Some things are just plain wrong. Your husband emailing you about his girlfriend, Liz Hurley’s love affair with white jeans, and beige M&Ms. I add to this certain words in the English language (crevice, hunkers, gusset and moist) and government departments.
Had the pleasure of dealing with the Ministry of Something-or-Other (Ministry of the Apocalypse) in order to register a birth. Following my ethos of life-long learning, I came away wiser. I learnt that queuing at such a place involves joining the gaggle of people at a desk and yelling for directions at the sweaty, confused looking man hiding tremulously behind it. I learnt that a pram, two children and three adults can fit in a half metre square lift. I also learnt that in Cyprus you can only have two names… “so choose”. Standing there in a full-to-capacity room with no air con, just a fan suggesting refreshment and some really funky body odour coming off my fellow customers, I was not the epitomy of patience. “Are you telling me,” I politely seethed through clenched teeth, “I can’t call my baby what I want to call her?” Feeling foolishly safe in her perspex prison the attendant suggested I go in the following week to see The Boss, who was on leave. I contemplated shattering her illusion of protection by reaching through the “talky hole” but thought better of it. I could wait. You see, at about three to four weeks postpartum a woman’s hormones reach their peak, which means that when I meet The Boss I am likely to either produce a gale of tears or go medieval; both situations can be fashioned into a credible defence in a court of law. Yes siree, I sense a battle is imminent. I love the smell of cordite in the mornings, smells like… victory?
My second brush with authority came but two days later when I was pulled over by the police. Just quietly, between you and me, when a traffic policeman says “We have a problem, you turned in the wrong direction”, the answer is not “I’m cool, no problem, this is the direction I want to go in.” Also, bear in mind, should he suggest you turn your music down, “But it’s the Stereophonics, it has to be loud (or why bother),” is not the answer he is looking for. For any police officers reading this; big thumbs up, you’re doing a great job…
It is not government officials that I am mistrustful of per say. It is anybody who fills in forms for a living. Take for example the crowd at the local supermarket who offered to measure my body mass index and my body fat percentage. I bought into it. Name? Sure thing. Height? No problem there. Weight? I responded with the mildest of blushes. Age? Getting cheeky, but what the hell. Then it was simply a matter of holding a fancy gadget in front of me that measured it all out and the results were recorded. It is with a fanfare of golden trumpets that I announce my place in the normal body mass index range. The form read I was just (I stress only just) in the above normal fat range. This can of course be qualified by me having had a baby three weeks ago and my unusually fat hands. Despite a convincing post measurement presentation on milkshakes, aloe juice, and free follow up phone calls from a trainer to see if I was still “fat”, I did not purchase any of the suggested products. I believe the form-fillers rigged it. I did leave Alpha Mega with a set of scales and a packet of muesli though.
Having had “one of those weeks” I emailed a friend for comfort. She works as a nurse in Afghanistan and, as anyone who has done humanitarian work can tell you, the form filling in such places is both plentiful and futile. Many hours are wasted writing inter-colleague memos, detailing procedures, for say, uplift of corpses. During the time taken to write these memos family members (or mysterious others) can sweep in and take away the deceased, leaving no trace. While some tales, such as the old man bitten by a dog who insisted on barking at everyone, often amuse, it is her stories of young land mine victims which tend to put things in perspective. This week she picked a ladybird out of a boy’s brain. Miraculously the boy survived and went home. She wasn’t sure about the insect. Possibly a form was filled out stating it had flown in the wrong direction, recording it’s body mass index, and listing two names only: Lady Bird.
