The brothel next door to my parents’ house has finally shut up knocking-shop. It’s been there for six or seven years. The first we knew of it was when half a dozen men came hurtling over the row of garages at the end of the garden and my mother, running, as ever, counter to what others would consider natural instinct, hurtled with equal vigour towards them to make sure they didn’t damage the roof.
There have been no more police raids since then. Everybody seemed to feel that honour had been satisfied. It’s not like the place was noisy, or they left a dog barking while they went out to work. A couple with children in another flat added a bit to the fence top in the garden so the kids wouldn’t see anything by accident.
You didn’t, anyway, see the women very often – a procession of different accents and ethnicities, always thin, always pale. The sheets and towels tacked up at all the windows in lieu of curtains got grimier and grimier but never fell down. The security grilles at the doors and windows got more robust. The men, who arrived in taxis, or shuffled or strode round the corner, as the mood and temperament took them, went in and out on the far side of the building. Sometimes they looked guilty. Not often. Slightly more often they looked shifty. Occasionally simply avid, and you’d have to turn away.
But now the towels and blankets are down, the grilles are off, the inside’s been stripped, re-floored, refitted, repainted. New people are moving in. I don’t know where the women have gone. Somewhere better? Somewhere worse? The taxi drivers who used to take them to the station after their shifts might know – home to their children? Off to richer clients who could afford home visits? Another shift, somewhere better, somewhere worse? But the men will be fine. Might have to travel a little further, but they’ll be fine. Driving, shuffling, striding, guilty, shifty, avid … they’ll be fine, I’m sure.
Massaging the truth
Courtesy of a gift card from a friend who either knows or likes me less than I thought, I recently had a massage at a place that promised to reboot my spiritual system by rubbing crystals over my chakras and releasing my inner energies. The masseuse led me into a little room afterwards and with a concerned face informed me that I had tensed and my breathing had changed when she got near my base chakra (located just above the start of what I believe the Upanishads call your bumcrack), which deals with emotional health.
Did I have any problems that needed sharing? I nearly said, “No, I have a broken coccyx from giving birth four years ago.” But of course I didn’t. I mumbled, “Gosh, um, how interesting, no, I don’t think so” and hightailed it out of there. Thus on such muzzling mixtures of politeness and embarrassment does mumbo-jumbo thrive.
Christmas? Already?
Selfridges has opened its Christmas section umpty-billion days before actual Christmas. Boo to that pantomime retail villain! Boooooo!
It’s not the unseasonality I most object to (though I do object to that – boooo! Boooo!), but the havoc it plays with my syncopated shopping. I live my life a year behind – or possibly ahead, I can’t work it out, you’ll have to tell me – everyone else because I do most of my Christmas shopping in the sales-wake of the one just gone. Recipients of my largesse get more bang for my buck and I get finished before there is any chance of being assailed by wassailers. Everybody wins. Except if the non-season gets extended beyond all reason. Once Christmases join up, the opportunity for bargain-hunting fun is over. Let it stop, let it stop, let it stop.