Do you know that history is full of the unworthy recipients of accolades? Pythagoras merely wrote down what the Egyptians had long since known; Marconi, Tesla, Graham-Bell, and Edison, were driven types, who beat the less well-funded originators of their ideas in a race to the Patents Office. Homer, like Shakespeare too perhaps, was no more than the actor chosen by those higher placed to be the titular author of the national compendium of tales and yarns? Add the Wright Brothers, and definitely Einstein, whose addendum to his main report, referenced e=mc2 an already well-established concept, just at a time when the scientific community wished to talk about it. In the same way that dickheads receive million-dollar bonuses for no better reason than investment banks are black holes that suck in money from all parts of the universe, and shower it on everyone who happens to be there at the time.
We all know about things like this in our own little worlds, at school, university, in jobs; ambitious grifters, who eclipse the timid person whose insights identified the tiny shift in perceptions required for the new idea to establish itself. Have you ever been in a group being fêted and thought, ‘But I did nothing’? I think of those team photographs that made the breakthrough in discovering Coronavirus vaccines, and wonder how many people on that photo did not contribute at all, or perhaps even opposed the work of their more committed colleagues. Like Lincoln, who chose to adopt emancipation policies to preserve party unity, and became lauded by history for that which his colleagues had shown real zeal and passion, and for which he was a half-arsed opportunist?
Ages ago, when I had what other people consider to be a proper job (it wasn’t – the mentally ill consent to gather in offices to distract themselves from suicidal thoughts). So bored was I, and occasionally angry, that I’d sometimes amuse myself by sending letters to newspapers. Mostly they were about the way that unexpected swarms of insects had ruined national holidays. Occasionally though, they were serious. And, during that time, I wrote three real letters to the Daily Telegraph. None were published. But every single one was followed by a column the following week on exactly the same subject. All written by Borrey Johnson. There is a difference, I know, between liggers and plagiarists, and the ‘there by accident’, but history blesses them all in the same way.
I shuffle along the empty, dusty, roads of this scarred landscape, and I find myself rehearsing opening conversational gambits for imagined people I might encounter along the way, and wonder if these ideas might provide the means? The Ukrainians must have their version of the boy who put his finger in the dyke, who was no more real than me, Dickie White. I try to summon Keith, but I can’t hold onto the thought; all I get is a brief flash of that very first conversation I had with him – the one where he asked, ‘How come you ended up here?’ to which I’d replied, ‘Every decision I ever made in my life was wrong, and I ended up here.’
I sense the need of his companionship, but all I get is me on repeat, because that forced memory of our first ever conversation immediately subsides to real ones impatient for centre stage. Those negative, circling, thoughts, that I believed I’d banished with Keith’s assistance, are here again, stronger than ever. They arrived at the very moment I set out into the world to fend for myself alone. I realise now that they are part of me, and that only in the constant company of cherished partners like Keith will there ever be any respite from the torment of being me.
With the sun, regret and despair they find their way in through the thought that begins, ‘Had I done things as I should have …’ A kaleidoscope of fragmented images appear; beaches, picnics, horses, pets, swimming pools and restaurants, cascade to present a life that I have let slip through my fingers. And worse, that I’ll never know again. I allow myself the indulgence to recall a summer’s evening; preparing dinner in that big old house and eating on the terrace. All that space around us, that was only ours. The sheer luxury in which the animals bathed; how much they loved that all that was theirs alone. I knew it would hurt. I try to swallow the anguish, but it’s too late. It hits me like a heavyweight’s piledriver to the centre of my chest. So hard I wonder if I’ll stop breathing.
They’re all dead now. If I were granted a wish to have that situation back again now, what good would it do me? The friends I most want to tell how much I’ve missed them; how much I want to do it better this time, and enjoy it more, they’re never coming back.
This is the thing. Say you ever get your life back on track. Say you ever arrive back at that place to which once you were headed, what happens then, with all this dead space between the two events? What would it be but a few more decades of sad and destructive thoughts, whilst my present, abundant with potential, melted into a future full of regrets?
Those people above, did they also think like this? Or did they jump from success to success without a thought for the chasms over which they leapt?
