The Village of the Damned
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Lie-ins are frowned upon
More news from the Village of the Damned this weekend, courtesy of my mother who called on Sunday at 9 o’clock in the morning. I tried to ignore the phone but it kept ringing non-stop for five whole minutes until I cracked and answered it. Then she had the effrontery to ask whether she’d woken me up. Not swearing at her was extremely hard. My parents don’t use “language”. They believe it to be common. Sometimes I have difficulty believing that we are related.
My mother’s unilateral feud with the Clancys continues apace. Their electric gates are now in place and are quite the talk of the village. Which incenses my mother no end. So she has informed my father that they too are going to have electric gates. And in a masterstroke of one-upmanship, they are also going to have their gravel drive tarmacked. As my mother pointed out, “It’ll mean that we’ll only be able to go on holiday once this year, but at least it will show that Clancy woman that she’s not so special after all.” My mother is also fuming about the fact that the Clancy’s horse chestnut tree is dropping conkers into her garden. So she’s been scooping them up on a spade and catapulting them back over the fence. She’s roped my father in as well, who has taken time off from shooting the squirrels with his air rifle to whack conkers into the Clancy’s garden with his five iron. I fear that one day I’m going to get a phone call telling me that Kenneth Clancy has been killed by a horse chestnut and that my father has been arrested for manslaughter.
My mother is also foaming at the mouth about the renovation of the local pub. The Blue Cap used to be a dreary, unfriendly hole of a place, the pub equivalent of a London bus driver. It squats malevolently at the end of my parent’s road. I could never get served in there as a teenager and the landlord always used to call me “Sonny Jim”. In my opinion, renovating the place is a waste of time. Burn it to the ground, blow up the smoldering remains and sow the ground with salt. But now it is apparently “family friendly”. What this means I have no idea. Presumably they have taken down the “No Children” sign. In addition to painting the outside a bubblegum pink, my mother tells me that they have also installed a jukebox and are going to have karaoke nights. She sees this as a sign that the area is “going downhill”. My mother is also suspicious of the new owner of the pub, who is a woman. She seems to think that any woman who runs a public house must be some sort of brazen hussy. “You won’t be seeing me in there!” my mother declared. I chose not to mention that the last time she set foot in a pub a pint of beer only cost tuppence ha’penny.
In other news, the War Memorial was defaced again, the day after the renovations were completed; the local primary school is having a jumble sale; and another neighbour, Rowena Neale, is expecting her fourth child, which my mother thinks is excessive -“but then again,” she said, “they are Catholics”. My father’s golf handicap is still improving. Probably thanks to all the practice he’s having with the horse chestnuts.
I went back to bed as soon as I got off the phone, but that was it – no more sleep for Late. Thanks a bundle, mother. I think it’s time I invested in an answering machine. Or maybe just threw my phone away.
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One-woman Chronicle
My mother loathes the fact that I'm here in the metropolis, doing a job of which she disapproves in an area she dislikes with people whom she openly despises. She believes that I would be much better off "at home" in the village, and is determined that I will return. To this end, she sporadically attempts to entice me back with details of the exciting things that are happening in the parish. Little does my mother know that, while she is recounting the local intrigues, I am silently giving thanks to God, Allah, Buddha and the Lord Krishna that I've managed to escape the suffocating black hole that was my home town.
This week, I've learned that the local boutique (The Village Trader) was ram-raided. The perpetrators got away with the whole collection of authentic Mexican silver jewellery, some faux-sheepskin throws, five sets of Alessi tableware and all the aromatherapy oils. "But," as my mother says, "we know who did it. There was a gypsy lurking near Cafe Rouge last week with a suspicious air". He was obviously keen to redecorate his caravan. My mother said the word "gypsy" in the same tone she uses when she has to say "paedophile" or "Labour government".
Also making a stir in the parish are my parents' neighbours Christine and Kenneth Clancy, who are having imposing wrought iron electric gates built at the entrance of their property. Christine and Kenneth are a perfectly nice couple who struck it rich through a winning combination of canny investment and luck back in the early 90s. They moved next door to my parents and proceeded to extend the house in all directions. My mother objects to being able to see their new conservatory from her garden and has been waging a one-sided war of attrition for the last year. She strung up a washing line and hung my father's old underpants in a line to obscure the view of the Clancy's property. She left the underpants out all winter until they froze solid and resembled strange ice sculptures or pieces of salt cod. Despite this, Christine Clancy is unfailingly nice to my mother and invites her to her coffee mornings. This only seems to enrage my mother even further. "She's had her living room redecorated again," spat my mother, "and this time she's had the carpet taken up and the floorboards stripped". I think she believes that not having carpets smacks of a degenerate lifestyle. I'm glad she's never seen the inside of my flat. I don't even have a proper bed, let alone a carpet.
In other news, my father's golf handicap is improving, the War Memorial is being renovated and the local pub The Blue Cap has been taken over and is being painted pink to make it more "family friendly".
I got off the phone, breathed the Gitane-tainted air of the shop. When I crack open a bottle tonight, I'm going to make a little toast to lucky escapes. Cheers.
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