THE WAY HE IS
Contents
Kilt Ms Bunny Cowman Pisser of a Mood The Way He Is Amber & Debs Dad Flowery Slippers Toothache Merbabe & Dogman Marmalade Delicious Prissy Cheese In The Beginning Giant Bolster & The Press Oil Supermarket Spilt Milk Yellow Punk Man Blue Dog Man Hoover Rubber Gloves Women & Cars Treacle
Kilt
It’s the online dating malarkey that was to blame. I mean, all Tasha wanted to do was to meet someone sane. But as you’re probably aware, online dating sites are the preserve of anything but. And Kiltman took the biscuit, well, ended up deleted, cos there he was in his introductory photo proudly stood by railings in the brisk breeze of a spring morn, knees on show and soft as plums. DELETE! DELETE! DELETE! She yelled.
Ms Bunny
Meet Ms Bunny. She’s a right laugh. Though her teeth can be a bit much to look at if you get too close. She hangs around down the bar at the end of the street cos she gets bored at home. It’s all that bunny energy...She can leap a table in one go with pint of beer in paw and not spill a drop. Cor.
Cowman
Cow eyes make him want to weep. He thinks he may have been a cow in a past life, which is why he gave up eating meat. He’d like to believe in a higher, benevolent power but thinks this may be fantasy, so he trundles along in his daily life with the dream of waking up one day to bird song, not an alarm. He likes clotted cream and country walks. If he could have his own way he’d move out of town, buy a piece of land and do permaculture. But he’s only read books on the subject and done a week’s course on a farm where he stayed in a yurt and was taught basket weaving and digging. He likes wellies and women in knitted jumpers, though he keeps this to himself.
Pisser of a Mood
It’s november, it’s cold & damp...the drizzle has even penetrated through his thick-knit jumper to make his mood even more sour. He sits by the fire drinking copious amounts of tea, mumbling to himself whilst the rain drips, drips, drips...
The Way He Is
He likes pigs. He doesn’t like frogs. If you’re a frog don’t take it personally, it’s just the way he is; he has an aversion to cold slimy things. When he wakes up in the morning he plays a tune on the thumb piano he keeps by his bed in case of the blues. He hopes it’ll cheer him up on dark November mornings but it rarely does. He sees life as being one cold, dark November morning, poor luv.
His favourite tune goes something like ha ha ha hee hee hee sung with a guttural thump and scrape cos he eats too much burnt toast. It has that kind of effect on the throat if eaten too quickly and without margarine. He likes the crunch so he can pretend he’s eating a crustacean from a million years ago. It’s the kind of fantasy he has whilst eating breakfast at 5am before dawn’s grey glow. When he’s older he sees himself as having a nippy black car that he can squeal around corners in trying to kill cats and kids. He’s quite indiscriminate as to which. Kids are an easier target though especially when dawdling to school with music welded to their ears and backpacks on. They are an especially easy target when their shoes have those flashing red lights & their bags fluorescent strips. Nice! He thinks to himself, imagining ramming his foot hard down on the accelerator. He’s forgotten who his parents are. That was such a long time ago, longer than a giant’s mind span. Big brains & dawdling careful thoughts & a sense of time stretching to the moon and stars, that’s what he has. And a smile that’d never melt a woman’s heart; more likely send them through the nearest door they could bolt briskly behind.
Amber & Debs
Debs has just finished with her bloke so has some spare time on her hands. You could say she’s been getting a bit morose, dwelling too much on the state of the planet with its wars and conflicts and the fact we’re heading towards environmental oblivion. And she has no one to cuddle up to now, poor luv… But at least she has a friend like Amber who can’t really be arsed with all the naval gazing but does her best, though it goes without saying she’d much rather be sat down the pub.
Dad
She thought he’d be a safe bet & he is. Sometimes you do actually get what you ask for in life.
Flowery Slippers
He had a friendly, poetic aspect. He loved words. He loved watching golf. He loved cheese & pickle sandwiches & a nice cuppa. & peanuts. & chicken...with chips of course. His favourite trick was to fit as many beetles between his lips as he could & crunch them in one go. He also liked balloons & planes & biros. & spider’s webs.
