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the curious incident of the third kitten

~ jim clayton ~ Leave a comment

What I need you to know is this: it happened back in 1980, I was eighteen, I was clueless, and I didn’t have a mobile phone. (No-one did. They were the size of field radios, for god’s sake. No shops sold them, and even if they did, a contract would cost about three thousand pounds. So only bankers, film stars or presidents had them, and as I was none of the above, I had to use a call box like everyone else).

My girlfriend Max and I had decided to live in Bristol. It was a desperate move, the kind of close your eyes and jump tactic you adopt when things aren’t going well but you can’t think of anything else. I’d been acting in a production of Journey’s End at the local theatre. By some inexplicable kink in the casting process I’d scored the part of Captain Stanhope. It didn’t go well. The problem was, when I thought I was conveying nervous exhaustion I came across as bored. In a promotional still for the production I’m staring off into the distance looking pale and a little ticked-off, like I’m at the back of a long queue for the toilet. ‘You smoked a lot’ was what my brother Pete said when he came to see me. When the review came out in the paper I only featured in the also appearing section, an act of courtesy that read as a damning sleight. (The relationship between Stanhope and Raleigh is central to the play. It would be like a critic going to see Hamlet, ignoring the Prince and focusing on Polonius, instead). Which isn’t to say the critic was wrong, of course. The guys playing Sargent Osborne and Mason were obviously better actors than me. The tragedy was – wholesale slaughter of The First World War aside – I’d been miscast. I should’ve played the cook. I’ve always looked more cook than captain.

Anyway, I’d thought acting was my ticket out, but in the end it was National Express.

We’d chosen Bristol because it was far enough away to escape the gravitational pull of our home town failures, it was cheaper than London, and Max had some friends there who could put us up the first night whilst we looked for a place. We arrived at their house one sharp winter’s evening, knocked on the front door, and waited.

No reply.

We knocked again, blew on our hands. Waited some more.

Still nothing.

I decided to look through the letterbox. Why, I’m not sure. If Max’ friends been standing in the hallway hoping we’d go away, spying on them through the letterbox wouldn’t have helped.

The letterbox was low down on the door, for some reason. I’m sure the postman hated having to bend down to shove the letters through, and aesthetically it gave the door a strangely upside-down appearance. Still, that’s where it was, so I knelt down on the front step and pushed the flap open.

And found six black eyes looking straight back at me.

I dropped the flap and jumped back, because in my road-weary delirium I thought it was a giant spider specifically bred to guard the letterbox. But I recovered quickly and bravely pushed open the flap to have another look. And there they were! Three cute kittens! One tortoiseshell and white, one brindle, and the other the purest black. They’d obviously been attracted by the knocking and come to see what was going on. I waggled my fingers through the letterbox making kissy-kissy noises, and the kittens clambered over each other in their eagerness to get at me. It was a beautiful moment after all the hassle of the journey, the cold and the worry. I played with them like that for a minute or two, then straightened up again to talk to Max about what we should do next.

Maybe her friends were out at work. Maybe they had to go to the shops. We stood on the doorstep looking left and right down the street, hoping we’d see them hurrying towards us along the frosty pavement, laden down with bags, smiling and waving. But the street was resolutely empty of anything but parked cars and a layer of ice so sparkling white you could hear it cracking as it thickened.

There were other things to be considered. Maybe we’d got the dates wrong. Maybe they were expecting us tomorrow.

This is where the lack of mobile phones comes in. If we’d had them we could’ve called her friends up and said Hey! We’re here! and sorted the whole thing out. As it was, the best we could do was find a phone box and call them at work – if Max could remember where they worked.

We were standing on the doorstep wondering what to do next when there was a thin meowing sound close-by. One of the kittens – the pure black one – had somehow escaped and was wrapping itself around my legs.

I picked it up and gave it a cuddle.

‘You shouldn’t have encouraged it,’ said Max. ‘Now what do we do?’
‘Put him back.’

But looking at the house, we couldn’t figure out how the kitten got out. There was no open window, no cat flap, no access to the back of the house we could see.
‘He must’ve squeezed through the letterbox.’
‘He’d never fit through there’
‘You’d be surprised what cats can fit through. Especially when they’re as cute and tiny as this one!’
I held the kitten up next to my face to demonstrate, then knelt back down on the front step and gently introduced it to the letterbox, face first.
‘Come on, sweetie!’ I said, holding the flap open with one hand and pushing him forwards with the other. ‘There you go!’
The kitten braced his front paws against the door and pushed back.
‘Come on! Come on, little fella! Thaaaat’s it…!’
He meowed pitifully and fought back, wildly scrabbling.
I thought maybe there was something on the other side stopping him going through, so I handed him up to Max and bent down to have a look.

And saw three kittens sitting on their haunches with horrified expressions on their faces.

‘It’s a different kitten,’ I said, gently closing the flap and standing up again.

‘Shit,’ said Max. ‘Now what?’

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oops

~ jim clayton ~ 3 Comments

Nicole Kidman starred in an advert for Chanel no.5. At one point she’s on a rooftop in New York or somewhere. She laughs and says: ‘I’m a dancer! I love to dance!’

Well – to paraphrase Nicole. I’m a writer. I hate to paint.

I don’t mean the opaque That’s a cat, that’s a man on a boat, that’s an angel, and I’m calling it: Prayer no. 5 kind of painting. I mean primer, undercoat, eggshell.

