After the sixth dig, the lady sitting next to me turned to me and said, ‘You really should shut up.’ (This gives you an idea of just how obnoxious I was being. This lady hated me earlier but was now trying to help me out.) To which I responded, ‘Why? I’m not afraid of Alistair, he looks about sixteen!’
This, it turned out, was the straw that broke the Alistair’s back. He walked over to me and barked, ‘What did you just say?’
But if anything this put me in an even better mood, mainly because I had become something of a fan of Alistair and now my hero was finally paying some attention to me, and so I responded affably with a huge grin on my face, ‘I said you look about sixteen, Alistair!’
His eyes popped with rage. ‘I’ll show you who looks sixteen!!!’
‘How are you going to do that, though?’ I laughed. ‘Line up a bunch of kids and be like – he looks sixteen, he looks sixteen but he’s seventeen, this one’s older than he looks . . .’
‘No I’m going to drag you out of this bus by your fucking teeth, slam your head on the curb, stamp on your eyes . . .’ This latest monologue from Alistair went on for ages. It was graphically violent and I was laughing uncontrollably throughout. I wasn’t even laughing in a mean way: Alistair’s words were genuinely, in that moment, the most hilarious thing I had ever heard. I laughed so much that one of Alistair’s friends put his hand on Alistair’s chest and said, ‘Alistair, you might want to back off, mate, this guy looks mental,’ to which I replied, ‘Yeah Alistair, you shouldn’t mess with me, I’m from the projects.’
I was particularly proud of the line about being from the projects so I turned to the lady next to me in order to be congratulated on how funny saying I was from the projects was (I was imagining she’d say something along the lines of, ‘I can’t believe I asked you why you were talking to me earlier, I know now it’s because you’re the best, most coolest guy on this planet!’) but I received no congratulations because she had gone. Instead of seeing her sitting there laughing because I had claimed to be from the projects, I saw every single one of Alistair’s friends looming over me, having formed a sort of horseshoe around me, and looking very much like they wanted to murder me. One boy was blocking my exit by standing with his legs wide apart and holding on to two poles with his hands, like a very cross starfish. As soon as I looked at the starfish he snarled, ‘Don’t fucking look at me, you face the fucking front.’ And so I immediately faced the front and, like that, the spell was broken and I was scared.
The starfish
They could tell as well. They all started laughing and sneering at me. ‘Not so funny now is it?’ And instead of sitting there quietly I just responded, ‘No it’s not very funny any more, actually,’ because I still couldn’t shut up. I now had to escape somehow, and I’m going to tell you in advance that I did escape and I escaped because of the plan I came up with. I tell you that because when I tell you what the plan was it will sound ill-advised and stupid and I want you to know going in that it worked.
Here was the plan: I pretended to receive a phone call where I then spoke very loudly, saying, ‘Yeah there’s about ten of them . . . Yeah the number 29 bus . . . about five minutes away . . . yeah bring him . . . bring him too . . .’ I was pretending to rally my troops! Of which I had none! Surely the only result I could’ve reasonably expected here was that they would beat me up there and then before my terrifying gang arrived to defend me! What an unnecessary gamble. This says a lot about me, that when backed into a corner and boozed up enough, I will attempt to bluff my way out of any situation I happen to get myself into. I love a good bluff. The act of winning when you’ve got absolutely nothing to win with – what a thrill! The only thing more thrilling than bluffing is calling someone’s bluff. Taking a chance and accusing someone of lying when they could be telling the truth – what a thrill! If I played poker, all I would do is bluff and call other people’s bluff constantly. If you are a regular poker player I probably just blew your socks off with my game-changing tactics so please take a moment to put your socks back on because this scrape is not over yet and I wouldn’t want you reading the end with chilly feet.
