S3:E2 The Day of The Short Sword, Yesterday's Shakes and Thieving Urine.

So I googled it.  What a dinosaur I am.  A dinosaur in search of a myth. I wore flares when I was in my teens, and when I came across people who had worn them in the 1970’s it was with mixed feelings of awe and pity.  Right here, today, I am that 90’s dude.  I went to university with a typewriter and graduated without one. I have been a parody of myself since before you were born. 

It’s 8.32pm on a work night, weeknight.  I should be shovelling in Mcvitties Chocolate digestives with one hand and trying to crack the glass ceiling that is my highest ever score on Block Blaster (15 something K from memory) whilst idly half watching Season Five of some crap I hated in Season Two, that was a habit in Season Three and became a frikken grim addiction in Season Four.  I would normally be chewing over the pros and cons of turning on some heating vs stealing quilts from my kids beds (they are with their Dad this week) and making a huge feather nest with airlocks that I don’t want to break come cross- the-bedroom-floor for  (cue The Cuckoo’s Nest soundtrack) Medication Time. I won’t have eaten because I have been around food all day and feel as though I have ingested 105 covers.  Instead, I am on a trail. A mysterious, sudden and powerful quest.

Going back to the event that set all this in motion, I get a recurring image of me standing down the service end of the kitchen. A kindly co-worker is approaching me and I am standing there, fists clenched, ears steaming like vents on a pressure cooker, eyes wide.  It’s not a protest against a co- worker or the job or even management or the government it’s coming out as one phrase.

What’s wrong? She asks.

I have one phrase, and it’s not personally directed, and I hope I have made it clear that this message is not for her.  The message is:

Are. You. Taking. The. Piss?

Between that moment and now, via the day of the long sword and today of the short sword, I did another search.  The results were (surprise surprise) irritating.  The sensation was one of shallowness, of a false floor below a lake of information that is rapidly evaporating…

But the gist of it takes me back to my (also shallow) roots in London, place of my birth but not of my upbringing.

To take the piss originates from a practise of urine collection.  It was used in dyeing and households could make small change selling it to the vat keepers. So there’s the idea of the theft of something gross and personal, a lowdown petty gain.  Something dumbass.  And then in later years, “just taking the piss” is a precursor for “taking the mick” or having a harmless laugh at someone else’s expense.  Can I believe this or is it just some cooked up hooey that stuck? I don’t got time to verify.

This is my cry, to life, all the universes, everything.  I am not going to bother looking up absurdist because I gave up using isms around the same time I gave up…..

Whatever.  I just hope against hope I wasn’t flailing my arms around in some kind of bitch slap windmill gesture.  I think I was holding the mop at the time.  My workmate reminded me that the floor doesn’t need the heaviest mopping on the weekends but I was not to be deterred.

“Nah. I’m scrubbing this hard today. Push me to the brink and I come back hard.”

There are no cockney gangsters in my heritage, at least not that I am aware of.  I may have listened to UK Grime a little obsessively last Summer.  Something has rubbed off.

Cockney gangster, mop, weekend kitchen shift. Long sword.

As a long sword, the mop is easier to approach than the vacuum cleaner with the mighty great suck and the loose nozzle.  I have a two good neighbours in my street, and he who we shall call Him-over-The-Road does a lot of things, but professional cleaning is one of them.  When I talk to him about it, I realise there is a lot to learn and a very long way to go.  Did you know that a mop head has three sides?  I’m going to leave you with that, go away and google it if you are feeling retro.

This is the Day of the Short Sword.

In the way of two swords, the longer sword must be held and operated in one hand.  The shorter sword is tucked into the belt, at the back. In reach, but not always in sight.  It serves to remind its bearer of correct posture – straight and upright.   Together they are known as the sword and the companion sword.  Companion. There is something so comforting about that word.  I like people, I have three children. I adore them. But I am alien. Perpetually alone. The older I get the more this nature embraces me. It resonates for me when Henry Rollins talks about trying to relate to women: “Why are you messaging me?” he quips. “I thought you liked me.” I did message Henry, back in, um, 2005. He emailed back immediately. Real as. If those emails were letters I’d have them in a manila folder, along with my birth certificate and the only essay I wrote at University that seemed like a good one to me. It was a very short essay. The manila folder is slim. But the emails are long gone, washed away by the great wave. Do you remember a time when you didn’t have 15 thousand emails in your inbox alone?

I am left-handed.  Polarities reversed from positioning in an uptight utero. My left hand must be the hand of the sword.  When I work a lower kitchen shift I get to push a heavy trolley during the morning restock.  There are ramps and bumps and rattles and boxes of cargo on a journey that includes 8 litres of freshly made protein shakes and 8 litres of  yesterday’s shakes in little one litre jugs.  Yesterday’s Shakes.  Great name for something. I forget.   Usually, when I push this loaded trolley up hill, I struggle with posture.  Shoulders hunched, butt stuck out, head forward like a tortoise.  It’s the classic british vintage tea lady pose – if I could wear wrinkly brown stockings and wrap around apron I would.  It’s earnest but it’s not as dignified as I would like. 

But today is the day of the short sword.  I take my right hand off the trolley and plant the left hand bang in the middle of the handle. Instantly, I am upright. Core activated, face neutral (instead of the daily uhksakes grimace), eye lids lowered. And the trolley – the one that has a whistle in one wheel and a lilt in the other – starts to coast smoothly. Magic.  I am no longer fighting. The sword hand takes the load, and the companion sword hand is free. For anything.

I should probably disclose something at this point.

I have been carrying a companion sword all along.  But this is the day when I have come to understand it’s worth.

Work was a bit crazy today – any place where a number of humans gather has its seasons. “There’s a lot going on at the moment” is the phrase we use.  Stuff gets overlooked sometimes, in the machine that is a kitchen that must run 14 hours a day.  This is the day when I put some rectangles of card in my back pocket and began to write things down. I am an inveterate biro thief so writing sticks are never far away, but paper usually eludes me. It is after all and, praise be, not an office job.  If you saw my notes from today you would not remember them. It’s mundane stuff – Clock in Rm 12 needs battery, Tea bags missing from upper kitchenette.  Miscellanea. Some of it not even in “my lane” or part of my “schedule”. I drew my companion sword (black retractable Winc. Biro if you must know) time and time again in the course of the day.  At 4pm, in the ten minute break before the “runway” that leads to evening service (Tea as our clientele know it) I took out my little cards and re-wrote them, leaving out the bits that had been resolved.

It was as if the “stuff” of the work, with its million little moving parts, was dissolving.

I have always seen writing as a kind of hanging on, a perpetuating process.  Fun, transporting, but anxiety inducing.  Always the sensation that anything “might be taken down and used against you in a court of lore.” I mean law. Pardon.

This writing, the black ink on the rectangle cards, was dissolving things in front of my very eyes.

Vacuum cleaner. Mop. Biro.

Can you feel me hedging.  I am, of course, self-diagnosed avoidant.  I haven’t been completely honest with you.  I may be messing with you.

I may, in fact….could it be….

I am laying out clues and glitches. Have you noticed the ones for today?

No one here gets out of this scot-free. Blameless.

Who am I fighting? Am I fighting? And why?

I will show you the companion sword tomorrow. The one I have been packing for sometime now. I promise.