Ah, Margot!
Today I've been reading an exhaustive but badly written website about execution. This seemingly oxymoronic line amused me:
A walk to work this morning in the adorable rain. Paving slabs were glistening; policemen's capes were shining; the flanks of cab horses were bejewelled with rain drops. The only thing marring this wet and sexy vision of London was the number of golfing umbrellas being used by solo persons which is surely the pedestrian equivalent of driving a 4x4. I know that standard umbrellas are not quite up to the task of protecting one's trouser cuffs, but surely a bit of damp cuffage is worth avoiding the opprobrium of one's fellow man?
Great heaving Crivens! Since I wrote that I've ... well you all know what I've done because I've spent lots of time with you off-wiki. Any old, I'm back online, and in broadband flavour. After three weeks with no net access other than occasional forays to the 24 Hour Tinseltown Diner it's great to be back. And it's still not quick enough.
Today I performed a simple favour for a stranger and was rewarded with a case study into the hopelessly and inherently flawed nature of humankind which has fundamentally depressed me.
There is already something poignant and irritating about the lonely soul who will tell their life story to the first poor schmo civil enough to pay them attention. But the stroke victim to whom I passed a box of tissues from the bottom shelf in a supermarket gave me so much more. The effects of his stroke were by no means as obvious as the effects of his alcoholism. Alcohol on the breath of a young and sprightly thing smells - depending on your outlook - appetising. Seeping through the pores and between the mottled lips of a wreck, it's not such a pleasure. There is a foetor to it as if it were a metaphor for something rotten within. Given the demons that drive people to drink, it probably ain't such a metaphor either. The man could barely have been more than in his mid-sixties but his physical condition had ceased to reflect his age. His cheeks were a network of dead-end veins; a map of a broken city. His hair was dull and brittle, his anorak grey; and although he seemed clean enough, he ought to have been stained. He had the air of a stained thing: something yellow under the skin; blood under the fingernail; a blot that always reappears behind the wallpaper. His big old glasses were blurred, or maybe his eyes were.
These people always take you by surprise: how did we get so deep into enemy territory so quickly together?
'Don't get old, son.'
'It's better than the alternative.'
'What? … oh …'
'Dying young.'
And there he was, back in the army, a sergeant throwing himself into battle without a thought for his own life but trusted implicitly by his men.
'I had a girl back home. Sent me a Dear John, see. After that I didn't care whether I lived or died.'
The man had a soul; he was sensitive. We skipped lightly through the rest of his career: anti-terrorism. Middle East and a lot of time in Cyprus. Back in Blighty he met a woman as beautiful as the one who'd hurt him and they married and had thirty happy years until she died of breast cancer last year. They had a daughter. A beautiful daughter. Sadness was a glance to the left and a pause. He didn't talk about his daughter after that; was happier reliving the army life. In Cyprus: the ambulance truckful of nurses with babies (or were they pregnant? His story was fogged. Pregnant nurses bears thinking about even less in the light of what happened). The Turks killed all the nurses and left the babies in the ditch at the side of the road to be eaten by dogs. The aftermath of this was the only thing he'd seen that had really upset him. Really got to him. You steel yourself but … The man had a soul; he was sensitive.
'My commandin' officer said to me, "I'm going to turn a blind eye. It's up to you." So we went in to the nearest dozen villages with tanks, the lot, and flattened 'em. Killed everyone. Women, children, we went in with our machine guns, didn't matter. Wiped out the lot. Them tanks, a village won't stand a chance.' It was terrorist country, you see. Terrorists could have been hiding in the villages and it was retribution - these women and children machine gunned, villages flattened - for the thing they'd seen. The terrible, degraded thought flashed through my head that he'd deserved his stroke, his dead wife, his lost daughter but these were just events that happened once, in the life of this man. 'It don't do no good. It's just tit fer tat. It's what they get into in Israel, Ireland. Where does it end? It can't do any good.' The man had a soul; he was sensitive.
'The Turkish army was the worst. They're the ones we feared. I wouldn't stand up to them, they're animals. The French are the best. They start off in the Foreign Legion then they get trained to be Paras. Yer Germans, Brits, they're all right but the Turks: they start off as animals and then they get trained to be Paras and they're still animals.' He told me another Cyprus story; how the Turkish army were coming and he had orders to get out. He tried to take the local bar owner Georgios with him, but Georgios would have none of it. He left it too late to leave and the Turkish army showed up. He told the lead chap straight that he and his men weren't going to fight; that they'd be going now and if they could take Georgios that would be fine. The lead chap removed the cigarette from his mouth and calmly said, 'You can go. He stays.' And fifty men took Georgios aside and stuck their bayonets in him. The man didn't like to see that. He had a soul; he was sensitive.
Well maybe he exaggerated and maybe he didn't seem sensitive but he did have a soul and there was a reason he drank. He was the human condition wrapped up in a miserable grey anorak. He did stupid things and he knew they were stupid and he did them anyway. He knew there was something better but it was tantalisingly out of reach. Like a box of tissues.
He had got on to American foreign policy now: how they'd done things in Iraq that we would never know about, and how their fleet could surround Britain and flatten it and this is why Blair kow-tows. But I'd drawn my conclusions (I have a soul; I am sensitive), got ten minutes' entertainment and an anecdote. I stopped him mid-breath.
'It's been nice talking to you,' (nice!) 'but I must get on.' Poor devil looked amazed and crestfallen.
'Yes, so must I' he lied and trundled away. I fairly sprinted for the booze aisle.
I have started a LiveJournal but it's just for chatting. This one is still my real one, as far as it goes. Anyway, while looking through my cartoons I was struck by how familiar they are, how few of them there are and how ... I suppose how fed up with them I am. It's really about time I did some new ones.