Well done, Sister Suffragette!

'I’ve thought of a better way than sticking in a pin,’ Grange Girl said, passing me a cup of tea and taking the pin out of my hand. I tend towards the literal when it comes to metaphors, sayings and proverbs. For instance, I do actually grind axes, I tend to put pans to the back burner, and I make goldfish faces when I drink too much.

‘I don’t know anything about any of these candidates,’ I protested, ‘so I need the pin to help make a democratic choice.’

She shook her head, and I said, panicked, ‘I know you’re going to make me read their manifestos or something. If so, give me back the damn pin, and I’ll use it to stab myself.’

‘Do town councillors even have manifestos?’ Grange Girl turned my list round so she could read from it. ‘Look at their names.’ She pointed to the first candidate. ‘Mr Flake, for the Lib Dems. Well, say no more.’

I nodded. ‘I see what you’re doing. But actually the word ‘flake’ for me conjures up, not an unreliable person, but a delicious chocolate bar which, thanks to the power of advertising, is forever associated with a sex act.’

‘This is an art, not a science. If you like the sound of his name, Mr Flake might be your man.’ She moved down the list. ‘Ms Makepeace, for the Greens. Make Peace. That’s nice, isn’t it? And look, here’s another Green, Alexander Fleming. Discovered penicillin, right?’

‘Different chap, I’m guessing, on the grounds of age.’

‘You can tell so much from a name,’ Grange Girl said. 

‘You can’t, though. That’s a proverb you’ve just made up.’

‘Here’s a Labour candidate called Mr Blair.’

‘Well, to be fair to him, he couldn’t really stand for any other party, could he? It would seem like he was trying to avoid his fate: ergo, evasive.’

‘Exactly. And look, another useful-sounding Green: Mr Handy.’

‘Don’t tell me, the Tories are fielding Mr Tickle.’

‘No, they’ve got Ms Orwell, which makes me think of Big Brother and double-think. You know, I think this method does actually work.’

I looked under the table at Grange Girl’s feet. There’s no-one I admire more, but I wasn’t surprised to see that she was wearing clay slippers.

‘Grangey, how is choosing a candidate by their name any less arbitrary than sticking in a pin in?’

‘How is it any more arbitrary?’

‘Fair point. I guess this is the exact sort of random freedom the Suffragettes fought for. So,’ I asked her, ‘You going to use this method for the parliamentary election too?’

‘Don’t be silly,’ she said. She held up my pin. ‘I’m really going to need to keep my eyes closed for that one.’

 Beth Miller, 5th May 2015

I never knew you, you never knew me

“I was just thinking,” said Grange Girl, “about the time I tripped up Bob Geldof.”
We were sipping homemade lemonade in Baltica, spinning out the last taste of summer. Grange Girl’s words jolted me from my melancholy reverie on the futility of existence. “I’m sorry?”
“He deserved it, honestly. You see the lead singer of my band, Megahertz…”
“Hang on! What the what?” I knocked over the lemonade in my confusion. You’d be looking at Grange Girl a long time before you thought, there’s a person who was once in a band.
“In the early 80s, we busked outside what’s now Churchill Square.”
I encouraged her to go on by means of the universal signal, the dropped jaw.
“Well, Bob Geldof pinched our lead singer’s ideas for costumes for his Rat Trap video. Naturally, when I saw him walking down the Kings Road, I stuck out my leg. He went down like a sapling in a storm.”
I gazed at Grange Girl. “Who are you?”
This certainly snapped out of my September torpor. Just how many of my friends, I wondered, had these odd bits of unexpected backstory? That evening I put the question to Pixie Haircut, and she immediately said, “Well, I wrote to Jimmy Savile…”
“OH MY GOD!” What can of worms was I blithely approaching with a tin-opener?
“No, it’s all right. I was upset he didn’t reply, but obviously with hindsight that was the best outcome. I asked him to fix it for me to trim Denis Healey’s eyebrows.”
Back home I made the same enquiry of Man of the House. He lowered the paper, his own not-insubstantial eyebrows beetling, and said, “I was once a model in a fashion show.”
“Ha ha, good one!”
He spread Gentleman’s Relish onto a Bath Oliver. “Photographic evidence in my filing cabinet. Under ‘I’ for ‘Implausible.’”
Stone the crows if it wasn’t true. Though younger and more hirsute, MotH on the catwalk had the familiar dour expression I know so well, though so would anyone who’d been asked to wear that shirt. I showed him the picture and he nodded gravely. “Fund-raiser for the Scottish Enlightenment Society.”
Ah! A dry-as-dust cause. Maybe that wasn’t so out of the ballpark after all. And thinking about it, Pixie Haircut is a neat and orderly person, who as a child would doubtless have been irritated by Denis’s negligent grooming. So I just needed to find some aspect of  Grange Girl’s story that would put her back into her pigeonhole. “This band,” I asked her. “What music did you play?”
“We did a fine version of Leaving On a Jet Plane.”
OK. Nerdy. Tick. Things were begin to slot back into their proper place. “And what was your instrument?”
“The cowbell.”
Of course it was. All was right with the world. “Welcome back, old friend,” I said.