My antipathy goes back years. One of my first jobs coming to London as a teenager was painting the outside of a housing block in Putney. I was lost in more ways than I could tell. No belief in the future; certainly none in the present. Breakfast was a Mars bar and a bottle of milk on the tube on the way in. Supper at night I stopped off at Mickey’s Fish Bar in Ladbroke Grove. I was staying in lodgings – a dreadfully cold and downbeat room with a cracked sink, scummy bathroom down the hall, and fights next door so regular you could set your watch. Ella, the owner, lived in the basement with a budgerigar called Rico, who she’d draw out of the cage from time to time and press to her lips. (I had feverish visions of her reaching into my room and doing the same to me). Ella was kind enough, though, so long as you paid her on time. She always accepted the money with a profoundly sad expression, holding the cheque as tightly as she held Rico, her broad face collapsing over the red crease of her lipstick, so thickly and crudely applied it looked worse than anything I was slapping on in Putney.

Since then I’ve always associated the smell of paint with cold hands and existential horror.

Which goes a little way to explaining why it took me so long getting round to painting Jess’ room.

What happened was, I suddenly found I had to take two weeks’ annual leave. I’d been called into the office – to get the sack, I thought. So a lovely surprise, then, to be told I’d underused my leave for the financial year, and had been allocated two weeks on spec. With such a generous stretch of time, there was no way I could defer the painting any more. Kath bought the materials; I cleared the decks and got everything ready.

The thing with jobs you put off for a long time: they never actually seem so bad once you start. I had the radio on, regular cups of tea. There was almost a meditative aspect to it all, the sanding down, the sugar soaping, the taping of the windows and carpets, the laying of dust sheets. Why had I made such a fuss? In fact – maybe there was a job here for me? I could quit work and set up on my own – Jimmy C’s P&D. Or something classier: St James Interiors. I could get a little van, with a big fibreglass brush on the roof, and a sweet little collection of tools neatly hung on a rack in the back.

It wasn’t so bad. I was over my phobia. I was actually starting to enjoy it.

Kath came to help towards the end of that first afternoon. A couple of times whilst she was painting the top of the cupboards she said Oops.
‘Try not to spill any’ I said.
‘Sorry.’
I went downstairs to fetch up a ten litre bucket of emulsion.
‘How are you going to get that in the paint tray?’ Kath said when I struggled in through the door.
‘I’ll be careful,’ I said.
‘Oh. Okay,’ she said, and stopped to watch me from the top of the ladder.

I prised off the lid, lifted the bucket, and started to tip a quantity of paint into the tray. It was heavy and hard to control, and I didn’t want to overfill, so I tipped the bucket back towards me, overcompensating because of the weight, and slopping paint down the front of my trousers.
‘Shit!’
I put the tub down and took my trousers off, covering my socks in the process. Whilst I was struggling to hold the dripping trousers in one hand and take my socks off with the other I fell backwards against the wet door, getting paint down my t-shirt and boxer shorts.
‘Shit!’
I stripped everything off, stuffed it all in the trash bag, and ran naked into the next room.

When I came back half an hour later dressed in fresh clothes, Kath smiled down at me from the top of the ladder
‘Okay?’ she said.

No.

I hate to paint.

 

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howling not bowling

~ jim clayton ~ Leave a comment

If you were given the job of rebranding Hell to make it more family-oriented, you couldn’t do better than a bowling complex. A neon sign over the door: Hell’s Bowls, with a series of elongated, screaming faces being knocked over by a skull. Steeeeee-rrrrrrriiiiiikkkke!

The thing was – Jess had just turned thirteen, and she wanted to take some friends bowling. We booked a lane online, and got there fifteen minutes early for check-in, as the ticket printout suggested.

Hell’s Bowls turns out to be a hangar divided into areas, each area contributing about 100db of its own particular horror to the overall soundscape. Immediately to the left are the arcade games, straight ahead is the area for booking in and hiring shoes, to the right is a western bar with pool tables and sports playing on gigantic screens, further to the left is a Fifties’ diner, and then, occupying half of the space, the bowling area itself, a series of UV lit lanes, thirty or forty in a row, crashing neon pins one end, screaming crowds of people the other.

As we stand waiting to check-in, and my eyes and ears adjust to the discordant clamour around us, I begin to pick out amongst the crowds a particular variety of customer – like me, I suppose, standing utterly still, arms by their sides, gaunt expressions, as if some spidery machine has unexpectedly snuck down onto the top of their heads from the dark heights of the complex, unscrewed the tops of their skulls, slooped out their brains and hurried away with their prize.

After a while we make the front of the queue.
A woman dressed in pink stripes like a giant candy but with the hollow-eyed demeanour of a gaoler working a back-to-back, thumps the computer with her fingers. After a while, she grunts an acknowledgement of something, and hands us an electronic tag with a star in the middle.
‘What’s this?’ says Kath.
‘When it beeps, your lane’s ready,’ her voice as flat as if what she’d really meant to say was: When it beeps, you’ll be taken out and shot.

The western bar is closest. We decide to wait there.
Which we do.
For twenty minutes past our due time.

Maybe the tag’s faulty?

We go back to the counter. Queue again. When we reach the front, the woman doesn’t seem surprised to see us. ‘It’s busy’ she says, glancing over our shoulder, like maybe we hadn’t noticed. ‘The lanes are running late. It won’t be much longer.’
She turns her attention to the computer again, punches some more keys, then sighs and looks at us again.
‘They’re on the last ball’ she says.

We go back to the western bar and wait some more.

When the tag still doesn’t beep, we’re forced back to ask what’s going on.
‘It’s ready for you now,’ the woman says, without the slightest indication she’s recognised us or thought much about the thing at all.
‘Lane Number One,’ she says.

The girls are happy to start bowling, but the lane table and chairs are in a real mess, junked-up with half finished drinks, plates of food, crisp packets and stuff. Whilst the girls get on with the game, I go back to speak to the woman.
‘I’ll send a lane attendant over,’ she says.
‘Okay. Thanks.’
But like the tag that didn’t beep, the lane attendant doesn’t come.

