NO MEAN FEET

Aren’t feet small. I mean relative to the rest of your body, with what they’ve got to hold up.

I thought that this morning when I awoke. Sitting on the edge of my bed, I observed my feet, waiting patiently on the end of my legs, ready to go about their daily duty of trundling me about the planet. How do they do it?

It was different when we had tails. Then we had a sort of third leg. A tripod. I wonder how many thousand years of evolution it took to get rid of the tail? And during that time how were the feet being preparing to do all the work on their own?

You’d think that as our tail grew shorter, our feet would grow longer – to compensate. But no. And the fact that did not happen is another one in the eye for the creationists: I mean if we really were designed then surely when an important modification like this was carried out there would be all sorts of calculations to make. And one of the most likely outcomes would have been to have made the feet longer. But, as I say, this was not the case. Instead we had to learn to walk upright on ‘too-small’ feet.

I have a blister on the little toe on my right foot. This is due to the chafing of heavy gardening boots. Edgar says my feet will get used to the change of footwear – there you go again: relying on the poor old feet to compensate – and in the meantime he has given me an Elastoplast to apply to the affected area. It came off in bed and Edgar did not think to give me a spare. So I shall have to pay a visit to the pharmacy in my lunch hour.

Another thing I’ve noticed about my feet: there is more space between the big toe and the next one on my right foot than there is on my left. This does not seem to cause any problems, but I am keeping an eye on things.

You see, when you have a sedentary occupation you tend to think more about the care of your bum. But when you do proper work – like gardening and park maintenance – then your focus is, quite naturally, on your feet (since so are you – for most of the day).

I hope you don’t think I have gone on too long about feet. Actually I don’t care much if you do. I think feet need to be brought to the forefront, not taken for granted so much.

So if you take my tip, you’ll look after your feet.

THE ANSWER LIES IN THE SOIL (?)

I am ‘finding myself’ in the pursuit of honest toil. At the end of the day I am tired, but in a physical, healthy way; not this tiredness in the head I am used to feeling most of the time.

Okay, you post-modernists, maybe there is no ‘self’ to find. Maybe we re-invent ourselves, from day to day, as circumstances demand. I don’t know. All I do know is that I am feeling better for doing this manual work, outside in the open air. And to stride bare-legged through the long grass – well, all I can say is that if you haven’t tried it, you should!

Another thing this physical stuff has done: it has made me feel more kindly to my erstwhile husband.
We think we can communicate with people because we speak the same language: English, in my case. But we each live and move in a different mental landscape; we are all aliens.
we don’t know this, and so we become confused and angry when people don’t understand us. That is the tragedy.

Anyway, enough of this philosophising, I have to hose the shit off these boots; they’re stinking the place out.

If you go down in the woods today...

This is a photo I took on my first ‘community service’ with my mates: Shaz, Baz and Derek.

For the first time in my life I have got ‘mates’!

Single mum Shaz comes to work on her scooter. She refuses to get a lift in the minibus. She says minibuses are dangerous – but really she likes to be independent. She has got more rings, pins and studs in her face than anyone I have ever seen: rings through her ears (ten in each), eyebrows, nose, lips, and pins and studs in her forehead and neck. I call her ‘the perforated mum.’

If there were to be a prize awarded for creative swearing, Shaz would win, hands down. She can even manage to insert a swearword in the middle of another word. For example: I overheard Baz telling her something about ‘catching a packet last week’, (I thought he was talking about taking a steamship somewhere, but it turns out to be slang for ‘contracted a sexually transmitted disease’).
Shaz suddenly exclaimed, in a voice that could be heard all over the park, ‘Well I’m not sur-fuckin-prised!’
She continued to admonish poor Baz. You should have used a fucking condom’ .

I wondered if there were any other kind.
But anyway, Baz says condoms are not cool.

People in Derek’s world always ‘turn round’ before they say anything… ‘So I turned round and said… And she turned round and said…’
He also has a couple of general-purpose phrases: ‘Well, it would, wouldn’t it…’ and ‘Stands to reason’.

But although I have had some difficulty getting used to the idiom, I quite like being with my new mates. They are so open, so direct. Does that sound patronising? I don’t mean it to be. They say you start to become like the person you marry; I don't want to become like George.

George used to say that the ‘lower classes’ could be quite amusing on occasions. He is a snob, of course. I don’t know why, since he likes to tell everyone how he was born in a ‘two up, two down’ with no bathroom and an outside lavatory. But my new friends do have a wicked sense of humour – often taking the piss (as they say), out of each other.

And out of Edgar. He is in charge of our little gang of ‘criminals’. He is about my age but they call him ‘grandad’. He has worked for Parks & Gardens ‘Since I was a lad’. And although they pull his leg something awful, he takes it all in good part and seems genuinely fond of his little ‘team’. He doesn’t know quite what to make of me! But then, neither do I.

I have decided. I am going to see George. I am pretty sure I know what his ‘little surprise’ is. There have been rumours flying about the village for some time now.
Ah well, let’s hear it from the horse’s mouth.

Is that the telephone ringing?

Have you ever thought of committing suicide? I mean serious suicide, not this ‘cry for help’ business. I have. Trouble is – apart from the difficulty of finding a method that doesn’t hurt – suicide is so final.

Benny Hill used to sing a song, about a man, who, by some freak, was the only person left alive in the world after a nuclear disaster. He’s living in a penthouse on the top floor of a New York skyscraper. But after a while he can no longer stand the loneliness – and he jumps.
And as he passes the seventh floor he hears the telephone ring.

