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Morals went up in smoke
A FEW years ago this cockney chap started chatting to me at a bus stop. The bus turned out to be very, very late so the story he told me lasted at least 40 minutes.
He was aged 75ish and very dapper in a camel-hair coat, pocket-handkerchief sort of way. He took out a posh cigarette tapped it extravagantly on the box, as people did before smoking got furtive, and offered me one.
Which I refused because, being prone to mean-spiritedness, I thought he might be a nutter. By the time he had finished I was sure that he wasn't, even though you might find his story implausible.
He said he had spent a lifetime as a cigarette salesman and had had a fine career but its highlight came when, some time in the 1950s, as a young, single man, he had travelled to the north of England with a team of similar young cockney colleagues trying to persuade cigarette retailers to stock his company's brand.
This was hard work considering the number of places which sold cigarettes in those days – a thousand corner shops in every town, mill canteens, hospitals, swimming pools, TB clinics – but the young salesmen had a fantastic time.
Because the brand (which I can't remember now) was a posh one and the boys had the cachet of coming from London and were giving away free samples, the mill-town girls let themselves down considerably by uncontrolled, to put it delicately, swooning.
Revelations
"You would go into a shop," the man said, "and the girl behind the counter would say 'My hubby owns this shop but he's working all day and we close for lunch in five minutes (wink)'…well, what do you do? (upturned palms)."
To which I made male solidarity noises, although actually such things are totally outside my experience and I was hoping the bus would come before the revelations got worse.
Which they did. The man said that during the sales tour, he stayed for a few nights in a particular northern town, which for reasons which will become clear, I cannot name except to say that it was of a size to have a third or fourth-division football team which might reach the second division in a good year.
Here the man went into a sort of reverie, raising his eyes skyward as he recalled the town, which, he said, had the most stunningly and universally beautiful female population in the entire world and every single one of the girls had – and what sort of heaven is this? – remarkably loose morals.
It sounds like an episode from Homer's Odyssey, ('The Seduction of the Floozys') but although this is a town which you've probably been to, I doubt you noticed its mythic qualities.
Anyway, the young salesman finishes his Odyssey, returns to London, puts all that behind him, gets married and has children. One of them, a boy aged eight or nine, is very interested in football and asks his father which club he should become a fan of – West Ham, Spurs, Arsenal etc.
The father tells him the big London clubs will take him for granted; that he should go for a smaller, provincial club which would value his support.
And so ("I don't know why," said the man, though I found it fairly obvious), his mind went back to the Northern town of the beautiful loose women and he told the boy that he should write to the town's football club expressing his interest.
The boy did and got in return a collection of club programmes, a club shirt and a signed letter from the chairman. He was hooked for life and now, well into middle age and doing very well for himself, still travels from London to attend as many of the team's games as he can. He also sits on the board.
Embarrassment
Of course, I can't name the club because I don't want to cause embarrassment between the middle-aged boy and his father, who may prefer not to mention his reasons for picking this small club over the London giants.
Also the women of the northern town, now thoroughly respectable matrons, might want to draw a veil over their loose smoking days.
But I can't resist retelling the bus-stop story as a parable about how things ripen in time in ways you wouldn't expect and how small acts of generosity, such as the club's response to the boy's letter, can pay you back in spades.
Anyone for roasted Aborigine?
MY eldest son Aron is often called upon to make business trips to far-flung places, while my daughter Hannah, studying for her doctorate, has recently returned from Mauritania, North Africa, and has just squeezed in a trip to Strasbourg before moving on to Oslo.
Which is not relevant; it's just that I spent my whole childhood being told that I would, being utterly useless and outstandingly idiotic, never get anywhere and isn't it satisfying that if I can find any of my old teachers (not that I'm looking for them), I can tell them how wrong they were. OK, its vicarious and it's skipped a generation, but, in a familial sense, I've got further than they ever did, so they can stop looking at me like that.
Anyway (and isn't it interesting how a hurtful remark to a 12-year-old boy can still sting so freshly after all these years – always be very careful how you speak to children), Aron was talking to a Turkish friend recently.
The Turk was a very nice man who spoke good English but had a strange blind spot. He thought an indigenous Australian was called an aubergine, as opposed to an Aborigine.
There followed, says Aron, a very surreal and funny conversation, which I should think it did because, of all the words you could confuse, aubergine and Aborigine possibly offer the richest comic possibilities.
"How do you prefer your Aborigines, roasted or fried?"
"I believe we should pay more attention to the ancient wisdom of the aubergines."
"Aborigines make me burp."
And so on…you can play this game yourselves.
Listen out for this meme
I THINK I've discovered what Richard Dawkins, king of the militant atheists, would call a new meme.
This is like a gene, except that it's spread by social interaction rather than sexual reproduction, and in this case it's to do with the use of the word 'OK'.
I've just noticed (which probably means it's been going on for years) that professional-type people when they say 'OK' don't say it in a simple, dismissive checking-off sense; they lean forward and look you in the eyes and give it a rising inflection, as if it's not just punctuation, it's significant.
Virgins
I promise, if you haven't noticed it before, that if you look out for this new meme and speak to enough men and women in suits, you will hear it this week, probably before teatime.
Incidentally, Dawkins notes in his book The God Delusion that some scholars of Arabic say the 72 virgins which suicide bombers are convinced they will collect in heaven may in fact be a mistranslation of 72 'white raisins of crystal clarity', or in other words a pocketful of dried fruit.
Before I remembered that there can't be anything funny about suicide bombers, I found this funny.
Oliver Cross Life, but not as you know it
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Weather for Leeds
Saturday 11 February 2012
Today
Sunny spells
Temperature: -2 C to 1 C
Wind Speed: 7 mph
Wind direction: South
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Cloudy
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