Simply Sue: The Man With Sixteen Earrings
Would you let a chap with eight rings in each ear take you for a drive? Sue Papworth is pleasantly surprised.
A few years ago, when I ceased to be mobile, I advertised in the back end of our local paper for someone to drive me out occasionally, complete with electric scooter. I had some rum responses.
There was George, who was 80-odd, about four feet two and stone deaf, in bottle-bottom glasses. He toddled in, peered at the books and notepads that litter the place, and said, “Oh, you’re still at school, are you, dear?’’ This reduced my confidence to zero at a stroke: anyone who can take me for a schoolgirl, with his specs on, ain’t gonna drive my car.
Then there was this curious young man, a train-spotter if ever I saw one, in 18-carat nerd horn-rims and those violent knee-length shorts one would have killed one’s mother for making one wear, but which persons of under 30 wear voluntarily. (He was about 38, and must have weighed around 7½ stone.) He appeared to think that the ad was some kind of bizarre lonely hearts affair, and that where I really wished to be driven was wild. Which he did, but not quite in the way he’d hoped. He left rather swiftly, with an earful of fleas and a hole in his ego the size of Argentina…
The next applicant seemed ideal. An early-retired office manager, complete with wife and estate car, keen to do something useful with their newly acquired free time… I rang him. Great, super, ferrying me and scooter to all points of the compass no problem, great fun, any time. Whoopee. Rang him the next week, to be met by a hiss of “I can’t speak now!!!’’ and a slamming down of the phone. Followed by a call of the “Don’t Call Me At Home, My Wife Is Beginning To Suspect’’ type, from a phone box. Good grief, I thought. I felt his wife probably knew what she was on about, thank you and good night…
I rejected the ones who actually said they were perverts, axe-maniacs and alcoholics, and gloomily sent for a chap at the bottom of the list.
He was 22, and arrived on a motorbike, entirely upholstered in black leather, and embellished with eight earrings per ear and a green pony-tail. And he’d brought is driving licence, three references, a sheaf of leaflets on scooterable places in the area, and he was totally sane, decent and charming. We set off for the hills at once.
