Diaries: March 3-6, 2022

Historical distractions and when animals attack

March 3, Leyton, London

My girlfriend sent me a picture of a Blue Plaque she saw today. Blue Plaques, for the unfamiliar, are (according to their Wikipedia page) “a permanent sign installed in a public place in the United Kingdom and elsewhere to commemorate a link between that location and a famous person, event, or former building on the site, serving as a historical marker.”

The purpose they mainly serve in my life are to provide distractions, or things for me to squint at one from the other side of the road. I often will decide to go and have a look at who the plaque belongs to, and then briskly walk into oncoming traffic without so much as a sideways glance. So it was a nice relief to be sent one through Whatsapp, where I wouldn’t be so distracted by it that I’d end up a statistic.

The plaque in question belonged to Joseph Lyons, Sir Joseph Lyons nonetheless. It proudly stated that he was a pioneer of “mass catering”. It was the word mass that puzzled me. I thought that it sounded like the people who made the plaque clearly hadn’t thought much of Lyons’s catering if he was cooking for one, but oh boy, if he was cooking for a thousand? A whole different story.

That wasn’t the case, obviously. He basically invented tea shops, so really there should be a plaque of him in every Starbucks, but I can’t imagine that’ll catch on.

March 6, Marylebone, London

I was stood in the travel section of Daunt Books in Marylebone today looking for something weird to read when I spotted Tim Cahill’s Pecked to Death by Ducks. That’ll do, I thought. I read the introduction later that evening and was very disappointed to discover that nowhere in the book does anyone get even close to being pecked to death by a duck.

Cahill actually admits that there really aren’t that many ducks in the book in general. Still, I liked the title, and it got me thinking about animals and what happens when they try and hurt us.

I have a love/hate relationship with animals, in that they seem to love me, and I hate them. Well, they love to harass me, and just generally make my life a misery, and I’m allergic to basically any animal with hair. My list of allergies is long and complicated, a doctor once described my nose as “not that good at being a nose.”

I do have an experience with ducks to report, though I wasn’t pecked to death. One of my earliest memories is walking up to a duck by the side of a canal and having it promptly try to bite my finger off. I’m pleased to say it wasn’t successful.

Then there are the many, many experiences with dogs. If they’re not trying to bite me, they’re trying to shag me. One knocked over my beer in the park last summer, and I laughed and told the owner, “it’s alright, no worries!” It wasn’t alright, obviously. I thought the dog was a prick.

But my main enemy in the animal kingdom is the goat. I admit, the goat is not that vicious, but we had a particularly tense moment once in a resort in Spain. I was there with my family, and I was about thirteen, when the goats which normally stayed in the field above the resort went rogue one morning, and came through the gates to crash the party.

They did this on the morning my stepbrother and I were taking the rubbish to the bins at the front of the resort. One moment the goats seemed in the distance, the next they had completely surrounded me. I had stood there like a lemon throughout their surrounding, but my stepbrother had hotfooted it back up the hill. I thought he had gone to get help, he had actually gone to get the camera.

A stand-off ensued. I tried to carry on walking to the bins, to ignore the road full of fur, only to be blocked by the herd. The situation wasn’t helped by a woman who had come out to her balcony to witness this and was yelling SHOO at the goats who were taking absolutely no notice of her. She noticed this, and instead directed her ire at me. “Walk towards them! Clap at them! Come on, walk towards them!”

I was about to ask her if she wanted to come down and do that herself, when the big goat, the one with the bell around its neck and horns, turned to face me. It stood looking at me for what was probably about ten seconds, but felt like weeks. It looked like it was weighing up how one of its horns would look halfway up my arse.

I tentatively clapped at it, and walked one step, and it clearly decided that it couldn’t be bothered maiming another boy that day, and it led its comrades back towards the field. The woman clapped while they did this, and in the distance I could hear my stepbrother still taking photos and pissing himself with laughter while he did so. I followed the goats down the hill, put the rubbish in the bin, and wondered whether this sort of thing would always happen to me, even as an adult.

At least you’ll get a blog out of all of it, I’d have told my teenage self if he’d asked.