Strangeness

I took a phone call in the shop and it was some young guy who wanted a book for his girlfriend. With painful slowness he gave me the details: Sexual Relationships by (he spelled it out) Ivor Biggin. Well it should have been Biggun: after so much effort, he’d even got the joke wrong. And I was equally uninspired. Only later did I think of what I should have said: ‘We were going to order that in, but then we decided that it sounded like a really bad joke.’ Or: ‘Sorry, some tumbleweed’s just blown through the shop, I’ll have to go and deal with that.’ Instead, I just said we didn't have it, and he put the phone down while mumbling to someone else in the room. What was really remarkable about the whole thing was the complete lack of humour informing it.

Customers are rarely funny intentionally. Paula served a woman with a New Zealand accent who asked for a book on (she thought) ‘gravy’. Well, we’ve had stranger requests. So she took her to the ‘sauces’ section of cookery, only to discover that in fact she wanted a book on ‘grieving’. Not the sort of misunderstanding you can comfortably laugh off, at least at the time.

On Friday night we left a tired Ross in the house, and visited the pub. On our return, three cabs had drawn up in front of the house and a very tall man with a sinister obsequious smile was standing outside the front door telling us that they had been ordered from our address. Well Ross had been planning to go to bed; it seemed unlikely that he had ordered one cab, let alone three. On the other hand, maybe he’d suddenly decided to have a party. But when I went in the house was dark and silent and there was no response from behind the closed door of Ross’ bedroom. I went downstairs again to discover that the taxi driver had had the wrong house number.

All perfectly explicable, of course, and yet the incident had a decidedly uncanny air. The fact that the cabbie looked like he should have been driving Dracula’s coach and horses helped; also, the fact that there were three cabs; and the hushed gloom of the house, in place of the imagined party. It was strangely frightening, in an unresolved, Robert Aickman-ish way.

Though perhaps not as frightening as Vernon Kay’s All-Star Family Fortunes on Saturday night. Since Vernon Kay has had his hair cut, he looks like a completely different person: it’s like he’s been replaced. The sequence where they introduced the families of the ‘stars’ had the camera zooming through the front door and all over their houses at terrifying speed, to the accompaniment of music played at nerve-jangling volume. Although this was ‘family entertainment’, it had borrowed its signature moves from some state-of-the-art horror movie. Is this what people now regard as normal? Dave and I fled from this inhuman spectacle to Billericay (with the aid of Chad, who drove) and we wound up watching the future head of geography at my old school bouncing on a trampoline in the dark at the back of a pub. Well obviously, there was more to it than that.

carry on

Someone rang twenty minutes before opening time and was not best pleased when Verity said the systems weren’t up and running yet, and could he ring back at nine? It had - he roared - taken him all the previous day to find our phone number. ‘All day’ to find the phone number of a shop (part of a well-known chain) in the high street! One began to wonder what terrible experiences he had gone through. Perhaps he could write a book about his adventures.

On one occasion when I did not manage to avoid being behind the counter, I had to serve this aggravating woman who is notorious for changing her mind in the midst of a transaction. True to form, she first wanted points added to her loyalty card, then, no, she wanted to redeem the points already on it to pay for the books she’d just bought, which meant refunding the original transaction and doing it all over again. And, she added, she was in a hurry. Well that’s just what you do if you’re in a hurry, isn’t it? Ask, on a whim, for a shop assistant to do something really complicated.

At first I thought she was a con artist, then just insane. Now I think she’s a renegade mystery shopper, who has lost contact with HQ and has started to believe her own cover story. Hopefully they’ll ‘bring her in’ soon. And shoot her.

Paula encouraged me to start unpacking the other day by telling me that I would be able to ‘get the snakehead out’. This curious phrase was in fact a reference to the many copies of Anthony Horowitz’s new kid’s bestseller Snakehead which were waiting to hit the shop floor. Later, a complete ban on innuendo was announced by Barbara, after a discussion on the sexuality of a job applicant got out of hand. Then, only a moment after this, she said - in all innocence, re the Lynx delivery guy - ‘Is he coming in the front or the back?’

Well, we fell about. Just for the record, he came in the front and went out the back.

I’m supposed to be doing the ‘CDP’, or ‘continuous development plan’, but so far I’ve only glanced at a few of the questions it poses. ‘What would you use a ladder for?’ Hmm. Challenging. CBeebies haven’t covered that yet.

