Mon 27th July 2009

I was at a wedding in Lancashire yesterday, so I visited my Mother today instead. She had other visitors; a mother and her 7 year old son. I was introduced to the young boy, who just sat staring at me with a particularly disconcerting grin. In the absence of any conceivable response to his silently amused gaze, I rather uncomfortably proffered my hand to him in a formal but rather awkward looking manner of introduction. He responded by raising his own tiny palm, completely bypassing my handshake, shoving it toward my chin, before devilishly tugging at my beard hair. I laughed politely pretending to be amused, whilst inside feeling completely out of my depth, not really knowing what to do or how to respond. I was drowning in a sea bereft of appropriate polite social conventions. “How old are you?” his half-angelic-half-demonic little gob enquired. “31” I replied. He informed me that only people over 40 grow beards and this seemed to amuse him even further. Why does my beard seem to be suddenly getting so much slack lately? Like I said yesterday, I don’t object to a jibe or two, but it was almost like he was aware not only of his insult, but the fact he could manipulate an alibi of childish innocence to merit immunity from retribution. I would like to say that the next words I spoke cut the cheeky whippersnapper down to size in a manner as wittily akin to anything Oscar Wilde’s finest canon. But I can’t. Because all I did was continue to stand with a gormless grin of paralysis. In real terms, I was being psychologically hoisted by a 7 year old.

When I sat down, his mother managed to discourage him from jumping upon me long enough to have an interesting conversation and to even order a Chinese meal. I did not partake in this feast as I had only recently eaten. The boy soon devoured his meal and then opened his fortune cookie, which informed him he would be a flourishing businessman. I bet he will be too. I can just imagine his maverick and acerbically brutal negotiating techniques once they have been honed, like a nightmarish cross between Vinnie Jones and Malcolm Tucker. Personally I would have settled for such a successful and optimistic premonition without the slightest temptation to take any further gambles with the God of fortune. But the boy was not satisfied by this, and was soon snapping open everybody else’s cookie; which either made him appear a greedy selfish little sod, or a genius little satirist of the novelty biscuit premonition system.

In fairness, he had been pretty restrained for quite a while, and I could even go as far as to say quite fun. But it was when his mother left the room to nip to the toilet that all hell really broke loose. The young man suddenly launched a frenzied attack firing fists at me from all angles, laughing like a maniac. Once again, the paralysis of uselessness struck me, as I stood rooted to the spot. I hadn’t a clue how to counteract this unruliness. Giving the lad a good knee in the face would have probably been considered inappropriate. It didn’t even really seem like my place to shout at him. All I could do was stand uselessly swinging from left to right trying to shield my genitalia from his barrage of waist-level punches. My own mother stood beside this spectacle of demonic outburst, assessing its psychological implications. “He’s testing you to see what he can get away with”, she concluded. After sating herself with her academic hypotheses, and watching me receive a couple more swings, she eventually addressed the boy. “Stop that now,” she sternly ordered, “This behaviour is not acceptable.” And as if by magic the lad simply turned around and sat back down on the settee. Peace was restored as quickly as the chaos had erupted. But there is no getting away from one depressing fact: I had needed my Mother to protect me from getting beaten by a 7 year boy. This was a new low.

Sat 25th July 2009

I walked into the pub tonight an acquaintence who I had not seen for some time. He came up to me and asked if I had joined the Taliban. I was a little fazed by this. What possible rumours could have circled the village during my holiday to have bought upon this surreal chain of events? To my knowledge, I have not crashed into the side of any buildings using any planes. I did once crash into the side of a bus in my Nissan Micra, but that was years ago when I lived in Liverpool, and seems a tenuous connection to say the least. There was certainly no malicious or disruptive motive to the crash, and even if there were I would have been a pretty sorry terrorist. At the point of impact I had barely got into first gear so was only travelling about 2 miles an hour. There wasn’t even as much as a dent on the bus. The only damage was a scratch on my wing and the bus driver only took my insurance details for what he called “precautionary administrational procedure”. According to the letter I received a few days later I learned, “precautionary administrational procedure” actually meant “free pay-out opportunity for a bogus whiplash claim”. A further 24 letters followed suit, from each of the passengers who had seemingly sustained a similar injury. It was quite a surprise that the same 2 mile per hour collision had not given me the slightest bruise or scratch yet had caused 24 cases of whiplash. Especially since there were only about a dozen people on the bus in the first place. Like I say, it was just too hapless to be considered anywhere in the league of a Taliban atrocity. Unless helping Scousers to pilfer free-loaded money constitutes as an act of national terrorism. But even if it were, it would not be for me to perpetuate crass implications about regional stereotypes. That is for other people to do.

Astonishingly, the reason for his questioning of such dramatic ideological shifts transpired to be even more tenuous: it was because I have recently grown a goatee beard. Bin Laden has a goatee beard. Ergo, I must be a member of the Taliban. Don’t get me wrong, I do not have a problem with having my beard derided (being boorishly heckled is all part of the charm when entering an English drinking establishment, and if my beard makes me look like a twat then fair enough - it is the closest my mouth has come to one of those in quite some time). But Bin Laden also had a walking stick. Yet did the old man who hobbled with a walking stick across the very same bar on the very same night get likened to the 21st Century’s biggest perpetrator of genocide? Oh no – HE didn’t. He was somehow immune.

It is the complete lack of consistency which got on my goatee.