This isn’t my first entry into this diary but the first one I have chosen to share with the world. I ramble to myself most days using my quill and my leather bound note book as my tools. It was during one of these ramblings I had one of my moments, “Why don’t I share a bit of this ‘gold’ and, I hope to eventually turn it into my memoir which already has bits written. Anyhooo, I hope you enjoy what I am sharing.
So, why a Fifty-Something Nobody. I started off being ‘Normal’ rather than ‘Nobody’ but I am not sure what normal is? I also think that Nobody is at least a thing whereas normal is just the same as everyone else. I like being a ‘Nobody’, we are able to crawl under that radar which is always watching and blipping. If you are ‘Somebody’ you are expected to behave and act in a certain way but I don’t have to bother with any of that stuff. Just for the record, I can’t do anything about the ‘Fifty Something’ element. It is what it is and I have no issue with age other than it is often an inconvenient label.
I could have been ‘Useless’ as this is what one of my parents told me I was, at some time in my childhood. Ah yes, of course, it all comes together now – I am a ‘Useless Nobody’. Can you see me nodding sagely as I come to this realisation? This too is OK because it brings no pressure to achieve whatever society says I have to achieve because I am useless. All good then.
It is also fine because I live in a part of the United Kingdom which is very unmemorable, the East Midlands! “Ah yes”, I hear you all cry followed by, “where is that?” There are a few famous elements to where I live but one of the most famous is that I live on what was the front line during the Miners’ Strike in the mid-eighties. There is also, of course, Robin Hood, who ran amuck with that pesky Sherriff of Nottingham a few years back and we have the Peak District within the squiggle line I call home. I actually live in what I fondly call, ‘Ugly Derbyshire’ which is the area of our county which isn’t ‘Peaking’.
But you know what, and please don’t tell anyone, stuff does happen to Useless Nobody’s in Ugly Derbyshire. I mean only yesterday, I met a cousin who I hadn’t seen for a little while. On the edge of your seats aren’t you? Anyway, we are very close in age and grew up in the same village, in the same class at school with the same Grandma and Grandad around the same corner. As we sat celebrating our mutual Aunt’s 88th Birthday, he handed me his business card which declared that he was now a professor at two universities. I was a little surprised to be receiving a business card from someone who I had shared a bath with when we were babies, as I was confident I still knew who he was. Although I am surrounded by dementia, I think my memory is still OK even if not much else is. Still, I learned of his professorship on a little card. This must be the way that professors communicate with Nobody’s who have only crawled up to a post graduate education level. It made me smile and made me think of all the times I had covered for him as a child, especially as his subject of specialism is Criminology.
Perhaps I missed a calling in life, maybe I should have been a Ying to my Cousin’s Yang? I could have become a Criminal Mastermind operating from a hollowed out Pit Tip (a big pile of unwanted earth from the coal mines they surrounded). There would have been ‘nowt’ as fancy as a white, Persian Cat for me to sit and stroke as I issued orders out to the little men with flat caps, as they ran around building me a rocket launcher which would be used in my bid to take over Yorkshire (I think the World may have been a bit much for me!). I would have been sat stroking a snarling Jack Russell (her name is Dottie for the record) staring out from behind my blue NHS glasses. My cousin, not quite James Bond, would laugh at me thinking he could soon bring me to justice but I knew I could always evade him by running into a field of flowers as his hayfever would never let him capture me there! HA!
To be honest, I am actually quite proud of him (don’t tell him, mind). Although we had good childhoods, I am sure the good people of the country out there would have expected very little of us as we came from ‘Nobody’s’ (See Agricultural Labourers/ Miners / Peasant Farmers / Framework Knitters on the census’ of old) and would not have looked out of place in a Lowrie. We were born to be ‘the workers’, the cannon fodder not the people who make policy but I suppose we both defied expectation. Now that is a story for another day.