33. All Or None

I expect you've noticed how things have a habit of going from one extreme to the other.  Our weather is one of the best examples of this as any postman will know.  Many a walk has been started by a furtive character disguised as the Ancient Mariner battling his way from door to door against the driving rain and wind, and finished a couple of hours later with sweat pouring down his face and back because the sky has cleared and the sun is doing it's best to fry him through his mac.  And how many times has a "double" been started with mac's and hats airily discarded, to enable a clear sky and balmy breeze be enjoyed as much as possible, and finished by the happy, laughing postman moodily squelching across the office floor leaving a trail like a snail up a garden path, Dr. Martin's filled to the brim and trousers flapping soggily against his legs.

There is always some nit who wants to know if it's raining outside, mostly when a delicate operation like trying to extract the bits of yellow pulp that were once registered receipts from a pocket full of bits of string, elastic bands, dog-ends and rain water is under way.  This infuriates me, but is getting off the theme of things going from the sublime to the gorblimey.

London Transport do their best to conform in this respect. There's not one of us who hasn't cooled his heels at a stop for half an hour or more, then in desperation started to walk and when a couple of hundred yards along the road had to belt back like mad to catch any one of the four or more buses which have suddenly appeared in convoy.  See what I mean? All or none.

I was reared in Paddington and like all of my mates lived in a tenement house of three storeys and a basement, I don't mean we occupied all of it , only two rooms and a basement scullery. They were all gas lit, draughty, and very damp with a communal lavatory on one of the landings, which was shared by all the families, from each floor.  No such concession to bodily hygiene was made by builders of these mansions when it came to bathrooms. 

There just weren't any and cleanliness was achieved in a tin tub in front of the kitchen fire, or an up and a downer at the sink.  This was down with your shirt off then up with your pants ditto.  The problem of personal toiletry was rather difficult when lumbered with an ailment as, for instance stomach enteritus, which we knew as the runs.

My mate Charlie was at one time thus severely afflicted and had set up an all time record by being in the "lav" queue seventeen times in a day.  Now Charlie had one all consuming weakness. "Pancakes".  Not the paper thin wafers that masquerade as such, but monsters about an inch thick crammed with currants and raisins, which he always cooked himself. After the seventeenth visit he felt rather empty and thought a couple of his favourite fruit were indicated.  On returning to the two rooms and scullery his family occupied, he found the place in darkness and his mother out.  Apparently the gas had run out. So, not having any money to put in the meter, he decided to mix up the pancakes in the dark and cook them over the fire in the grate.  So he got all the ingredients from the cupboard in the scullery, made the mixture in a basin and had just finished eating the two great thick cakes when his mother returned.

She told him that she'd been to the shops to buy a bag of flour as she knew he'd fancy some pancakes after his stomach upset, and when Charlie said he'd already had them, she said that there wasn't any flour in the cupboard that's why she had gone out to buy some.

After lighting the gas they went to the cupboard to see who was wrong and found what he had made his pancakes with. A bag of starch, which was standing on the same shelf. Charlie got a stomach as hard as a board and never got in the "lav" queue for another week.

See what I mean?  All or none.

32. Cats Have Nine Lives?

aka The Cat Ghost

I've always been proud of what I consider to be my practical frame of mind.  I don’t believe in ghosts or supernatural occurrences, the first are figments of the imagination and the second always have a logical explanation, scientific or otherwise.  It’s funny how many people think their dreams have a special meaning when a touch of the screaming hab-dabs in the night followed by a mouth tasting like the bottom of a parrots cage when waking, is merely the result of too many keg bitters or shag fags the night before.

Spooks, banshees, werewolves and vampires live in books not in life, the only blood suckers I know are mosquitoes, leeches and money-lenders calling themselves finance companies.

If anything went bump in the night where I used to live in Paddington, it was the rats under the floorboards playing tag with the spuds they pinched from the larder, and the rats were there because the Irish family next door kept chickens which they seldom cleaned out.  When I asked Pat why he didn't clean his chickens he said it was natural for them to be like that, but he would make a trap to catch the rats. So he did, and he caught a rat in it too.  Trouble was, the trap he made was the size of a small tea chest, and when he dropped it in a tin bath of water the rat just swam on top of the water inside the cage.  So Pat tried poking it under with a stick but couldn't keep it down, so he decided to electrocute it. He fixed a length of twin flex to a bayonet cap plug, put it in a light plug and plunged the bared ends into the water. The next second there was a blinding flash and the rat was dead and Pat was thrown against the backyard wall with enough force to break his back.  He didn't, luckily, but I thought it would have been easier to clean out the chickens or leave the rats to our cat who, in between siring most of the kittens around and fighting any available tom, was a dedicated rat killer, and seemingly indestructible. 

Until one night he forgot his kerb drill and went to the old tom's Valhalla via the wheels of a passing motorist.

Two little boys knocked at the door and asked did I have a black cat with a white spot on his left ear, cos if I did, he was laying in the road, he'd been "runned over".

It was him alright, white spot and all, so I took him home, dug a hole in the garden, or should I say, backyard, and buried him with due respect for a departed warrior.

It was about an hour later when my wife and I were in the throes of a game of chess and I was in my usual position wondering how the hell can I be two moves from defeat when I’ve had her completely tied up since the start, when the silence was shattered by the deep yowling of a randy tom.

Our tom.  No mistake about it.  We'd heard it so often.

We looked at each other and she said fearfully "It's him". My wife appeared to have gone a delicate shade of green and I felt as if my tongue had been dipped in the budgie grit box.

Reason asserted itself, whoever heard of a cat ghost?  No such thing as ghosts.  Just an interloper who sensed the king was dead and was taking over his domain.  So I opened the door to shoo away the pretender and in walked our mog, as disreputable as ever, between my wife and I and straight to his feed tin. Ate his grub, gave himself his usual swift lick round the face and backside, and sallied forth past my wife and I into the night.

We hadn't moved or said a word.

Hadn't I just buried him two feet deep in the yard? We went to the grave to see and it was undisturbed.  Then I tumbled. As I said, there's a logical explanation for everything and what I'd done was to bury another cat exactly like ours. A coincidence no less, which more than likely accounts for half the so called ghosts.

Mind you, thinking back, I never did dig up the stranger to check that it was still there, and as we moved some years ago I will never know. Thats stupid thinking, ain't it?  After all, our old mog is still with us, a pretty solid ghost, but that old saying about a cat having nine lives must have originated from somewhere, mustn't it?