That Day's To Do List - the story

Chapter 5
buff mallets for exhibition
if corgi sad, cheer up - rubber chicken?
relight my fire

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1. Mallets have long been a passion. And I'm lucky to live in an area where their vital importance to our lives today and in the past has been honoured. On any day of the week you can drop into our local speciality shop, 'Mallets Aforethought' and have to shoulder your way through the many local mallet enthusiasts who come to find out what's new in the world of large wooden hammers and who cluster in front of the notice board thick with wanted ads, for sale ads, mallets to rent and notices of exhibitions.

I was in there yesterday, savouring the tang of wet raincoat that pervaded the shop's crowded interior, to check the board for the show I'd been waiting for - a 50s tent-peg mallet exhibition with prize money going down as far as second place, unusual for such a niche mallet show - and there the announcement was, stating a date not three weeks away, at a venue in the next town. A shiver of blissful apprehension skittered down my spine and I hastened home to crack open the wax polish and anoint a fresh duster.

2. He won't take St John's Wort because he has a problem with non-Welsh saints - really, this corgi, had he been a human, perish the thought, would have been setting fire to English holidaymakers' second homes in Snowdonia with the best of them, and spraypainting Welsh language placenames, probably execrably punctuated, onto all the signposts - and he won't see a dog counsellor because his evenings, when the counsellor, Mr Tanner, who works full time in 'Pelt 'n' Down', the local leather and duvet shop, is available in his surgery, which is really the plucking shed round the back of the shop, are so charged with evening classes, concerts, ceilidhs, line dancing competitions and so on that he just hasn't the time. He claims he suffers from depression, but does he nip me in the calf because he's in a trough, or because he simply enjoys it? (I need to get him a new trough, now I think about it, and coincidentally there's a shop that's just opened in the new arcade, called 'Plight thy Trough' which, like so many of Wellminstow's shops, thanks to ceaseless and untiring work by borough council members in giving sweeteners, bungs and golden welcomes (in fact there is an establishment called 'Golden Welcome', now I come to think of it, but I'm not sure what it purveys - the window shutters are usually down.), is a narrow-niche speciality shop which should serve my purpose well.

I'd mentioned all this to Keith the other night over a pint of Berserk Bulldog, our local brew, and he'd looked round carefully, winked at me, smiled mysteriously, tapped the side of his nose ('Oh for fuck's sake get on with it', I'd snapped at this point) and delved into his trusty nylon bag, coming out with a rubber chicken, part of an over-ordered job lot that had been rejected by the Magic Circle's organisation committee, which he placed in my own nylon shopper. I hope it works, otherwise I'll have to try and persuade that bloody corgi that there's a medicinal herb called St Maldwyn's Wort.

3. The swish of her charcoal grey A-line skirt as she turns swiftly on her heel to put a card back in the drawer; the tap of her sensible black shoes on the reinforced linoleum that makes Wellminstow library's flooring a regular finalist in the regional 'Toughest Library Floor of the Year' contest; the elegant sweep of the barcode reader as she passes it at just the right speed over the book barcodes; the glint of sunlight on the lenses of her steel-rimmed glasses; the smudge of grey on her right index finger… Ah yes, it's all coming back to me. How could my passion have receded? How could the flame have flickered low? No matter, for now it burns again, and the temperature's rising. Watch out!

Alf

Alf is our astrologer. He's a rotund, middle-aged chap, usually to be found in the pub nursing a pint of mild and sucking breathily on a clammy roll-up. Alf is not, I must emphasise, gifted in any way with second sight, clairvoyance, spiritualism, faith healing or anything like that, but round here he’s the number one consulted astrologer, even more than that Jonathan Cainer in the newspaper. Alf is able to read things we don't, rather than see things we don't; and his fees are very reasonable. He won't always want 'monetary recompensation' as he rather stupidly puts it, for his work; payment in kind is fine, which often means that when Keith's done one of his 'special' booze cruises to Calais and makes it back with enough stuff to start up his own offie, Alf gets a few packets of Old Holborn and some kingsize Rizlas, or a case or two of Stella.

Alf once showed me his Third Eye. I've read, and I hope you all have too, T. Lobsang Rampa's unparalleled description of his childhood in Tibet and his initiation into Seeing and the development of his Third Eye. Alf has clearly read it (Runty says he probably wrote it, which is a bit cruel, if apt) and spent most of an evening at The Mason's Handshake trying to make its outline appear in the middle of his pink, slightly scaly brow. As he hunched forward in his efforts, he bent over his roll-up and the lit end touched his skin, and after his eyes had stopped watering he pretended that it was a kind of Third Eye stigmata. I didn't have the heart to gainsay him, old Alf, with his pointy brown suede shoes and greasy comb-over (does he think that some of the hairs will take root in the middle?) and his liquorice-flavoured fag papers.