He lived by the park & you could hear him at night brushing his gunked teeth & howling with the effort cos it was a hell of a pain that shot across his jaw, down his back & straight to his big toe. Brushing his teeth was one of his least favourite activities. He only did it cos there was a hefty lass over the road he fancied who wore flowery slippers. He caught glimpses of them as she sat in front of the TV. Oh to be sat beside her he thought to himself. But it was a good job she’d always avoided him on the street cos he could’ve squashed her in one fatal flop. He had ancestors from some northern realm & his grizzly frame was a genetic throw back & the reason his parents had abandoned him in 1979 in the supermarket car park. & so he lived in his bedsit talking to the spider plant & answering the questions to quizzes on the radio. He would’ve been such an asset on a pub quiz team. But he was never asked. & if there was a happy ending to the story I’d tell it
But there isn’t.
Toothache
Oh life can sometimes be painful like toothache. Like the wince you get when eating icecream with sensitive teeth.
Ow.
Merbabe & Dogman
Merbabe is the Mermaid of Zennor babified. She thought she'd come onland for a bit of fun, maybe even seduce a bloke whilst he's too drunk to see her tail hidden beneath her pink & orange sarong. By the way, you can always tell a mermaid by her wet hem. Be warned. Dogman is a jack-the-lad, the Beast of Bodmin down from the moor & on holiday. He's in St Ives eyeing up the babes, enjoying the ale & pretending he can surf, but he can't. He's such a slacker....except when it comes to food. He can gobble up old grandmas & children whole.
Marmalade
There was once not so long ago a girl called marmalade. Well, that was her nickname. And she relished telling boys off and frightening old ladies at the bus stop and being rude to whosoever crossed her path...The usual teenage stuff. One morning she was shuffling down the road in her scuffed up shoes singing rather badly to the tunes blasting into her ears when a huge crow swooped down, sat on her head and started pecking at her eyes...
Marmalade screamed and screamed and ran and ran til she ran out of breath and fell over and the silky crow sat on her shouder cawing with an eerie fatalistic croak. Oh my God, she thought, I’m done for! Then it spread out it’s huge wings and enveloped marmalade in one massive swish and the girl with the red knotted hair disappeared... Well, not completely, as she has become a legend. To this day she is said to be seen loitering around bus stops where her spirit scares old ladies waiting for buses, and lads smoking outside pubs. This story was told to me by a grandma who swears she saw her ghostly apparition last week whilst getting on the 177 at 9.30. And this picture is how I remember her before her mysterious disappearance. Others say she’s working as a waitress in Spain and the bloke over the road swore he saw her down the supermarket at the weekend.
Delicious
Her slippers are scuffed by seven winters of shuffling. New, they were green and white, in case you were wondering. She likes boiled eggs washed down with loose leaf tea and such images frequent her thoughts. Cheese and pickle sandwiches are also a favourite which she shares with her cat Thomas. Mmm...Delicious.
Prissy
This picture I drew when I moved to a place I'm about to leave. I liked her attitude, but she did scare me a bit. I'm glad I won't see her again.
Cheese
Life grates on him. Life the grater. Him the cheese.
In the Beginning
Sometimes it can take a while to get going in the morning, like til midday even. Well, this bloke has that kind of a feeling most of the time. If I was going to be critical I’d tell him to get off his backside & go & do some exercise to get those endorphins moving around his body. It might perk him up a bit. But he likes to wallow in the inanity of his life so much so that it has become his main preoccupation, nay excuse, for inactivity. Best steer clear.
Giant Bolster & The Press
Giant Bolster has made it into the Cornishman newspaper! Which is a miracle as he is huge & hates having his photo taken. But thanks to the wonders of modern digital photography he looks about 2 inches high.
It took a while convincing him the picture would do him justice. Giants can be vain, though some of course are very shy & hardly ever leave their mountain peaks & murky bogs. Giant Bolster is of a cantankerous nature but the professionalism of the paper's photographer ensured the photo-shoot was a success. & I've even heard rumours down the pub that Bolster keeps a framed copy of the picture on his favourite crag.
Oil
He came over with a grudge the size of a lorry, his face smeared with oil. He’d been fixing his car he said. This was not a good day to ask him for a favour.
Supermarket
I drew this a while back when I had the mother of all menial jobs in a well-known supermarket. It was the most boring, oppressive, brain-destroying job ever, & I had to get out of bed at 4.45am to do it. But the whole deadendness of it must've seeped into my very being when I wasn't looking & I became a zombie, fulfilling the will of this multinational corporation that was tighter than Scrooge. But one day I realised how bad my life had actually become & I escaped!
