gamboling.co.uk

The driver came out of his… Is it a cabin or a cockpit or what is it on a train? I think it’s almost certainly a cabin. But then when we’re on aeroplanes we don’t end up with the pilot sitting in the cockpit driving his aeroplane, and us all sitting in the cabin driving trains. I mean, for one, your incredibly unlikely to get them all to want ot go the same way. Everyone would be leaving Gatwick wanting the plane to fly over their house so they could take a picture out the window. And despite repeated requests, whenever there is turbulence on an aeroplane, the air hostess (or steward – why not air host?) has refused to tell me where the winder for the window is. I only need a little air and I’ll feel much better. Well it works in my car.

Have you ever stuck your head out of the window to see where you were going in your car because your windscreen was too dirty? Well, I haven’t obviously because I’m a decent upstanding citizen.

Anyway, so the driver comes out and asks if any of us want to get out of the train. We all say no and he looks very relieved. Unfortunately, he tells us, the doors aren’t working in our carriage because of a minor electrical problem. As if to emphasise his point as he’s talking to us somebody walks up to our carriage presses the button, the door opens an they get onboard. “Oh”, he says, and buggers off to wherever he came from.

My brother has invited an Italian to move into the flat. I was standing on Waterloo East train station on the phone to him when he broke the news.

“Oh yeah,” he said, “I forgot to tell you that we’re going to have an Italian student living with us for a bit.”
“Right,” I suggested.
“I’m going on a foreign exchange so he’s got to come here. It’ll only be for a couple of days. And don’t worry I go to their house after they come to ours so if they mess anything up then when I get there I’ll trash the place.”
“Okay,” I add, “that sounds good.”
“Yeah and they might even be fit, or a bloke.”

“So have you always been blind?”
“Oh no. I used to see thing, it’s just now I can’t.”
“that’s a shame. About teh4 now stuff not the havening been able to see of course>”
“Well I don’t know about that. Now I can’t see and I can remember what stuff used to look like and log for it. Which isn’t very nice but at least I’ll never have to see Lawrence Stevenson again”.
“Lawrence Stephenson?”
“Yeah he was this guy I knew. He used to be my best friend and then he double crossed me. Right before I lost my sight, which happened very rapidly. I said to him, by way of a parting gesture, ‘I’ll be happy if I never see your face again Stephenson’. And I never have”.
“That’s quite weird.”
“But good! I had many an argument with my wife about old Larry Stephenson. She argued that if I hadn’t said what I ‘d said about seeing his fat ugly face I’d still be able to see. Which you and I both know is rubbish. But she believed it. She called me a damn fool. And then I didn’t see her any more.”
“What she left you over it?”
“No. I was blind by then. Do try and keep up.”
“I see.”
“Well I bloody well don’t and that’s the point.”
“Sorry.”
“So you see even though I’m blind I can be happy about it because it means I will never have to see Larry Stephenson again.”
“But wait a minute., you said that you could remember what things look like.”
“Yes.”
“Well then surely you can remember what he looked like.”
“Of course. The vision of him turning away from me on that very day is burned in my mind.”
“Well I can hardly remember anything I see, especially people I don’t care about. Mainly because I can always go and look at new things. Whereas I would have thought now that you can’t see you’ll spend a lot more time ‘seeing’ this man than you would have otherwise”.
“Great now you’re just depressing me.”

She had the word “love” written eighteen times on her t-shirt but she didn’t know what it meant. She’d had enough of it damn it she had been trampled on enough, too much. It wasn’t fair when Malcolm had done it but she had been too hurt then. She had just rolled over. And now her kids just kicked her every day. They assumed she could drive them home after their parties. They assumed she’d walk their dog. They assumed she would make them their tea. They assumed she had nothing better to do.

The problem wasn’t their assumptions, and she knew it, it was that they were right. She hadn’t had a man since Malcolm. She hadn’t wanted to at first, and then there was Simon which she had known was a mistake before anything happened. She had no regrets about Simon. His hair had smelt of smoke but she’d never seen him smoking. He was obviously a liar she deduced and so she let him pay for dinner and then never returned his calls. Then there had been nothing for a while. And that had been fine really. Until Malcom invited them all to dinner. He had been banging that bitch Brenda for years of course, but he didn’t have to parade her. Didn’t have to rub her nose init. The problem wasn’t bitch Brenda though. I t was her kids. Everyone had someone but her. They all had partners. Except her. The problem was that there was an odd number of people at the dinner table.

That night she’d gone home and made a vow to change a few things. She pulled out all of her old clothes she had gone up two sizes since then and she wanted them back. The old clothes that flattered her. To be thin again. To be wanted. To feel good enough that you wouldn’t just feel contempt for someone who wanted you.

And a month and four days later she had done it. She’d lost the weight and now she was wearing the shirt. As she looked in the mirror she recognised her 22 year old self. She had the word “love” written eighteen times on her t-shirt but she still didn’t know what it meant.

He was determined to show this lad something exciting. Something to show him that he still mattered. He was probably down there right now mutter into his merlot about how damn boring his grandfather was. She’d been kind enough to come though, he had to remember that. Aha! There it was. He pulled the grey painted metal microscope out of its box. It felt incredibly cold through his skin. There were some slides in a shoebox which he took into his jacked pocket.

He’d laughed when his grandfather had put his jacket on to go upstairs. But later when he was sleeping up there he’d curse his grandfather for not simply turning the heat up. He appeared in the study and suddenly the space seemed smaller, cooler but cosier. His grandfather was tall, thin, blue and clutching a microscope with a sense of purpose.

