Me and Graham are thinking of moving in together.
Oh, don’t take on so. The signs have been there for weeks, months even. Those furtive diversions in Midhurst on the way to and from the office- what did you think they were? Did you really think I was just going off to walk the dogs on Bepton Common, or do multiple trips to the Amenity Dump? All those unexplained bills? The strange smells around my car? The truncated phone calls whilst out in the garden? We’ve known each other for years, Graham and me, so it’s a wonder something like this hasn’t happened before. Surely you guessed?
Looking back, I suppose it all kicked off when we both simultaneously joined the ‘Why I hate Audis’ forum, him on one side of the desk, me on the other, and the sun slanting in the oil-smeared window through the little birch wood behind. We’re not talking Chekhov, I grant you, but the whole scene did have something of an air of Russian tragedy about it. Romantic but businesslike.
‘Face it Rog, you just shouldn’t have bought it,’ he said, and handed me a bill that was so big that I swear his printer had physically blushed as it coughed up two full pages to include all the jobs.
I looked at it, like a savage being shown a simple conjuring trick that he somehow knows deep down shouldn’t work.
‘But Graham, I wanted you to fix an oil warning light, not secure me the TV rights to test match cricket for the next five years.’
‘The such and such has gone,’ he said with confidence, as if it explained everything. ‘It’s got frothing on the extruder gasket’. That might not be what he actually said, but a man in shock is not a quick learner.
‘Couldn’t you have called me?’
‘I could have. But it’s got to be done to keep it on the road. I knew you were taking it to Scotland tomorrow.’ He had a point, and had been trying to do the right thing.
I tried to visualize how much there was in my cheque account before handing over the bank card, but it hurt too much.
‘Bring it in when you’re back, and I’ll fix the turbo gusset, and the smoked mackerel distributor’.
‘You haven’t finished with it, then?’ I gasped. ‘Have I paid up front, by any chance?’
‘No, Rog. The next bit won’t be much more than this one.’ It was like Mao Tse Tung telling the family of the millionth victim of the Cultural Revolution famine not to worry, and that they were starting to get the hang of it all.
And on it went. You’re bored of it already, and so am I. Six times it has been back to the workshop and each time, as I drive home, a different warning light beams its twat like message at me: ‘I’m still broken.’ And the next day I take it back to the workshop, all hope seeping from me like snow in a nuclear winter.
There may be a less mechanical person in the Northern Hemisphere even if I am not aware of them, but even I used to be able to change the distributor cap on my old Mini when it got wet, or use a bent coat hanger to replace the radio aerial when I forgot to retract it in a car wash. Nowadays, it’s all bloody artificial intelligence and computers so bloody clever they don’t even understand themselves, let alone the actual job they’re supposed to be doing. You open the bonnet and all you can see is a cat’s cradle of untouchable complication, all designed by a German engineer who wants to get his own back for Brexit. Even when we finally seemed to have got somewhere, the DVLA reminded me that the wretched MOT had expired, so back in it went this morning, and back I went to the walk of shame between the garage and my office.
So what me and Graham reckon is this. That it would save time, petrol and heartache if I just moved in with him above the shop, and let him sort the fresh day’s problem out whilst I did him a breakfast fry-up.
Vorsprung Durch Technik, my arse.
Our World needs Cushions more than ever.
A couple of months ago, I came breathtakingly close to being able to say something polite about our Prime Minister.
Obviously, the moment passed unfulfilled, and I like to think that subsequent events have proved me right. In fairness, you only had to look alongside him in the school photo they took back in the summer of all those leaders at Carbis Bay to see that historians will probably look back at this age as being one where we chose to be run from the reform school. I mean, a world that reveres as almost godlike the qualities of a Chancellor who has mortgaged her entire country’s energy policy to a hostile power, is a world that is easily pleased. Or at least doesn’t have much in the way of choice. You will all have your own examples, but let us at least agree that most modern leaders are almost comically awful.
I have a solution.
A friend has been living at our house whilst we have been away on holiday, keeping it secure and looking after (our own) Boris, and a new and extremely excitable Springer Spaniel puppy.
When we arrived back after a long drive up from Cornwall last night, we thanked her profusely for keeping it all in such good order and, in particular, for re-enthusing and revitalizing a sofa in the kitchen that had spent the last few months with that forlorn look manifested by the back end of Jeremy Corbyn’s Labour leadership.
‘Don’t worry,’ she said. ‘I just love plumping cushions.’
Leaving aside the sheer loveliness of the verb ‘to plump’, it slowly dawned on me that the world would be a darn site happier place if that hotel at Carbis Bay had been less full of Merkels and Macrons, and more full of gentle people who simply loved to plump up cushions.
Obviously, the first beneficiary would be the cushions, and possibly all soft furnishings, in the St. Ives area. That goes without saying. But my bet is that a comfortably arranged cushion will lead to local envy which, in turn, would lead to regional, and then even national imitation. What starts as a simple and polite plumping -(there really is no other suitable verb)- in Cornwall, would swiftly burgeon out to Canterbury, Cork and Costa Rica. Thus would we start with being more comfortable, which would make us better rested and rather less irritable.
In leadership terms, this is not as stupid as it sounds. The kind of person that likes to plump up cushions has a number of qualities that should be welcome in a world staring into many abysses simultaneously. They like to make the best of something existing, rather than endlessly replace it; they are less the movers and shakers than the smoothers and bakers, dedicating their lives to comfort and kindness. They are the quiet aesthetes that only the eyes and the backsides notice, rather than, say, a bawling Macron, or a scheming Xi. They know when a room is right, just as I suspect they would know instinctively when a planet was right, as well.
For hours, I could not bring myself to sit on the sofa at all; that’s how beautiful the cushions were. Early this morning, I made myself a mug of tea and then, like someone quietly touching a John Makepeace table whilst no one is looking, I slowly lowered myself onto it and luxuriated in its sheer…..plumpness. There really is no other word.
And you know what I went off to do straight afterwards? Of course you do. For the first time in my life, I re-plumped out those cushions myself. And, like that US Navy Seals admiral whose wonderful advice was to start each day by making your own bed, mine is now to plump up the cushions on my own sofa.
It is by tiny steps like these that I intend to make the world a better place.
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