I sometimes wonder if the lads secretly knew that there was no one on the other end of that phone call. After all I had faked a reaction to the phone ringing on silent and they must’ve seen it wasn’t lit up when I took it out of my pocket. Maybe they knew all along and felt sorry for me so pretended to be concerned that I was calling for backup. I’ll never know, but while I was talking to my imaginary death squad, one of the lads asked me who was on the phone and when I didn’t tell him, they all started panicking between themselves. This meant they were temporarily distracted when we got to the next stop. I could see the bus doors open behind the angry starfish, and as soon as I heard the beeping noise and they started to close, I leapt like a salmon (that is headfirst with the rest of my body propelling me like one big tail) under his arm then back up into the air towards the door, dodging a kick to the head as I did so, passing sideways through the doors as they shut, landing on the pavement, turning to face the bus and, as it pulled away with all of them looking at me from the inside, I stood in my own starfish pose and taunted them. The perfect picture of a man who has not learned his lesson. At all. I then realised the next bus stop was one minute down the road and instantly ran all the way home, terrified.
But I survived. I slept deeply as one does when blasted then spent the rest of the following day remembering what had happened and feeling sick at how close I came to getting beaten up, or rather obliterated, by ten lads who were all younger than me. Fortunately, I have not behaved like this since. Unfortunately, Alistair and I have not kept in touch. I miss him.
Strimmer
In general though, moving to London had been a positive experience. I had lived in Wood Green in the north of the city for about six months, sharing a house with three very lovely people I had found online, and I was working as a classroom assistant at a secondary school for autistic children in South London.
I loved working at the school. It was an incredible experience and I sometimes wonder if I should have continued working there instead of pursuing a more selfish career path. Not that every day was a picnic, of course. Once I managed to get myself poked in the eye by one of the students. It was my fault: I had said the wrong thing at the wrong time and caused him to feel distressed and so he’d slammed his finger into my eye with the force of a punch and then scratched my eyeball with one of his very long fingernails. I was taken to Moorfields Eye Hospital and while in the waiting room a lady asked me how I’d hurt my eye. I told her the story and at the end she said, ‘Oh you work with autistic children! That must be so rewarding!’ Yeah . . . but not all the time.
The house I lived in back then was a bit of a mess, mainly because me and a man named Keith weren’t tidying anything up. We had a cleaning rota for a while but had to stop using it because the rota itself had gotten too dirty to read.
When we had moved into the house one of the things we agreed to in our contracts was to maintain the upkeep of the back garden. We did not even attempt to honour this agreement. It was a rather sizeable garden and now it looked like a scene from Jumanji, overgrown with grass and weeds, a real-life jungle. There could’ve been animals living in there and we wouldn’t have known, and not small animals – a family of stray Alsatians could’ve been thriving somewhere inside that dense undergrowth and we would’ve been none the wiser. It got so bad that one of our neighbours snitched us out to the landlord who promptly emailed us saying he would be popping round on Saturday to inspect the house ‘in case there’s anything you’d like to sort out beforehand’. It doesn’t take Alan Turing to decode that email – sort the garden out before the weekend or I’ll come down on you like a ton of bricks. We didn’t own a lawnmower or any shears, so I decided to ask the headteacher at the school I worked at if there was anything I could borrow from the school, and to my surprise he immediately suggested I borrow the electric strimmer for ‘as lon
g as I needed it’ and, just like that, all our problems were solved.
I’d never used a strimmer before but I knew this much about strimming – strimmers were badass. We were sure to have that garden shorn in seconds, probably giving an Alsatian a buzzcut as we did so. The design of a strimmer is so cool as well, it’s like a metal detector that makes you feel indestructible. I couldn’t wait to rev this beast up and unleash it upon that no good, punk-ass grass back home. They put the strimmer in a bin bag then put another bin bag over the top of it and taped the bags together by wrapping an excessive amount of gaffer tape around the middle. As secure and practical as this was, it did make it look like I was carrying a dead body in some bin bags. I couldn’t sit down with it on the tube so just stood by the doors while my fellow passengers looked at me with suspicion, memorising my face just in case I was the most confident serial killer in London and had decided to take the remains of my latest victim home on the Piccadilly line because I was in a bit of a hurry.
