Graham Spaid's Blog, page 2

Party animals

A young man was filmed recently in Welwyn Garden City (handsome name) swinging a Chihuahua around his head on the end of a lead.  Yippee!
Britons have mistreated animals for hundreds of years.  The last time the river Thames froze, the BBC tells us, “oxen were roasted in front of roaring fires, drink was liberally taken and dances were held. An elephant was marched across the river alongside Blackfriars Bridge.”  All on the ice.  They wanted to prove how thick it was.  It was extremely thick.
‘Health and safety’ is our mantra now, but we still put animals at risk for the sake of entertainment.  Parties billed as “wild nights out” have been held in London Zoo.  Drunken guests have “crushed butterflies, touched penguins and poured drinks on animals.”  When challenged about his interference with a rare white baboon, one young man replied, “I thought it was my girlfriend.”
Like us, animals can be dangerous.  A car with a family inside caught fire at a safari park.  They had the choice to leave the vehicle and be eaten by lions, or stay there and be burnt to death.  A witness said the lions “didn’t take their eyes off the car for a second.”  Implication: the family with big teeth wanted to eat the family with small teeth.  However, if you put two households side by side, one will often have bigger teeth than the other.  The family in the car might not have looked as scary as the one in the grass, but you never know what’s going on inside a person’s head.
“I give them thirty seconds,” said Daddy Lion.  “No,” said Mummy Lion. “They’ll last longer.  Are you hungry?”
Baby Lion asked, “Why don’t they get out of the car, Mummy?”
If you always think badly of a certain animal or person, it’s easy to mistreat them.  The vegetable kingdom is also mightily abused.  A man has pushed a Brussel sprout to the top of Mt Snowden.  He said he “selected a large sprout so it would not fall down a crevice in the rock.”  The safety of the sprout was the most important thing.  Remember now.  The crevices on Mt Snowden are all narrower than a large sprout.  No need to push a pumpkin up there, or a tree.
Pity the sprout, and the dung beetle.  It heaves a ball of dung that’s bigger than itself.  In London, office managers do much the same thing – push lumps of shit around all day.  However, we are now told that dung beetles get extra-terrestrial help.  Research has shown that they are guided by the stars.  Scientists “put little cardboard hats on the beetles’ heads, blocking their view of the sky.  Those beetles just rolled around and around aimlessly.”  Sounds like my graduation party.
I wasn’t fair on Brussels Man, either.  I didn’t tell you that he pushed the sprout up Mt Snowden with his nose.  He was worse off than a beetle.  They use their legs.  I’m beginning to side with humans again. Let’s get this ball of dung back on the road.
At the safari park, the car was still burning.
“Maybe they don’t know it’s on fire,” Baby Lion suggested.  “We should tell them.”
Mummy Lion shook her head.  “No, darling.  It’s not safe.  We don’t like fire any more than people do.”
Baby Lion looked at her intelligently.  Mummy Lion went on, “We’ll just wait here until they get out of the car.  Then we’ll eat them.”

Working class germs

Passengers are requested not to speak to or obscure the driver’s vision whilst the vehicle is in motion.
This sign is near the driver’s seat on London buses.  We know what the author intended, and the formal style, motion, whilst, obscure, are requested, reminds us to respect the message.  The bus company means what it says.  Well, almost.  Speak to the driver’s vision.  Some people might be able to.  It's a bit spooky, though, for the average bus.
I wonder what the company would say if I rang their helpline to point out the mistake in grammar.     
Sometimes we know what we’re doing is wrong, or stupid, but we keep doing it anyway.  When I travel around London, I play word games in my head.  I start with a railway station, take the short ride, say, from Liverpool Street to St Pancreas, then move on by tube and bus to Cockfisters or Dickhead.  You can probably think up better ones.  
I got this letter from Adelaide, South Australia, from the cultured eastern suburbs.
One of the concreters has flu, according to him.  It's probably just a heavy cold, but either way we don't want to catch anything, so I had the dilemma of flu germs on the coffee mug after he'd had the coffee I made him. My husband wisely suggested finding an old mug, then throwing it away afterwards, because I didn't want it germing up the kitchen sink.  This was fine until they had to finish early and come back today, meaning another cup of coffee would need to be offered and I can't keep throwing away mugs.  I had to clean it somehow, so I stood it in the laundry trough with a little squirt of dishwashing liquid and poured boiling water all over it.  One cannot be too careful.  I dried it with a paper towel and now it's ready for his next cup of coffee on Monday.  The irony is, of course, that this cup of uncleanliness and germs is probably much cleaner now than my daily cups and dishes washed all together in the kitchen sink.
I like the scepticism, the nervous energy, the shared commitment, the regard for duty, the thrift, the creativity, and the meticulous care.  The sense of irony. 
I like the workman.  He didn’t ask if the mug was clean.

