By Rob Beddow 

I’m in sympathy overload. My motherboard’s burning up, my keyboard is sticking, there’s too much traffic on my bandwidth. Everywhere I turn I’m besieged by interest groups wanting my attention. Take Saturday, my one morning of the week when I’m not in a library or teaching. It’s my little bit of innocent consumerism.

I walk down the High Street of our bog standard London overspill commuter town and tell myself a series of white lies - I’m going to buy toilet cleaner; I’m going to sign up for giving blood; I’m going to  teach some adult literacy classes. But I know I’m not: I’m not going to go and do anything practical or hygienic and certainly nothing altruistic. I’m going to meander via a couple of charity shops where I’ll search for first editions and, failing to find an illuminated copy of the Karma Sutra personally signed by John Terry, console myself by buying shedloads of junk cop fiction. Then I’m going to have a fragrant, salty cholesterol pasty, and somehow (by accident?) I’m going to end up at the out of town posh garden centre where I shall spend money I don’t possess on shrubs, bulbs, purple basil plants, a rose or three.

That’s the meta-text, the actual object of my journey and, I suspect, the white lies are in themselves a sort of salacious transgression, indulged in just for the sake of the frisson of guilt. But this Saturday I didn’t transgress - I went home with a headache and it all started outside the newsagent in Sheep Street. Mercifully this is now plain Martins again after a surreal period being known as ‘Forbuoys’. An inscrutable name for a national newsagents chain, unclear whether it was selling maritime flotation gear or dyslexic male prostitutes. But outside the now happily re-titled Martins it was the Albanian Big Issue seller who put me on the first step to migraine.

In full Balkan drag she whines for hours ‘BeeeG EEEsheEW!’ rising to a crescendo on each word, zapping your synapses in the little orgasmic nasal yelp of the final syllable. I’m going to leave the ethics of the problem aside I’m just pissed off with the drain on my sympathies produced by a simple walk on a sunny morning. I ricochet across the road and it’s worse still - a Christian healing group are do-gooding outside Boots, laying on  hands to a Barry Manilow [sic] soundtrack.

Do I feel stressed with life at times, asks a floral printed  victim of a blue rinse turned  maroon-ugly? ‘Zounds, it must be that I am pigeon livered and lack gall’ as  Hamlet quoth, because in my younger days  I’d have taken on these god-botherers with glee, inventing chapter and verse when the quote failed me and usually giving a resounding version of the Kierkergaardian - Marxist- Ghandian - Ian Duryian cod philosophy that was my preferred platform in the heady days of  the Brixton riots and the first hesitant entrée of the cappuccino into our malls and markets.

No more, I’m tired these days, and clearly have Stella’d away a lot more neurones, because some  reckless middle-aged idea of wit caused me to mutter ’Polski, - only to have my wrinkled Honour Blackman look-alike approach nearer with her cool and healing hands and shake my (by now sweating) hand in a gurgle of some Eastern European  Creole. Oh God, I’m trapped in a desiccated handgrip and  I really can smell wee and lavender water. A last throw of the dice - I feign deafness and do a runner into Tesco.
Immediate Slavic retribution followed - the herbs and spices section where I normally indulge by buying herbs whose names I like (I have little or no idea what to do with Methi, Tamarind and Sweet Nim leaves but I love the names and the dinky little jars) is not there, not there to pour the possibility of aromatic pungency like balm onto my soul.
Outrage! My herbs are all gone, exiled , dumped round the corner next to the tampons and piles cream in plebeian ignominy and in their place are misshapen odds and ends of vacuum sealed pig, labelled in an abundance of consonants. (What national crisis caused the Poles to sell their vowels?)
Like some bitter variant of the Midas story, my Polski lie has caused everything I can see in the supermarket to transubstantiate. Everything is steamed, smoked, made of caraway, cabbage and vinegar. My brain aches. It feels as if I’m wading through sauerkraut; I’m in a rabid Gdansk emporium conjured from my own mendacity.

The purchase of a packet of fags seems to offer some  immediate action , an easy, soothing and familiar  ritual of self-destruction, an incitement to constructive thought after the existential  turmoil of the Polish smoked meat section (Sartre has a lot to answer for: I bet he never saw his juniper berries shoved into insulting intimacy with a tube of Anusol).

It’s nice Bernie who serves me, a testimony to the efficacy of her high tar products, grunting good morning in a raddled baritone; we normally have a natter about my teaching Chinese people which she finds curiously difficult to fathom (‘Do they like things like Mini-Cheddars and  pickled onions?’ she once asked  as if this were the acid test of  admittance to full civilised status). This morning, however, she asks me if I want to buy a daffodil for breast cancer - I just manage to avoid replying that if I knew the genus Narcissus gave people breast cancer I’d not have put so many in the garden and, instead, donate 50p and go out with my throat cancer congeners in one hand and a yellow fabric talisman against breast cancer in the other.