Mind you, if they did, it would probably turn out that you use a ladder to make soup. I found myself idly watching something called Numberjacks the other morning. This is a bit like Thunderbirds, only with anthropomorphic numbers instead of the Tracy family. They are sent on rescue missions out into the world, the idea being, so I assumed, to teach kids how maths helps in everyday situations. Except the everyday situation in this case was that a malevolent spoon was floating around exchanging heavy objects for light ones. And vice versa. The problem was resolved when the evil spoon decided to take a rest from her (for the spoon was a she) evildoing on one end of a see-saw. The numbers simply jumped on the other end and catapulted her off into the stratosphere, leaving me wondering what I’d learned. That numbers are heavier, and less evil, than spoons? Or simply that the world children are being prepared for by TV is a very strange one?

Though no stranger than my mind, I suppose. I had a dream that three dogs were asleep in my room. I chucked them out into the garden, but the last one suddenly turned into Sid James. Let sleeping dogs lie is the phrase that sprung to mind, though it seemed a peculiar way of illustrating it.

shot by both sides

At Waterstone’s they’ve gone crazy! All stationery is 3 for 2, suddenly! Did you see that American programme, which was like a spoof of The Apprentice, in which the ‘boss’ who was making all the decisions about who was hired and fired turned out to be a monkey? Likewise, it wouldn’t surprise me if all Waterstone’s marketing decisions were being made by a chicken with its head cut off.

All this frantic undercutting is so undignified, isn’t it? Running around slapping stickers on things like in a children’s game. No wonder Paula’s resigned, due to high blood pressure. ‘Do you resent me jumping ship?’, she asked me. I pointed out that, with no job to go to, she might just as well say she was jumping overboard. And I can’t resent that, no matter how hard I try.

But it's pretty clear that she doesn’t care anymore. I mean, the other day she put four copies of In The Woods by Tana French under ‘w’ instead of ‘f’. Now there are occasions when you can legitimately confuse title and author (ie: Charlotte Gray by Sebastian Faulks) and ‘Woods’ is a plausible surname, I agree, but ‘In The’? Despite her attempts to convince me that this is perfectly valid in hip-hop culture (she’s from South Woodham Ferrers) I was not won over. That would be In Da Woodz, anyway, wouldn’t it?

Luckily I can go home to a warm welcome. ‘…fuckin’ shoot you!’, comes the cheery call from upstairs in the office as I walk in. ‘On! Your! Knees! NOW!’ Dave playing a computer game. Or so he says.

Mat Sadler is a thieving bastard shitbag

Entitled thus because Mat has set up a ‘feed’ from this blog - and others - to his newly revamped website in a desperate attempt to pass them off as his own work. So we’ll see how that title looks on his shiny new homepage. Very professional, I imagine.

We went to the fireworks at Button Common, Herongate. Mat prophesied that the trees, getting nearer to the bonfire every year, will one day go up in flames. ‘The trees are growing’, he announced, as though it might be news to us. I had a sudden image of him running about in the crowd, all dishevelled, screaming into the uncomprehending faces of bonfire-goers: ‘The trees are growing!’ But everything passed off without incident: no fireworks, as they say.

Although there were fireworks. That phrase was not, perhaps, the best I could have chosen.

Talking of clumsy writing, there was some discussion of this blog at the Green Man later. Some of it was praise, even: it was suggested that, if it isn’t actually worthy of publication, it does at least show ‘transferable skills’. Hannah said it was ‘brilliant, but not accomplished.’ She seemed to have an unusually specific idea about the definition of ‘accomplished’.

But it is nice to be appreciated. I just hope it doesn’t make me too self-conscious to

What was I saying? Oh yeah, Rhys was down from Cardiff, staying at our place. In the absence of taxis, I ended up walking back to Brentwood with him. Cars kept honking their horns at us. As two people walking along the pavement we were a real novelty, it seemed: enough in ourselves to promote a carnival atmosphere. Later a car stopped for the occupants to ask us the way to Southend, then they laughed and drove off. Were we missing something? At one point, the cheerful sounds of a party ending (fond farewells, car doors slamming) gave way, as we approached the house in question, to vicious abuse: two blokes had got out of their car and were verbally laying into their host, who was responding in kind. What had gone wrong? One imagined these men cheerily saying goodbye and getting into their car, then one of them suddenly saying: ‘Those twiglets were stale! He was insulting us!’

Or was this just a traditional Essex farewell?