Bike sex

Seven years ago, a man in Scotland was caught having sex with his bicycle.  I missed it somehow.  It’s not a piece of news you’d forget.  A few days ago, the story popped up again on the BBC website, in the ‘most read’ section.  Thanks to the internet and our fascination with sexual content, the world is going to laugh at him forever.  Flogging a dead bike.
Most of us have experimented sexually.  Positions, people, places.  Some of us do it with animals and corpses.  One of us, at least, with bicycles.  But we are usually more careful, or luckier, than our Scottish friend.  Think back.  The last time you locked your bedroom door, then did something bad, were sturdy women with mops in their hands waiting outside to clean up the mess?
He must have thought he was safe in his hostel room.  He wasn’t outside the local school, or carrying his bicycle on the train.  (At peak times, fold the bike – Kama Sutra.)  It was right between his legs when the cleaners walked in.  They said they knocked.  Two ladies.  That was bad luck.  Men might have blinked.  And how many cleaners do you need for a single room?  Obviously two.  More bad luck, but convenient for the magistrates.  Our friend couldn’t deny it now.
The BBC said he was “caught trying to have sex with his bicycle.”  He was charged with “simulating sex,” found guilty and sentenced to three months on probation.  I expect he was moving his hips in a frightening way, like a bicycle pump, at the rear of the machine.   Three months’ probation for simulating sex.   What if he’d really done it?  What if he’d screwed the bells off his beloved bicycle?  They would have thrown away the key. 
For some men, a car is like a girlfriend, one you can’t get into the bedroom.  Biceps Femoris loved a bicycle, and he got it into the bedroom.  He deserves a medal, or a yellow jersey.  Recently, young men in tight pants humped their two-wheelers around the English countryside.  People watched and cheered.  Women were among the crowd.  Some of them were probably cleaning ladies.  The police did nothing.  

            Le Tour de France.  Apt name for an event on this side of the Channel. 
I said magistrates, but they’re not magistrates up there, are they?  They’re sheriffs.  Like Tombstone or Nottingham.  The Sheriff of Ayr proclaimed: “In almost four decades in the law, I thought I had come across every perversion known to mankind, but this is a new one on me. I have never heard of a ‘cycle-sexualist.'" 
Neither have I.  Sexualist.  That’s a word in Scotland.
In the BBC report, there’s a picture of a bicycle chained to a fence.  In England these days, victims of sexual assault are treated with more compassion.  They are not arrested, let alone chained.  A bicycle is unable to defend itself.  Its very structure invites abuse.  It is made to ride.  Town bicycle – you know what that means.  Although we are not told the gender of this machine, a barrister could twist things around to show that she brought it on herself.  A male bike would provoke a Sheriff even more, and what if it was only a few years old?

