Smoked Fish

So there I was, surrounded by stiff tissues and trying to get to grips with the similarities between 'Scarborough Fair' and 'Girl From the North Country' when my head was flung around by the sound of a long reverberating squeak at the window. Dressed in only a white towel at the waist I gripped it tighter and faced the window cleaner who was 3/4 profiling his face and now focusing on only the dirty pane his length of rubber was strigiling. Had he turned as I did? Which of the two lyrics below is the most pleasing? I decided to leave the room for a glass of orange from concentrate and smoked mackerel, perhaps with some of the fruit loaf I knew I had left. I closed the window on the west-facing wall to help the cleaner, to give him a bit of resistance, and to hide from his ears the lines:

Remember me to one who lives there.
She once was a true love of mine.

Remember me from one who lives there,
For she/he once was a true love of mine.

A'wonder how many stories window cleaners; and gas men, telephone-line installationists, paper-boys, septic tank-diviners - what sort of stories they tell each other. A'wonder how many variations on the teenager wanking, the au-pair fucking, the cleaner sucking, the dog shitting, the husband throttling they come across and tell their friends in the work. A'wonder if they decide that the stories are boring and start to discuss the changing tastes in wallpaper and dado rails. A'wonder if they have physician-style tradesmen's oathes, or a butler's discretion, never to see and certainly never to tell of.

I'd finished the mackerel and washed down the oil with orange juice when the window cleaners knocked, they wanted paying. What I really needed was an audio recording of 'Scarborough Fair' and 'Girl From the North Country' and a working-class upbringing.

3 Billion

I wondered, when I was smaller, whether everything just had the same number of heartbeats, one finite number, let’s say 3 billion and when they reach that 3 billionth beat, that’s it. They just die. Unless something bad happens before like a bus hits them or they drown. And so a mouse whose little heart just beats so fast, well he gets there quicker, to the end I mean. And someone who’s stressed, their heart goes a little faster too and pulls their 3 billionth beat a little closer so they sound their last more early. And smokers.
There are no doubt scientific examples that prove this not to be the case, though I can’t say I’m desperate to know them, anyway I was young when I thought this. Though I still wonder and am wondering whether it could be true, at least for most humans. No-one has really proven it wrong…
I’m just firing up a cigarette and listening to reggae instrumentals again, I guess I could wonder what number I’m on.