“Right, give me some of your hair.”
“What?”
“Your hair. Pull it out.”
“Why?”
“Well we’re going to look at some of the bacteria that’s on it.”
“And then?”
“Well, I was thinking that we could put the cover on the slide. You get to see them explode. It’s quite exciting.”
“Granddad. We did that at school. I’m too old for all of that now.”
“Nonsense. You can never be too old.”
“Yes you can Granddad. Actually that’s part of why I came up here today. Jane and I… Well we feel you might be getting a bit too old to be here all on your own. We’re going to arrange for you to go into a home.”

“Where are we going? Reading?”
“Yeah.”
“Alight well drive on then.”
“that’s what I’m doing.”
“I can see that… I’m just… Well… Encouraging you. You know. Teamwork.”
“Are you? Are you alright?”
“Yeah. Well yes and no. We really need to think about these CVs on a personal and a corporate level. Especially in the context of KPMG, PGWC, ICBM, IBM and oh I don’t know CRAP.”
“Yeah, well, what we need is…”
“Maybe you should talk to me about this when I’m more sober.”
“Okay.”

She walks in the room, in a bit of a rush like everybody else, but also trying to feign some kind of laid back appearance. She absentmindedly rubs her left palm against the side of her other hand. An ink stain from last minute revision has left its mark. She’s not even consciously aware that she’s embarrassed in case anyone realises that she has actually done some preparation. She finds a desk three-quarters of the way down the hall, on the opposite side to the door.

Two pens, a pencil, a protractor (for some reason still in her bag from the maths exam), an eraser (she didn’t like to call it a rubber because it reminded her of an embarrassing joke somebody had made about something she’d said back in middle school), some tissues and a sweater which she hung over the climbing bars that were next to her desk.

The girl in front of her had three teddy bears and a troll. For a fraction of a second she wished she had something to personalise her desk with. And then she remembered what she thought of people who did that.

She sat for a moment trying to decide if she was nervous. The boy next to her was opening his mouth wide enough until it clicked over and over again. He looked bored, was he feigning it?

The back of her neck prickled. The noise of slowly moving footsteps was coming towards her. A flop of paper landing on each desk. Face down it would be. Sitting there on the desk. Face down. The footsteps are at the desk behind her now. The kid behind is looking at her rather than their paper or the invigilator. She can feel the look, it’s making her fact hot. Her face feels suddenly very warm, like she’s being suntanned from the inside. It’s that damn kid looking at her. She’d be okay as long as they stopped. The footsteps arrive. Flop. So does the paper. All she can see are the words “This page has been intentionally left blank.” Her face goes cold and the top of her head feels like it is mid-way through a massage. Which rather than being relaxing is merely unsettling.

It had taken the invigilators ages to get to her table. She still has time. She looks up at the front of the gym. They’ve finished laying out all the papers already! Somebody is writing out the start and end times. There are forty seconds to go. 39. 38. 37. 36. 35. She tries desperately to remember her candidate number. 31. 30. 29. 28. 27. If that boy clicks his jaw one more time she’ll kill him. 20. 19. 18. 17. 16. 15. 14. 13. She adjusts the jumper on the bars. 7. 6. 5. 4. Oh God. “You may now turn over your papers”.

But on the weekend he isn’t present as he is taking a well deserved nap. The Saturday Telegraph is superb for one reason only. And it isn’t Anne Robinson. It is due to the General Knowledge Crossword. I love it. It perfectly fits everything I like in a stimulating game. Namely I can see that one day, I will win.

“Good Morning,” said the red haired man who was beginning to have a red face, more through wine consumption than embarrassment. Although he lived in constant fear that somebody would reveal that his favourite artist was Britney Spears and not The Rolling Stones as he usually told everyone. “They just don’t do it for me anymore,” he revealed one drunken evening, “they’re too slow, too loud and too old. I like Britney now. It’s frankly all I can do to try and stop thinking about her.”
“I can see that you haven’t yet.” Replied the man who he now lived in fear of, even though he couldn’t quite remember his name. If pushed, he would probably move a bit, and then say probably “Joey Joe Joesonson.”

“Hi!” Came the rather belated reply.
“Who’s that Mick?”
“That’s our rodie, Keith”
“Really? That’s the fucker who thought Britney was better than us in the pub last night.”
“Right let’s get him man.”
“Yeah don’t you know Britney’s star is fading? It’s all Cristina now”.

They sit next to each other, smoking. One with slicked back hair, which obviously I can’t see because he’s wearing a jacket and I don’t have X-Ray vision. He’s also got slicked head hair too. But I know he’s got terrible back hair because he’s exactly the type. And I know he’s done something about it because he looks rich enough to and, well, he’s exactly the type to have done that too. It became big after André Agassi waxed his chest hair to make him more streamlined in the swimming pool, or whatever his porpoise was. (Porpoises don’t have to wax, they are generally naturally streamlined except for one I met called Gerald who, due to an unfortunate genetic accident, had more hair than Robin Williams).

The guy sitting next to him is smoking more quickly and less girlishly. Which is odd because generally the most girlish way to smoke a cigarette is to puff at it lots and make it go away as quickly as possible. However real men and women smoke slowly, purposely and death defyingly. But here was situation where the slow smoker was being girlish. “How so?” I hear you ask. Well, to be frank, he was holding his cigarette at an alarming height. When he wasn’t using it he was holding the cigarette above his head. In a vertical position as though the cigarette was a light bulb over his head suggesting that he had recently had a good idea. I can think of lots of good ideas but none of them involve holding burning things above flammable things.* Certainly not when the flammable thing is the hair product that is in your own hair, which is attached to your own head. The resulting situation was one that I shall remember for a long time.

* Unless of course you are trying to run an engine of some sort.