The importance of staying on green

When I was at school, there was a boy named Birdseye.  Our teacher called him Bird’s beak, Birdbrain, and so on.  I thought it was funny.  My name wasn’t Birdseye.  Or Wurm.  Sir called him Grub.   He didn’t connect the two, bird and grub.  These days, insults only come from little beaks.  Teachers get the sack. 
Home time.  I slipped out of the girls’ school and reached the bus stop, safe back in the adult world.  You’d think.  A group of girls had come through the gate behind me.  When they saw me at the bus stop, they chorused “Hallo, sir,” suggestively, the way that only teenage girls can do, but everybody understands.
“Hey, hey, hey,” said the man next to me.  He didn’t have to say it so loud.  “Male teacher at a girls’ school.  He must be gay.”
Move on.  I made it to Hainault.  It’s an outer London suburb.  I got off the train and walked towards the bus stop for Chigwell Row, which is up the hill, where it’s green, and there are lots of trees, with a church on top.  I don’t live there.  I was helping a wealthy Russian with her English. 
The bus stop is next to the station.  I was almost there when a man dropped his bag on the footpath in front of me.
“Can you pick it up for me, please?” 
It wasn’t pretty please.  I looked at him.  He was about my age.  He wasn’t drunk.  When I didn’t bend down straightaway, he carried on speaking, like someone who wanted to finish a script.  But his tone was harder.
“I asked you to pick it up for me.” 
“I thought you dropped it on purpose.”
“Fuck off!”
He walked on, I walked on, we continued with our afternoon.  I wonder how long he’s been doing that, in Hainault of all places, and how he hasn’t been stabbed to death. 
It was very hot, a nice day for the beach.  I’d just got sand in the face.   The road outside Hainault station doesn’t look much like a beach, except for the litter and the bare-chested youths.  I don’t remember if Hainault made the news during the riots.  It doesn’t mean there weren’t any riots.  The youths of Hainault may have intended to riot, perhaps some of them even thought they were rioting, but people didn’t notice any difference, and it wasn’t reported.
          A child’s mother once called me a wanker.  Parents, like children, can say things teachers can’t.  In some schools you can’t even discipline the children.  I mean you’re not allowed to.  I was sent to a primary school in Hackney.  It’s London’s Wild East.  The deputy head explained their ‘traffic light’ system.  A lot of schools have it.  All the children start on green.  If they’re bad, their names are moved to yellow.  If they’re bad again, their names are moved to red.  She emphasised the importance of staying on green.  I thought she might have told the children that, not me.  The class teacher said the children never stopped talking.  I thought she might have told the children that, not me.  

           She came in later while I was teaching.  The children were completely quiet.  She was amazed.  Then she saw the traffic lights.  A lot of names on yellow and red.  She was horrified.  I was thrown out before lunch.        

A Big, Fat Royal Wedding

We need some Royal news, something big to catch up with the monarchies abroad which are procreating and abdicating at reckless speed. 
How about another Wedding?  You remember the last one.  The UK was a better place.  Weeks before the ceremony, TV pictures showed happy brown children and happy black children lining the streets of London, waving little Union Jacks as if the Wedding was already here.  Where did those pictures come from?  The children weren’t waiting for Wills and Kate.  Not that far ahead.  They were waving their little flags at something else.  Whatever it was, some file pictures had been cleverly employed.   It looked like a Royal Wedding.  Perhaps it was.  There has been more than one.  The BBC was misleading us again, but for once it didn’t matter.
Adults were also pleased just looking at the happy children.  Liberals enjoyed the ethnic mix; conservatives, the buzz of Empire.  On the big day, at the Abbey, we saw a black choir boy, a yellow choir boy and a white choir boy with glasses, standing side by side.  Given the white-cheeked adults wedged into the stall behind them like a row of perfect dentures, it is clear that over time the incongruities are effaced. 
The roads were swept clean, too, but the Wedding wasn’t good for everyone.  Anarchists were arrested and banned from central London.  They had once made jokes about Diana’s death, so it probably served them right.  But what about the squatters, living inoffensively in grand, old buildings, vast and vacant as cathedrals?  They were evicted in a single heap – emptiness is next to godliness – while the libertarians who defend them were distracted by the pomp.

Less enchanting than Diana’s, the Wedding just reminded us of her.  In the papers, people said the bridesmaid was prettier than the bride.  They weren’t arrested.  We followed the procession on the BBC.  The commentary was so sombre it felt like burying royalty, not marrying it.  People complained.  They weren’t thrown out of London.  They watched the “Big, Fat Gypsy Wedding” on Channel 4 instead.  Channel 4 is very helpful.  It does the same at Xmas.  We get the Alternative Queen’s Message, one year a transvestite from Tooting.  

