Life changing events don’t usually occur when I open the letterbox outside the door of my flat on a Monday afternoon. Still, when a small handwritten envelope greeted me, my hopes were raised that something special must have been contained inside. After all, nobody communicates by writing letters anymore, so someone had to have gone to a great deal of effort to get in touch with me. It seemed quaint; charming even. My immediate thought was that it could be a secret admirer who had finally summoned the courage to make their long-suppressed feelings known, even when it didn’t seem the most romantic of gestures to address me as “the occupier.” People go by all sorts of nicknames, I thought, and I could probably get used to it for the sake of a little loving.
The return address on the back of the envelope was a local one – Ganavan; so my admirer was apparently someone from money. I bounded through to the kitchen and peeled the envelope open with all the delicacy of a nervous lover. Inside was a beautifully handwritten note that had letters swirling across the paper like great rivers, along with a thin pamphlet posing the question: “Can the dead really live again?” The brochure provided three options as a possible response: Yes, no, or maybe, and if the ‘dead’ that was being referred to was my hopes of finding love, it seemed that the answer was a resounding no.
Hazel is a Jehovah’s Witness. Her letter was making me aware of the fact that her organisation has produced an interactive bible course on their website. I have often joked that even the Jehovah’s Witnesses wouldn’t pay me a visit at my flat, but now it seemed to be the truth. The really bitter blow came later in the week when I received another envelope in my letterbox. It was penned in the same swooping writing, though this letter was intended for my neighbour across the landing, who was also given the name “the occupier.” Is nothing sacred anymore?
My correspondence from Hazel asked plenty of questions, but it didn’t contain the answers to the riddles that I’ve been thinking about as I’ve grown older, such as why there has been a pair of boots standing on the wall at the end of my road all week, or why two bees suddenly appeared in my flat over the same weekend when I have lived here for more than four years without so much as one finding its way in. If the people at the Jehovah’s Witnesses could tell me why a bag of mixed leaf salad can often survive in my fridge two or three days beyond its ‘use by’ date, but a pint of milk starts to turn a day before the label suggests it should, I would consider signing up to their religion.
As I have aged, it has become increasingly clear that the answers to the questions I didn’t know that I needed resolving are not to be found in a church pew, but rather the barber’s chair. At this stage in my life, most of the knowledge I have accumulated has come from the wisdom of my barber. He has a different story every time you take a seat in there, and they always go in a direction you could never expect. This time he was telling me about a rival barber from a mid-Argyll town who used to run the shop for him on a Monday. He twice tried to set up his own business some years ago but struggled to attract customers, despite being the only barber in the town. The story goes that this guy had an irrational dislike of people who whistled in his presence. He couldn’t understand why anyone feels the need to whistle and it would drive him crazy if somebody walked into the shop with a jaunty tune emitting from their mouth. So the story goes that whenever a resident of this mid-Argyll town came to Oban to have their hair cut, the barber would ask them that once they return home they visit his rival’s business and simply walk into the premises whilst whistling before turning back on their feet and leaving. It was a mischievous scheme which seemed to please the barber greatly. As clumps of brown and grey hair cascaded all around me, all I could picture was the scene in a ghostly quiet salon in the middle of nowhere as a freshly-groomed man strolls in whistling the theme from The Addams Family.
Where the tale turned was when the barber vowed that after he told me what he was about to say, I would never be able to go anywhere again without noticing it happen. My eyebrows were raised – at least until he trimmed those, too. According to the barber’s observations, people cannot help but whistle when they are walking between two points, such as the bathroom and the bar in a pub, the entrance to a supermarket and the first aisle, or the door and seats in a barbershop. It’s a nervous tick, a sort of placeholder to fill the void until something occupies their mind. I had never noticed this phenomenon before, and since I’m not yet ready to spend my time studying men as they enter and leave the toilets in Aulay’s I just have to trust the barber as the leading authority on the matter.
My entire purpose for going for a haircut in the middle of the week was the result of a chastening experience at the bar a few days earlier. On the face of it, it was just an ordinary Friday night. The Plant Doctor and I were talking to a guy who was telling us about how he’s teaching himself to play the guitar with the Pink Floyd album The Dark Side Of The Moon, which struck me as being the equivalent of learning how to paint by sketching the Mona Lisa. In time we were joined by several other experts in algae, although I believe they learned their craft the conventional way. At various points over a twenty-minute or so period, I noticed the four scientists as well as my brother and Geordie Dave conspiring over a piece of paper in the corner of the bar by the coat rack. I had no idea what they were up to until I was finally introduced to the sheet and asked to judge which of the six drawings they had each created was the best likeness of me, and to guess who had drawn which one. It was the first time I had ever seen myself in pen, while the portraits were a curious cross between touching and excruciating. I think, ultimately, I would have preferred it if they had spent their time in the corner whistling.
Despite the quality of the sketches, I failed to correctly identify any of the artists. Amanda who was working behind the bar, on the other hand, was able to guess four of the culprits. Some people have an eye for these things, I suppose. What the artwork demonstrated more than anything – more even than that the scientists had made the right career choice – was that I was in dire need of a haircut. A picture speaks a thousand words, after all, and I had six thousand of them telling me that my hair is a mess.
While the display of artistic endeavour was something that we would go on to talk about again and again, it turned out not to be the most remarkable thing we would see in Aulay’s that night. With the clock ticking towards closing time, the door swung open in the ominous way they do in horror films. In walked a couple of young guys who were effectively carrying a much older man with them. It was a slow, arduous walk from the door to the bar as the two men dragged their companion along the ground with them, as though they were moving a heavy piece of furniture. They shuffled towards the bar and struggled to manoeuvre the elderly man onto a barstool, all under the eye of a bemused barmaid. It was nothing short of a Weekend at Bernie’s scenario playing out before us. The barmaid immediately told the gentlemen that she couldn’t serve them on account of Bernie’s practically comatose condition, and they had to turn around and go through the entire charade in reverse. The scene was surreal to watch play out, and just like the theory of why people whistle as they walk between two points, the question of how these guys thought they were going to be able to buy drinks after carrying a drunk old man into the pub isn’t one that’s ever going to be answered in a pamphlet from the Jehovah’s Witnesses.
Diaries of a single man 