Split Milk
Alas, she's been having bloke problems. She's gone & split up with her surf hunk who looks really good with his tatty, weathered hair and tight t-shirt. She blames herself cos she wasn't that interested in surfing, & it showed.
Yellow Punk Man
I drew him a while back & the yellow is dirty, like his smirk. He knows more than he should & has a past I don't want to know too much about. It'd fill a book to full... If he could remember it.
Blue Dog Man
Dogs have big teeth like wolves. But they can also be trained quite easily, to sit up & beg, to roll over on their backs, to fetch a ball. Unfortunately though, they often have bad breath. This can be alleviated by crunchy charcoal dog biscuits. But remember, hide chews cause excessive salivation as do hot cars & the sight of a rabbit bounding over the hill.
To treat your dog well you must give him a comfortable bed to sleep in, make sure he gets plenty of fresh air, & long country walks. If you leave him couped up at home whilst at work in the office you may return home to find your sofa in shreds as well as your favourite pair of pink fluffy slippers. This would be most unfortunate. So my advice would be to give up your job, buy a van & travel around Europe playing the fiddle whilst he howls & tourists chuck coins into your hat. Now what an adventure that’d be!
Hoover
She’s a cleaner at the local branch of a nationwide estate agents. She’s seen countless staff come and go over the years and to her they are one mass of aftershave and perfume.
She brusquely dusts and mops, shoving feet out of the way with her hoover nozzle as she leans forward to pick up biscuit crumbs and crisps absentmindedly dropped, commenting on the weather or cost of living these days. When they’ve gone home she makes a cuppa and rifles through their biscuit stash, dipping a handful of Shorties into her milky tea whilst watching TV in the staff area. She knows she’s being filmed by the numerous CCTV cameras in the office and has a Devil-may-care attitude towards them, sprawling on the boss’s chair with her feet up on his desk, fantasising about zapping him up with her hoover. She takes great pleasure whenever one of his biros zips up the hoover tube or some lipstick accidentally dropped on the floor by Amanda or Claire finds its way into her hoover bag. Not that she’s nasty in anyway, but everyone has to have some level of job satisfaction.
Rubber Gloves
She grew up in a crumbly old house in the northern realms where spiders were big as a grown man’s fist and furry as his beard.
As a child she’d hear tick, tick ticking down the wall the eight feet of the kind of spider that hunts and swallows mice whole, or so she’d been told. Sometimes she’d even awaken to the beady eyes of a black beast staring back at her until her screams sent it scuttling off across the room on its hasty legs. The outhouse where the coal was kept harboured her second biggest fear, those creatures that are a blur of brown if you happen to look down when one of them is passing. Tunnels earthed out underground by these ministers of plague made the hanging up of washing a precision chore involving wellies tied with string, a good strong broom and precision pegging. She had it down to a fine art. And rubber gloves, well, they made her heart palpitate at the thought of strongly disinfected surgeries and the synthetic-gloved hands of doctors, dentists and vets, and that fatal glimpse of a pile inside out in the bin as they are peeled off with a suck and a slap and chucked swiftly in.
Women & Cars
He’s nervous due to recurring nightmares involving women and cars and for a sensitive type has a shady past. He finds it hard to say no and one particular favour led him down a dark alley and into a situation involving fast women and cars, sharp suits and even sharper knives. Not a nice place to be even with the razor teeth and claws of a dog.
But as he’s a canine used to the easy life of a housing estate all he uses his claws for are to scratch the odd flea off his back that escaped the herbal dog shampoo and he’s never had to chase a rabbit for his supper in his life. He’s a tinned food dog through and through hence the mezmerized look every time he hears a tin opener in action and his blind devotion to women with a stash of Chappie.
Treacle
She tries her best to be nice, to say the sweetest things and to smile. At the cashier, the bloke down the garage, her boss, her boss’s boss and even the cleaner of the office.
Sweat oozes out at times with the sheer effort of being nice, of not being seen as a threat, different, someone not to ask out, to lay into, to bitch about. She spends hours at a time on makeup, improving her accent, on Facebook.
But cracks appear in her portrayal, her betrayal, of herself.
Damn.