Driving Decoy

Slept well.  Rose.  Left the house to meet my friend for coffee.  It was a lovely morning, and the sun was out.  Once in the car, and on my way, my peripheral vision was sparked by a black car, sidling up at my driver’s side.  I was approaching traffic lights, on a road which only had one lane leading up to the junction, and I was thrown by this.  He was flapping his hands, his passenger window down.  I switched the button to roll down my window, looking in my mirror, conscious of the obstruction.  He informed me one of my tyres looked wobbly, didn’t seem sure which one.  ‘Oh,’ I said, my mind working overtime.  ‘I’ll stop at Sainsbury,’ I said.  ‘Just thought I should let you know,’ he said back, his forehead lined, his chin stubbled and his eyes bleary.  I drove on, slowly, making no sudden turns, looking in my wing mirrors, listening for clanking, or grinding or something to indicate I was about to lose a tyre.  I drove another five hundred yards before turning in at the Golf Course, worried about his reckoning.  I kicked both the front and the back tyres, which were solid, kicked them again before continuing on my way.  It was all pretty strange.  Maybe it was his eye sight which was wobbly I thought, but continually checking my wing mirror and my rear-view mirror, checking, checking that my car wasn’t cracking up.  Watch that bump in the road.  Easy around that corner. 

Once on the straight and narrow, and walking with my friend, it was pointed out that there were people about, waving cars down and committing crimes, stealing cars, handbags, or worse, kidnap.  It was broad daylight.  Surely not.  This didn’t stop my mind throwing up visions of the guy with the bleary eyes sitting in the carpark at Sainsbury waiting for me.  Yikes.  Lucky escape. 

After talk of the corrupt nature of people, various other subjects were discussed at my coffee morning, some with a high level of hilarity, subjects unfit even for the most secret of journals, so I’ll say no more.  The world has gone crazy, and me with it, my only source of survival to laugh in the face of it.  A big huge ha ha ha to the world and its craziness.  Our laughter made a dog bark.  We were at once charmed by a wagging tail and loose tongue.  No kisses for me, don’t save your kisses for me.  ‘Come on Fido, please keep your tongue to yourself.  It might be good enough to disinfect your sore bits, but I’ll pass, thanks.  It’s bad enough trying to avoid Covid, without contracting a zoonotic disease.’  What?  I love dogs, they are so much simpler than us.  And they’re not kidnappers.  They don’t steel your handbag.  ‘Hey, get your nose out of there.’  Would you believe it, Fido just stole my gloves? 

The current news is discussed.  The political pages.  I go through all the MP’s and political people I don’t like.  I’m not political, don’t have the back knowledge, the history of politics, don’t have the patience to read through everything written.  No, my process is to look at a face, listen to their words, their mannerisms, and from there I make up my mind about them.  I’ve never met them, but I dislike them, at least a handful of them, their arrogant, smarmy, bumptious faces looking up at me from one newspaper or another.  I do the same with dogs.  I look at their faces, I see their bared teeth, their glaring eyes, the raised hair on their backs, threatening pose and I think…run.  No, I’m joking.  I learnt young, from experience, never to run from a dog as it will chase you and bite you.  It was a dwarf Pekinese, if I’m allowed to say that, with a big bite.

I watched a documentary recently.  It was called The Center Will Not Hold.  A profile of Joan Didion, directed by her nephew Griffe Dunne.  Joan Didion was an American Writer.  She died on the 23^rd December last year, aged eighty-seven, so the documentary, for me, was like a farewell to Joan.  She was awarded The National Medal of Arts and National Humanities in 2012 by President Obama.  Joan mentioned during the documentary that she’d never considered herself into politics and yet, for example, she wrote about the US press coverage of Salvador’s internal war and then went there, to this dangerous country, to see for herself.  Joan was a small woman, 5 feet tall, sitting out of the limelight, but came over as a blinding light in her writing.  New journalism.  She wrote for the papers and for magazines, made it personal, in the I voice, and her voice was loud. 

I was truly inspired.  I may not be particularly political, but perhaps I can still write about what I see and hear.  I’ll study Joan Didion’s work, I say before another kick of my tyres.  I leave for home.       

Night falls.  I relax into Question Time, knowing that the next day I’ll have forgotten all the pertinent points amongst the whimsical whirling of my mind, the thoughts of loose rolling tyres, of sociopathic decoys, of simply puzzling human behaviour.