It’s Not Me, It’s You!: Impossible perfectionist, 27, seeks very very very tidy woman. Jon Richardson

Чтение книги онлайн.

СКАЧАТЬ of the retired couple down the road, keen to show that their wealth has not been hit by recent economic troubles. I have no problem with pebbledashing in the right place, but I’m afraid here it simply looks as though a drunk snowman has been sick all over their home whilst staggering back from the pub. Twice a year, at Halloween and Christmas, houses containing young children are made obvious by the volumes of cheap plastic paraphernalia that adorn the walls and front garden. From inflatable waving Santas to witches on broomsticks hanging from the guttering, the cartoon exteriors belie the misery and squabbling going on behind them. The children always look bruised from the inside out and the parents exhausted by what they are sure was once love.

      And then there is my house. Plain and grey, there are no plants on the tarmacked driveway since I am never at home long enough to look after them. I have a wheelie bin, thank the council, and a little porch light whose bulb has never worked as long as I have lived there. I don’t get many visitors anyway, so it is of no use really. The point of moving to Swindon was to encourage me to make more of an effort to travel to see my friends and family who are spread out across the country, which I do my best to do, although it seems harder year on year to find time when days off coincide.

      Swindon is a place in which I can exist in the meantime, drinking and sleeping. It’s not that I am unhappy here, just that happiness simply isn’t a factor. In the same way that you need the pang of hunger to appreciate full satiety, you need happy days in the park to appreciate the blues. There is nothing like that here, just people getting on with what they need to do and trying not to think about it too much. I don’t mean to make this sound depressing, because it isn’t really – it’s just the way it is. Cavemen didn’t waste their time thinking about whether or not they were happy or whether their lives had meaning; they were out hunting and trying to stay alive. We’re the same creatures – nothing has changed that much. We invented happiness when finding food became too easy and survival became the norm.

      Once we could all get through the days without trying, we had to find some other reason to wake up each morning; we had to adopt a scoring system to see who was winning at being alive – happiness! Now we think about it all the time, we talk about it with our partners and we travel the world in search of it. I am playing a much longer game; like good comedy I believe the secret to be about timing. If I am too happy in my youth, then my senior years will surely see me unhappily lamenting the passing of the life I once had. If, however, I maintain a level of enforced melancholy for as long as possible, then I can escape into retirement rather than be forced into it. If the last day of my life is the happiest, that will suit me just fine.

      As I ponder this point, a miserable-looking old woman walks by my car with bags full of shopping and stares at me as she passes, distrustful of why I am parked on her street and completely unaware that I live just around the corner. Her latent hatred of me is typical of almost everyone I encounter here. My neighbours, I am quite sure, suspect that I am a serial killer, a view I am quite happy to promote whenever I get the chance if it keeps them from talking to me, be it with a well-timed sinister chuckle to myself, or by making sure that they see how meticulously I clean the interior carpets of my car.

      I must point out at this juncture that I am not a killer, though I have often thought about it when in crowded cinema screenings or on public transport – but who amongst us can honestly say that they haven’t? There is no reason for them to think this of me, save for the fact that if you asked them to describe my character they would most likely tell you any combination of the following:

      1. I am polite

      2. I am hard working

      3. I am always well presented and meticulous

      4. I keep myself to myself

      5. I wouldn’t say boo to a goose

      As any viewer of late-night crime documentaries will be able to testify, this is a classic serial-killer profile. It only takes a few bad pennies to ruin things for everyone and it’s thanks to the likes of Jeffrey Dharmer that men like myself are eyed with suspicion wherever we go. I am no saint, of course, and willingly confess that while I may not have said boo to a goose, I did tell a swan to ‘fuck off’ during a walk in the Lake District a couple of years back.

      The car’s fan kicks in as the engine has been idling for too long now and my mind is turned back to the issue in hand. The problem, you see, is that taking the rubbish out is a rare event since I spend so little time at home, and so I am apt to remember doing it. Locking doors, however, is something I do all the time, so each individual occurrence blurs into an obscurity of infinite replicas. Perhaps if I mark out each time as unique by saying something memorable as I do it, it might stick better in my memory:

      ‘Jon Richardson is locking his front door in the rain and he had Shreddies for breakfast. Boobs.’

      That kind of thing would be memorable. This is what I will do from now on, but this time I am just going to drive and when I get back tomorrow and find that the door was locked the whole time, I will treat myself to a smug, self-satisfied smile and know that I am getting better at life. In weeks and years gone by I would have gone back to check, but that was when I didn’t have Gemma to think about.

      Gemma is the reason I am trying to be more normal, because I imagine that’s what she wants me to be. The best dating advice I can give you is that women like men who aren’t weird – and, I suppose, vice versa – and that’s probably where I have been going wrong for the last eight years. I am not a particularly attractive man, shorter than I would like and with too round a head to feel entirely comfortable when walking past a tennis court, but nor am I ugly enough to warrant the eight-year suspension from the opposite sex that I have been serving. My voice is rather too shrill and I tend to moan too much, but I suspect the main problem has been things like checking doors and getting uncomfortable because I feel that I have stepped on more cracks in the pavement with my left foot than my right – that’s what has marked me out for singledom. No one wants to walk the streets arm in arm with a man who occasionally breaks free to cross the road and step on a grid to ‘even things out’.

      Having someone else to think about once more holds a light up to some of my more eccentric behaviours and I can see that parking by the roadside, yards from your house, and sitting in a catatonic state is not right. Life is about simply playing the odds and I have to concentrate on making myself a reliable target for love. Gemma and I are normal people and we go about our business normally, thinking about one another all the while. Besides, who would call at my house even if the door were unlocked? Swindon and its total isolation wins again!

      Mirror, signal, manoeuvre. As I finally set off to my gig, I sing a song of victory to myself, a victory over the old me.

       Hit the road, Jon, and don’t you go check that door.

      13.02

       THE MIGHWAY CODE

      Approaching Birmingham I am finally starting to calm down and truly forget about things back in Swindon. For the first half an hour I realised that I had been kidding myself if I thought I could just drive away and not suffer any repercussions. The hardest moment came when I stopped for petrol, by which time I had not only become convinced that I left the door unlocked, but also wide open. I pictured vividly a burglar very casually walking up my stairs and taking my big TV from the living room, the closest thing I have to a friend in Swindon, before sauntering back out again and smiling at my next-door neighbour as he loaded it into the back of his van with all his other, much more hard-fought booty. The neighbours would, of course, do nothing.

       Well, he can’t be a thief because he is so brazen and the door isn’t forced. Jon must be moving away to another town … Good! Stinking murdering paedo with his closed curtains and clean car.

      My СКАЧАТЬ