36. Not Funny

I’m sitting in the passenger seat travelling south down the M6 toll road while Caroline drives.  It’s 9:15 on Saturday morning and as it costs £4.50 to use this bit of motorway, the road is fairly empty.  The speedometer needle is hovering on 120 mph. and the engine is purring quietly.  There is no tyre noise and I am listening to Capriccio Italien by Tchaikovsky, on Classic FM.  I can see for more than a mile ahead and there is only one vehicle in sight.  Despite the speed, I feel perfectly safe.

“According to the book, the top speed of this car is a hundred and fifty five,” I say.

“Don’t be silly,” says Caroline, “Even though it’s a toll road, there’s still a seventy miles an hour speed limit.” 

Then she glanced down at the speedometer.

********

On January 24^th in ‘Life’s Ironies’ I told you about a fabulous put-down I received from Sandra, the cashier in the Cayman bank I used.  Yesterday I received another, much better one.  It was superb and especially so because it was spontaneous.  It was not calculated to offend or upset me but it did and I’m still brooding on it.  

If there is such a thing as a ‘Put-Down Hall of Fame,’ then this should go straight in.  What makes it so brilliant is that my own wife said it and although it was deeply hurtful, it was said with sincerity and was not meant to upset me.  Indeed, remove two little words, just five letters, and it would have been a wonderful compliment.

We have been staying at Caroline’s parents’ house in Wilmslow, Cheshire.  Five years ago, just before we left for the Cayman Islands, we put three boxes of personal items into their loft for safe keeping.  Yesterday we were going through them and came across photographs taken during our holiday in Cyprus in 2002.

As you do, we were commenting on every photo - comments like, “Why did you wear that hat?” and “Do you remember how hot it was there?”

We came to one of me on the beach.  Caroline stared at it for several seconds.

“My God,” she said wistfully, “No wonder I used to fancy you.”

Take away, “used to,” and I’d have been flying down the M6!

********

We’ve been having dreadful problems with our Internet and telephone ever since we moved back into our house here in Winchmore Hill.  We decided to go with the package offered by Virgin but we have never been able to get a proper wireless connection.  We have been very lucky that our neighbours at number 27 have allowed us access via their wireless router.

Yesterday, we realised that we were not receiving incoming phone calls either.  Sandy rang me on my cell phone and told me that she had given up trying to reach us on our landline.  I phoned Virgin.

“Who have you been unable to receive calls from?” a nice young man from the call centre in Mumbai asked.

I thought for a moment.  “Well, David Cameron hasn’t rung today,” I said,  “but he’s probably been very busy with his new baby.  Neither has Naomi Campbell or Gandhi but he’s been dead for 60 years and so that probably explains why he hasn’t rung.”

Smart-arse remarks like that got me into trouble once in Cayman.

The “Strata” administer Prospect Reef, the complex of about 20 dwellings where we lived in Cayman.  Every homeowner pays a monthly Strata fee of $500 and this money is used to pay for the buildings’ insurance, the maintenance of the grounds and the upkeep of the swimming pool and the tennis court.  

Our Strata fee was one of the lowest on the island.  Most other Strata on the island employ a professional administrator.  We didn’t.  We did everything ourselves and my duty was to take the 25 cent coins from the washing machines in the communal laundry to the bank. 

The last time that I visited the bank was to deposit exactly $500 into the Strata account.  On the same visit I also put $5800 in cash into my personal account which I had received as payment for a car I sold. 

I had the kind of experience that just couldn’t happen in England.  I rather brought it upon myself I suppose and so I probably deserved the aggravation I received.

I had to stand in line for nearly 20 minutes until a clerk became available.  When I arrived in the bank I counted and saw that I was fourteenth in the line to be served.  There were no chairs.  I had to stand while I waited.  

There were eight booths to deal with customers but four were closed.  I suppose that as it was 12:45 the clerks were out for lunch!  

