[ 6 minute read ]
The man who gets his news from the past
Outside of Aldi, I met a man unlocking his bicycle from the bike stands. I am one of those bumbling fools that thinks everyone is free to talk. I almost always talk to people I meet. This one was in his late twenties and smartly dressed. His voice settled it for me; a university student. Well, it was probably because somehow I got him to tell me he doesn't watch the television. Too old to be an undergraduate.
'Postgraduate student?'
'Yes'
'What's your subject?' I asked. You can imagine I said this around a half-chewed piece of raw carrot in my mouth. I wasn't eating, but the casualness was there.
'Archaeology.'
'I have seen Alice Roberts on YouTube doing stuff on archaeology,' I said.
He looked at me blankly.
'Alice Beer? before she got married? No?' No.
'I don't watch YouTube videos.'
It was then that I realised that I should tell him that the UK is no longer in the EU. I didn't though. There is a good reason I didn't.
I am an idiot
For a long while I have been thinking that my neighbour is weird. He does things quite differently to how I have experienced other people doing things. He once tried to cut the grass in his back garden with a push lawnmower. 'S'okay.' It had just rained. 'Hmmm, maybe!' The grass was eighteen inches high. 'This will be hilarious, I thought.'
Let me spell this out for you: wet grass is quite difficult to cut with a push mover if the rotary blades are not perfectly aligned with the fixed cutting edge. His mower was new so it would probably be fine. However, push movers have a roller immediately before the rotary blades. They flatten the grass and the grass that flicks back up gets cut by the blades. If the grass is taller than the distance between the roller and the blades, it will not get cut because the spinning blades will pass over it before it can spring back up. Simple for any nine year old child to understand. At thirty one years old my neighbour should know this. He didn't.
Incidences with power tools and his handling ineptitude also caused me some concern. I was convinced that he had a learning difficulty which he was not admitting to the world. That is, until I saw his parents. They were in my neighbour's garden, picking green plums from a branch that was semi-severed from the tree, but still bearing good, plump fruit. They cut each little twig from the limb and then plucked off the plums off the twigs, and put the plums in a plastic carrier bag. They did not take the plums from the rest of the tree. My neighbour, Sally, thought it was hilarious that I took my tomato plants indoors with green plum-shaped fruit on them, to hide them from my neighbour's parents and their weird grazing.
You might think that they just wanted green plums, except they had always waited for them to ripen in earlier years.
My neighbour used to park as close as he could to the concrete path parallel to his gravel drive, so his girlfriend would not get her shoes dirty from the gravel when it had been raining until I told him that one of the qualities of gravel which makes it so desirable, is that when it rains, it gets washed completely clean. He had been making her walk further on a dirty and wet concrete path in the rain, than when it was dry! She doesn't wear high-heels.
He also put straw around his strawberry plants which were not planted on a midden, or otherwise fertilised by human or animal excrement. He could have wee'ed on the straw to release nitrogen, but I don't think he had thought of that. Somehow the words 'Straw' and 'Berry' had got separated in his head, and then rejoined, to mean you can't get strawberries unless there is straw somewhere. Straw was a waste product in years gone past, and placed around the plants so the fruit would not lay on excrement.
Yesterday, it finally hit me, he is vicariously ignorant. His parents have never showed him anything in the world. All this time, I was thinking that he had just come out of a twenty-year coma, and now I realised that it is his parents that don't understand things the same way as other people I have met, and they have not passed on knowledge that most of us take for granted. The most strangest thing!
With this in mind, confronted by a PhD Archaeology student outside Aldi, who in all likelihood does not know that Russia and Ukraine are fighting, and Trump is President of America, I could not help imagining that his parents might not know we were ever in the EU and had never told him we were. That is why I didn't give him any current affairs, or topical, news.
I couldn't help thinking of the PhD graduate I took to the Sorbonne in Paris, a decade before. He kept wanting me to stop the van so he could urinate. The day was not hot, but he was constantly drinking water; I mean constantly.
'I can't just stop on a motorway.' I protested. 'Why do you keep drinking water?
'We have to stay hydrated!' he wailed.
'No,' I said 'I have to stay hydrated, you do not. I am driving. You are not.'
I hadn't had a drink since 4am and it was now 11am. You won't die in Southern England or Northern France from dehydration today, if you were hydrated yesterday, in April. Most days, despite sweating heavily, I would drink only about a half a iitre of water, maybe a tin of Coca Cola and a sandwich in nine hours or so, during Summer. If this PhD graduate had parents that never showed him how the world works and he had to go on YouTube and hear that drinking a tablespoon of hot water before going to bed would help him lose weight, or listen to some ranting health freak, it is no wonder he kept needing to wee everywhere.
Looking back, I should have realised that my neighbour's father does not understand the world the same way I do, when he pointed to his son's pear tree and suspiciously asked me if I had made the branches grow over the fence into my back garden. My garden is south of his son's and the branches had grown towards the sun.
Yet, maybe it is my neighbour's parent's parents who never showed THEIR children how the world works.
Having experienced my neighbour's parents I now have an understanding of how immensely dim I am. I simply did not understand that some people have never been shown stuff because their parents had never been shown stuff.
But someone getting all their news from dead people and shards of pottery, is just too much for me to work out how the archaeologist, outside Aldi, had ever learned to ride a bicycle.