rather like a warning shot. A shot that is fired deliberately over the bow of a ship and intended to miss. I think they missed because they meant to miss. That they knew there were children who might be killed and I like to imagine, and I hope that it is true, that whoever fired their missiles had enough humanity in their soul to ensure that the missiles missed. That the missiles missed because they thought of their own children and what it would be like to lose them. That they were just throwing stones.

The kibbutz covered a vast area of land with a huge building at its heart. It was not a target that it would be easy to miss. It was rather like a bull’s eye that took up the whole of the board.

And yet miss they did.

But Israel’s fixed principle of firing back with ten times the power and the aggression caused indiscriminate deaths in Lebanon hours after the spectacular miss.

I realised then that Israel was a nervous, unsure, adolescent country. That it was paranoid and jumpy.

That Israel was like a flea bitten dog.

I see from the way they are killing in indiscriminately in Gaza that Israel is still a flea bitten dog. Maddened and crazed and governed by people who still think might and power is the only way to stop the irritation.

They are wrong.

Scratching at fleas does not solve the problem.

However, since the Palestinians are not fleas, and the Israelis are not dogs and that they are instead people with shared common ancestry and shared common grief there can be an end to all this.

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5) Slight of Coin…Slight of Name

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How different it could have been if in the building of the Israeli nation someone could have put caring into its heart.

The kibbutz could have build links with the Arab villages around them. They could have shared their surplus produce with the struggling Arab villages around them.

Small acts of kindness and warmth could have broken down barriers.

Small acts.

Small acts could have made fear something lost in memory, and the need to make retribution redundant.

Small acts of kindness are need now.

There can not be a sudden end or a 'now' solution to this problem.

Israel needs to take the first step.

Small acts of kindness.

To ignore the thrown stone even when the missiles kill and to respond instead with the hand of kindness.

Israel needs to see that there is strength in forming bonds of friendship. That a country that bombs with the accuracy to kill and does not balk at the sight of blood on dead children in Gaza is not a strong country but a weak country.

Israel needs to take the first step.

Small acts of kindness.

If Israel can not help the citizens of Gaza and see them as their own citizens, then Israel has lost. The strong can not claim any moral victory for destroying the weak.

Small acts of kindness…ignore the thrown stones/missiles…respond by talking.

I would like to offer the first small act of kindness namely an invitation to the leaders of both warring parties.

Come to my home.

You do not need to talk.

Let me just make you both a cup of tea.

Though I am a person slight of coin and slight of name, I can offer you both this small act of kindness.

RSVP
.......

How to be the World’s Worst Mum. Step Eleven: Speaking the Truth.

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We are sitting wriggling our toes which are wrapped in cosy socks. Outside fireworks are exploding to announce the New Year. We have cake to eat and a DVD to watch.

All is well with the world.

‘Do you remember what you said?’ The Teenager asks.

‘What’s that?’ I ask smiling.

‘When I was…about …seven?’ The Teenager asks.

‘Seven?’ I look at him puzzled.

‘When I asked how dinosaurs got the name “dinosaur”.’ The Teenager explains for me helpfully.

‘Umpphh,’ I say. ‘I don’t remember that question. What did I say?’

‘You said you didn’t know; but that perhaps they were first discovered by a Mr Dino Saur and so they were named after him.’

‘I don’t remember saying that.’ I say laughing.

There’s a pause and I know what’s coming. ‘And I believed you!’ he declares with full Teenage angst.

‘But that was in the days before Wikipedia,’ I feebly say in my defence, still laughing.

‘But I believed you!’ he says.

I type “Mr Dino Saur” into Google and discover that for those souls that would like to a Mr Dino Saur T. Shirt can be bought.

‘Look,’ I say delighted with my find. ‘Others have had the same thought!’

But the Teenager isn’t to be mollified.

‘But I believed you!’ he moans in a hurt voice that has even more impact as New Year breaks, and celebration cake lies uneaten, and fireworks break in the sky.

‘Mr Dino Saur?’ I say.

And eventually he laughs too.

'Do you not see that I am unarmed? And at this season, at this hour, there are frightful, unearthly beasts about.’

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I was carrying a bowl of cereal in my hand walking through the freezing downstairs realm and very eager to return back upstairs where the temperature was just a few degrees warmer than the regions below, when the phone rang.

I walked over to the phone still holding the bowl of cereal.

There is an unwritten law of thermodynamics that states that even as you reach for a ringing phone, the bowl that you are holding in your right hand will suddenly lose its equilibrium.

Strangely, as soon as you are looking at a ringing phone and reaching for it then the unwritten law of thermodynamics comes into play. Even though you know you haven’t shifted the grip of your hand; nor have any sense at all of moving your hand along any directional plane; unknown spatial forces will seize this moment to act. The action of these subtle forces means that a mere mortal will no longer be able to maintain the full bowl of cereal along an horizontal plane, but will instead find that it tips just enough to allow maximum spillage over the ringing phone, the address book, the settee arm, and the table.

Despite all this, still undeterred you pick up the phone. This is the moment when an automated woman’s voice recites at a terrible speed an unknown mobile phone number.

With my phone in one hand, a half empty cereal bowl in the other and a Niagara Falls of cereal dripping down the front of my new pyjamas I have no chance of writing down this mysterious new number.

I’m told to press ‘one’ for the message. More cereal spills.

A machine talks to me mechanically. No name is given.

I half expect the machine to break out into evil mechanical laughter after it coldly recites the message...

‘Happy New Year!’
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