This is the second pamphlet from the GANTOBverse for 2024.
Urs is having a bad week. Please hear her out. Indeed, you can listen to her read her story here:
Next week’s blog will be by Stuart Huggett. It’s a cracker. Find out how you can contribute at the end of this piece.
Erratum: Urs is mistaken about the first tree. It is a viburnum, which is meant to blossom at around this time. The labels had got mixed up. The cherry tree, however, is not meant to be in flower.
Over to you Urs…
My husband Douglas has admitted defeat with this week’s pamphlet. You may know him as The Tonsure, The Benefaktor or Rev K______. His piece was to have been a version of Edwin Abbott Abbott’s 1884 novel Flatland, or Orwell’s Animal Farm, but with fruit rather than shapes or animals. He is still working on it, but I have offered to do my bit. That curious individual GANTOB will put it into pamphlet format I am told.
There is burnout in the air after Christmas and the New Year. Our son, a GP, worked both long weekends with the out-of-hours service. Two four-day stretches when everybody else was resting. He tells us that he spent the intervening days curled up in a ball recovering. Before he worked in the out-of-hours service he was a GP partner, but the pressure was unspeakable. He is talking about reducing his hours further. Douglas was swanning about with our granddaughter in Europe over the New Year, as is his habit (except over the Covid years), but this time they came back dejected. Both in a great big sulk.
We soldier on. But there is an edginess in the air. The Post Office scandal. The Middle East. Trump. Global heating. And here I am writing about three trees (and a plastic one). But they are symbolic of what we are all experiencing, so bear with me.
On Wednesday I set out to the Nostalgia Café where I volunteer most weeks. Out of my usual routine and having had a rush with the baking I took a shortcut through the local park grateful for my choice of boots. And there was the first tree. It was a funny gnarly thing with offshoots off the main trunk. A hawthorn with a small crop of last year’s berries shrivelled on the stems but also a fresh display of fully formed pink blossom on the newer growth. No bees or birds to enjoy the heady perfume. I took a photo as evidence, the morning gloom failing to do its blooms justice.
Blossom in early January on the “May tree”. I attempted to explain it away. The enthusiasm of youth. The main body of the tree, after all, had no blossom. I kept moving. I was meant to be setting up after all. Nobody had been in over the holiday period. There would be quite a lot of tidying up, and who knows what would be happening with the heating.
Tea, cakes and reminiscing with the “old dears”. Not that some of them are any older than me. That is the way of things. Same with volunteering at the Marie Curie clothes shop. The young ones come and go, but it is the core of septuagenarians and octogenarians who keep things afloat. We always have such a beautiful selection in the shop, and so well organised. But that is my Friday job.
I was pondering this while taking down the Christmas decorations and squirreling them away into the group’s limited cupboard space. I put the 5-foot plastic tree back in its Woolworths box, which already contained the broken branch that we never quite get round to fixing or chucking out.
Googling it now I see that Woolworths closed 15 years ago, in the period immediately after Christmas 2008. Miserable for the staff. I do not know how long before that this tree was acquired. I am told that it was a donation from one of the families we were supporting. But that was before my time. I was still working at that point. Not that I have ever really stopped since “retiring”.
The community centre that hosts the “café” each week looked bare when I had finished. But we are lucky to have the space. During the pandemic it was a Covid testing centre. I remember it from my own test, having dodged the bullet for 18 months. Cubicles in a row, staff dressed in spacesuits, everything spaced out and demarcated. We were not sure that we would get back in again after it was decommissioned. Lots of talk about decontamination, which we took to be a euphemism for gentrification. Another block of student flats. More profitable than refurbishing it and returning it to its original use. A petition has granted it temporary reprieve. Who knows how long it will take the bureaucrats to make their final decision. No doubt more paperwork and meetings to fill out. Add it to the pile.
I had only 15 minutes left to turn things around. Nobody else was there. Time for a sticking plaster fix. I covered the bare plaster where there had been partitions, and the signs and arrows mark that era. I found the box of posters and pictures from previous visits by a local artist. That cheered things up, as did the tablecloths and napkins. The home baking would also help when the rest of the team arrived. I left the corner by the kitchen clear because we had a singer and violinist visiting. I hoped they were not doing the WWII greatest hits again. 1960s and 70s would be more appropriate for our current group. A bit of Dexy’s Midnight Runners would hit the spot I thought. John, one of the other volunteers, had roped in his husband to play the piano. And speak of the devil, the other helpers appeared, rushing in, excuses about the traffic.
