Haiku

So….it’s been a while, and you might be wondering what on earth I’ve been up to since my last entry. Well, first I must explain my reasons for the temporary loss of service. November 2005 wasn’t such a good month for me, but this diary isn’t about me whinging on about my troubles. Suffice to say, I had a major health scare with one of my daughters, and the strain of worrying about her made me lose the will to write. I didn’t have it in me to be wry and amusing, so I stopped writing and started learning. But on the flipside, what I was learning helped me to recognise the cause of Rosie’s problem, and the skills I’ve acquired helped to rectify it, so, as usual, fate moved me forward in a positive way. 
I do have a lot to write about, but I must be strict and start at the beginning. I shall start with weirdy-beardy man - I’ve never been particularly fond of facial hair, especially on a man, and WBM did nothing to change my opinion.
I got an email out of the blue one day, from a guy who’d heard me on the radio and wanted my help. He seemed very personable and explained that he was holding some kind of charitable conference in Scotland, and asked if I would do a 20 minute speech about the importance of fathers. I had never spoken in public before, but I was flattered to have been asked and agreed to do the gig for nothing, because it was for a good cause, highlighting the important role that fathers play in family life. The man mentioned Fathers for Justice, and I told him that although I agreed with their reasons for trying to get publicity for their cause, I did question the need to wear those strange costumes, which highlighted so starkly the parts of a man, which are perhaps, best kept hidden if you’re trying to make a serious point. The only serious point I could see was clearly outlined in Batman’s tights, as he made his protest at the Queen’s official residence. And that wasn’t nice. I do believe it is the only time that the crown jewels have been on display to the public at Buckingham Palace.
However, I digress.
WBM called me a while later and asked if I’d fly up to do a quick interview for his departmental newsletter, in order to publicise the conference. I don’t know how much they give local councils up in Scotland, but it’s clearly a great deal, and it did seem a bit odd that they could justify the cost of flying me up to Glasgow to do a quick chat, when a simple phone call would have sufficed. I said I would be too busy, and so WBM said he would fly down to do the interview, and asked if I knew any places near to where I lived that he could stay. This made me feel a bit uneasy, and I told him that it would be better if I met him near the airport. All the time I was thinking,  ‘Charity - it’s for charity. He seems nice enough and he works for local government, so it has to be kosher’. It was about as kosher as Gwendolyn, the happy pig.
So, still feeling decidedly uneasy, I drove to meet WBM at the B&B at which he was staying. I’m sure that deep down that some of his intentions were good, but when he suggested I go to his room in order to do my chat with a woman back in his office in Glasgow, I realised that I’d been stitched up like an Arbroath smokie.
I did my chat with the woman via WBM’s mobile, from the relative safety of the guesthouse garden, and as far as I was concerned, that was the end of that. But WBM had other ideas, and before you could say ‘iambic pentameter’, I was sitting on a cast-iron bench, with crumpled man, in crumpled cords and a flat cap, listening to poetry…
I may be abrupt at times, but I am always polite, and out of politeness I stayed put and listened to a selection of poems, penned by my host. Now, I like poetry as much as the next person, and to be read poetry by a man is a wonderful thing, if that man happens to be a man you desire to be with. But I did not desire to be stuck in a garden, balancing a cup of tea on my lap, trying to look earnest and interested as pages were turned and words dribbled forth in a whiskery, crumb-tinged drone.
He put down his book for a while and began to talk about my book and website, but then he got on to the subject of my diary, and made mention of my entry about the blind date. He made it clear to me that he was decidedly unhappy about what I’d written, finishing with the words, ‘Shame on you.’ I told him that it was my web site, and my personal account of life, and that if people didn’t want to know my views, they didn’t have to read them. But he just shook his head and said, ’Shame on you’, again and again, and by that stage I was getting ready to leave, because frankly, I’d had about as much Haiku poetry as I could stomach and had already decided that I would not be speaking at the conference if it meant having any more contact with such an angry, creepy, opinionated man. And then came the statement that I just love to hear, ‘And I hope you realise that divorce is much worse than bereavement.’
Shame on you; shame on you, for levelling that at me, Mr. Weirdy Beardy Man.
I got up to leave, and he asked if we could go somewhere to have lunch. Lunch? So, what, WBM, you want me to drive you in my car, with your flat cap and your weighty opinions, and your little book of angst-ridden three-line gems, to a nice little pub, so we can extend this interminable horror of a meeting? Fuck that. Not my exact words, you understand, because I’m far too polite, but on reflection, it’s exactly what I should have said. Or, maybe I should have expressed it in Haiku-speak…

Why am I here?
Danger hovers near
Flattery comes in many forms

Give me a club
And I’ll make your flat cap
Even flatter

But I wimped out. I said I had to paint my kitchen, which was true, and he countered by saying that I shouldn’t waste such a beautiful day painting, when I could be having lunch with him. Don’t really get the logic of that one, but he was insistent, and when I said that I was definitely going home, he then suggested that I might like to drive back that evening in order to see him performing his poetry at an open mic session in a nearby pub. Sounds tempting, doesn’t it? And I’ll admit that I was weighing up whether it might be nice to make the 30-minute drive back to Exeter, and turn up with my trusty 12 bore in order put him, and the crowd, out of their misery.