Eventually I’m forced to go back to the desk. I can’t bear the thought of queuing again – but maybe I don’t need to. There’s a lane attendant standing in front of the counter, looking out over the lanes with a bruised kind of detachment, like the sole survivor of the apocalypse. She strikes me as the kind of person who might be able to help.

‘Hi’ I say, waving at the same time, for some reason.
She frowns and leans away from me.
‘The woman on the desk said she was sending a lane attendant over,’ I shout. ‘But no-one’s come.’
‘Why d’you need a lane attendant?’ she shouts back.
‘The lane needs clearing.’
She stares at me.
‘It’s busy’ she says. ‘‘We’re short-staffed.’
‘Yeah, I bet. But the thing is – we booked online, we were late going on, the lane’s full of junk, and we were expecting our drinks order to be there. And they’re not. To be honest – and I know it’s not your fault – but we’re not very happy.’
‘You have to ask for drinks vouchers when you sign-in.’
‘Why aren’t they just given to us?’
‘That’s not how it works. The computer’s just the booking. That’s it.’
‘I don’t understand. I mean – it must tell you how many are in the party.’
‘Yeah…’
‘So if you can see that on the computer, why doesn’t it say you’re due some drinks?’
‘Because it doesn’t work like that. You have to ask for vouchers.’
‘Look – Is there a manager I can talk to about all this?’
‘A manager?’
‘Yeah. It’s my daughter’s party, and to be honest, I’m not happy with the way any of this has gone.’
She sighs, presses a button on her handset and then puts one hand over her earpiece so she can hear.
Yeah. It’s Janine. Can you come over to front desk please?…. there’s a customer wants to speak to you…. (she glances at me like she’s tempted to add a few other things to the description)….I don’t know., he’s unhappy or something….. yeah, but he says he wants to speak to a manager… and that’s you, yeah? Okay then.
She twists off the handset.
‘She’ll see you in the lane,’ she says.

Walking back to the others, I try to temper my frustration by imagining how difficult it must be to work in a place like this. The noise, the crowds, the flashing lights. It’s like being miniaturised and injected into a migraine.

The AI revolution can’t come quick enough – bomb disposal, sewage maintenance, bowling. It’s simple humanity.

Eventually the manager appears. She comes striding over, pre-armed with a smile and some compensation – a handful of free passes for more bowling (which is like offering a free road traffic accident after you’ve just been knocked over). But we’re grateful. We take the tickets, and thank her for talking to us. A lane attendant cleans the decks, hurries away, comes back with drinks. It all begins to settle into something more bearable.

The girls want some time alone, so Kath and I decide to go to the Fifties diner to get some coffee.

There’s a long queue. Only two people serving – a flushed, distracted looking woman with crazy, curly hair who’s singing to herself and jigging from side to side as she operates the slushy machine, and a man with one arm in a cast. The man is trying to scoop vanilla ice cream into the milkshake machine. It’s appalling – but also instructive – to watch how he braces the tub with the crook of the cast and uses his body weight to counterbalance the whole operation. Of course, it’s fantastically slow. The people in front of us glance around, suspicious this is some kind of elaborate prank – then sigh a great deal, and check their phones, and look around some more. After ten minutes of nothing happening, we give up, head back to the western bar and get some cokes.

Later on, with the girls on the last leg of their second game, I glance over at the diner to see if the queue has improved. It seems okay, so we both head back to get a coffee before we go.
Crazy Hair is comforting Cast Man, who’s rubbing his eye with his good hand.
‘What happened?’ says Kath.
‘He squirted himself in the eye with sanitizer,’ she says.
Suddenly, an angry man steps round us and goes up to the counter with a plate of fries in either hand. At first I think he’s going to throw them, but instead he tips the plates upside down – demonstrating what he thinks of their quality by the fact that they stay in the bowls. Then he puts the plates on the counter, turns round, and strides away.
Cast Man watches all this with his sanitized eye swollen shut and his mouth open. Crazy Hair takes the bowls, quietly puts them under the counter, and turns to smile at us.
‘Now then! What can I get you?’ she says.

tell tails

~ jim clayton ~ Leave a comment

A drive out to see Alistair for another dog walk. It’s been a while since I was here – August, in fact – and even though it’s still something of a building site, they’ve accomplished a lot. He shows me the brick reservoir they’ve renovated in the middle of the land, how they’ve organised things so that everything drains into it. He shows me the pipes they’ve run from the tank to the raised vegetable beds off to the side, and the solar pump that’ll keep a trickle supply running. It’s all very organised and admirable. He’s even using rocks they’ve scavenged from all the clearance to landscape the area around the tank and make it good.

‘You have to use your imagination’ he says, but really, it’s not such an effort.

We head down to a gap in the fence at the bottom, and out onto the neighbouring field where a dozen horses in quilted jackets stand and stare at us, their breath steaming around them in the brisk morning air. Ailsa lies down and stares back, obviously wanting to round them up, but Alistair whistles for her to come, which she does, so quickly it’s as if she materialises from one spot to another.
‘Good girl’ says Alistair.

Meanwhile, Lola has chased after Dexter, heading for the woods. Lola would’ve caught him a few years ago, but these days she’s slowing up. Dexter leaves her behind, galumphing into the undergrowth and disappearing.
‘Dexter’s staying for a while,’ says Alistair discreetly, like he’s describing a guest at a rehab facility. ‘There’s something going on at home,’ he adds, darkly.
Ailsa has already overtaken Lola as they both chase after Dexter into the woods. Lola’s in love with Dexter. It wouldn’t surprise me if a little later we found their names carved by claw into a tree. A heart with an arrow, initials, kisses.