Beth Miller. Published in Viva Lewes September 2014, and vivalewes.com. Illustration by Michael Munday.

People who need people are the luckiest people in the world

In lieu of a social life, Grange Girl has hobbies. She’s always embroidering cushions, or pasting faded Record Mirror articles into her scrapbook, or whittling toothbrushes. There’s never any tempting her out to a pub or party: she likes to keep a seemly distance from what she refers to as ‘the Majority of People’. She is interested in others, though. She’s even able to have a good gossip about her neighbours, based of necessity on pure speculation. I was round last week, sipping camomile while Grangey twitched the nets.

‘Here’s the Estate Agent’, she muttered, watching her neighbour go into his house. ‘Back early I see.’

I noticed an invitation on her mantelpiece. ‘Street party! Are you going?’

‘Good heavens, no. There will probably be people there. Ooh’, she raised her binoculars once more. ‘The Pashmina Woman’s going into the wrong house again. She’s having an affair with the Estate Agent. She’s always round there.’

I gave Grangey a brief lecture on the importance of human connections, of getting out and making an effort. She protested that she had plenty of friends (‘two is two too many’). But I spoke from the heart and felt I had impressed her.

Yesterday she summoned me in a state of distress, and I found her distractedly dusting her musical snowglobes collection, always a bad sign.

‘It’s all your fault’, she said, but as this is a normal Grange Girl greeting I just nodded and put the kettle on. After some fortifying sips of chicory – desperate times, desperate measures – she told me my homily had indeed induced her (‘against my better judgement’), to attend the street party, and thus enter a vortex of confusion.

‘He really looks like an estate agent’, she moaned. ‘And there was once a Lewes Estates van outside his house. But he was playing the guitar, and when I complimented him, he turned out to be a professional musician. I asked how that fitted in with selling over-priced houses, and he thought I was mad.’

I choked slightly on my chicory. Grangey said, ‘The Pashmina Woman kissed him in front of everyone! The brass front! Then I heard they’d just celebrated their twentieth wedding anniversary. They weren’t having an affair at all, and I’d got her house wrong.’

The most amazing thing about the story was such a long-term couple still kissing, but Grangey continued, ‘the woman with the baby is a single mum, though I was sure she was married to number 15; turns out he’s gay and lives at 28; and the policewoman is actually an aromatherapist but I saw her the night she went to a fancy dress party…’

Poor Grange Girl. She doesn’t like change. It takes her three months to adjust to Greenwich Mean Time.

‘They were all surprised to see me’, she said. ‘They thought I was a hermit.’

She drew the curtains, and took up her candle-making kit. ‘That was the only thing anyone said all night that made any sense.’

Beth Miller, 8th September 2010. Published in VivaLewes.com. Photo by Alex Leith