The sympathy merchants are now threatening to overwhelm the shoppers. Outside Holland and Barret two men with a frightening mastiff thing on a lead are collecting to send sick and dying children on one last magical trip. Opposite, outside Clarkes, a few spotty squaddies in camouflage and an NCO wearing a T shirt and pecs are collecting for our Heroes in Afghanistan. Insanely the idea crosses my mind that the little kiddies might be sent on a final magical trip to Kandahar province but putting such rancid and unpatriotic thoughts out of my head, I purposefully stride towards the other end of town. Into the arms of the Cat Protection League.

Before I have an army of belligerent feline devotees writing to me in green biro from Wagga Wagga, let me say I don’t hate cats as such.  I hate their unfettered numbers, the death of all the song birds in the garden, plunging my fingers into feline faeces as I plant tulip bulbs, tom cats scent marking my front door, the obscene mewling as they copulate  in my rose bed. No I don’t hate cats; I simply wish they didn’t exist.
There’s a difference…I think.
Quick arabesque round the cat nutters, pirouette past the tall vacant man with dandruff collecting signatures for fuck knows what, avoid the Brownie Troop cum Lolitas coquettishly enacting Fairy Tales and Pop Idol dance steps outside the Catholic church and collecting for a new Brownie Hut and voila, I am now positively waltzing down  Chapel Street and, like Mr Toad, have the scent of the open road in my nostrils and the garden centre in my sights. Poop! Poop!

Walking on air I am about to twinkle past the Anglican church when a man in a clerical collar approaches me. I’m starting to feel quite chipper and benign by now.  I’ve avoided so many hazards and, assuming he’s after money for the church restoration, am about to disgorge a pound coin. False move - he’s not with my lot, the Anglicans, he’s one of the Gospel Outreach project, a group so outré that even the Seventh Day Adventists won’t touch them. I thought he was with the Saturday Church Restoration Book Fayre in the churchyard but, too late, I realise my mistake.
The Hebron Gospel Tent has been pitched on the football field at the back of my favourite boozer the Swan, and this one with the dodgy toupee, halitosis and scuffed trainers (‘Jesus is God’s rapper’) is like the hyena who leaves the rest of the pack as an outrider to spot a wounded wildebeest or spavined zebra, and wear out it out before the pack arrives to dispatch it. Not sure the simile will hold much longer - although after a few pints I do amble like a gnu with a hernia but nevertheless he was upon me.

“Hello, may I ask you if you have committed to our lord and saviour?”

God knows what made me reply that I was a Mormon and that my wives were waiting for me outside Asda; it wasn’t big, it wasn’t clever, it wasn’t funny. It led to an ugly little fracas where I defended polygamy with a rictus of manic joy and then (I blush), when he rumbled me (could have been the bottle of Teachers in the Oddbins bag), I think I told him to stick his evangelism where the sun didn’t shine and follow it up with a wire brush. Backwards.

He told me he would pray for me; I told him to consign his prayers to the same lower reaches of his rectal canal with his gospel - and - I’m so ashamed to say - his toupee. The last was cruel and gratuitous and such behaviour, as my old philosophy tutor at Cambridge would have said, was not the behaviour of a gentleman, as he put down his valuable first edition of Mein Kampf and stared at me in saddened disbelief over the top of his lorgnette, adjusting his yellow silk kimono in a show of gentlemanly disapprobation.

Loathed by faith healers, soul savers, Balkan Big Issue vendors and cat fanciers, all I could do was give up the garden centre (I did so much want to buy the flashy new frost hardy double blossoming rose ‘Katy Price’). The Teachers was however left, to me, along with an afternoon of early spring sun and a new Val McDermid thriller.

My headache ebbing away,  I thought, Gentle Reader, of extending my picaresque tale of woe into a parable of a Britain on the verge of an election, a broken society of competing ethnic groups, an unstoppable influx of immigrants, the hypocrisy of church and state, and the sheer irritating unpronouncability of Krakow food labels. Sod that for a game of soldiers! The sun is still shining and I’m loving this book (anyone out there who has a strong stomach and loved Ian Rankin, go and read Val McDermid…now!). I have a good portion of the whisky left, and this Polish smoked sausage makes a great sandwich. I’ve just found on You tube a 1972 video of Gladys Knight singing ‘Help me make it through the night’, my favourite song. The rest of the day looks good.