26. The Successful Person

If there's anybody who makes you feel sick, it's the person who is  a success. By success I mean anyone who can make money, or decisions, or their way in the world, or progress.

Yeah I know its not a motorbike, but it was the closest I could find - see later on

Usually they only things they don't make are mistakes. Leastways, according to them they don't.

The average person is a bag of indecisive phobias, and usually has as much natural talent and purpose as a jellyfish without a sting. Or is a natural disaster area when it comes to making or mending anything. How many of us are the type that fixes a shelf only to have it fall down that moment it get dusted? And on to your foot, as a rule.

Or plants in the garden only to see it wilt and die before your eyes as if you'd sprayed it with battery acid.

And don't you hate the bloke who gives you a large bag of the reddest tomatoes you've ever seen, weighing about a pound each because he's got so many that he and his family will never be able to eat them all? You know, and he knows that your plants have got an average of three miserable, wizened, puny nubbins on each, trying hard to make up their minds whether they're tomatoes or greengages. And are going to end up as green tomato chutney, which is muck you can't stomach anyway, cos the only way they'll ripen to red is if you happen to cut your finger on the pruning knife and bleed all over them.

He's a success. You ain't. And you hate his guts.

When the car breaks down, do you get out, lift the bonnet and stare at the works trying hard to remember what the hell makes it all tick, with a mind as blank as a petrified eyeball? Is your first instinct to walk home and leave the bloody thing? Hoping that some mechanical Rumplestiltskin will have mended it during the night and all you'll have to do in the morning is get in and drive it away. That is, if you ain't lost the keys.

                                                 

You're like that ? Well, don't worry. You're one of the great army of incompetents. The average bloke who can't knock a nail in without hitting his thumb or smashing the hammerhead in to the wall.  It's these geezers who turn every quid they get in to a million, who can look a fierce Alsatian in the eye and make it back off with its rudder slotted between its rear legs , who can put the stars in the eyes of beauty with a few well chosen compliments, who don't admit that such a word as fate exists; they're the ones out of step. We're the naturals, the folk who, when they get a quid back a loser with it, if confronted by a poodle get bit, when trying the old Don Juan stuff with a bird are told "Get knotted, buster", and are ruled by fate and all the other four letter words in the language.

                                                  

So, if you're a cesspit of despair and every other situation is a O one (Oh dear, what the hell am I going to do about that?) be comforted by Robbie Burns famous words - "The best laid schemes o'mice and men, gang aft aglae" - which translated into English means that even the super-beings who can't a put a foot wrong, even when walking through a field of cows suffering with diarrhoea make a cock up of things now and then.

A lovely example of this happened during the fireman's strike*. A unit of the army, who had taken over emergency firefighting, were called out to rescue an old lady's cat who had got stuck up a tree, which they did with trained efficiency.

Afterwards, having thanked her, they trooped out, got on their Green Goddess and drove off, running over the cat and killing it. Happens to anybody, don't it?

                                                 

And should you think that only you are the ultimate in total incompetence, ponder on the guy who achieved an Everest peak in cock-ups, both metaphorically and literally, when having a bit of nooky in the back seat of the lady's mini. His back gave out and froze solid and no ways could he move, nor she.

In desperation she attracted assistance by pressing on the hooter with her right leg, which was draped elegantly over the drivers seat. Eventually they were freed by the fire brigade who got them out by removing part of the car.

The lady seemed less worried by the star turn being in full view of a lot of gleeful firemen than what she would tell her husband when he wanted to know how the back of his car got cut off.

Another example of making a cock-up of things actually happened to me when taking a motorbike test many years ago.

This I took on a moped, which you could in those days. A pass qualified you to ride anything from a 50c.c. to a 600c.c. which was a stupid state of affairs. But no matter, after riding god knows how many times round the block, first one way, and then the other to show that I could turn right and left, I was told to ride around till he jumped out and waved his arms and I was to do an emergency stop. I rode around for so long that I thought he'd gone home and forgot me, when he suddenly appeared waving his arms like a windmill in my path. I didn't know where he came from but I saw where he went. Straight back in to the cafe where he'd probably been swilling tea while watching me, with one tremendous leap to get out of my way as I shot straight at him at 30 because I'd put on the anchors so hard that I snapped both the handbrake cables.

Funny enough he gave me a pass, possibly in case I reported him for being in the cafe, which shows messing things up ain't the end of everything. After all, man's real genius lays in being incompetent. Most of us are good at it and if you're like me, with a head which is useful only in keeping your ears apart, don't worry you're doing a good job. Have compassion for those people who've got it all. They're in the minority. Gosh, I hate 'em. Don't you ? 