So you hang on, ‘waiting for the telephone to ring’
Your ‘ringing telephone’ might be: a letter, telling you he loves you after all. Another’s ‘telephone’: the police have dropped the charges. Someone else’s: the depression mysteriously lifts, and doesn’t return.

Of course, if you are of a certain religious persuasion, death is simply a gateway to another, better life. And if you belong to a certain 'faith' this might induce you to strap a few pounds of explosives to your person, and go out in a blaze of glory: a martyr to the cause.

Ah, but if you have the misfortune (from a potential suicide’s point of view) to be a card-carrying member of the Roman Church, then it’s no virgins for you! You have committed the worst possible sin. And it is going to need a lot of petitioning on your behalf if you are to have a chance of making it to heaven instead of hell.

It's all very well to say you should read the 'suicide' clause before you sign up - how many of us are that far-sighted.

Yes, but what if the telephone doesn't ring?
Look here – I haven’t got the time to discuss such morbid thoughts. The sun is shining, and the Parks & Gardens truck is outside, the driver impatiently blowing his horn.
Where are my boots!

A pattern emerges

“Here I go down that wrong road again” Do you know that song? I don’t know who sings it but every time I hear it I think - that’s the story of my life.

Have you ever looked back over your life and detected a pattern? Or patterns? Patterns of behaviour, I mean. You know, you find yourself doing something, and you think – this is familiar. I’ve been here before.

Like, you find yourself making the same choices; even though it turned out bad last time, you’re doing it again. It’s a pattern, a habit, and you don’t know how to get out of it.

Well, I’ve been looking back. Not in anger – more in sorrow. I can’t blame George for everything – although I’d like to. No, I was ‘set up’ long before I met old Georgie boy.

Part of it is in my genes of course, but a lot is due to my childhood: the old ‘nature/nurture’ debate.

By the way, I am not really a lesbian. It is just that I tend to see everyone’s point of view. Well, isn’t that a good thing? You may ask. Up to a point, I suppose it is, but I end up not knowing who I truly am. Perhaps I am not truly anyone. I keep thinking of that man who said ‘We are that which others allow us to be’. I think that’s so true. Well it is for me, anyway.

I asked if I could do my ‘community service’ as a crossing patrol officer (lollipop lady). Like George did – for a bit. But they said it’s the school holidays just now. So I said – well can’t I practice until they go back to school? They said that I could, but it wouldn’t count as ‘hours’.
Stuff that. I’m not doing unpaid training – which is what it amounts to.

So they are going to put me working with the Parks and Gardens team. I protested that such work would wreak havoc with my nails. But they said I would be provided with gloves! Also a stout pair of boots, and waterproofs (they work outside in all weathers). Can you imagine me in boots and waterproofs! The indignity of it!

But if I don’t do it I go to jail. And as I said, I am not a lesbian – so pass me my spade.

Putting things behind me

Extract for the Cotswold Cryer – Monday, 06 August 2007.


NON-CUSTODIAL SENTENCE FOR LOCAL WOMAN.

As a result of last-minute dramatic plea-bargaining, the police withdrew the original charge of ‘Harbouring illegal immigrants’ and replaced it with the less serious charge of ‘Keeping a disorderly house’.

Mrs Georgina Turner pleaded guilty to this lesser charge.

In passing sentence, the judge, Mr Justice Quilt said:

‘I have taken into consideration the mitigating circumstances detailed by counsel for the defence, Mr Harry Sheene, and I do not think that, in this instance, a custodial sentence would serve any useful purpose. In my view, this woman is more ‘sinned against than sinned’. The court will have been moved – as indeed I have – by the tragic circumstances of this woman’s life, outlined by defence council.
Rejected as a baby by her natural mother, she has been dogged by misfortune throughout her life. A succession of foster homes – two of which were destroyed by fire – were unable to offer her the care and support to which every child has a right. Various positions of employment failed to provide job satisfaction; job satisfaction which would have given her the much-needed self-esteem she so valiantly sought. Instead she became the victim of sexual harassment and, in one instance, racial discrimination, whilst working for a firm of Rastafarian clog-makers.
Is it any wonder that, in an attempt to achieve some stability in her life, she accepted, at the tender age of 18 years, a proposal of marriage from a much older man. Clearly she saw in him a sort of father figure; a substitute for the father she never knew.

Her naivety, her trust, proved to be sadly misplaced. The man turned out to be a drunk, a womaniser and a chronic depressive who was unable to give her the love and affection for which she yearned. He is currently being held in a secure psychiatric hospital.
This vulnerable woman then got in with a ‘bad lot’. It is not for me to comment on matters that may form the basis of subsequent prosecutions, let alone name the people involved. I will just say that, in my view, she was taken advantage of by, shall we say, individuals with their own (dubious) agendas.

The judge said he hoped Mrs Turner would be able to re-build her life and become a useful member of the community and, to give her a start, so to speak, he was awarding her 118 hours community service.

Mrs Turner told our reporter: “I cannot say how relieved I am to know I can now put things behind me, and get on with my life. Once again, British justice has been seen to be the best in the world. No wonder these foreigners (no names no pack drill) come over here from countries where if you get into the back of a police car that is the last anyone sees of you. Anyway this has taught me a lesson. In future I shall only buy the ‘Big Issue’ from a man (or woman) with an English accent.”

She was then driven away by her defence counsel, for a champagne reception at The Jolly Pervert.