‘I’ve been getting into coding’ says Alistair, ducking under a wire fence. ‘It’s amazing how everything’s come on. It wasn’t so long ago you’d be struggling with a big old text book that was out of date as soon as you opened it. Now you can log onto forums and watch people explain it all on YouTube. It’s so much easier.’
‘I know! When I think how hard origami used to be, trying to figure out those drawings – dotted lines for a valley fold, a kinked arrow for a squash fold. Half the time I’d give up. Now you just watch a clip on YouTube. We had a whole series of origami books written by Robert Harbin. Is that how you say it? Harbin? It’s funny – I’ve never said it out loud before. It sounds made up.’
‘No, no. I think Harbin’s right.’
‘I bet no-one’s publishing origami books anymore.’
‘Or code books.’
‘Or any books!’

It suddenly strikes me. We are almost certainly the biggest nerds ever to walk through these woods. It’s probably a good thing duck season hasn’t started.

Alistair yawns whilst I stop to take some pictures of a derelict railway bridge, the tracks IMG_6633gone, the brick parapet breached by thick stems of ivy.
‘Sorry,’ he says. ‘I got up so early this morning.’
‘Why? Couldn’t you sleep?’
‘No – it was just that when I went to bed I was trying to figure out a tricky bit of code, and then about four o’clock, I sat up straight from a dream, and I was convinced it was telling me the answer. So I went downstairs and tried it out.’
‘Did it work?’
‘No,’ he says. ‘Complete garbage. I’ve been yawning ever since.’
‘I remember reading about this chemist who was trying to figure out the molecular structure of benzene, and he had a dream about a snake with its tail in its mouth, and that’s how he figured it out.’
‘I read that, too’ says Alistair. ‘Bastard.’

The dogs appear again, Dexter first, closely followed by Lola and Ailsa. We come to another stile. There’s an elderly woman the other side, rattling a bag of treats and shouting Arthur! All three dogs leap through the gap and sit around her.
‘You’re not Arthur,’ she says, but they carry on sitting anyway.
‘Lost your dog?’ says Alistair, climbing over.
‘I’ve only had him two weeks,’ she says.
The woman is strangely dressed for the muddy conditions. She’s wearing a red two piece suit with a fur trim, soft leather boots, and a pointy, green velvet hat. In fact, it’d be easier to think she she was on her way to an audition for Robin Hood than taking a dog called Arthur for a walk. But who knows? Maybe this is all a last minute decision.
‘Are your dogs okay with other dogs?’ she says.
‘Fine’ says Alistair. The worst Ailsa will do is round him up.’
‘And Lola’s too busy with Dexter to notice anyone else.’
The old woman cuts across us.
‘There!’ she says, pointing with the treat bag. ‘Arthur!’
We all turn to look (including the dogs).
Arthur turns out to be a heavy Alsatian, warily hanging back on the brow of the hill. I must admit I’m shocked. I was expecting something smaller. I can’t imagine the woman being able to hold onto a hound as substantial as Arthur. She’d be safer throwing a saddle on his back and riding him home.
‘Arthur!’ cries the old woman again, shaking the bag of treats in the air again. The dogs – giving up on the treats as any kind of prospect – jump to their feet and race up the hill to intercept him, Dexter and Ailsa making the running, Lola tagging on behind.
‘Are you sure they’ll be alright?’ says the woman.
‘Of course!’ says Alistair. ‘Just look at those tails!’

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the man who found too much

~ jim clayton ~ Leave a comment

I’m balanced precariously on a limb of the fallen pine at Broken Tree Hill, taking pictures, when I see Stan striding down the slope towards me with Moffat and Briggs, his two brindle greyhounds.
‘Beautiful day!’ he shouts, swiping off his hat and waving it in the air, strands of pure white hair standing up over his balding head, very much like the clouds over the hill.
‘Lovely!’ I wave back. ‘Just beautiful…’
The greyhounds trot over to check me out; I run my fingers over Briggs’ nobbly spine whilst Moffat noses around my pockets; when I reach Briggs’ head, he pushes up against my hand, signalling the end of this particular meeting. The two of them trot off to see what my dog’s up to, and I chat to Stan.
‘Oh – I meant to email you but forgot. I found another tool over the woods.’
‘Another one?’ says Stan, rotating his hat a couple of times, pulling it back on, and then standing heroically, hands on hips. ‘What tool? Where?’
‘Over there…’ I say, gesturing to the southern end of the woods.
‘You’ll have to be more specific,’ he says.
‘A handsaw. Among the sweet chestnuts near the meeting place.
‘A handsaw?’
‘A good one. I hid it under the log pile. Again.’
I can see he’s a little annoyed. I mean – it was only last year we had that strange business with the shrub-cutters.

Stan is part of the woodland posse that meets every Monday to maintain the paths and stiles and so on. They’ve got a little tin shack in the middle of the woods, hidden in the middle of a holly thicket. Just next to the shack is a larger clearing in the middle of which are five log benches, each being a wired stack of timber with a flatter piece on top for the seat. The benches are arranged in a pentagonal shape around a fire pit. They call this the meeting place, and even though I’ve never seen a meeting there, I can easily imagine them together at the end of the day, the flames throwing their shadows back into the trees.
Last year I was over the woods when I found an expensive pair of shrub-cutters. I took them back to the shack, hid them under a pile of timber at the side, thinking I’d email the group to let them know what I’d done. Half way back through the woods I found another pair – which freaked me out at the time. I mean – finding one pair of shrub-cutters was unusual, but two? What did it mean? Was someone trying to tell me something? Feeling strangely observed, I’d retraced my steps, put the second shrub-cutters with the first, and thought some more about that email.

But nothing happened.

