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[ 8 minute read ]
Spitting
Spittle, I recently read, 'has genuine soothing qualities, and in folklore it has strong magical properties, especially when used fasting.' (Encyclopaedia of Superstitions, E. & M.A. Radford, edited by Christina Hoyle, 1974, Book Club Associates [ 1964, Hutchinson and Co. (Publishers) Ltd ] )
When I was growing up, teenagers used to spit on the pavement but no-one ever asked them to spit onto the little pieces of chewing gum stuck near them. Instead, people would write letters to the Council to tell them of their disgust and exasperation. Every now and then, the Council would unstick the chewing gum.
We think that we live in enlightened times and things work more efficiently now than before. I might disagree. Lots of people were disgusted by the spitting youths. They were told to be upset by everyone else. You see, the awful behaviour of teenagers gives other people things to talk about. The Councils, when I was growing up, actively ran a social interaction policy to make up for chopping local trees down and clearing derelict sites. When everything was manicured and trimmed they discovered that neighbours started to spend less time talking to one another; there were no cars stuck in hedges on a Saturday morning after a good Friday night piss-up; the local kids no longer ran away from home to doss in the derelict 'haunted house', and milkmen, postmen and busy housewives no longer needed to clamber over fallen tree branches in gardens. 'It's unsafe...got to go!' the Council said. Suddenly, electric milk-floats could go everywhere!
Once the roads and lanes got cleared up, local village shops grew quiet. Without constant mental stimulation from conversations on the way to the shops, people grew dimmer and more forgetful; they started making shopping-lists just for something to do. Many people were loathe to throw them away and because their walk to the shops was in a zombie-state they needed to refer to them in the shops. No-one was interested in hearing how other people were.
'Hello, How are you?'
'Fine. There was a clear route from my house to here and nothing happened along the way.'
'Yeah. Me too. Let's see. Ah! I need carrots. Bye.'
Recognising that the Council had messed up people's lives by clearing up the streets, in an attempt to re-invigorate villages and small towns, they covertly hired tourist businesses to bus in visitors. They figured that an insertion of new homeowners, those who were idle and were impressed by clean towns and villages from bus windows and short walks to a dirty river and back, might provide some much needed stimulus. The result however was terrible.
'You're not from round here are you?'
'No'
'Looks like rain. Goodbye.' This on a day with clear skies.
The local pubs went suddenly quiet when these 'foreigners' disguised as locals entered. The barman, local of course, would reluctantly break off the weak but long conversation with a 'local' customer about how nothing happened that day.
'What?' to the unrecognised new customer.
'What bottled beer do you have, please?'
Silence.....
The clocks ticked loudly on and eventually, 'Er...Pardon?'
Invariably, the Council's plan went wrong. Many of the visitors had ideas. This was a completely alien concept to the locals. The visitors bought houses locally and before long the roads and lanes got even tidier. The cows returning to the farm to be milked no longer splattered their khaki poop over parked cars, and front lawns were levelled. Many moles recognised that times had irreversibly changed and they moved away leaving the worm population to explode. Because there was a new desire for weird garden plants; ones that the locals had never seen or heard of before, but the new people had seen in books, libraries and garden centres opened in towns. Shops started to sell more than five different types of seeds. This was part of the Council's plans to hide their mistake of clearing the trees and derelict houses away which had resulted in local zombies. No-one suspected that granting planning permission for garden centres instead of leaving the fields and meadows fallow for dogs to run away from their owners would further devastate the conversational and financial environment.
'Hello. How are you? Hello Bonzo! chased any rabbits lately?'
'We're poor! He just follows me home these days. Eating us out of house and home, he is. We are going to have to sell up and move to Wales at this rate.'
'I know! Have you heard about reading? It's quite new.'
'How Odd! You used to be fun to talk to. Bye'
Gradually the ground improved in people's gardens from both heightened worm activity and the compost from the once potted shrubs leaching into the soil. Newcomers, those that had moved into villages less than thirty years ago, planted flowers. The Council spotted an opportunity. They recognised that the happy years of bumbling chat was forever in the past. The future was about to be permanently set. By now the 'foreigners' who looked like the locals, and spoke like the locals, and to all effects were indistinguishable from the locals except when they ordered bottled beer in the pubs, had gotten jobs in the Council offices. These were people who had gotten used to complaining.
'That blooming farmer has a cockerel that wakes me up every blooming morning!'
'Do you know, I saw a car with an area of rust on it parked outside the shop today? I think I will get on the parish council and put a stop to the locals just quietly living.'
