Ahh, the rich pageant of life! For nineteen years I was trapped in the vice-like grip of a dental laboratory in Shrewsbury.
How much duller and soul-destroying would my life have been were it not for the colourful characters that existed on the periphery of those halcyon days. Dentists, patients, colleagues and others unconnected with work, yet whose presence looms large in memories of innocent times.
For a start off there was Rory. It wasn't his real name. He was one of the endless stream of bods who turned up in reply to shop window adverts for the cleaners the management seemed to think we required. He would appear three afternoons a week and slop about in kitchen, toilets and ante-room, moving things about and projecting the illusion of tidying up. He also made the tea. Rory had been in the army in his youth. His tea was like nothing yet imagined in the works of Stephen Hawking. I have never experienced anything like it before or since. Its colour was that of soiled corduroy, its consistency of badly-mixed plaster and its effect on the melamine mugs so thoughtfully provided for our enjoyment by the directors the same as the Alien's blood on the walls, floors and ceilings of the Nostromo. Invariably the vile fluid went straight down the sink where it had God alone knows what effect upon the indigenous fauna of the sewage system. Spoons made of anything less robust than plutonium melted on contact. Sugar poured into the stuff exploded with noiseless puffs, reminiscent of somebody squeezing meringes. Only after Rory had left us did something slightly worrying come to light - like the little bit of shoe poking through from the next toilet cubicle. His position had been filled by yet another autumnal skiver who complained that there weren't enough cloths. It transpired that Rory, throughout his term of office, had used just one cloth. Given that his duties included not only washing and drying our mugs, but also cleaning work surfaces, floors and toilets, I prefer not to devote too much thought to it. After surviving Rory's tea and dishcloth, the horrors of cholera, beri-beri and the creeping mange are but child's play. The fact that we are all still here casts doubt in my mind upon the already dubious value of some of our more zealous hygiene laws.
The subject of hygiene brings memories of Bernard . Bernard: who dropped by, once upon a summer's day, to enquire after the possibility of commissioning us to restore his "gnashers" to working condition, they having been rent into myriad fragments during an altercation concerning the ownership of a bottle of Tesco's sweet cider the previous afternoon in the town's historic square. Bernard was a dosser. One of the last of the Old School (or the Old School House, which was a prominent doss house in Shrewsbury in those days) - not a tramp, his range was too restricted. At a push, a vagrant, but essentially, a dosser. Bernard was well-known about the town, and enjoyed a wide, if cauitious, popularity. His idea of personal hygiene was to wait for rain and stand out in it. If he ever required new shoes, shirts or trousering, he shunned the use of cash, chequebook or finance house. He would simply collapse in the street. It was generally a matter of minutes before some public-spirited citizen ensured "Police Aware", and Bernard was hauled off to nick or hospital prior to being given into the care of the Sally Army for a feed, a hose-down and a refit. He and a couple of "colleagues" appeared once on the cover of the local evening paper, newly-fitted out, surrounded by tea and biscuits and grinning. Bernard was something of an entrepreneur on the quiet. Around Christmas he would enter Woolworth's and pinch as many diaries as he could cram into his overcoat pockets, then flog them round the less salubrious public houses half way through the following year, thus allowing time for the heat to die down and enabling him to offer his wares at a substantial discount. His successful sales record, I imagine, he attributed to sparkling personality, a way with the ladies and the negotiating skills of Henry Kissinger. Actually he stunk so much that people would thrust money at him just to be rid. Occasionally, Bernard would visit our local where he entertained the assembly with his exotic "Dance of the Dirty Hanky" to the strains of the Stones' Spider and the Fly which some obliging scoundrel would put on the jukebox. Bernard seemed happy with his lot and I never, ever saw him beg. Sadly, after one too many collapses, he failed to get up again. The world is poorer for his loss. Rest in Peace, Old Lad, wherever you are.
One of the most disquieting presences during these years of debauchery was a familiar local sight (!) by the name of Betty Switch. She, and I use the term loosely, was, we were convinced, a scout sent by an alien species in order to determine whether or not our planet was worth invading. Many versions of this theory were recounted as time went by. The one I liked best was that she was an outcast from the planet Skrot in the star system epsilon Grossbucketus X, who had been banished to Earth under the pretext of the above because she was unforgivably ugly. When I explain that the Skrotan estimation of beauty revolves around attributes regarded amongst other species as unattractive it may help to convey just how indescribably vile she was. Boils, dripping noses and the inability to retain bodily fluids are looked upon on Skrot with reverance and their pharmaceutical industry is kept busy producing unctions composed of used sump oil, vinegar, psyllium seeds and weak tea. Skrotan beauty contests, broadcast to the Universe live, by means of their televisual organisations, have to be strictly censored in order to prevent the full horrors being shown to viewers of sensitive and not-so-sensitive dispositions. Betty was about five foot two with a figure like Pavarotti's obese uncle. Estimates of her age varied from 55 to about 300. She wore a faded denim mini-skirt, tank top (Centurian, I think) and ankle bracelets made from anchor-chain links. She was given to suspenders and torn stockings. The holes were not due to any current fashion fad so much as being the result of hauling them up around the great hams that constituted her lower limbs. For mascara she used tarmac, and reeked of a perfume evidently distilled from the pancreatic secretions of an out-of-sorts dung beetle. The most chilling aspect of all was her choice of profession. She let it be known that her favours could be bought at a competitive rate, and wasn't above offering group discounts and season tickets. It was put about that Bernard was her pimp and a former suitor, an allegation he vehemently denied, often with threats of violence. Betty was once persuaded to put in a turn as a kissogram for one of the less popular regulars at the pub. She showed up in a policewoman's uniform (nobody dared to enquire where she got it), brandishing a saveloy sausage and four yards of piano wire. The last we heard of our colleague, he had been observed pitching a tent in a lonely spot 200 miles north of Ayers Rock, having escaped from an institute for the bewildered by nailing a ward sister's feet to the ceiling.