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November 03 Whistle I've told you before about one of my favourite regular customers, Fretful Mathew. He lives in a small village about three miles out of town, along by the river in a lovely rural location. His house was left to him as some sort of trust when his mother died, and he says it's like being in prison as she left him bound by so many conditions of tenancy. Prison though? I bet he doesn't have to share a cell and a toilet with a man called Reg who burgled the Rectory and had a shit on the vicar's kitchen floor. We know Reg. We don't like him though. His defence lawyer said he did it because he was nervous. Reg the Nervous Burglar. Very plausible. Ah, to be sixty five years old and still under the maternal thumb, even after mother's become extinct.
He was in the shop today, was Mathew, fretful and agitated. Reg wasn't. He was probably out taking a dump on some poor absent householder's bed linen somewhere. It's the nerves you know.
"Mathew, what troubles you? Pray tell?" I asked him but not necessarily in those very words. Perhaps I shouldn't have.
"I was typing a card for someone today, whose baby is unwell in an incubator and I got distracted by the sound of someone whistling outside." Which says a lot about Mathew, living as he does in a village where at this time of year pheasants are being blasted out of the sky in phenomenal numbers, quite unwillingly in most cases, and even the shouty man wears ear protectors. They do taste good though. Pheasants that is, not the shouty man's ear protectors. I fancy they'd have an overpowering bouquet of unwashed hair and fetid earwax. Most unappetising. "I had to stop typing and go outside to investigate. The sound of whistling is so distracting."
"Did you duck?" I asked. He looked at me as though I were the crazy man.
"Can you believe, it was someone who'd lost a dog!"
"Mad, man, mad. Tell me more, daddy!" I begged.
"Anyway, I was so incensed that when I got back indoors I tore up the card. My concentration had gone as well, and I felt that they probably wouldn't want a card from me anyway, they'd only feel obliged to reply if they received it and they'd most likely feel resentment at that. They're not even friends, I just read about them in an old newspaper which I found in my garden. And I keep getting pestering letters from a charity to whom I once donated £30 for a destitute Indian child with a harelip and now they want £3000, I take all the letters to the post office and I tell them that I don't want them but they tell me there's nothing they can do and I should just put the letters in the bin but I'd feel too much guilt. Do you have days like that Graham?"
"Funnily enough Mathew, until quite recently I hadn't, but I can feel one coming on now. Now, first things first. It was an old newspaper? Your card may well have come too late. Next, ignore any and all charity requests. I do. Because I couldn't bear the responsibility for encouraging a small disabled third world infant to become dependent upon me. I just haven't got it in me Mathew. I'm just not the caring type. I know it's hard to believe, but there we are, appearances can be deceptive. And just remember, nobody wants to be thought of as a parasite. And don't bin your letters Mathew, burn them. And burn them gladly knowing you are serving a higher purpose. The world needs carbon dioxide, it's a valuable plant food, and remember, it's CO2, there's lots of oxygen in that there gas. Twice as many oxygen atoms as there are carbon. And before you ask, the answer is yes. I would say that existence, along with resistance, is futile. Yours is anyway. There. Are you feeling better now? Do you want another cup of tea?"
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