David Charters: Fate places us all in profoundly embarrassing circumstances

Feb 5 2008 by David Charters, Liverpool Daily Post

AN EXPRESSION of limp despair settled on the face of “Pimples” Perkins, the office’s surly tea-boy, when he was told that his right leg was to be tied at the knee and the ankle to the left leg of the lightly-scented Tobias Fernley-Trout, finance director, so that they could together enter the three-legged race in the inter-departmental-bonding section of the company’s annual sports.

In its more frolicsome moods, fate places us all in circumstances that are profoundly embarrassing and from which there is no obvious escape. This, I think, is life’s method of spreading the merriment around evenly – on the basis that nothing cheers one man more than watching a rival seized by misfortune.

Many years ago, I was friendly with a pale and consumptive poet of the Communist faith, who coughed insistently when entertaining on the patched lino floor of his damp bedsit, in the belief that pearls of blood on his milky-white handkerchief would stir romantic yearnings in the bosoms of young ladies.

At his school, there had been an Army cadet force, into which he was unhappily recruited. To his alarm, on a weekend camp, he observed ropes being attached to poles on either side of a swelling brook. It gradually dawned on him that he was soon to be invited to cross the brook, which had become in his imagination a raging torrent, using only his feet and hands. “Would you mind awfully,” he said to the thin-lipped brute in charge, “if I took the long way round?”

It was decided instantly that our poet was not what is sometimes described as “officer material”. This was not a pith-helmet wearer given to the world by God to guide us through the malarial swamps.

For my late mother, the most chilling words on holiday were, “Let’s go for a swim”. This was not because she lacked the confidence to swim like a salmon once in the water. No, her dread was of changing into her angel-blue bathing costume and cap in the back seat of the car – without revealing a suggestion of wicked flesh to the peeping-toms, whom she was convinced were lurking in the sand-dunes with their binoculars at the ready. The car rocked to the slap of elasticated fabric as she arched and stretched in the manner of a Russian gymnast to complete her delicate manoeuvres.

My own experience of being in the wrong place at the wrong time came rather surprisingly on a Friday night in the otherwise familiar setting of the local off-licence. I was at the counter waiting for the prim young cashier to complete my purchase of two bottles of wine and a packet of crisps – those new thick ones which are sealed so tightly in the packet that releasing them would challenge the stamina of a Serbian tug-of-war team. On several occasions, I have sustained severe bruising to my knuckles while wrestling with such a packet on the kitchen tiles.

“Would you like to top up your mobile phone?” she asked, staring at the computerised till. The brown corduroy hat leapt from my head and completed a somersault before returning to its berth. Sweat glistened on my brow and my jaw hung open to emit a gasp, which, in a different location, might have been mistaken for a death rattle.

I understood all the words individually. It was just that in this sequence they made no sense at all. However, at that moment, an older cashier, who knows me slightly, rallied to my aid. “I don’t think he’s the sort of gentleman who carries a mobile phone,” she said. “You can see that in the tilt of his hat.”

“But I thought everyone had a mobile phone,” said her colleague, a little peevishly.

“Not quite everyone,” replied the other, giving me a prophetic smile, which suggested warm tea, ear trumpets, a tartan rug and a bath-chair.

“Some people cling to the old ways,” she added.

And I remember those Fridays when the pulse raced for the fall of dark. Arrangements were made without resort to electronic gadgets. Our gang simply arrived at the same part of the same pub at the same time. Without question, the barmaid would pull our drinks because she knew what everyone liked.

This may all seem rather dull and routine. But funny and wild stories followed the serious discussions in crazy patterns and, as our drinks were topped with goodwill, we visited places where mobile phones will never be heard.

And then with mellow strides we spread into the lamp-lit road. “Goodnights” filtered into the gloom. “See you next time.”

“Yeah, same time, same place.”

* LISTEN to David Charters on his podcast at www.liverpooldailypost.co.uk