I felt terrifically boss returning home with the strimmer. I had saved our bacon. We no longer had to worry about the scary landlord because I would have this garden strimmed in seconds. We hung an extension cord out of the kitchen window (the wide and narrow kitchen window above the main one that’s only ever used for running cables through) and I plugged in the mighty strimmer. My flatmates watched from the kitchen window as I carried it over to the haunted forest that used to be our garden. I pressed the on button, half expecting it not to work, and when it hummed into life I was delighted.
I began to to strim.
Back and forth, weeds and grass were disappearing before my very eyes. I felt a sense of pure elation, euphoria even, as I stram with the greatest of ease. For the first time, I understood why people enjoy using power tools. I didn’t know if a strimmer technically counted as a power tool, but it was a tool and I’d never felt so powerful. Maybe I’d start doing DIY. I could buy a drill, maybe a sander? I had found my calling and now I was invincible. I turned to look at my housemates, who were celebrating in the window – I was a hero! I raised one hand in the air, throwing rock ’n’ roll horns to the sky. As I pulled a series of rock ’n’ roll faces to accompany the horns, my housemates’ faces changed from delight to expressions of pure horror as they began to frantically point at the strimmer. At first I assumed they were simply getting into the spirit of things and returning my rock ’n’ roll gurnings but then I looked down to see that the strimmer’s power cord had got wrapped up in the blade and was spinning around wildly, getting shredded in the process. DIY was not my calling. Before I could do anything the strimmer had stram clean through its own power cord, whereupon it stopped strimming and went dead. As soon as it died, all the lights in our house died too. In fact all electrical appliances in the house were now not working because I had tripped the power like a fully certified cool guy.
As I looked at my housemates, all of them standing in a dark kitchen, now shadowy figures who I could tell were less than impressed with me, my main concern wasn’t the garden but the strimmer. What would the headteacher say when I told him that within a minute of using it I’d strum right through the power cord and broken the strimmer he had trusted me with? I would clearly have to buy a new one, but how much did these things cost? I’d like you to ask yourself this question now, actually. How much do you think a strimmer costs? I have asked many people this question since this event, and most people guess between £100 and £300. I have checked online and it seems that £150 is about right. But at the time I didn’t check online and I didn’t ask anyone, I simply assumed, for no particular reason, that strimmers cost around £2,000 each. I did not have two thousand pounds and so I was panicking hard. All weekend I tried to come up with ways that I could raise two grand and pay for a new strimmer. Maybe I could put on a charity car wash with all the money going to me? But we didn’t even have the equipment to wash cars with, so I’d have to first of all borrow a bucket, some sponges and a bunch of cloths and whatnot, and then I would undoubtedly manage to break all of those things within seconds. That’s how little I believed in myself at this point: I was convinced that I would break a sponge. No one has ever broken a sponge before but I was certain I had what it took to become the first. If I tried the car wash idea I was sure I’d dip a squeegee into some soapy water, touch it to the windscreen and then the whole thing would instantly go up in a ball of flames, resulting in decades of scientific investigation into how this had even been possible.
I travelled to school on the Monday with the strimmer in its bin bags, getting more looks on the tube this time, as not only did it look like I was carrying a dead body in a bin bag but I was clearly riddled with guilt and it was written all over my face that I’d done something I wasn’t proud of. Perhaps murder, perhaps damaging a gardening tool that didn’t belong to me – my fellow commuters couldn’t be sure. When I arrived at the school I headed straight to the headteacher’s office and handed him the strimmer, unable to look him in the eye (although he was used to this sort of behaviour as the headteacher of a school for autistic children).
‘Did the strimmer work out well for you?’ he asked.
I hesitated then answered, ‘For a while, yeah.’ I looked terribly ashamed of myself and took a deep breath. ‘But then I stram straight through the power cord and broke it.’ Silence. I was probably about to get fired. ‘I’m really sorry, I’ll pay for a new one.’
He shrugged nonchalantly, smiling, reassuring. ‘Oh not to worry, we’ll just get Patrick to fix it,’ he chirped and then wished me a pleasant day.
