Heart of darkness

5 September, 2011 (09:34) | All articles | By: Stuart Fraser

My holiday was spent traversing far, uncharted territory deep in the Amazon basin, beating precarious paths through dense forests where none had dared venture before. I cast all danger from me with a manly nonchalance, as you would expect, be it 30-foot anaconda or deadly piranha.

Eventually, far from my Western home and in a place as remote as it must be possible to find oneself on Earth in the year 2011, I came across a tiny clearing where a few native tribespeople squatted glumly around a rude camp fire.

I hung back, aware that I may well be the first visitor from the mysterious world outside their forest home ever to have intruded upon their simple lives.

But two of the tribespeople rushed straight up to me, jabbering furiously with much gesturing. One gesture, in which the poison-tipped end of a primitive wooden spear was thrust energetically upward, gave me considerable cause for concern.

But Joao, my guide and interpreter, told me there was no need for alarm.

“What, then, are these poor people so excited about?” I asked. “They seem so incredibly upset and angry…”

One of the tribespeople howled a bitter curse, his face turned skywards, his fists clenched and shaking in impotent rage at the cruel fates.

Joao placed a comforting arm around the distressed native, and turned to me with pity and sorrow etched in every line of his homely, honest face.

“He is weeping frustrated tears of anger and railing at the cruel injustice of the world,” said Joao, “because he and his tribe have bought a new clearing some miles from here and have been waiting to move into it for some six months now.”

I was stunned, horrified, amazed: “Don’t tell me they’ve got solicitors and bankers in the sodding Amazon rainforest!”

Joao’s unhappy grimace, and the pitiful, beaten, agonised, helpless expressions of the poor primitive people he was trying to comfort in their hour of great distress, were all the answers I needed.

It was quite a coincidence.

I had travelled to the Amazon, far from the home we have been in the process of selling for what seems like many years now, and far from the home we once were foolish enough to think we would be able to buy at some point before the end of the century, because I was in terrible fear.

That fear was this: if I stayed around here much longer I was likely to cause severe and highly illegal, though extremely entertaining, damage to members of the legal and financial professions.

Many friends tried to make me stay, making it clear that were I to sell tickets for the prolonged and exquisitely painful public torture of either a banker or a lawyer I would very soon be as rich as, well, as a banker or lawyer. At the time I thought it best to try and keep on the right side of the law (and the one beacon of light in the whole grim scenario is the solicitor working with us, whose niceness has spared his colleagues).

I mention this because it seems to me ironic to be in this situation, given that you are all depending on me.

You need me to buy and sell a house; you need me to employ builders and plumbers and electricians and buy paint and flooring and furniture. That’s what the Government tells me, that’s what the media insists: I am needed to kick start our faltering economy.

Why, then, is it so bloody difficult? Why does the process make me feel as if it would have been simpler to paint my arse lilac and recite Latin declensions while climbing Everest in the nude?

We will return to this issue. Because it is patently absurd that we have allowed a situation to develop in which we pay thousands of pounds to be patronised and delayed, our money buying a service that moves slower than a banker’s sense of shame.

In the meantime, do you remember the classic episode of Fawlty Towers which ended with Basil striding down the hotel drive clutching a large garden gnome, which he told Sybil he was about to insert into an Irish builder?

 

Comments

Comment from Iain
Time September 8, 2011 at 8:56 am

Hear, Hear. I don’t have a plastic gnome, but I do have a surplus of cockerills of various ages and sizes, including one that is best described as particularly spikey and grumpy. I would like to book my place at the front of the box office queue in order to purchase the best tickets, so if you could let me know when the tickets become available I would be most appreciative. (Cockerills are available for collection at any time)

Comment from One Old Fiddle
Time September 8, 2011 at 10:05 am

Cockerills: ‘Tes an old Cornish word for they male ‘ens.

Write a comment

You need to login to post comments!