Moving On

He stood staring at me in the Supermarket, his eyes large with disbelief. ‘It’s you!’ he said pointing his finger in my direction,
’ I thought you were dead!’
‘ Huh! ‘Feeling startled at such an unexpected observation from someone who appeared to be a complete stranger, I could only mumble,
‘well err people are living longer now you know.’
The mild hint of disappointment in his voice suggested we had met before in the distant past and it hadn’t been a jovial get together. But life is too short to be dwelling on historical differences, I’m not a believer in regurgitating the past, you have to let go and move on.

He told me he used to live in Croydon and had recently retired to Hampshire. I congratulated him on the smart decision to get out of that place.

I told him as a teenager I’d often cycled to Croydon from Tonbridge when it was a leafy green place with a large outdoor swimming pool. Now it’s like Manhattan. ‘The planners have wrecked the place.’
‘Your dead right there ‘he laughed, ‘my brother calls it the anus of England’.

We continued with a brief but polite exchange and then he departed with his trolley of toilet rolls.

My memory went into overdrive as I tried to figure where I’d met him, and why my longevity would interest him. I had a growing suspicion it didn’t fit into one of life’s more wonderful moments’ I also wondered what on earth he was doing with all those toilet rolls.

I was passing the vegetable section when a large marrow caught my eye. The marrow is an honest unpretentious vegetable much underrated in my opinion. I checked it for firmness by knocking on the outer skin which should sound like someone knocking on your front door. As I squeezed it into one of those flimsy plastic bags I caught a sideways glimpse of the man with the toilet rolls heading towards the exit. I recognised him in a flash as the mechanic who had worked on my boat engines some thirty years ago. I remembered the fiery altercation about his monumental bill. His three page breakdown of the cost which read like an excerpt from Alice in Wonderland. My normal happy-go-lucky temperament had been shattered. I was hopping mad, come to think of it, I still am!

Time had not been kind to him. He had lost most of his hair but grown a beard and with his gappy teeth and sagging jaw he was hard to recognise.

During this era there had been a clamouring for elevated status. Everybody wanted to be somebody. The most menial jobs developed highfaluting titles. The car mechanic later adopted the title Marine Engineer.
The bastard was full of sh*t he needed all those toilet rolls!

It was during Prime Minister Wilson’s era when anyone with brains left the country. The unions trashed the long established apprentice’s scheme calling it a cheap labour policy. The Poles were not so fussy about job titles and took up the slack. A plethora of ladder climbing self appointed experts and consultants flooded the country and now the establishment is largely run by these overpaid inept buffoons who hide behind committees or take early retirement. Is it any wonder we have tragedies like the Grenfell Tower. That is a real can of worms that will hopefully expose some of them.

It is a sobering thought to realise there are people out there who might think you are dead, when in fact all you have done, like me, is moved house. Of course if you are moving to Croydon you might think death a better option.