Now and again on the morning walk I’d go via the shack to see if the shrub-cutters had been collected. A month later they were still there. Two months. I emailed the group a couple more times. No reply. I’d pretty much given up on the whole thing until I happened to see Stan over the woods again. He’d been away on a long trip, he said. He hadn’t been checking the group email, and none of the others knew how. He thanked me for saving the shrub-cutters, and said they’d better start signing the tools in and out at the beginning of each shift, so they wouldn’t lose anything else.

And yet – here we are with the handsaw. I feel like asking him about the list, but don’t.

‘You’re always finding things,’ he says.
‘I know! I think if you did a DNA screen you’d probably find my great great great grandma was a jackdaw.’
He laughs, but then hesitates, looking at me out of the corner of his eye, like he’s not sure whether there’s something else going on here that he’s not seeing.
‘Anyway – thanks again!’ he says at last, then clapping his gloved hands together, turns and strides off down the hill.

‘Moffat! Briggs! Come on!’

I watch them enter the woods.

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clubbed

~ jim clayton ~ Leave a comment

Groucho had it about right: I don’t want to belong to any club that would accept me as one of its members.

Except – the arguments were stacking up:
– I fuelled up at pretty much the same petrol station every other day
– I already used a reward card at the supermarket – and look at how much that saved every Christmas!
– It was one more card to carry, but hey? my wallet could stand it.

So I finally caved and said yes, okay, fine, I’ll be a member of the Shell’s Drivers’ Club, even though it made me scratchy to think of myself as part of a drivers’ club. What next? Lambskin gloves? A pine tree car deodorant? A SHOVEL IN THE BOOT?

I took the card.

But one thing I hadn’t reckoned with was That Woman Who Works There.

I’m sure she’s perfectly lovely, given the right kind of people. Except, TWWWT has made it perfectly clear, over the three or four years I’ve been stopping by her station, that access to The Right Kind of People would be a little more problematic for someone like me than simply saying Yes, I’ll be a member of the Shell Drivers’ Club and holding out my hand for a card.

Maybe I’m reading too much into a face. But it’s difficult when that face has the kind of brutally fixed expression that wouldn’t look out of place on a camp governor in Colditz. I can only be grateful she doesn’t have access to a uniform, because I’d probably faint clean away if she came stomping over from the bread aisle wearing shiny leather boots and a monocle. I’m a nervous wreck as it is, and I have to say, the bloody Shell Drivers’ club card was only making things worse.

I mean – it never, ever works. Not for me, anyway.

‘Don’t swipe it so hard’
or
‘You’re swiping it too quickly’
or
‘The other way! The other way!’

And then – inevitably: *The Sigh*

It’s *The Sigh* I find most distressing. And the fact that no matter how hard I try I still end up getting it only makes the experience worse. Because I know it’s coming. And though it’s probably true that a coward dies a thousand deaths and a brave man only one, it’s also probably true that the person who first said that never had to use their Shell Drivers’ card with TWWWT watching, and the thing not working, and then *The Sigh*

Because *The Sigh* means that the next terrible thing is about to happen.

You see, TWWWT is only about five five. It doesn’t bother me. I’m five seven. I know what it means to be compromised in the leg department. But crucially, for TWWWT it means that if the swipe card doesn’t work she’s not tall enough to reach over and do it from behind the counter. She’s forced to walk all the way round and come and do it herself. Which admittedly must be annoying for her. Hence *The Sigh*

And it is such a sigh, such an explosively expressive communication of her utter and abiding contempt, that I can’t help thinking I’m the only one this happens to. Certainly that’s the feeling I get from the look she gives me – how I imagine it feels to dunk your head in a vat of nitrogen.

*The Sigh*
‘Give it here…’

And then I make it worse by trying to say something to ease the pain.

For instance, yesterday I said: ‘It’s all in the wrist action!’ – which was meant to be a quote from an advert for a kid’s toy in the 70s. Battling Tops I think. Anyway, it sounded crude when I said it to TWWWT, which is why she frowned at me with such severity I think I actually whimpered.
‘Thanks!’ I managed, waving the card in the air and backing away, straight into a builder with a coffee and armful of doughnuts.

That night I checked my points online to see how I was doing. In all that time I’d accrued five pounds worth of credit. Five pounds! Exposing myself to the wrath of TWWWT for three years, for five pounds?.Hell – I’d pay twice that to avoid it! So I decided to toss the card and take the hit.

Today I filled up as usual and presented myself at the counter.
‘Pump number four’ I said, as breezily as I could, putting my debit card in the machine.
‘Take it out,’ she said. ‘I’m not ready.’
‘Oh. Sorry.’
She stabbed a few buttons – then paused, looked up and narrowed her eyes.
‘Where’s your Shell Drivers’ card?’
‘I … erm… I don’t want to use it,’ I said.
*The Sigh*
‘Pump Four…’ she said, heavily, as if it was typical of me to choose that one, and then stared out of the window as I tapped in my pin, like she was hoping to see someone else, someone better – anyone – a real driver, to come fill up at her pumps.

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hive mind

~ jim clayton ~ Leave a comment

Maybe it would help if we dressed like bees.

A little history.

There’s a big reorganisation, a consolidation of three or four front-line community services that pretty well do the same thing. The reorganisation is aimed at reducing duplication, focusing resources, rationalising cover – and no-one can argue with that. Too many times we’re going out to patients and finding another agency already there, doing the same thing. Or, more worryingly, that a patient hasn’t got the help they need because of a glitch in the lines of communication. Although management knows that after consolidation the caseload will increase, the pros will outweigh the cons, the system will be tightened, efficiencies made, money saved, standards raised.

So far, so good. The pros are strong enough and sensible enough to sign up to.

But then the cons start to huddle-in as the consolidation plays out, and it’s more and more difficult to maintain enthusiasm.