At last I approached the counter and lifted the extremely heavy bag on to the top and took the bags out, one at a time, counting them as I did.  “Five hundred dollars,” I said to the girl.  In the past, that would have been the end of the transaction.  She would have written out a receipt and off I’d go.  Not that day.

She took one bag containing 100, 25c pieces ($25), emptied them, spread them out, studied each one and then, counting them one at a time, put them back into the plastic bag that they had come from.  Then she took a second bag and repeated the process.  When she had investigated three bags I asked her what she was doing.  

“I’m checking the amount and looking for American quarters,” she said.  

“Why, are they valuable?“ I asked.  “The amounts have already been checked,” I said. “Why don’t you just weigh them?”

She ignored me and reached for the fourth bag.  I had already been standing for over 30 minutes by now, my knee was very painful and there were still 17 bags to go.

I’d had enough.  Time to bluff!

“I’m a mathematician,” I said, “and I can tell you that a 20% sample gives a result statistically significant to four decimal places.”

“Excuse me?” she said.

“Well, if four bags taken at random from the sample show no differential variation in the Gaussian context and content, you can be certain, to one part in ten thousand, that none of the others will either and if it does, it’s very easy to put right, simply by reversing the polarity of the terminal condenser.”

She looked at me blankly.

“That is if you accept the validity of Fermat’s last theorem, which I am sure you do,” I added helpfully.

She looked doubtful.  Then she gave me a look that was almost of pity and reached for the next bag.  Half an hour later she had finished and she handed me a receipt for CI$500.

All the time this had been going on I had been holding an envelope containing my $5800.  I put that on to the counter top.  The cashier was staring at her computer screen.  I took the money out of the envelope and it sat there - a beautiful thick pile of banknotes.

“I haven’t finished,” I said.  She looked up.  “I would like to deposit this please.”

“From where that come?” she asked.

“That envelope,” I answered, pointing at it.

“No.  Where from it come?”

“From my pocket,” I said, smiling brightly, trying to be helpful.

“Where you get the money from?” she said again, beginning to lose patience with me.

“Nowhere.  It doesn’t matter.  It’s just my money,” I said.

She just sat there and glared at me, stony faced.

“All right,” I said, “I robbed a bank a couple of months ago and this is what I haven’t managed to spend yet.”

Her glare became more intense and her face became even stonier.

“OK, sorry,” I said, realising that I might have gone a little too far, “I sold a car yesterday and this is the money I got for it.”

She picked up the pile of notes and walked to the back of the room where a man in a suit was sitting at a desk.  They entered into earnest conversation and every few seconds he looked over at me.  After a couple of minutes he got up and ushered me into a side room.

“From where this money is? He demanded.

“From the sale of a car,” I muttered meekly.

“Huh!  You say that now but earlier you say you rob a bank.  Which it is?”

I was getting pissed off.  “Guess,” I said.

“We not here for fun, you know.  We have work to do.”

“Do you want my money or not?” I asked him.

“What bank you rob?  You know we have you on CCTV here.”

“I am not a bank robber!”  I sighed.  “Look at me.  I can hardly walk.  I’ve got an arthritic knee and an artificial hip.  I was trying to be funny.  I’m sorry that it wasn’t funny but I was getting very fed up standing for an hour watching your clerk counting out five hundred dollars, twenty-five cents at a time.  I won’t do it again.  Promise.” 

“Hmmph,” he said.  “You not funny, man.”

Two days later that branch was held up and robbed.  

It wasn’t me!

3. Georgina and the mountain

I taught for 36 years.  For the first thirty of those years I taught geography and then I taught maths.  Incidentally, I hate the way Americans call it, ‘math.’  The word is mathematics and so the short word for it is, “maths!”  

I suppose that ‘math’ is preferable to the way a very highly placed official in a school district in Florida spelt the word.  He was responding to a discussion paper that Caroline had circulated to do with the Maths Strategy in Cayman schools.  No abbreviations or shortened words for him, the pompous oaf.  Five times he referred to the “Mathermatics Strategy.”

