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May 24, 2005
Being Susceptible to Requests of a Certain Nature
I had another removal to attend yesterday evening. I walked to the church from work along the banks of the canal, taking a good forty-five minutes to get there. The weather had the meteorological equivalent of ADD, by fits soaking the place with fierce showers or towelling us off with a stiff breeze and steady sunshine. I stopped for shelter at one stage under some form of archway, which lead to an open yard of the type seen on television ads warning children of the dangers of slurry pits.
With my headphones in my ears I couldn’t hear the blustering conversation of a man on crutches, very slowly crossing the road behind me. I had turned so he was just visible out of the corner of my eye, hoping that I wasn’t the target of whatever it was he was saying. This isn’t because I’m generally mean to strangers talking to me on the street. It’s because I’m generally lovely to strangers on the street. I don’t mean to be, I just seem to default to extreme niceness when caught in situations where I’d rather be anywhere else. Why not try asking me for money some time?
Eventually he got close enough to where I had to take off my headphones and respond. His first question was, “Are you Irish?” which I suppose was reasonable given I’d been playing obliviousness up until that point, and being foreign is apparently a ready explanation for deliberately ignoring something.
He wanted me to carry his bag around the corner, as it had a two-litre carton of milk in it, which was hard to manage with the crutches. Especially in the wet; the crutches tended to slip very easily. He’d had a very bad fall last week, getting off the bus. His foot was the problem, it had an ulcer on the heel which was finally starting to heal now he had a home help to look after him two days a week. The diabetes was the other problem; he’d gotten it from eating too much fried food, just like Brendan Grace.
We made very slow progress along a route which I was acutely aware (in the sense of how impaired his movement was) would only have taken twenty seconds to cover on my own.
He thought I was about 17 or 18, which was nice. And then sympathised with my increasing baldiness. But he didn’t know how to get to the church I was headed for. So I deposited the bag in his porch as requested and set off again, guessing that a church in the distance was the right place to go to (it was), and arriving with a couple of minutes to spare.
Posted by Oliver at May 24, 2005 04:50 PM
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