retrospective two

A woman rang at work trying to sell us a book called Get Rid Of Your Accent. I said it didn’t sound like the kind of thing that would sell in Brentwood. People seem to enjoy their accents here, though possibly they are making a mistake. She said: ‘Do you have a lot of foreigners there?’ ‘God yes’, I was tempted to say, in my best upper-class British voice. ‘Swarms of the blighters. But I seriously doubt if any of them can read.’ I held my tongue, though because, curiously enough, she had a foreign accent herself.

A former employee, Sam, came in with her daughter Ruby, who is - what? - two? However old or young she is, she certainly had an unerring grasp of the most annoying thing she can do in a bookshop. Which is to ‘post’ the books down the back of the shelves, so that they fall into the dust-and-spider-haunted cavity behind and have to be fished out at a later (endlessly deferred) date. She walked around doing this with some enthusiasm, like it was her new job. This is the year, says Sam, in which they will finally make the move they have been going to make for years, to America to live near her parents. Or to Norfolk to live near his parents. (Perhaps you can see why a delay has arisen). One of the two will definitely happen this year. Sam seems to think it will be Norfolk, but I can’t help thinking that America will suit Ruby best.

Extremes of weather continue. Now it’s snow. This morning I heard a commotion outside my bedroom window and it was a couple of youths stealing our ‘LET BY’ sign to go sledging on. I’m not in Ingrave any more, I realized; then immediately went back to Ingrave, where the Daily Mail could give me some perspective on the weird weather conditions (‘Confused Trees’, ‘Frogs In Peril’) and I got my hair cut by a woman who reminisced throughout about a disastrous family holiday in the New Forest in which the tent caught fire and her parents lost their eyebrows.