There’s a lag in the provision of the IT needed to back the enlarged caseload. Extemporary changes are made to the existing systems, last-minute, white-knuckle affairs. Spreadsheets metastasise. There are queues for working computers, and the ones that work are noticeably slower.

And then there are the folders. In the middle of the office, three large cabinets of them, cluttered-up floor to ceiling with all those patients currently – and quite literally – on the books. A colour-coded, ragged-spined, wretchedly-administrative version of the Tower of Babel. A Wailing Wall of folders.

‘We should go full Victorian,’ says one of the lead nurses. ‘We should have ledgers up on high desks and write with quills. Have fireplaces burning coal.’ She sighs and folds her arms, waiting for the computer to stop updating. ‘Tall hats and moustaches.’

But beyond the IT deficit and the burgeoning folder problem, the most immediate and obvious result of The Great Consolidation is the overcrowding.

An office that was designed for the comfort of a dozen, an office that could, perhaps, at a pinch, handle twice that, now has to accommodate, at the busiest times of the day, upwards of forty. Plus guests. Plus cleaners.

The office runs from eight till eight. The busiest times are from half seven when the early shift arrives; midday when there’s a crossover, and then three o’clock when everyone heads back for handover. At those three times the office is like the floor of the stock exchange, or worse, a giant beehive, with the centre of it being the folder shelves, that great, comb-like structure containing all the honey – rich in patient intelligence, dripping with detail. And it’s these giant combs of information that the nursing staff principally serve, their arms filled with sheets of paper, correspondences, referrals, new folders (of course); doing their best not to crash into each other as they manoeuvre through the runways and cluttered spaces, turning round, feinting to one side or the other, hurrying this way and that, stopping, excusing-me-ing, laughing, gossiping, carrying on in the way that bee people do when they’re pushed for time and harassed and stressed and making the best of an impossible situation.

‘CAN WE HAVE A LITTLE QUIET IN HERE PLEASE?’ shouts the bee pharmacist, one pad clamped over the phone. ‘I CAN’T HEAR MYSELF THINK’

It would be satisfying and instructive at these busy times to lift the roof of the office clean away, and peer in for a moment, and watch with detached fascination the funny little comings and goings. Is that a dance they’re doing? Is that how they know where the patients are? Maybe after a time, you might be tempted to lean in with your puffer of gas, and smoke them all senseless – harmlessly, of course, just long enough to take out the racks of folders, and put them in a spinner, and extract the gorgeous, lovingly-collected intelligence.

‘Mmm! That’s amazing!’ you might say, admiring what you’d collected, dragging a finger through the observations, the progress notes, the summaries and the charts. ‘You could really make something out of that!’ And then gently replacing the shelving, and sliding the roof back into place, you might sit for awhile on the opposite roof, and breathe quietly, and listen to all the buzzing.

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a shaggy nag story

~ jim clayton ~ Leave a comment

Everyone’s got at least one story about everything.

Take horses. I don’t know the first thing about horses. Okay, maybe a few things.

– Where you might want to put the bit
– Horses are measured in hands, for some reason.
– One aspect about them is called the hock (I’m guessing the feet, but I’m not going to google it, for comedy value)
– Don’t be tempted to buy a spavined horse, even if it’s really, really cheap
– A horse whisperer is someone who can make a horse lie down without putting them to sleep (which would be a vet).

Other than that, I’m clueless. Except – I have one story about horses I can trot out if I have to. It goes like this:

I was persuaded to go on a cross-country hack once. On Dartmoor. Because I was a novice they gave me a sedate old nag called Onions. We started off down a road, then a country lane, then veered off along a dried-up river bed, and on into some woods. And the thing that impressed me more than anything was how steady and sure-footed Onions was. There was nowhere she couldn’t go, one hoof in front of the other, hour after hour, her head bobbing up and down, utterly relentless. And I thought: This would be the perfect off-road vehicle – if it wasn’t so fucking uncomfortable.

(That is actually the pay-off. I know. Sorry. Now you know why I don’t get invited out much).

And the point of all this is – earlier today I interacted with a bunch of horses.

(Is that what you do? Interact with horses? Maybe if you’re an alien masquerading as a human, nervous you’re being watched, trying to act natural. Still – too late. That’s exactly what I did. I interacted).

IMG_6027What happened was, I’d taken Lola for her morning walk. Not the usual spot – a place I stopped going to a while back for no real reason I can think of. I’d met these particular horses before (nailing the I only have one story about horses lie, right there). I knew they were inquisitive – downright nosey, actually – were good with dogs, basically safe, so far as I could tell, although there was no way I’d ever be persuaded to walk at the kicking end, which is basically north and south. I was excited to see that the dew pond at the top of the field was full of water. I’d only ever seen it like that once before, and now that I was into taking pictures, I could see there might be some interesting tree-reflection shots to be had. The dew pond is where the horses hang out, though. Mostly. They have a tumbledown shelter way the other side of the field, but I can’t tell you much about that. I can’t even tell you who owns the horses. Maybe no-one. Maybe they’re a bunch of horse outlaws – or horselaws – and now that I think that I can never go there again.

