Open Writing

After living in a prolonged vacuum of boisterous opinions, incessant brawlings provoked by petty thefts from a comb to a wine gum, all accompanied by continuous sultry mumblings from Elvis Presley, the dog and me now look like two prisoners in solitary.

Except of course we are both smiling.

I must have become so brainwashed by the sound of Elvis’s voice during the last fortnight, I find myself unable to stop impersonating him. His songs have taken over my mind completely, which is bad enough, but it must be a source of surprise to shoppers and bus queues when I strike up in best ‘Presley’ tradition with ‘All Shook Up’ warnings of ‘You can knocka me down, slappa my face, but aha honey, lay offa my blue suede shoes!’

I can never decide which gives me most pleasure, putting the trimmings up or taking them down. On the other hand, although I welcome the extra hour in bed that school holidays bring, there is no comparison for the joy in my heart as I wave them back to teacher.

As most people seem preoccupied with predictions I may as well join them and see what the stars have mapped out for Cancarians. Naturally I do not believe in these horoscopial absurdities – they have no influence on my life whatsoever – I just read them first because they are next to my favourite cartoon.

I have to be on my guard a little at the moment, for some reason the Moon has it in for people in my sign. ‘Something unpleasant is due to arrive at any time.’ Seeing as most of our bills have already taken over the mantelpiece, it must be something really nasty.

But it’s the ‘you are in a hardworking phase at present,’ which sets my lunar
‘tic’ athrob. Is there some job I ought to be doing, I ask myself from the com-
forting depths of my sofa. ‘The holiday could have left you jaded,’ sounds more like it, if it was not for the rest of the sentence ‘or it could have brought much-needed relaxation.’ Still I suppose they have to cover everything.

No harm in casting a blood-shot eyed over my partner’s future, I suppose. I often see him off to work with the bits about his ‘ruler being nicely aspected with the main emphasis on business matters, etc.’ No need to burden him with any of the disturbing non-committal jargon like the promise of a ‘new romance’ one star gazer promised him for Christmas.

You never can tell – perhaps one day this ‘mooning’ over the family signs may produce some profound conclusion, besides an empty coffee-pot. An accurate reading of one’s future comes more expensive, of course. A relative once wrote for her personal horoscope and received a wad of typewritten sheets. The only two bits we could decipher were the suggestions ‘Your daughter will soon have a child and you will be moving house in the near future to a place near running water.’ She was highly impressed by these altruistic observations even when we pointed out these facts were easily deductible from the rough sketch she had submitted – mentioning two married daughters and the fact that on average she changed her address every three years. But the astrologer did predict the running water unprompted.

One aunt lives in mortal fear of ever offending a gypsy. She would rather adorn her mantelpiece with expensive sticks of pink tissue-trimmed privet (remarkably like her own garden hedge) than risk being ‘cursed.’

I used to have a regular gypsy visitor whose appearance I eventually became to dread. She was exactly my size and although I admired her good taste, she had an irritating habit of begging the clothes off my back. Until one day I got my demand in first and asked her if she could possibly have something to fit me? After a short silence and a warning that I was going to spend a lot of time crying in the future, I managed to shut the door and get back to my onion pickling. I have never seen her since.

Was it one of her relatives, I wonder, who paid me a visit one snowy lunchtime a few years later? My son and I were just about to eat our fish and chips, when she knocked on the door and asked for a cup of water. ‘A slice of bread please, if you don’t mind,’ she then asked, until my son, probably realising it was the only way he could get his dinner, offered her a chip.

We finished up in a cosy threesome around the fire. That is until I made the mistake of telling her about my forthcoming ‘happy event.’ This seemed to agitate her so much I began to wonder if she had been sent by the family planning organisation. When she left she was still pleading with me not have any more. Any minute I expected her to break into a chorus of ‘Don’t have any more Mrs More.’ Mind you when the wind whistles round the empty coal bucket and I gaze at the row of occupied chairs guarding the fire, I often think of her words.

I admit to a semi-detached fascination, but I also hold a deep mistrust for Spiritual Mediums.

Looking ever so slightly forward can jog the adrenaline somewhat, but too much looking back would give me a pain in the neck. The literature I have read on this subject concerning what are described as ‘true life’ accounts of liaisons with the spirit world have not altered my agnostic aloofness. People often turn to mediums following a bereavement or other personal tragedy, when their emotions are particularly vulnerable and easy to seduce. In the cruel grip of acute disorientation they grasp at any escape from awful reality that offers the ‘go-between’ a powerful status.

A woman turned to such a person for help last year when her sister’s daughter went missing. She was informed that her niece had been strangled and buried. Strong words for a medium. The day before Christmas Eve the ‘strangled’ daughter rang her mother and told of her whereabouts and three years of misery were obliterated, thank God.

Somerset Maugham lived for ninety-one years believing that ‘there is only one thing about which I can be certain and this is that there is very little about which one can be certain.’

I fervently try to make myself believe that today is the best time. Some people have three worries, yesterday, today and tomorrow, when actually they need only have one.