The Utility of Cowardliness

I have lost count of the number of times I have been spared embarrassment, - not by any exercise of wisdom on my part but rather by my unfortunate propensity to cowardliness. If fortune, as it is often said, favours the brave, then it cannot be denied that it sometimes intervenes on the side of the cowardly to save them from their own folly. This was amply illustrated in my own case recently when I foolishly took it upon myself to be civic minded. I had just set out on my usual gentle jog when going past my neighbour’s garden, I noticed a woman closing the lid of his “wheelie bin” (wheeled dust bin) as though she had just dropped something in it. My neighbour’s dust bins, like those of nearly all others in the road, are usually kept right next to the front garden gate, so that it is quite easy for strangers to drop waste material in it surreptitiously. Indeed, this kind of fly tipping, as it is called, has become quite a hot topic of public debate in recent months within the borough that I live in. The Borough Council has even coined a new label for it, - “Envirocrime”, and its monthly newspaper, exhorts civic minded borough residents to be active in helping to combat this new menace. The council’s exhortations seldom penetrate the dull brain of a 75-year old like me but somehow its campaign against fly-tipping had made a deep impression on me, and I was something of a recent convert to the need for vigilance against “Envirocrime” as I stepped out of the house that morning. Unsurprisingly therefore, it only needed the sight of a woman furtively closing the lid of my neighbour’s dust bin to stir the hesitant enviro-vigilante in me into a creature of fiery resolve, - or so I imagined. My initial reaction was one of indignation with words like “would you mind not dumping rubbish in my neighbour’s dustbin please, etc.” forming in my head. But predictably they never passed my lips, for that would have required uncharacteristic courage on my part. Resorting instead to discretion, I merely sauntered past the lady pretending that I had not noticed whatever it was that had just occurred. But however straight-faced I may have tried to appear, I realised straight away that in choosing to be non-confrontational, when nothing but bold action would have sufficed, I had failed miserably at the very first hurdle in my newfound mission to fight enviro-crime. The realisation made me feel wretched at my own cowardliness. But cowardliness had thankfully not diminished my capacity for cunning and in an instant it came to me that I could use guile to atone for my failure where courage had so miserably deserted me. So it was that I proceeded to enact an elaborate charade, which began by my stopping abruptly in my tracks and doing an about turn, having just scurried meekly past the fly-tipping lady. I then assumed a puzzled look and made an ostentatious show of checking my pockets in the manner of a perplexed man who had suddenly found himself bereft of something that should have been on his person. These actions of mine were of course designed to allow me to take a good look at the fly-tipping woman and more importantly, the registration number of the car that she was in, without arousing her suspicion or heaven forfend, her wrath at being observed. In the latter aim I succeeded admirably. Having noted the registration number of the car, I kept repeating it in my mind as I walked back to my house in order to commit it to paper before my notoriously non-retentive memory could set in. With the culprit’s registration number carefully recorded on paper for later action, I felt that I had done enough to take at least the first faltering steps to discharge the civic obligation that the council had urged on me in their crusade against enviro-crime. My next step was to go up to my neighbour’s house to advise him of what had taken place. It was of course quite safe to do so. There was no intimidating presence of a possibly wrathful fly-tipping lady to deter me, for I had taken good care to check that the lady had already departed from the scene in her car. To my dismay, my neighbour was out but that was probably just as well, as in my state of excitement, he would probably have found my breathless account of what had occurred a little too unnerving. Disappointing though it was, there was little to be done about my neighbour’s unavailability. As events were to prove, the unavailability of my neighbour was a fortuitous boon to me as it spared me some embarrassment subsequently. My neighbour’s unavailability meant that I could carry on with the jogging that I had intended to go on when I had first come out of the house that morning. Later that day, long after I had returned from my leisurely jogging exercise (it could actually be characterised as an exercise in “shambling”), I decided to go round to my neighbour once again to inform him of the “fly tipping” outrage that he had been the victim of in his absence. This time my neighbour was in and I proceeded to appraise him of exactly what I had seen. Recounting what I had witnessed only served to bring back an onset of righteous indignation, that left me spluttering incoherent phrases as I sought to offer my neighbour my sympathies, for having had to endure the outrage of his dustbin being misappropriated for fly-tipping. In contrast to my embarrassing agitation, my neighbour was the epitome of unruffled sang-froid. In a matter-of-fact voice, he merely said “let’s see what they have dumped in the bin. It was emptied only yesterday by the bin men”. We walked up to the bins with foreboding on my part as to what horrors were about to be uncovered inside the bins, when to my astonishment the first bin opened by my neighbour revealed nothing more shocking than an empty coke bottle. The other two bins were completely empty! For a second or two I was stunned and in a state of disbelief and complete denial: I could not possibly have been so mistaken about what I had seen that morning! I had most emphatically seen someone furtively opening a dust bin and dropping something in it! How could that be explained as anything other than outrageous fly tipping? But faced with the incontrovertible proof of the absence of any fly tipping, in the form of a solitary empty coke bottle, it began slowly to dawn on me that what I had witnessed earlier was not so much an act of environmental criminality, - rather a well-intentioned action of a civic minded woman anxious to avoid littering the street. It is perhaps a moot point as to whether the lady should have first sought the permission of the owner of the bin before proceeding to use it. I am aware that using someone else’s property without prior permission is not something that is to be indulged: it is termed colloquially as “taking liberties”. But in this case, the unauthorised use of a private bin was arguably not as reprehensible as the dropping of litter might have been. The pursuit of a higher goal sometimes outweighs the impropriety of its method and although the lady’s unauthorised use of a private dustbin was to be deprecated, it did achieve the laudable aim of keeping the street litter free. I was ashamed that I had attributed to this lady’s actions base motives that I had only conjured up in my own mind, but in my shame and misery I blamed not myself for my mind’s paranoia, but rather the high powered “enviro-crime” awareness campaign of the council. The campaign undoubtedly pursued a worthy aim but as often happens with well-intentioned plans, it seems to have been struck by the dreaded law of unintended consequences. In this instance, in trying to make placid mild mannered borough residents like me “enviro-crime aware”, the council had only succeeded in making us “enviro-crime paranoid”. As it was, it took all my innate cowardliness to ward off the embarrassment that could have befallen me. And therein lies perhaps a profound truth. Although, cowardliness can scarcely be considered a virtue, it too has its uses: as my example has shown, it is the best curb to rash acts of paranoia. If discretion, as the Bard tells us in Henry IV, is the better part of valour, then cowardliness is arguably the safer part of paranoia.

