26 April 2018
An Apparition
My time as a ghost.
By Chin Chin
It isn’t often that I get to appear as a ghost. Not often enough, the nastier of you may mutter, but I am not going to listen to you. I am not going to let your malice make things worse. They are bad enough already.
First to deal with the obvious point. As you may have realised, I cannot be dead because I am writing this column. In Discourse on Method, the 17th century mathematician and philosopher René Descartes proved his own existence by observing “Cogito ergo sum”. Actually he first published the phrase in French rather than Latin (“je pense, donc je suis”) to make things clearer for those who had the misfortune to live outside the périphérique, but in any case the logic was straightforward enough. Someone was worrying about whether Descartes existed. Who could it be? Louis XIV? No, too busy directing his armies. Isaac Newton? No, he was sitting under an apple tree in Cambridge and would hardly have cared about René. Queen Victoria? No, not born yet. That only left René himself, so he had to exist if only to do the worrying. QED.
If a man who worries must exist, then the same can be said for a man who writes. “Scribo ergo sum,” that is Chin Chin’s rule and for those whose Latin is a bit rusty it means that if you write something you must be there to do the writing. Anyway, that’s the position at present and will stay the position until Amazon produce a program for writing in your style without you having to do anything, so that the creation of literature became rather like the driving of an automatically controlled car. So I am still alive and Chin Chin’s rule proves it. It follows that the opportunity to appear as a ghost did not arise by what might rather sombrely be described as the orthodox route.
Actually it was the laundry which did it.
Everyone is away for the week and I have been left to catch up on my correspondence and on paying the bills. Of course I am also responsible for the running of the house and after I had waved goodbye to them all, I found that a long note had been left on the kitchen table. I made myself a cup of coffee and began to read.
The more I read, the more insulted I felt. I really do not need instructions on how to turn on the heating. Suppose I left corresponding imstructions for a woman on how to get the car into reverse? What a fuss there would be then. Condescending male sexism would be the very least of it. What then was this? In these days of sensitivity, even necessary instructions should be considerately phrased. After all, a millennial might read it. And I didn’t like being taken for an idiot, either. Did they really think that I had learned nothing from the day when I put an unopened can of beans into the microwave and it blew a hole in the ceiling? What sort of fool would do that twice? The two pages of microwave ‘dos and don’ts’ were patronising in the extreme.
The question, of course, was how to react to the note. To ring up on the telephone to complain would look petty. It could also refresh everyone’s memory of why there was an iron-shaped hole in the middle of the bath mat. No, a different approach was needed. I had to perform some difficult feat of housework to the highest standard to put my credentials as a “houseman” beyond any possible doubt. The obvious thing was to wash the linen so that everyone would come back to clean white sheets.
It got off to a poor start. The sheets were that elastic sort with corners and were stretched very tight so it would have been better if I had taken everything off the bed before I removed them. Unfortunately however the television remote and the telephone were still there, so that when I released the corners they were catapulted into the wall like missiles from North Korea. The telephone seemed all right but the remote is now jammed on some adult channel. Goodness knows why it chose that one. Anyway, if I can’t un-jam it I will have to break it up with an axe and lose the pieces of it in the rubbish. I have a reputation to think about.
Getting the sheets into the washing machine proved easy enough and after a bit I hoiked them out looking pretty clean. Now they are made of some nylon/cotton composite, so if I hang them out carefully it should be unnecessary to iron them. With this in mind I advanced on the clothesline.
You would think that to put a sheet on a clothesline was an easy matter. Drape it over so that the line runs down the middle, secure it with a couple of pegs and that is it. You would be right too but there is one condition, that the line is reasonably accessible and that it is a calm day. When I went to hang out my sheets neither condition was satisfied. The line was rigged up along a raised paving along the side of the property and it was blowing lustily. To get a wet sheet over a clothesline in these circumstances is less easy than you’d imagine. I threw it over the line and stuck on a peg or two to hold it. As soon as I tried to straighten it, however, it billowed straight at me so that I had to jump out of the way. It then took the opportunity afforded by my absence to wind itself around the line, and when I came back the clothes pegs had disappeared. They were now deeply entangled with the sheet, a pity because I had to release the sheet in order to straighten it.
Eventually I got the sheet unwound and, holding on grimly, moved to the other side of the line. I was now at least up wind of it which was good, but trapped between the line and the edge of the paving, which was less so. The wind changed and, like an experienced matador, the sheet came for me again, abandoning the line to wrap around me until I was like some sort of Egyptian mummy, blinded by heavyweight fabric. At that point I forgot where I was and stepped off the paving, shouting as I crashed into the flowerbed three feet below.
It was a loud cry, but nothing compared to the screams when the Spanish au pair from next door came to investigate and saw my shrouded figure rising from the ground. They do not do that sort of thing much in Spain and, being a Roman Catholic, she leapt to the obvious conclusion. I tried to say something soothing from underneath the sheet but by the time I disentangled my head she was off to fetch her employers. There was just time to get that sheet into the tumble dryer and strike an insouciant pose with the newspaper before they arrived.