Another Giant FA Cup

May is a month that shows the importance of winning – exams, football finals and the like. The FA Cup is a favourite of mine, mainly because of its name.  I prefer it with two syllables – FA Cup – although it should be three.
When teachers here mention sport, they talk about the teamwork side of it, not the trophies.  I guess they know that most people are losers, and that children might become dissatisfied, then anti-social, if winning was more important to them than taking part.  Perhaps some teachers really believe what they say.  Perhaps they’re just losers. 
In a primary school assembly last month, the children watched a cartoon entitled Teamwork. They enjoyed it, as children tend to do.  I’m not sure they got the message, though.  I’m not sure I did. 
A dozen little birds were sitting on a wire, feather to feather, looking quite pleased with themselves, as little birds tend to do.  They were all identical.  A much bigger bird flew down and pushed his way into the middle.  He was a different colour and very clumsy.  The wire sagged because of his weight.  The little birds got sick of it.  They started pecking at the big bird’s claws, one by one. This seemed to hurt as he took each claw off the wire as it was pecked.  In the meantime, the wire kept sagging lower and lower.  The big bird now hung upside-down.  He almost touched the ground. Just one big claw was clinging to the wire.  The little birds could see that they were nearly done, so they pecked even harder.  Then two of them raised their beaks and looked at each other.  It was too late. The big bird eased himself onto the ground and removed the final claw, releasing the wire like a giant bowstring.  The little birds shot up into the air so fast that their feathers came off.  A moment later, they plopped back to earth through a cloud of floating feathers.  The big bird sat and watched.  When the little birds realised they were naked, they ran off to hide.
The teacher who was taking the assembly asked the children to comment on what they had seen.  They all said the right thing.  Someone pointed out that it was dangerous to sit on a wire.  The teacher agreed.  An older child said that the little birds were punished for discriminating against the big one because he looked different.  The teacher agreed again.  No one said that the little birds’ teamwork backfired, that revenge feels good, or that bullies win.  

Bi guy, 62, very open-minded dog

I saw this dating ad on TV and I thought, how nice, a fellow creature who won’t look down on you.  Pets can be picky, but one dog at least won’t snarl.  Then I was disappointed.  On the next line, the word lover was waiting to pounce.  The bi guy, 62, was an open-minded dog lover. 
It was meant to be reassuring.  You can trust someone who keeps a pet.  Daters, like everybody else, are looking for people they can trust.  They often specify genuine.  I’ve even seen Status no problem, just be genuine.  It doesn’t matter if your intended mate is married, as long as you can trust them.  But however genuine another man’s wife turns out to be with you, she is not being very genuine with him.
Loverand love are two words that don’t often appear on dating sites, unless they relate to a pet.  You don’t want to put people off, especially if you’re looking for love.  Of course, it’s usually more to do with fun.  It’s also pretty mercenary.  I like Must have own house and car.  It does make physical meetings easier, so it’s partly practical, but whoever posts this could sound like a money-grubber.  To tell the truth, on-line daters count pennies as much as penises.  They don’t write own house and car.  They put ohac instead.  And gen, not genuine.  No tws = don’t reply if you don’t want sex.  They abbreviate to save the credits on their account.   Think about it, though.  If you have your ohacand want to impress an f, m, cd, xd, tv or ts, too many abbreviations might just look stingy. 
There must be people out there who are looking for love.  OK, it was just a thought. But there arepeople, apparently, who believe in ‘forever.’  What else can ltr mbmmean?  I saw this the other day.  Usually, the ad will run: text chat mbm (maybe more).  That’s where the ohac come in.  But what more is there after an ltr (long-term relationship)?  Marriage?  Exchanging smutty videos till we die?  One day, hopefully quite soon, I will stop having thoughts.
Before I leave you – no, I’m not dumping you today, or dying – a final word on pets.  There are people who let their dog, or hamster, watch them make love.  Watch, not join in.  Perhaps some people insist.  Sit!  I expect a dog would show more interest than a hamster.  A pet could also help if things went wrong.   I read in the news that a couple got stuck during sex.  

