Local People: An Examination

Felicitous greetings, from whichever glorious corner of the world you hail.

In my locale, we are used to the interminable drudgery of heavy overcast grey, and the knowledge that if you go outside, you will most definitely get wet. Imagine my surprise therefore, to discover that it actually does look like summer today.

You’d think that would in some way placate my days and save me from ongoing tedium, and you would be completely, 100% wrong. There’s nothing quite like a street thronged with people to bring to the surface a healthy hatred for everyone, tinged with the risk of slight genocide. Seeing the hulking lumps of thoughtless flesh flump around the place, sometimes fisting pasties into their mouths or attempting communication with one another, is inherently depressing, nauseating and infuriating. Ooh, enough adjectives for you? Leave me alone.

Some examples of ennui-inducing public behaviour:

A parcel was meant to be delivered to my house today, I know because we received a slip through the door, from the postman, notifying us that he had attempted to post it. However, this slip was a lie. There has been three people in the house all day, one of whom is sat less than a metre away from the front door. Upon hearing a knock from the postman (who for some reason known only to him hadn’t rung the doorbell, which is there for a reason, no?) this individual went to answer the door. This is the correct thing to do. She found at the door that it had not been a knock, as she had assumed, but that this slip had been posted instead. She quickly reached for the key, unlocked the door, and stepped out onto the street in the hopes of stopping the postman and reclaiming the package there and then. However the postman was already doing unto Sebastian Coe down the street, without a parcel. The sharp among you will have realised that in order for this to be the case, the postman will have had to fill the sheet in his car, before even attempting to deliver the parcel. This is infuriating for me for a number of reasons:

1. There were three people in the house to accept the parcel.

2. It shouldn’t have needed a signature: POST IT THROUGH THE LETTERBOX.

3. IT WAS MY PARCEL!

4. It was his JOB to deliver it and he couldn’t be arsed.

Regardless, living in a house which receives parcels often enough, we are familiar with not being in to receive them, since members of the household work in the day, and others work in the night and so are in the house but dead to the world. So we went on our way, several hours later, to reclaim the parcel from the Post Office depot.

Now I don’t know if the Post Office only recruits from the Homo Erectus branch of human evolution, but it can be safely assumed that the man at reception that day most certainly was an example of the now-extinct variety. I gave him my most winning “Give Me My Fucking Parcel” smile, and he dutifully took the reclaim slip from me. And here is where the ponderous thing happened.

The employee look at the slip in his hand with complete incomprehension, as though I had placed an object there that he had never encountered before. The sort of reaction I would have expected had I, instead of passing him the slip, put a scoop of ice-cream and a USB lead in his hands. He poked at it for a while, wearing the grimace of a lost chimp, eventually telling me that I would be unable to pick the parcel up until tomorrow. His lack of movement throughout suggested that he would not have moved to get the parcel, regardless of how many hours ago it had been delivered. He took great pains to finger the “24” on the back of the slip, indicating that I am an utter dolt for attempting to reclaim the package on the same day it was supposed to be delivered, despite the fact that I have done it on many other occasions. Maybe he was just intimidated by the appearance of someone who takes the delivery of parcels slightly more professionally than anyone on call for the Post Office on this day.

On the drive home, we were forced to stop the car, due to the presence of the chubfaced goggling progeny of the streetpeople on the road. There is nothing quite as depressing as seeing a vacuous saggy faced oik standing blankly in the middle of the road with a football under their arm as if silently asking the forces of science to prove to them that they are unable to withstand the impact of a car. Most depressing as it is possibly the closest I will ever come to seeing into a direct portal to my own childhood.

I also decided to go outside for fear that I had breathed all of the oxygen in the house and I was now merely attempting to live off the carbon dioxide that I had breathed out. Having few destinations of interest in the little town I am currently stuck in, I went for the high-voltage excitement, roller-coaster mania of a trip to the shop, and then Chinese. What frightens me about my local Chinese shop is that they know who I am there, which may provide insight into why I spent my childhood as a larger child. This, however, pales into insignificance when set against my fear of almost anyone in the local vicinity. I live in a town populated by grizzled and brainless thugs, beanpole gelled apparitions and aggressive greasy slags (both male and female). I am able to write that here with no fear, as anyone capable of using the internet in order to find this blog is automatically disqualified from any of those categories, as the sort of people I’m talking about think an ‘internet’ is the place you keep the rats you’ve fished out of the river before you put them in the cage in the kitchen.

What frightens me the most about the people from these categories is the sense of passive-aggressive bonhomie they exude, they all seem to be living their lives half an inch from smashing someone’s face in, or alternatively, having their faces smashed in. They also insist on ‘avin a chat with you if they’re bored. Luckily for me, there were enough of them in the Chinese take away to ensure that they would talk amongst their track-suited, paint-speck-smeared selves rather than amuse themselves with a long haired, bearded man. The lack of self-awareness became frighteningly apparent as the ‘conversation’ continued. One man, let’s call him Dan-o, was talking to another bloke, who for this retelling we will call Dean-o. Their conversation focused on Dean-o’s son, who will remain nameless, and the fact that Dean-o had managed to get him working with him, so that his son at least had some money coming in. Dan-o said to Dean-o: “How is he finding it?” to which Dean-o replied: “He finds it boring”. From passive eavesdropping earlier on I was in the knowledge that both Dean-o and his son were working in a factory. Dan-o then came out with possibly the most honest or stupid thing he will probably ever say: “Bored? Well beggars can’t be choosers.”

Dan-o quickly moved the conversation elsewhere, as I am sure that he was aware that in his statement he had labelled both Dean-o and his son as “beggars”, which, while I’m not a huge fan of factory work, I think is a bit fucking harsh. Especially seeming as Dan-o was the one wearing ancient patched spectacles, ill fitting everything and was covered in a fine layer of paint spatters. But I mean that is the height of fashion in this area, especially when going to order food. In public.

As Dean-o later received his food and left, handing pleasant goodbye’s to all involved, Dan-o turned to a different acquaintance, Jon-o, and starting laying into Dean-o. Now I thought this was harsh, as I’m sure you will agree, since I have built Dean-o up to be the more empathetic character. Again, Dan-o reached into his bag of ignorance to slam Dan-o about being overweight, with the line “Yeah well, he doesn’t have to cook for himself very much”.

From what I can make out of this, he was implying that Dean-o often ate take away, which was why he was overweight. He said this whilst in a Chinese take away, where he was ordering Chinese take away, talking to a man who was also ordering Chinese take away, in front of a group of people who were all waiting for their Chinese take away to arrive. That is the shell-suit calling the pebble-dash chavvy.

There is an age, I believe it is around 4 or 5 years – but I am likely incorrect, where it is thought that children become aware of themselves, of their existence. This self-awareness is hugely lacking in this area of the world, perhaps there is an evil local GP who puts a chip in children’s heads in order to stop that facet developing. It would explain why, once, when walking down the street, a guy shouted at me “Why are you looking in through my window”. To which I replied “You have put a poster in it”.

The Chinese was nice though, thanks for asking.