I stood there dazed. This was amazing – what else could I borrow and break? If there were no repercussions I might start borrowing whatever I like, treating it with zero respect and then bringing it back on the Monday for Patrick to fix so I could borrow it again whenever I felt like it. That strimmer cost two grand and he didn’t even care! Maybe I could take the school minibus out for a weekend roadtrip, leave it in a John O’Groats car park on fire, text Patrick the coordinates and return to school for Monday morning registration guilt-free.
I later discovered that the strimmer in question barely cost one hundred pounds and that it took Patrick no time at all to replace the power cord. In the meantime, they let me borrow some shears and my housemates and I took it in turns to shear the garden. Shears aren’t as fun as a strimmer. For one, they’re not as fun a word to say; also for every minute spent strimming you spend an hour shearing and it is impossible to shear without bending over all the time and doing your back in (next time you see someone strimming, note their posture – impeccable). Also, once four people have taken shifts shearing a garden, the level of consistency is all over the shop and the garden will look like it’s tried to cut its own hair. I was proud of myself when I returned the shears to the headteacher still intact, although a part of me was tempted to celebrate the completion of the garden by smashing up the shears in the street and then returning the separate parts directly to Patrick, who would inevitably accept that this was going to become a regular thing.
The landlord’s inspection went well, though. He walked around the garden, admiring the random tufts of grass, and asked us what we used when mowing the lawn.
‘We just use shears usually,’ I said and he raised his eyebrows while surveying the scene.
‘You should get yourselves a strimmer, they’re only cheap.’
Fell Foot Sound
During those early comedy days, I was still in touch with musicians and promoters from my time in the band. One such promoter phoned me up out of the blue to ask me to curate two hours’ worth of comedy for a music festival he was setting up called Fell Foot Sound. It would be held in the Fell Foot Woods over four days and on the last day he wanted to put on some comedy around a campfire for whoever wanted to see it. At the time this sounded splendid (these days I know that comedy around a campfire would be an awful idea but that’s irrelevant since the whole campfire plan never took place in the end) so I phoned up three of my favourite co
medians – David Trent, Chris Boyd and Nathaniel Metcalfe – and booked the full line-up in all of fifteen minutes.
David and I in particular already had a history of bad gigs together. David was a primary schoolteacher at the time and once asked me to come into the school and perform stand-up comedy for the children as part of Red Nose Day.
There were about thirty six-year-olds in the audience and I thought I’d start by asking them if they liked my jumper. They cheered, so I asked them if they liked my green corduroy trousers and they cheered again. Then a kid screamed excitedly, ‘What about your shoes?????’ and the cheers got even louder, then another kid screamed, ‘What about your socks??????’ and I pulled the bottoms of my trousers up so they could see my socks and they all fell about laughing. They thought my socks were the funniest thing they’d ever seen. I was wearing plain mustard coloured socks. Then one kid lay on his back and stuck his feet in the air so everyone could see his socks too and all the kids laughed again. Then another kid did it, then another and pretty soon they were all lying on their backs with their feet in the air showing their socks to each other and laughing uncontrollably. So I started describing some of their socks as if I couldn’t believe they were wearing them. Stuff like, ‘Oh my word!! Blue and white stripy socks! Are you serious?!’ One child had gone so far as to take both his shoes off and so I exclaimed, ‘He’s taken his shoes off!!!!’ And then all of them took their shoes off. Then one kid jumped to his feet and started to do a little dance, a combination of the twist and jumping up and down. Then all the kids copied him, all doing the same dance in their socks. One kid got so excited that he jumped as high as he could in the air and then when he landed on the shiny assembly room floor in his socks, he slipped and fully smacked one side of his head on the floor and the sound reverberated all over the room and through my very soul. All the kids started freaking out when this happened. One kid laughed so much that she actually, literally, wet herself, at which point the headteacher ran into the middle of the pit of children, held one hand up at them and another at me and, while looking up at my bemused and helpless face, yelled, ‘Enough! That. Is. Enough!’
James Acaster’s Classic Scrapes Page 15