IMG_5982Still – this morning I was prepared to take my chances. I slid down the bank of the pond and was busy taking pictures when I noticed the horses emerging from the gloom and heading straight for me. As usual they were led by the solidly built piebald who seemed to be the leader, the others tagging along behind in a shiftless kind of way, looking like they’d rather be anything other than a horse. I didn’t want to get nosed into the water, so I climbed back up the bank to meet them. I thought bowing my head and holding my hand out would be the sensible thing to do. They’d see I had humility, respect, and allow me to journey on peacefully through their realm. The piebald was pretty dismissive, though. She sniffed my hand – seemed aggrieved there was nothing in it – nosed my arm to the side and went straight for the pockets, maybe thinking I’d simply forgotten to take out whatever deliciousness I had to be carrying, or why else would I be there? It was like being patted-down by a weary cop, and a little unnerving. Trying to stay calm, I decided to retreat, walking as neutrally as I could to the nearest gate. The horses all followed me in a line, the piebald in front – natch – the others behind. I said some bland and vaguely placatory stuff, like good girl and thank you for escorting me to the gate…. any moment expecting to be beaten to the ground and hooved into a horrifying mash that some other dog walker would come across, and scream, and bite their knuckle, and all the crows in IMG_6002the elm would fly up, the piebald grinning maliciously from the tumbledown shelter way the other side of the field. I made the gate in one piece, though, and braver once the other side of it, offered my hand again by way of apology. The piebald let me ruffle her awful mane some, then as if that wasn’t enough, began rubbing her enormous skull on the post that stood between us, I suppose to emphasise how big and ornery her skull was, that she could knock this post down and get to me if she wanted, and to please bear all this in mind if ever I dared to think I could visit the dew pond with nothing more interesting to offer than a dog and an iPhone 5s.

So there. That’s my new horse story.

Needs some work.

But at least this time I got some pictures.

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feathers & the beginner’s mind

~ jim clayton ~ 2 Comments

So what happened was, we were queuing to board our flight back from Toulouse when there was an announcement. Mesdames et Messieurs. They were short of space in the overhead lockers, and would appreciate it if some passengers would volunteer to put their carry-on luggage into the hold. We already had two pieces checked in, so it didn’t make much difference. There were a couple of laptops in the carry-on, so we took those out and Kath went ahead to sign in the case. Which meant she took her seat on the plane first.

The seats on these planes are arranged three by three, either side of the aisle. What we normally do is sit two in front and two behind, Martha and Jess, me and Kath. When Kath went to sit down, she found that the third seat was taken up by a young guy who for some reason had ended up in the seat immediately behind his wife. They were newly married, and it seemed a shame, so Kath volunteered to do a swap.  She would sit with the girls in the three seats behind us; the guy would sit next to his wife by the window, and I’d be in the aisle seat next to him.I didn’t mind. It was a short flight, late at night, and I probably wouldn’t be all that sociable anyway. Everyone settled in. The young couple next to me were halfway through a film on a netbook, sharing some headphones. I tried to figure out what the film was. A slick, supernatural thriller. Tense shots of glossy people at a cocktail party in a skyscraper. Every so often they paused the film so the guy could explain a plot point. No – you see, it was his brother who did the deal. So now he’s the one trying to stay out of Hell. But the girlfriend has the book and she hasn’t found out about the ticket yet… When the guy finished explaining, his wife squeezed his arm and gave him a kiss, the kind of kiss that sneaks up the arm, smiling, eyes open. They would lock like that for a while, then put the headphones back on and unpause the film.

I watched the cabin crew demonstrate the emergency exits. When we’d taken off, I closed my eyes and tried to meditate.

There’s a technique I’ve been trying to learn called ‘noting’. It’s a way of dealing with distracting thoughts. You don’t fight or try to control them, because the effort of doing that will become as distracting as the original distraction. If you see what I mean. The idea is simply to ‘note’ that you’ve become distracted, a light acknowledgement – as light as a feather touching a glass – and then gently bring the focus back to your breathing, and the business of being in the moment.

I was using the feather a lot. The young couple were about as distracting as it’s possible to be without training. Apart from continually stopping the film, explaining what had just happened, leaning into each other for elaborate shows of reassurance and affection, rearranging the small mountain of coats and bags that surrounded them like a nest, they were as exercised by the menu choices on the snacks trolley as they were about the film. Hot chocolate or a glass of wine? Pretzels or peanuts? What do you think? No what do you think? Reassuring kisses. I checked the expression of the air stewardess waiting to take their order, but she was as professionally neutral as the safety demonstration, perhaps even more so. (Note to self: check out any courses in mindfulness endorsed by EasyJet.)  Finally they made their order, everything passing inches in front of my nose, despite me trying to make whatever adjustments I could to minimise the risk. Money going backwards and forwards, complicated transactions. But finally it was done, they had their drinks and were back into the film. I closed my eyes again and thought about a giant feather swinging into the side of a glass house like a wrecking ball.

The boutique trolley came round.

The guy thought he might buy a watch, because they were twenty percent off. Should he, or shouldn’t he? You should treat yourself. You’ve done so much for everyone else. Why not? But I don’t know… You’ve been saying for ages you wanted one… yeah, but – really?  When the trolley stopped in the aisle he tried on a few. The whole range, as far as I could tell. Holding each one on his wrist, his wife saying yeah.. but a brown strap? The turbulence was getting so bad I was worried about the stewardess. She had to brace herself with one hand on the overhead, her legs apart still maintaining the kind of professionally passive look you only see on saints and contract killers. Finally, after a great deal of tryings-on and comparisons, the guy settled for a Boss watch. Sixty-three pounds and twenty pence. His card was declined. Horreur. Not normally a problem. His wife offered to pay on hers, but he was adamant the stewardess try again. She did. Mon Dieu. It worked (although I was suspicious; I think she faked the sale, happy to pay sixty-three pounds and twenty pence so long as she could move on with her trolley and her life).

I went on with my meditation. Fell asleep. Had a dream I was sinking beneath a stormy sea. Woke up with the guy’s coat over my head.
‘Sorry! So sorry!’

The plane had landed; everyone was getting ready to leave.

*

There’s another technique in meditation: ‘Beginner’s mind’. It means that no matter how experienced or practised you think you are, you should try to approach every session as if you were coming to it for the very first time.