Offending your fan base

Offending your fan base presupposes fans.  Once you’ve got them, don’t let them go.
In Adelaide, there was a well-known journalist on a leading daily paper. This is a long time ago.  He had his own column where he commented on all sorts of things.  He could do what he liked.  He’d been popular for decades, especially with middle-aged women.  To tell the truth, what he wrote seemed pretty bland to me.  Maybe that was why he was popular.   
His admirers tended to be the old girls in the foothills, where the polite people lived.  In their letters to the paper, they regularly agreed that he wrote beautiful prose.  Whether he did or not is beside the point.  They said he did.  Most of what he wrote had some resonance with the older generation.  This was natural.  He was getting on himself.  He wasn’t just courting the older reader.  He wasn’t 19, flirting with Aunt. 
Still, I’m not sure why the old girls liked him so much.  Perhaps he reassured them.  They thought someone understood them.  Perhaps they just liked him because everyone else did.  He was very easy to read.  Anyway, his articles were the main reason they opened their newspaper in the morning.
For me, the most interesting thing about him was the manner in which he folded.  It was a kind of literary suicide, if not a conscious one.  He may have been complacent.  He didn’t see it coming. 
The old girls of Adelaide were picking up their paper, as they usually did, from the driveway or the garden, where the lad had thrown it; they were looking at the headlines, as they usually did, before turning to their favourite column.  What was it about today?  The shape of women’s bodies.  
He hadn’t done that before.  Something didn’t feel right.  Again, it all seemed pretty bland to me.  He had just set down, in his beautiful prose, the opinion that women of a certain age should not wear jeans, in particular the tight sort that teenagers wear.  They should show a bit of leg.  The naked leg, or even one in stockings, was better for an older woman.  He himself preferred the actual leg.
We will never know what triggered that article.  He probably saw an old girl in tight jeans on the bus into town, or just popping around to the shops, and then wished he hadn’t.  We’ve all done that.  It’s not something you would imagine, is it, like a poet?  His mistake was to put his thoughts down in print.  He never said that middle-aged women have lumpy bodies.  He didn’t need to.  And now ladies knew that he looked at their legs.  He came to be regarded as a kind of pervert, or at least someone who had grown senile, a writer who had gone on writing too long.  None of his old fans were flattered that he noticed what they wore, at least not the ones who wrote in to complain.  No one defended him.
He retired, or the paper pushed him.

Punctuated by a schoolboy

I thought I should run a check on my internet profile, so I did a Google search.  A split second later, there I was. 
‘My cat tends to jump on and torture an older male cat we own. She’s spaid and about 8 months and the male cat hates her?’ 
The male would be a sci-fi fan.  I like the question mark.
Life is a litter of mysteries.  Do things just because you can. You might want to cause pain.  You might sometimes do it without meaning to.  We all make mistakes.  I work as an English tutor.  One of my teenage pupils told me that he’d neutered a male cat while on work experience at a vet’s. Being a boy, he is used to making errors.  Spelling, punctuation, that sort of thing.  But the spaying was no mistake.  He was told to do it by the vet.   For once, he put a glinting full stop in the right place.  His mistake, the vet said, was to cut too deep. 
Candidates on work experience make all sorts of blunders.  Like ordinary employees, they are unable to do lots of things which they have been told to do.  They arrive late for work, they put too much sugar in the boss’s tea, they over-darken the photocopies.  They cut too far into the kitten’s flesh.  On work experience, of course, you can get it wrong and no one really minds because no one is paying you.  The vet even said it wasn’t a bad job.  I wonder, do schools send pupils out to hospitals and airlines? 
Most children wouldn’t dare disobey instructions from their employer during work experience.  They want a good report.  But it wouldn’t occur to them in the first place that they might be asked to do something which was wrong.  My pupil hadn't realised.  He'd actually felt quite pleased with himself.

          When he told me about his improvised snip, I ad-libbed a short piece of my own, something about empathy – with the owner of the cat, not the cat itself.  I asked the young man if he’d want his pet cat neutered by a schoolboy.  He said no straightaway.

Sorry

When I walked past Keith’s window last Thursday, just after sunset, he wasn’t doing what he usually did. 
At that time of day, the light on the road was darker than the light inside his room, so anyone passing, and bothering to look in, could see immediately what Keith was up to.  He never closed the heavy curtain till well after sunset.  His thinner, net curtain you could see through quite easily.  Yellow with tobacco smoke and age, it was there where it always was behind the glass.  It looked untouched.  I’d never seen it move.  It was like the painted scenery on a stage.   
Keith was different, though.  He wasn’t sitting with his face towards the window, eyes on the laptop, his features lit strangely by the light from the screen.  He wasn’t standing with his profile to the road, going over something in his mind.  He wasn’t in his kitchen space, touching the toaster.   He was slumped in his chair.  I thought he might be sleeping.  But it didn’t look like sleep. 
The main door to our building was open, wide open.  It did happen now and then, often enough not to alarm me anymore.  I walked in.  Keith’s door, the first on the left, was open too.  A policeman was just inside, writing notes on a pad.  He was standing by the toaster, but he didn’t see it, and I knew that Keith was dead. 
I turned away.  A different man appeared, looking embarrassed, and said sorry.  For the next two days, he and his wife came and went, emptying out Keith’s room bit by bit onto the back seat of a car.  I’ve lived nine years at this address.  When Keith was alive, I didn’t see them once.
He used to trim the bushes and tidy up the garden at the front.  On the tree which he pruned, spring growth is swelling neatly like bacteria on a slide.