I stop to lean my arms on the top bar of a five-bar gate while I consciously draw deep, controlled breaths. My heart feels like it’s trying to assert its independence, and wants to get away from me. I know I’m going to have to ride it out. It will return to normal on its terms, not mine. I accept the situation and go to lie down, facing the gate, in the scrubby roadside grass, hoping that a moment’s sleep will descend on me, and an hour or two of real life will pass. Then I hear myself snoring before I’m ready for it, and wake up just as sleep was starting to envelope me. A toothless, tattooed, idiot is leaning on the other side of the gate grinning at me. How long has he been there? How much has he witnessed?
I’ve got one like that, he says, in what is either bad or lazy Russian, or perhaps it’s just the dialect that the lower orders speak in Ukraine. He nods towards the bike.
I rub my eyes, making out I’ve been asleep. I’ve met things like him hundreds of times before. They seem drawn to me somehow – seeing me as a sort of special person (special in the sense that I have all my limbs, teeth and observable organs) who is accessible to their ranks, like some sort of ersatz messiah, or perhaps easy prey, I don’t know. But I know he means to get the better of me. ‘I’ve got a bike like that mate,’ is usually a precursor to having your bike nicked. There is nothing else about me that is valuable. Unless he has spotted that I am yet to be anally violated, in that special way that the depraved sniff out these prizes. I have heard that line from schoolground bullies all the way up to senior execs, ‘If you let me have this sale, I’ll bring you in for the services on the back of it.’
‘Oh yes,’ I used to reply, ‘How clever of you to spot that I was a gullible fuck-wit.’ Sometimes I used to let them get away with it, just for the amusement of watching a cunt come in his pants.
I don’t answer him, as my thoughts drift again, but this time to all the two-bit losers who’ve attached themselves to me in my life, as if I were a conduit to a better place. Maybe I’m destined forever to be one of those people who considers himself too good for the people who would adore him, and not good enough for those from whom he desires affection?
The half-wit says something which sounds like, ‘Would you like to come to the house where I make love to my aunty?’
Whatever he said, it’s obvious that the next stage of his plan is to divest me of something or other. Hard-earned experience tells me to say ‘No,’ and get away from him, but instead I decide, ‘What have I got to lose?’ So what if he puts a bullet in my head to get hold of my bike – it’d make a nice sort of symmetry to the end. Besides which, I’d no longer have to spend any more time alone in my own company.
‘Have you noticed,’ I tell him, in atrociously bad Russian, ‘I have been free of captivity for little more than a day, and already, the war has taken a different course?’
He nods in agreement.
‘Well then,’ I say, ‘as long as I can head north within a few days, because it’s obvious that Putin, much as you are here, has hatched an absurd plan, to pretend that he has fallen out with Prigozhin, whereas, all he’s doing is redeploying thousands of troops to the the Belarus-Ukraine border under the guise of a flimsy and ridiculous bluff.’
As I said, my Russian is as bad as his, and so he just smiled and pointed in a direction down the road, towards the promise of a bath, and perhaps a ringside seat at the courting of his aunty.
We all know that Prigozhin’s intervention was nothing to do with me, but you know, mention this coincidence of facts to the right sort of lazy, connected person, and suddenly I’m the architect of the end of the war. ‘Do you know Borrey Johnson?’ I ask him, but he just smiles and shakes his head.
I’ll paraphrase all this and see if I can get it in front of the letters’ editor at the Daily Mail. That’s where the Abominable Show-off works now, isn’t it? I wonder if he’s now so indolent he could be seduced by the headline, “Putin needs Trump as badly as Trump needs Putin”? It’s got to be worth a punt with charlatan searching for new seam of populism to mine, hasn’t it?
Any sort of traction, and soon, more able writers, instructed by crowd-following editors are sent to look into the back story and discover that poor Dickie, before his pivotal appearance in the theatre of war, had previously been held in captivity. Suddenly his status is elevated to semi-messiah-cum-Saint. The rest is history, not to mention puff pieces in any new religious texts that might currently be in gestation.
Perhaps he’s not such an idiot after all.
Dickie White's Diary 
Every Town,city,village, office,school and universities has utter c**** like Borry Johnson….I’m thinking of a revolution to cull them
LikeLiked by 1 person