'I quite agree. It is just plain ugly to see. Better still, let's make it universal that the locals' noses are put out of joint.'
'That will teach them to play dominoes and darts and drink draught bitter.'
When a man in a long overcoat and a trilby hat knocked on my parent's door to speak to my father, I answered, age twelve. 'Punks and American Rappers.' I told him. 'Forget about the rappers for now though; we are just not ready for them just yet. It will come, but wait a while.' That advice is not what he had come for, but he remembered it
It was natural then that many Councils embraced the idea of employing a crack team of disruptors who 'individually and creatively' came up with punk rock. Soon, the UK Government passed a secret Act that Punk Rock would be given the 'green light' to displace disco music. Queen Elizabeth ratified it immediately; she and her sister, Margaret, had already tasted excitement outside of the Royal castles, shaking their heads and jumping around.
The Councils actions didn't work out well though. True, I made a lot of pocket money from envelope drops in the woods from Councils to hire young lads to spit on the ground. I also employed teenage girls to stick their chewing gum everywhere just like in 1950s movies. Unfortunately, spontaneous kissing became a thing of the past. By the time I was fifteen I almost always had to wait for someone to get rid of their chewed blobs. No-one wanted to swallow because it stays in you forever, they thought.
My expectation was that the spitting youths would with magic saliva undo the Council's efforts to dash the wonderful life that generations had always lived. The Councils, however, were convinced that complaints would enliven local communities, since normal and friendly chat was frowned on by the 'foreigners'. It never occurred to me that there was another force at play. Someone had realised that mass unemployment could be alleviated by cleaning up the litter and chewing gum. But first Punk had to go.
'There will be a cute girl in 'Neighbours' played by Kylie Minogue we might be able to use.'
'That will take a least a decade to engineer. We shall have to invent Indie Rock and dilute the record companies hold on new artists. Keith, go and make some small record companies. Take Branson there with you. Sorry, Richard is it? Scott, Aitken, Waterman, you will be at the forefront of this, Okay?'
The overrun from Punk Rock and Rock Music lasted well into the 1980s and the invention of New Wave and the Romantics just ended up producing sullen figures dressed in black. Conversation might have picked up because many kids missed school and ran away from home but, interest in them soon fizzled out.
'Hello Sarah. I haven't seen Mopey for a while. Everything okay?'
'Dunno. I haven't seen her for weeks. She might be in her bedroom.' Parents had caught the mood from the general attitude on the street.
In the end, the streets got cleaner This was largely because Goths and Emos hid themselves away to avoid getting tanned skin and they avoided eating their greens to bring on anemia, and only girls with bunches played in the streets with their television-fashioned brothers sporting expensive hair cuts that they didn't want to ruin by trying to give themselves headaches from heading footballs.
But there were some people working for the Councils, who had been tucked away in broom cupboards who never got the memo. They still worked on providing situations for people to complain about. To them, conversation was all about complaining. People were encouraged to write indignant letters to the Council, by stooges and plants at the bus stops and supermarkets that suddenly cropped up. These closeted bespectacled denizens wedged into cupboard that had clean mops regularly replaced with mucky and smelly ones by a special contractor, invoked misery by following the movement set up by a prominent woman in the 1960s and 1970s, who had been specifically trained to moan.
Teams of workmen drilled small holes in roads and waited for Winter to freeze the water in them to make pot-holes. At the Councils, one hand never knew what the other hand was doing.
Eventually, spitting was outlawed by mutual consent. Many people had found that they simply could not work up enough saliva anyway, because ever since a Government Minister had made a crazy suggestion that UK citizens should drink a pint of beer a day to ward off de-hydration during the drought of 1976, and cheap, cold, and rapidly-brewed lager filled in the gap left by the sudden and unpredicted shortage of real beer, everyone was dehydrated during the days and years that followed, and could not gather good spittle in their mouth. Soft-drink ads on the TV were used to help viewers at home drool. 'Lilt' was born.
Spitting these days is largely left to the honest gypsies who spit on their hands when they shake on a deal, to ward off evil or draw magic to their agreement - I don't know which.
Almost nothing is true in this; but if it was a film it would surely have a message saying it is based on real events and it would then become part of our history.
You can read edgier posts on some similar subjects (though not necessarily this one) on my own website martincadwellblog.hegemo.co.uk (opens a new page). Or my site, hegemo.co.uk for my viewpoint on mental ill-health (opens a new page). Look for the tabs at the top of the site, which you may have to drop down. I don't write on there very often though, about once a week or so.
Learn how I introduce and describe a character by getting another character to do it: https://www.hegemo.co.uk/creative-writing/