Old People

That I am now quite an old man, is no longer in contention. The mere fact that many men and women that I meet in the street address me as “Sir” is ample evidence that I am perceived as person of pitiable old age. But it never ceases to amaze me how so many youngsters routinely associate appearance of old age with some by-gone era that predates even the oldest living person of to-day: they may quite easily, for instance, associate a man of seventy with the trenches of the First World War, as has happened in my case. I recently visited my optician for a routine eye test. On arrival, I was greeted by a very pleasant young receptionist who asked me if I had visited the optician before, in which case, she informed me, she could easily find all my details on the optician’s computer system. On my assuring her that I was indeed an old client of the optician’s returning for a check-up, she asked me for my name and date of birth. With some, entirely irrational, trepidation I provided her with the required information: my forename, surname and my date of birth, which was of course, 22-2-1940. A flurry of finger tapping followed, to the accompaniment of echoing clicks from the ubiquitous computer keyboard that now adorns all shops and businesses. When the clicking ended, there was an ominous silence which I apprehended boded some inexplicable problem for which I might be held accountable. My foreboding was justified: my record, contrary to the receptionist’s expectations, seemed not to exist on the Optician’s computer system. And as I had feared, this eventuality only seemed to suggest to the receptionist that the information I had provided could not have been accurate; that she might have made an error in transcribing it into the computer, was a possibility that she was not about to entertain. Youth in its innocence tends to be oblivious to its own fallibility. Be that as it may, it was with the utmost courtesy that she asked me to repeat the details of my name and date of birth. More bemused than irritated, I re-stated my full name, followed by my date of birth. As I intoned my year of birth, 1940, I detected a faint smile on the receptionist’s face which left me in no doubt that she had just solved the mystery of my missing computer record. Curious to know how a computer record that had eluded the receptionist only moments ago, could now be about to make its appearance, I waited eagerly to hear what the explanation might have been. Alas when the explanation came, it scarcely served to flatter my ego. Showing scant recognition of any faux-pas that she might have committed, she said “Ah nineteen forty, - I thought you said nineteen fourteen!”. Unflattering as the assumption behind her remark was, it caused me more mirth than outrage. Mental arithmetic was clearly not her forte, or else she might have realised that even with my age-worn face, I was an unlikely centenarian. More to my disappointment however, what her unabashed explanation really revealed, was the inability of the young to comprehend the world of old age. To the still youthful, the aged live in a world in which there are no age differences: it is, in their perception, a world in which all the different generations of the elderly, however many decades apart, somehow coalesce into a single blob of longevity called “the old people”.