A 12-bore
Is quite a big bore,
Tiny compared to you.

I decided that I would be a waste of a cartridge, and politely declined, but the offers just kept coming. Next, he asked if I’d like to come down to his place in France and do a workshop on grief – which would be like a workshop on divorce, only much shorter and far less painful…
He tried to sweeten the offer by telling me about the marathon Bridge sessions that took place, late at night, within the cold, granite walls of his rustic watermill. ‘Sometimes, we play all night, it’s fantastic, you really should try it.’ Here’s a newsflash, Mr. WBM, Bridge isn’t something that I like to do all night long, Bridge is something that sad old tossers like you do when they’ve run out of more interesting pursuits involving rubbers, beavers, dummies, undertricks, and three tiresome geriatrics from Falkirk.
I escaped. Oh, the relief. Oh, the shame, that I’d wasted such a glorious spring morning in the company of such an interminable bore. But I’d got away from him and now I could get home, make something lovely for my girls’ supper and try to forget all about it.
Alice came bounding in the through the door sometime later, and I gave her a steaming plateful of Delia’s Chicken Basque. She’d barely taken a mouthful when there was a knock on the door. I went to answer it and was confronted by a beaming apparition in a rather garish smock-dress, who announced that she knew me, and had read my diaries. And then she paused, and stood smiling up at me, waiting for a response. I don’t know why - maybe it was my confused state of mind, or the fact that I am, by nature, a person who readily invites others in for a cup of tea, but I asked this strange woman into my house, having absolutely no idea whom she was.
She could have been one of the Falkirk Bridge four, a nonagenarian ninja, bearing a grudge and about to beat me senseless with WBM’s little book of horrors. She could have been an escaped lunatic, or an Avon lady. She might even have been an escaped lunatic Avon lady, and, judging by her rather alarming blue eyeshadow, and the way she managed to miss her mouth almost entirely during the application of her pearl-shimmer lipstick, she might well have been. I didn’t know, and by then it was too late, because she was already standing in my kitchen; this woman; this person that I didn’t recognise, and now I had to try and think of something to say to her.
Poor Alice was trying to eat her supper, but was sitting open-mouthed, looking in bewilderment at the jolly lady who’d invaded our kitchen.  I was trying desperately to think where I might have met this woman before, willing the kettle to boil and wishing I’d offered her something simple like a pot-noodle or a frontal lobotomy. And then she told me about her divorce, and I remembered who she was, and her strange little husband, who looked and spoke like the cartoon character Droopy, and the fact that I never liked either of them.
I had absolutely nothing in common with her, but she thought she had something in common with me – namely, that since she’d become divorced she was on her own, and naturally, being a widow, I didn’t have any social life, so I’d be readily available for fun nights-out. I thought, ‘Fuck that’. But naturally, I didn’t use that exact phrase, because it’s not polite, so I meekly wrote down her phone number and mumbled something about calling her…sometime never.
And then the tension was broken by the sound to the phone ringing. It was WBM, and by this time I was in no mood for small talk. I told him I would not be flying up to speak at his conference. He expressed surprise and disappointment, he could have expressed milk for all I cared, I wasn’t going to waste any more time or energy on the man. I told him that his behaviour was both inappropriate and unsettling, and that I never wanted to see or hear from him again. I said all this whilst pacing in and out of the kitchen, the jolly Avon Lady psychopath now looking about as bewildered and open-mouthed as Alice, but with less food in her mouth and more lipstick round it.  Frankly, I was too angry to care.
I dispatched WBM with all the control I could muster, said goodbye to the strange woman who’d interrupted Alice’s supper, and closed and locked my front door.
The lessons I’ve learned are twofold: Firstly, I’ve realised that some people, however well-meaning they might first appear, can have ulterior motives, and that using a charitable cause to try to get some baggy-trouser action in your twilight years is wrong, wrong, wrong.
Secondly, I’ve learned not to let just anybody thought my front door, especially at teatime, when my little girl is trying to tell me about her day. Call me callous, call me judgemental, but that’s what I call poetic justice.







© Kate Boydell 2004. All rights reserved. e-mail: [email protected]. Close window.