The old dears started to arrive a few minutes later, in minibuses and adapted people carriers, a couple in wheelchairs pushed from the flats and sheltered housing nearby. One of the men vomited on arrival, so we sat him quietly at the back to recover, arranged a cordon using chairs around the slip hazard, and directed the stragglers to their tables. Phyllis mopped up.
The morning was a blur as usual. Falls averted, misunderstandings between the regulars cleared up, the wanderers who would not settle. “Walking with purpose” is the current term I read in the form that I have to send to the council every year – I will have to submit that in a few weeks and I have not even started it yet. When the music started I loaded up the trolley and wheeled the dishes to the kitchen, rolling down the hatch to avoid disturbing everybody else. Ishbel came through to help, and we nattered away as usual. She talked more than dried, as is her habit. She had read something on the BBC News app about global warming and commented on the cherry tree visible through the kitchen window, in the garden of the Georgian house next door. The whole tree was ablaze with pink blossom. Months early. Not just the new shoots. No arguing with that. John, who is a keen gardener and helps out at the community garden project, confirmed this when he came in to escape the strains of “We’ll Meet Again”. I seemed to be doing everything, and the dishwasher had stopped working. I would need to report it. Another email to draft. And everyone was talking, that awful singing just would not stop and the violin was flat. I snapped and bawled out John and Ishbel, and wondered if we should have called an ambulance for the vomiter who was lying stretched out across three folding chairs, an accident waiting to happen. I worried that I would need to fill out an incident form.
I hobbled home, my left ankle throbbing. I was looking forward to a cup of something from the tea advent calendar that my other granddaughter gave me (a bargain from the New Year sales). Douglas was scheduled to be out that afternoon. I would have the house to myself. I would switch off. Silence.
But as I squeezed past the 4×4 parked up on the kerb I saw that our gate was blocked by a huge Christmas tree stretched across the pavement. The others along this stretch of street had been lifted earlier in the week. Presumably a neighbour in one of the big houses had missed the collection. Left outside somebody else’s gate for them to sort out. That somebody else being me. Another call to the flipping council. It had already become a magnet for other detritus – a packet of crisps that had perhaps blown along from the communal bins, a large orange pile of dog poo, another neatly bagged up in a blue bag, hanging on a branch. I could not bend down to reach the tree’s short stump and I did not have suitable gloves to protect my hands from the pine needles. I nudged it with my boot, but whichever angle I tried it was too big to move. Stupid ankle. And there was no hope of me climbing over the railings. The doorbell was out of reach and as usual Douglas was not answering his mobile or landline. It was the last straw. I would have screamed, but who was going to hear me?
I laughed bitterly at the irony. A dead tree, still bushy and green, looking as if it would survive and flourish if it were planted in the ground. Rootless, but immovable. Sorrowful in its undecorated state, save for society’s excrement. And the two other trees, too full of life, beautiful in their premature livery, potentially spoiling this year’s crop.
I made my way to the local chain café, picking up stronger painkillers from the pharmacy en route. I would be able to put my feet up for a few hours and hope that somebody else cleared the way for once. There really are so many jams to kick out, as I believe they say.
URS, 13 January 2024
PAMPHLET 02 (2024)
Want to contribute a blog?
In effect we will be constructing a memoir of 2024. Write it in the first person, or which ever person you want, and make it relevant to now, but building on what you’ve learnt so far in life. Or make it entirely fictional. Or philosophical. Relate it to the GANTOBverse in some way, however subtle, for bonus points.
Spread the word. Subscribe to gantob.blog, and follow progress via @gantob2023 on X and Instagram. Good luck!
As a guide, pamphlets should be between 800 and 1600 words, ideally an exact multiple of 400. Submissions to 100percentvinyl2@gmail.com should be made as soon as possible (first come, first served, unless something more suitable comes along), and no later than 27 December 2024. Suggestions for developing ideas or other modifications to the submitted pamphlet may be made by the GANTOB Pamphlet Committee.
GANTOB blog 