Common Flasher

I am once again gainfully employed and so find myself a long way from the Bus and the Husband and living in London.

Unfortunately my new charge is rather normal, which makes for rather boring blogging. Her only quirk is that she gets a bit depressed because as she said, “The trouble is that at 96 I’ve outlived everyone I like and now I’m left with the rest.” I can of course sympathise with her plight, she’s beyond the stage of attending funerals because everyone she knew has already popped their clogs. I on the other hand am at that stage of life where everyone is either popping the question or sprogs.

In order to ease my boredom (because unfortunately the nice, sane elderly are a little boring) I have taken to wandering off to Wimbledon Common during my time off in the hope of spotting a Womble. While I didn’t spot a fictional character from my childhood (hope springs eternal) I did see a windmill. You take what you can get in these hard times.

I was rather enjoying my jaunt around the park, until it was ruined by the British and their Behavioural etiquette. You see the thing about walking in British public places is that you must pass the British public. Should there be only two of you on the road ambling towards each other this involves a certain amount of English awkwardness. The rules of the road dictate that you should only make eye contact once and only very briefly at that, possibly with a ‘hello’ or better yet a curt head nod. If you should look up to find someone staring at you longer than the allowed 2 second head nod, you should assume they are some sort of pervert. In order to avoid being labelled a deviant, the entire operation involves careful calculation as to when exactly to look up. A mistimed initial upward gander will result in furtive upwards/downwards glancing leaving you looking like a Learner driver doing mirror observations.

As an amendment to this rule the onlooker should not be considered deviant if they are preposterously good looking and so are you. Unfortunately this doesn’t often happen to me. On my more colourful walks around Glasgow I was more likely to see some weird old bloke in a vomit stained polyester tracksuit top, muttering what sounded like ‘runt’ under his whisky breath. Timing the gaze all wrong I would catch an eye, only to discover that it moved independently of its neighbour - the chameleonic gaze resting briefly on my chest before darting to the tin of extra strength beer in his hand. Ah, life North of the Border, how I miss it.

However, Wimbledon Common strikes me as the kind of place that a flasher of the trench-coated variety would leap out from behind a tree baring his wares. In my youth, my mother told a tale of how, aged 13 or so, whilst walking to school with a girlfriend a Mac-clad flasher leapt in their path and his ‘whistle met the wind’. Unfortunately my materfamilias says she did not pay any attention to the flashing and would have been totally oblivious to the entire event where it not for her school friend’s purpling faced hysteria. Learning from her schoolgirl error she packed a magnifying glass in her bag the next day, but alas Flash Gordon did not appear. Not surprising really as I imagine a complete lack of attention is about the worse response to receive when your meat and two veg is on display, that and an utterance of ‘my, my isn’t it cold out.’

Now I’m off for a stroll, where’s my magnifying glass…

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