Waiting at the baggage reclaim, I told the girls about my experience with the young couple. Jess listened patiently, then touched me lightly on the shoulder (like a feather touching a glass).

‘Basically – what you’re telling us, Dad – is that you sat next to two perfectly normal human beings.’

The bags came round on the carousel, including the extra one we checked. I dragged them off, and we all headed out of the terminal for the taxi.

*

Thanks for reading – and a Happy New Year!

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cat scene investigation

~ jim clayton ~ 2 Comments

I took Solly to the vet’s for his vaccination and worming pill yesterday. Which is how I came to step barefoot on glass when I came down this morning.

You see, yesterday I’d taken the cooker extractor fan apart. It had started to make noises and drip gloop on the hob – a noxious, sticky substance that would’ve poisoned the whole family had it fallen into the soup (or improved it, one of the two). De-glooping the extractor fan is my least favourite chore. It doesn’t matter how much kitchen cleaner I spray on it, or how many times I flush it with boiling water, the two panels carry on oozing this stuff like it’s coming from a whole other dimension, like chef’s ectoplasm. Anyway, I did my best. I set the panels on some kitchen towel to drain as much of the gloop as possible. Whilst the panels were off, it seemed like a good time to change the bulb that had blown some time ago (shorted out by gloop, no doubt). We didn’t have a spare, so I put it to one side so I could take it in to get another.

Meanwhile, Solly had to go to the vets. He knew he was in trouble when he saw us bring the cat carrier down from the attic. But we’d thought ahead. We’d closed all connecting doors, shut the cat-flap and turned on all the lights. All that was left for him was to hide under the sofa, but we played the classic pincer-movement and made a grab when he ran for the chimney. Getting him into the cat carrier was tough. It always is. He sprouts extra legs, each one bristling with claws. It’s like trying to wrestle a bale of barbed wire through a letterbox. By the time we’d stuffed him into the cat carrier we looked like we’d been beaten up and thrown in a bramble patch.

‘Good luck at the vet’s’ Kath said, dabbing her arms.

As I took him outside, Solly began to wail. He’s a black and white cat, by the way – appropriate, given that this wail of his sounds exactly like the siren of a black and white cop car in an old noir movie, pulling up at the scene of a dreadful murder.

At the vets he was completely different, though. When the vet opened the carrier door and reached inside, he slunk out onto the examination table, looking straight ahead.
‘Wow! You’re like the cat whisperer!’ I said to her.
‘I wish I could take the credit’ she said. ‘But the plain fact is, he’s terrified.’
‘Poor Solly!’ I said, feeling guilty. I ruffled the top of his head, and that’s when he gave me the look. The look that said: Don’t think it ends here, my friend.
The vet began checking him over. Teeth, abdomen, ears. Stethoscope to chest.
‘How’s he looking?’ I said.
She sighed and took the stethoscope out of her ears.
‘Sorry. Carry on,’ I said.
She put the stethoscope back in.
And that’s when Solly gave her a look. See what I have to put up with?

Of course, when we got back home, Solly disappeared into the garden for hours. When he finally made it back in to eat, he was his usual, darkly mysterious self again, gnarling and chomping through his meat and biscuits with the noisy relish of an old sea captain back in the snug of The Neptune after a particularly harrowing whaling adventure. (Although I might be reading too much into it.) And that seemed to be that.

Except, of course, it wasn’t.

As Solly well knows, I tend to walk around barefoot. Certainly in the summer. In winter, it’s mostly socks, but I did get a pair of slippers, because the tiles in the kitchen are freezing. The only trouble is, I’ll often leave the slippers by the back door, so first thing in the morning, I’ll blunder downstairs, through the sitting room and into the kitchen to get them, not bothering to put on any lights.

That’s what happened this morning. Just as Solly knew it would.

I heard the crunch of glass before I felt the pain in my foot. I gasped and staggered backwards to put the light on, which showed me in an instant all I needed to know, like the flash of a CSI camera: Solly on the counter by the hob, smiling at me. Solly with one paw still extended – from having gently swiped the spent extractor fan bulb onto the floor. Solly leaping clear of the mess, and stalking away into the sitting room, his tail straight up, like an antenna, transmitting to all the other neighbourhood cats: Operation Vet Vengeance: Executed.

 

drag me to hell, traffic warden

We watched the Sam Raimi film Drag me to Hell last night. It was great. Plenty of outrageous set-ups, plenty of gloop (although nothing as horrible as the stuff from the extractor fan). One thing that did strike me, though – how convenient it is that the demons and evil spirits in these films always look so goddamn awful. They’ve all got terrible teeth and skin, weird eyes, ghastly nails. A demon is basically someone who pays no heed whatsoever to the basics of personal hygiene. Which is handy, in a way, because it makes them easier to spot.

Not like real life at all, then.

I mean, I was given a parking ticket the other day by a traffic warden, even though I wasn’t causing an obstruction, and even though I was attending to a very poorly patient.
‘Double yellows, yes. Loading bays, no,’ he said. ‘You should know that.’
‘But it’s Christmas’
He shrugged.
‘So let’s get this straight,’ I said, struggling to hold it together. ‘If I was unloading frozen chips to this chintzy fucking tea room, that would’ve been okay?’
‘Yes.’
‘So it’s chips and not sick people, is it?’
‘Yes.’
‘Don’t even bother,’ said a painter and decorator, passing by, stopping just long enough to give the traffic warden a stare that was worryingly like a curse. ‘He just better hope his family never needs help sometime.’

Looking back on it, setting aside all personal feelings about the matter, I have to say – the traffic warden looked as nice and friendly as anyone else. He certainly didn’t look like a demon, with yellow eyes and sharp teeth. And he had very nice hair, what I could see of it, round his cap.

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