If the hat fits wear it

Walking in the rain will make your head wet.

I walk by the bank of the Liffey near where I live. Rain does not respect our image of our wonderful selves. It comes down in sheets upon my unprotected head and on the land and trees and greenery all about me.

Come summer, this will be a verdant place suitable for tourists, and the like, to have their photos taken by the white water weir.

For now, my mind seeks shelter inside my skull from the hammering of raindrops intent on piercing my being.

When a voice hails me I think it is the Weather Gods mocking me.

It is John the Hatman.

He becomes that when he produces a white plastic bag, with handles, from his pocket and waves it at me.

He is walking a dog on a leash, the bag has come from his pocket, he wears a multicoloured peaked cap himself. The plastic bag is for my head; To keep me dry, he says.

I ask his name.

I pull the hat down over my soaked hair.  It fits. I bless John and all his descendants and thank his ancestors for the fine breeding they have achieved in this man, whom I have never met before.

Later, I come to terms with the awareness that I am waking beneath a bag originally intended to collect John's dog's waste as he perambulated along. I know though, for I have judged John in my mind, that the bag was unused when it was presented to me by a kind man.

I wear it with determination even when the rain stops and the sun shines on my headgear with malevolence.

I pass an Angus steer in a field and say nothing, nor does he.

You either understand these things.

Or not.


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Investing in an Ark

                            
A man wants me to invest in an ark with him. 

More to the point, he wants to build an ark and I will pay for it to be built: which means financing his wages and materials and anything else that comes up; like some housekeeping money for his wife.

Why I ask, not unreasonably I feel.

Because it may never stop raining, he says with patience. Animals can only swim around for so long and then they drown: whereas humans can sit on a roof for a long time: pending cessation of the downpour.

We, meaning he, will do  it and I will pay him to gather a pair of every animal there is to be found locally and bring them into the ark.

When all is dry once more we, that is he and I, will produce them like a magician producing many multicoloured rabbits from a hat and declare we have a monopoly on all the animals left on the earth and they are all ours, now.

This he seems to believe will lead to effective world domination by him, and me, in no time at all.

Which is a good thing, he says without saying why or spelling out which of us will arise first in the morning to do the ruling of the world.

He gives pause for thought when I point out that pairs of animals are like to mate and that if the rains last for a long time the new animals may very well take over the ark and decide to sail away to an  new Animaland across the sea, without us.

While he considers this possibility, the sun comes out and the rain stops.

He is terribly sad at this turn of events.

He goes home to explain to his wife that climate change has thwarted their ambition.

Once more.

I put my rain hat in my pocket and walk on.

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One coin is like another

I watch the cashier and calculate my change so I can casually check it while lifting my purchase with my other hand.I tire of being shortchanged by underpaid till jockeys supplementing their rent by imposing a thief's levy on unsuspecting shoppers.

Before me, an older woman waits after the till is closed. She has a few pastries in a bag.
"Was there anything else, Madame," asks the suddenly wary sales assistant.

She says she handed over three two-euro coins totalling six euro; but received change from a fiver.

The man opens the till and stares at the tumbled coins and notes of many transaction. He says yes you are right, I have your other euro here in my hand for you. Did you want anything else?

She shakes her sorrowful head and walks to a table to clutch her paper bag and await the arrival of someone else, who seems in no hurry to appear.

The same thing has happened to me, thrice, in different places in the past few weeks. All challenged by me, all apologised for as a mistake.

If it was a mistake, why did they not mistakenly give me too much change?

On my way out, I think to bond with the pastry buyer; but she flicks her wrist and produces a two-euro coin secreted by her in her coat. She had handed over not three coins, but two, to a value of four euro and received change of five.

She is in short, a thief, and the till jockey is not only an honest human but is now short of his employers' takings.

Do the police know who she is, or should I lock her in and ring them, I wonder?

I do neither; but watch out for pickpocketing grannies on my way home.

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Summer Loving

Summer Loving

Brendan Nolan tells his original story of what happened when a smiling man called to the door of a lonely woman.
Have you ever contributed to a good cause?
But, what do you do if the good bits go bad?
Well here’s what happened when Maria opened the door to a stranger.