I taught maths because when I began the job of examinations co-ordinator, my frequent absences from class meant that I couldn’t really teach ‘A’ level geography anymore.

The new, dynamic Head of Maths suggested to me that as I was numerate and got on well with the weaker students, I might enjoy teaching bottom set maths groups.  What a perceptive woman she is.  I loved it.

One of the problems I had with teaching geography was that I was expected to organise and lead field trips.  I had had enough of the buggers after seven hours a day at school and I certainly didn’t want to be stuck with them for five days, 24 hours a day.  

I was 26 years old and therefore only seven or eight years older than the students.  The biggest problem with organising a field trip was that as there would be female students present, I had to be accompanied by a woman.  Although I was quite friendly with a few female teachers, I found it a bit awkward asking one to come away with me for a few days.

My fear was that I would book accommodation, hire a coach, plan the activities, arrange insurance etc and then have the "statutory woman" pull out.  I made a few approaches but got nowhere.  

A month before the scheduled start of the trip, with financial deadlines looming and with a very real prospect of enforced cancellation, I swallowed my pride and one morning I put up a notice on the staff board pleading for a female teacher to accompany me on a trip to Barmouth, North Wales. 

I was amazed that an hour after the message appeared, Georgina came to see me and offered her services.  I was surprised because I hardly knew her.  I could only remember speaking to her once when I had called her George, and that annoyed her greatly. 

“Haven’t you ever read The Famous Five?” I asked.  No, she had not, she told me icily and so I wrote her off as not my kind of person.  She also had a PhD and insisted that everyone called her “Doctor Peto”.  She had seemed distant and unapproachable.

She never came to the pub after work and she never joined in any of the silly distractions that I organised for the amusement of the staff.  Once, I had been standing near to her in the staffroom when she had scalded her hand with boiling water from the urn.  I and everyone else I knew, would have screamed a series of obscenities.  Georgina said, “Poo!”  

I knew that she wouldn’t be fun to be with, but I had no choice. “Thanks very much,” I said and two weeks later, very early on a Monday morning, we set off.

Barmouth is a lovely town.  The area has everything a geographer could want: coastal features, glacial features, mountains, arable and hill farms and a climate so mild in December that London kids actually listened when you explained why.

On Tuesday evening, we had written up our notes on the day’s work.  I had given them a scintillating talk all about corry formation, roches moutonnées, rock striations, moraines and the U shaped valleys that we would see the following day when we climbed Cadair Idris to see the splendour and the beauty that is Llyn Cau.  

Llyn Cau is an almost perfectly circular lake that is found in a corry some 800 feet below the summit of Cadair Idris.  A corry is a deep depression in the high flanks of a mountain where ice collected and a glacier began to flow hundreds of thousands of years ago.

After I had finished the evening talk, the students had a couple of hours of free time and they went off to play table tennis or whatever. I didn’t care.  I’d act in loco parentis, but I wasn’t going to be a security guard too. 

I’d told them on Monday evening that as only two of them were eighteen, none of them should go to a pub and that girls should stay in the girl’s rooms and the boys in theirs but that was as far as I went.  If they got pissed or pregnant, it was out of my control. I felt I had done all that I could.

Georgina and I were left in the lounge alone. She read a book and I watched television.  “Will you turn that down please?” were the only words she said to me.  At about 9:30 she closed her book and looked at me expectantly.  “What does she want?” I thought.  “Does she expect me to entertain her?”

We started to talk.  It wasn’t easy.  She didn’t know me and I certainly didn’t know her.  I don’t think that she had mixed anyone like me at Oxford where she had been until two years earlier.  In desperation, I made some flippant comment about short-term hopes and long-term fears.  I got no response and silence returned and lasted for several minutes.  

Suddenly, she started to cry - proper tears - and then, she was sobbing uncontrollably.  I had never experienced anything like this before and I didn’t know what to do.

