Not the trowel I thought I was !

The phone rang just as I lifted fork-to-mouth. The timing was impeccable. A second earlier and my fork would have been empty, a second later and my mouth would have been full. Brilliant! As it was my pasta-laden eating utensil hovered just above - and dripped bologna’s all over - my clean white YSL. Another lovely shirt soiled another culinary delight left to court cold. I picked up the phone.

‘Hello!’

‘Geoff, it’s Peter. Are you all right?’

‘Yes! Shouldn’t I be?’

‘Didn’t you get a kicking last night? By three lads?’

‘No.’

‘Are you sure?’

‘I think I’d have remembered’.

Contemplative pause.

‘So you’re legs aren’t broken then?’

Astounded! ‘No, actually my legs are fine today’.

Pavlovian reflex had me checking them before I could stop my self and then head shaking with embarrassment.

‘Oh!’ Came the surprised, almost disappointed reply, then, recovering like a fast thing, ‘That’s good then?’

We agreed for the first and last time in the conversation.

Apparently I’d been bashed up again! For the umpteenth time. I’ve been beaten up so many times (in my absence) that I plan to ring Guinness books to see if I may, inadvertently, have set a new record.

This time though I got off lightly, just two broken legs. Apparently the beating was administered by a bunch of lads who, so the story goes, cornered me in a Coventry bar and beat me till their hands hurt. I wasn’t actually there when it happened so I don’t know the exact details, only what I’d been told in a Chinese-whispery-grape-vine type of way.

The ‘bad news’ was delivered by a vernacularly challenged friend who mumbled - unsure of whether he should have rang or not - a hand-me-down replay of the beating.

After the initial, somewhat confusing discourse he went on to spill the gory details. It was the latest in a long line of stories that did little more than supply me with a fucking good chuckle and material for my next article (thank you on both counts).

What surprises me most is not the fanciful fables, after all storytellers have been around since the woolly mammoth (no they are not a rock band). Rather, I am amazed by the amount of people who think I might, for a single second, be the least bit interested or that I might want to ‘do something about it’.

I also find it interesting, if not down right amazing that, six years after retiring my post as a night club doorman people still feel the need to; 1) make up stories that include, somewhere in the narrative, graphic vignettes of me being beaten close to death, 2) name the guy in the bar last night who didn’t think I was ‘all that tough’ and 3) ring me up at home (at dinner time) to tell me all about it.

The door was one of the dozens of occupations that litter my life path. I was a doorman; I am now a writer. I used to be a bricklayer but I don’t get phone calls saying ‘Joe Bloggs reckons you couldn’t ‘lay’ your missis’. I don’t get holster-hipped, bacci chewing ‘cowboys’ cornering me by the cement section of B&Q grunting ‘go for your trowel boy!’ I pushed a brush in the factory for years; do I get letters written in blood proclaiming ‘John Smith reckons he’s twice the broom you ever were?’ Off course I don’t, so why do I still get it from the door? I’ve finished the door and whilst it was a good experience for me at the time I no longer do it anymore. End of story.

So my messengers are misguided, their heads still back in 1989, stuck in their own personal ground hog day? And surely they are mistaking me for some one that gives a rats arse about pub gossips, about opinions that wobble precariously on sugar pedestals! My life, I have to tell you, does not revolve around being able to have a fight! I will not be measured by my ability to ’break noses at ten paces’ or ‘maim that spoon in one’. When I was still young enough to associate romanticism with violence, and thick enough to see a contrary viewpoint as a glove across the chops, it might have meant something. But now it means nothing because it is no longer me. It is a cast off shell, a shedded skin, a deceased and buried incarnation, a ‘pythonian parrot’ that is as dead as Darwin. But it is a dead parrot that won’t stay dead because people keep digging it up from yesterday’s scrapbook and dragging it into today’s portfolio.

‘Is this you?' they say with their very sharp tongues. ‘That was me’, my wearied retort ‘but it is me no longer.’ The exhumed ‘parrot’, my hideous, shadowy Mr Hide who hurt with malice and cloaked heinous behaviour with weak rationalisation is no more. I hated the dark side of my moon, my own personal Vader, the metaphoric wart on the end of my otherwise splendid nose.

My life is not about being able to beat people up, it’s not about chasing every beer-bag and garrulous mouth that wants a shot at a title I never had nor claimed to hold.

So, what am I trying to say? What is the point I’m labouring to make?

I am very flattered that my friends are offended on my behalf. I really am. No, honestly. But there’s no need. I’m not offended, and it’s me that’s getting the fictional beatings, so there is no need for others to take up the gauntlet. Be offended, be indifferent, believe the stories or crack you ribs laughing at them-I don’t mind either way, just please, please don’t ring me in the middle of my dinner to pass on the tidings. My life is too exciting, too precious, too overwhelming happy to be entertaining such trivia. And when all is said and done this is a free society, opinion and critique are not only expected they are entitled.

I am not offended so please do not be on my behalf. It’s costing me a fortune in shirts.