Notes:

* That'll be 1977  Firemans Strike 1977

25. Memory Lane

The old days when a person could reckon on a good long convalescent period after an operation have long gone by the board. The method used these days is to get you up and active almost before the blood has stopped dripping.

Mind you, this is nothing new. Women who work in the paddy fields have always given birth to their offspring on location, and carried on turning out the daily quota of rice with the one hand whilst smacking the new-born's rump with the other.

This is positive thinking, for the longer we don't use any part of the body, the more chance of it becoming permanently redundant. Jogging is a direct result of this result line of thought, but it is not intended to be an exercise to keep perfect our aging muscles, but to stop them disappearing down Memory Lane, never to return again.

Some people I have seen jogging have obviously reached the point years ago and are only on one sure thing. A heart attack, cos the only muscles they've got left are those that push their eyes out like organ-stops. The rest is flab and bones which they cultivated when they took to winding up their watches in front of an open window for their daily exercise.

When I was in my teens I used to go swimming in the Serps early in the morning before going to work. Summer and winter. During the winter, diving in the water was like a cross between getting a belt between the shoulder blades from Mohammed Ali and having a fakir's bed shoved up your swimming trunks. Made you gasp for breath while all your skin tried to climb round your neck to get away from the icy depths.

Now most of the chaps who regularly swam there were elderly men who looked as though they would have been better occupied supping a cup of hot tea in bed while they scanned the obituary column in the paper to see if their name was there.

The point is that it never affected these blokes cos they'd always done it. Never had stopped using their muscles and their resistance to cold water. Whereas I have, and if I tried it now it'd be curtains.

Use of the brain is just the same as the use of the muscles. If you don't use the old loaf, eventually you just can't.

Especially the section which acts as a memory bank. Retention of facts and figures has to be practiced just like weight-lifting. Of course there are things that the brain never forgets. Like the date of the Battle of Hastings and the word that springs to mind when a military band strikes up Colonel Bogey. But this is like the minute bit of gristle on your arm which is all that is left where a bicep used to be, if you ain't used it for a long time.

Mind you, it isn't disastrous if the memory don't work like a computer. These people who can remember everything they've ever read aren't always better off for it.

Remember the bloke who got the title of Brain of Britain when winning the final of "Mastermind"? He could remember everything he'd ever read but a fat lot of good it was to him when it came to earning some bread. He was unemployed.

The only fund-raising project he could conjure up was to offer himself as a stud to any lady who wanted a child with a super-IQ. A bit dodgy really, as although he probably got some work alright, there was always a chance that he could be sued if the end product didn't meet the Trades Description Act.

For all that, it's nice to be able to call on your memory when it's needed, and it can play tricks if not kept up to scratch as I found out one day at Heathrow.

We'd been seeing off our son and family after they'd been over here on holiday from Canada, and were strolling through the lounge in Terminal Three, when we passed a unit of the Old Bill, who gave me a very queer look. So much so, that I looked back after a few more steps and he was still giving me this eye.

Then slowly, but very purposefully he walked towards us. My first reaction was to run for it. I seem to have a well developed guilt complex as I always feel that I must have cheated should I ever complete a game of patience, even if I ain't.

This feeling of being guilty even when I haven't done anything must have come from childhood when we played football in the street. I was nearly always posted as lookout at the end of the road, and at the first sight of a police helmet had to yell "Copper" to enable the teams to bolt for it. Football in the street was frowned upon the  law in those days, and a constant vendetta was waged between the Fuzz, who were determined to stop it, and the hordes of herbs who had nowhere else to play.

After hollering "Copper", I invariably ran for it, although I hadn't been playing anyway. Thus the urge to scarper when Nick Nick approached.

He said "I had a feeling I knew you when I saw you, but I couldn't remember nicking you so couldn't place you for a moment". I searched through the memory bank but no go. Bit awkward, you don't like to tell a man that he could be the invisible man as far as your recollection goes. He could have been the bloke who let me off with a caution for speeding along Greenford Road, and wouldn't take it kindly if I didn't remember a friendly gesture and the face that went with it.

"You don't remember me" said he. "Do you?"

"Course I do" I said "Just for a minute I couldn't, er, sort of, er, think of where".

"You don't, do you?" he insisted.

I said no I didn't.

Turned out that he was an ex-postman who I used to do a station service with on late turn. Nothing to it really, but it illustrates my point that if you don't use any part of your body it'll go rusty and eventually die on you.

There's a saying that a starving man's stomach shrinks through disuse, so be warned, as I hate to think of what happens to the bloke who has been celibate for a long time.