The winter depresses me, I think I would rather be trapped in a room with Susan Boyle on Viagra, than get out of bed on a winters morning and have to go to work. But seeing as I didn’t have Susan Boyle at hand, and a hand full of Viagra, in effort to just prove to myself how much I would rather not get up, I would usually just get out of bed and growl around the house until I could half heartedly appreciate the pathetic effects of the rusty old central ‘heating’.
I lived in a four bedroom Victorian terraced house in the Midlands. You know the types, ‘Residential’ where teachers and people who owned their own businesses would live. Not too posh, but a lot posher than what I was used too. Asides from living next to an ex convict/complete psychopath who was on the brink of insanity, it was a really nice place to live. Working in the charity shop was good, it was just getting up and getting there that was the problem.
Once there, i would have to deal with weird 35 year old Stefan who would come in every Saturday invading my personal space in his grey pleather jacket and comb over. He would ask me exactly the same questions each week, only to receive the exact same answers.
S - ‘Can I take you for a drink?’
M - ‘No.’
This went on for about 8 months until I resigned. Stefan was strange, and definitely a few Bunsen burners short of a practical science school lesson. He would pretend to browse the video section but just stare aimlessly in my direction with a disturbing grin on his face. I hate to say it but in fact there was a few missing cards that managed to find there way into the shop.
A local alcoholic named Janice was probably my favourite, ‘If you need anything darling, just whistle’ She was eccentric, and I don’t think I had ever met anybody like her before. She had something about her, something which made me want to explore her face. Not physically, definitely not physically, id be to afraid that if I touched her she’d dissolve. Her face just looked like it could tell a few stories, like it had been to middle earth and back again and found the ring. I think she meant ‘Just whistle’ with the honest intent and actual belief that she was able to magically appear like Cinderella’s fairy godmother or similar if I just whistled, and I tell you what, I wouldn’t be surprised if that’s exactly what would of happened. I never dared whistle, just on the off chance that she would appear. Like a genie from a lamp, but It was a sweet gesture. The only thing she could probably do is show me how to neck a bottle of merlot in about ten seconds anyway, and maybe stumble up and down the high street for a few hours, tracking down balls of old wool and anything made from real animal fur.
She was eternal. I’d find her in the local pub often on my lunch break, completely unhinged by about midday, staggering around in her marks and spencers navy blue high heels, clutching dozens of empty glasses for the bar staff, dropping and smashing them and drunkenly slurring some sort of apologetic speech at the manager for the next twenty five minutes, insisting she was only trying to help. Everybody knew who she was and everybody adored her I think, in their own special way. I’d hate going to get lunch from the pub when she was around because her teeth reminded me of very old tombstones and she would always be hovering around me and smiling whenever I would see her, so I would feel like I was sometimes eating my lunch within close range of a mobile mini cemetery.
It wasn’t all doom and gloom in the world of dead people’s clothes and unwanted classical records though, the things you would come across were pleasing. I found an 80’s Casio keyboard so I of course had old Sussanah on loop pretty much as soon as I set eyes on it. I then found a family fortunes ‘X’ wrong answer keyring, which replaced my voice for the word ‘no’ for the next two days, and to top it all off I found a 500 piece jigsaw of Elizabeth the 1st in which a wave of excitement rushed through my entire body from head to toe. She was my favourite English monarch by far and I dedicated the next two weeks of my life to completing this jigsaw in memory of the big ginger, supposed virgin.
The only part I didn’t enjoy was the time when I found a bag of dirty knickers. That was disgusting. I wretched four times as the pungent smell of old discharge that slapped me in the face. And having to work with Joyce, a frail old lady who was probably born 6/6/6666 BC and on deaths door, I remember my manager saying she wasn’t long for this world, as she had been read her rights four times already, but still managed to piss on the light in the tunnel and do a u turn. Yet behind her frail sorry exterior and long thin gray hair which reached her hips almost, lied something definitely related to Lucifer himself. Joyce would frown behind the till, adamant that she was in charge and shout at children waving her walking sticks in the air. I remember on my first day I accidentally placed my coat on top of hers in the cloak room, a mistake I was sure never to make again. I’d never heard an old lady sound that angry before, she spoke to me like I had killed a kitten with a pencil, she was frightening, and I think she is still alive.
I bought my friend Ellie a bag of marbles from the shop for her birthday once, the old kind, the ones that slightly resemble a cats eye, and in her card I wrote:
‘Ellie, I have found your marbles’ she didn’t seem too impressed when she opened it, in fact she looked quite upset. I hope she wasn’t a closet manic depressant. I didn’t stay friends with her for very long really. Maybe that’s why.
Getting too and from work wasn’t hard, considering I only lived around the corner. I used to ride my £20 black second hand mountain bicycle there and back taking me around ten minutes. But I remember on this one particular day, it was snowing, It was early December and I was running late and I had forgotten my gloves, and foolishly under estimated the weather and told myself ‘it will be ok, its only around the corner’ I found myself peddling like a chipmunk with a gun to its head, so fast, whilst preying (to a god that I don’t even believe in) to please please please just let my fingers stay attatched to my oversized hands (and the breaks of course) for the duration of the journey so I can at least get inside and attempt to defrost my digits with steam from the kettle in the shop kitchen, that’s if they aren’t completely frozen to the bicycle handle bars in which case this is it, this is how I die. Because it is too late to go back now. I will never leave the house gloveless in a blizzard ever again. I think I would much rather die in a fire than freeze to death. Just incase anybody is planning on killing me with temperature, my preference is hot. Just make it fast.