When she had calmed down a little, I led her gently towards the washbasin in the corner where I hoped she could splash her face and feel better.  We hadn’t spoken since she started to cry.  We had almost reached the basin when she started crying again.  

She turned and flung herself at me and burying her head into my shoulder, sobbed louder than ever.  After another minute or two she had stopped crying but just hung on to me and we stood there, locked together in the middle of the room.

The inevitable happened. The door burst open and in came Spiro.  “Sir, are you going to come and play ……. Oh, sorry.”  

Spiro, if by the remotest chance you are reading this, it was not what you thought and certainly not what you told your mates.  

Georgina disengaged herself from me, picked up her book and went off to her room without saying a word.  To this day I remain baffled.  I must have said something to upset her so much but I have no idea what it was as it was never mentioned again.

On Wednesday morning, the coach parked below Cadair Idris and we set off along a pretty track through woodland.  I had told everyone the previous evening that the walk would take about three hours.  We were going uphill all the time but it was a gentle climb and very pleasant.  Georgina and I walked together.  I found that she enjoyed the juicy bits of gossip I told her about some of her colleagues.  As she knew very few people very well, there was a lot to tell her.  

I had suggested to Georgina that she walk at the tail of the file to pick up stragglers but she either misunderstood my request or ignored it.

After we passed the tree line, the gradient became steeper and Georgina began to struggle.  

“You didn’t say it was going to be this steep.” 

Then I made a big mistake.  “It gets a lot steeper.”

After a few more minutes she sat on a rock.  “I need a rest.” 

I estimated that we had covered about a third of the horizontal distance and a quarter of the ascent.  I wasn’t tired and nor were the kids.  They were all having a lot of fun running around us playing with four or five Frisbees.  Eventually I coaxed Georgina to her feet and we set off again.  She was painfully slow.

“I can’t go on,” she said. “I’ll stay here. You carry on and I’ll meet you back at the coach.”

You’ve got to go on,” I said.  “Suppose one of the girls needs the sort of help that only a woman can give. Come on and try and enjoy it. Anyway, we’re nearly there.”  I knew we weren’t but I had to lie.  

As we climbed, some of the boys started to take the piss.  They knew very well why we were going so slowly and every time a false summit appeared, they’d shout, “There you are Miss, the top.”  There are a dozen false summits on that route.

Conversation between us had totally ceased.  She plodded, head down, looking neither left nor right and so completely miserable, that she missed all the wonderful views to be seen. Every ten minutes she stopped and sat on a rock, silent in abject misery but at least she wasn’t crying.  I noticed that she hadn’t got her rucksack.

“Where’s your bag?” I asked her.

“Back there.  It was too heavy.  I’ll pick it up on the way back.”

After four hours we reached Llyn Cau.  We had lunch.  Georgina didn’t have any as it was in her bag.  I offered her some of mine and she took it without saying a word and then sat 50 yards from the rest of us and ate alone.  I did my bit about corries, rock lips and glaciers etc.  We were all aware of an ‘atmosphere’.

Then, we started back.  Georgina found her bag where she had left it and walked 200 yards behind the last of the group down the mountain.  She sat on her own on the coach.  

Later that evening at about nine o’clock, after the students had left us alone once more, I spoke to her for the first time since mid-afternoon.

“You OK?”

She ignored me.

“How about this, Georgina?  Let’s say that you have just realised that your wallet fell out of your pocket while you were having lunch and it’s still up there by the lake.  How much would there have to be in it for you to go back tomorrow and get it?”

“Five hundred pounds?.......Five thousand?....... a million?” 

She gave me a look of total contempt.

“You don’t get it do you, you fucking moron?  I fucking hate fucking Wales.  I hate fucking Cader fucking Idris.  I hate fucking Llyn fucking Cau shit.  I hate fucking glaciers, corries and whatever fucking other fucking bullshit you were fucking well boring us all to fucking death with today”

“Got that, fuckface?”

I nodded.