People watching in a forecourt…

Well I just said that thing about the sabre to get your attention.

Bucket rattling doesn’t have quite the same ring to it. I’ve never had a sabre to rattle. Not even a small one.

Today was Saturday and I spent three hours rattling a bucket in the draughty forecourt of a petrol station in Westport. Fund raising for Mayo Mountain Rescue. As if all the hours on call outs and training didn’t take enough large chunks out of one’s personal life, we also have to raise the money needed for our operations every year. Thanks fer nothing Irish government…..

However, lest you think I’m griping it’s quite remarkable how time passes in the forecourt of a busy petrol station. It’s an experience much like people-watching in an airport. Just take away the tans and the luggage and add a frigid wind blowing straight through the centre of your belly button.

I didn’t actually shake my little bucket. I don’t think that’s allowed anymore and anyway it would seem rude.

I just stood there rather passively beside the rubbish bin which was as tall as me, wearing my mountain rescue jacket and my ugly mountain boots which make my feet look like clumps of turf.

I smiled and greeted people as they passed me and gave fulsome thanks to those who put money in my bucket. Grovelled a little even. Then I spent the next three hours marvelling at all sorts of things.

For example, the driving techniques of the different demographics.

Who knew that old ladies were such a card-carrying menace in confined areas?  You can barely see their  blue- grey heads over the steering wheel as they wobble in to park at all sorts of impossible angles. Then there’s all that unnecessary revving whilst stationary.

I watched as one elderly woman, after buying her litre of milk, climbed back into her car with a good degree of agility. She turned on the ignition and with a serene expression and staring straight ahead, she shot backwards to get clear of the cars parked at the pumps.

She didn’t grace her rear view or side mirrors with a single glance. Nor did she exert herself to look behind. Luckily the guy in the white van behind her was alert to such old lady manoeuvres and alarmed but quick thinking, he accelerated out of her way and just managed to avoid a collision that might have killed her off completely. Maybe that was her objective. To die in a public blaze of noise and drama rather than suffer some protracted drooling end in a nursing home. Headlines in the Mayo News. ‘Local woman reverses to her death!’

After that suicidal but admittedly nimble display of reversing, she put the car in forward gear and everyone in the vicinity cringed at the whine of the gear change as she drove away with nary a care, oblivious to the fact that she had skirted death and damage to limb and property. Possibly someone else’s limb and property.  Ironically after such confidently brisk reversing, her forward motion had all the urgency of a wounded turtle on the way to see a distant relative. It took her hours to leave the forecourt…..

The other selection of drivers I noticed were the young men. In the way of young men the world over, they simply couldn’t help making a big deal of themselves. I was reminded of feather-inflating peacocks. They drove in off the road in a commotion of noise and speed as if competing in a rally. Then the abrupt car-rocking stop.

One young fellow with skinny jeans lying low on non-existent hips jumped out of his barely stationary car and jogged towards the shop ignoring me completely with my bucket. I held about as much interest for him as the bin standing beside me. He was out a half minute later holding a sports drink. I wanted to remind him about the sugar content but he was off again, after accelerating from 0 to 40 miles an hour in a nanosecond. Only to be stopped by the traffic I was pleased to see. Hymph.

Over the course of the few hours all manner of humans drove up.

Holiday makers with parents barely keeping it together while sullen teenagers sat smeared into the back seats, head phones on.

I mugged at a little boy when his father’s back was turned as he filled the car with petrol. The child was propped in his booster seat and in the alert and perky way of small humans, noticed me immediately. He peered at me for a moment and then stuck out his tongue. I admit to returning the greeting.

There were lots of solo young women in leggings. I appreciate the extreme comfort of leggings and wear them myself jogging but with some versions of really thin material, the woman’s actual anatomy is practically on show. We should really have a debate about this.

Call it ‘How public is your pudendum?’

I wonder for example if it’s socially appropriate to be in a position to check out a girl’s cervix as she approaches? It’s almost an incitement to indiscriminate gynaecological inspection.

Someday someone will call out in an urgent manner ‘Nurse! Speculum please! No! On second thoughts, make it a duck billed forceps! The big fat steel ones. Oh and a good dollop of KY jelly if you don’t mind. I m going in!” I should really carry these things in my hand bag just in case. Every good nurse should always be prepared.

The women who gave me money all found their coins in purses that they carried into the shop while the men found change by rummaging deep in pockets.

There’s another difference I’ve noticed between the habits of men and women.  (Really anthropologists should be getting in touch in their droves…there’s so much stuff they miss….)

The difference is where we keep our change. Unlike men, we women never ever carry change in hip pockets. I have never seen a woman lean forward with that stupid intent expression men get when they are rummaging for change, rearranging their balls etc to get that small 50 cent at the bottom corner of the pocket where the fluff is.

The reason for this is simple. Every woman, big or small, skinny or more generously proportioned, has the same issue. Our hip pockets are full to the brim with our actual hips. You could barely get a hand in there. Although there are many who have tried believe me……just slap them away ladies.

Anyway this explains why many men jangle when they walk. It’s a week’s worth of coinage. My father was very jangly. Mr Richard Bo Jangles Lyons. Without the Bo. With the jangles.

Back in the forecourt a young girl trailed after her father entering the shop.  She was cradling a baby doll. When I said ‘Lovely baby’ she admonished ‘It’s not a real baby silly!’

‘Oh of course not. What’s her name?’

It’s a boy silly! His name is Samuel’

I laughed at being called silly twice in such a short conversation and apologised for my mistake.

‘It’s okay’ she allowed. ‘I have a girl baby at home’.

I didn’t ask any more questions in case she called me silly again.

An entire football team climbed down from a bus and trooped past me avoiding my eye in that furtive way of teenage boys.

There was a moment of embarrassment when a woman walked towards me and I smiled and held out the bucket but she was just putting something in the bin. We could have salvaged the moment with a joke but before I could make any she wheeled away mortified. Some people need to relax a little. Embarrassment is essentially unnecessary unless of course you’re returning from the bathroom of an expensive restaurant with toilet paper trailing from your knickers.

I got bored eventually and tried to make myself useful.  I minded a guy’s bike and a woman’s dog, a tiny dispirited looking pooch with less personality than the bike. There was no chance anyone would run away with this particular canine so I didn’t even try to make small talk as we waited for his mistress to emerge.

The bike on the other hand looked as if it cost about thirty grand and I figured its’ owner, a fit looking man in his thirties for an out of towner. He had a tan that looked like it was cooked on a yacht in Monaco. He wore expensive lycra bicycle shorts and had a vague air of moneyed privilage. Before entering the shop, he took off his helmet and shook out rich ebony curls. That head was in no way shape or form a west of Ireland head. I can tell these things. He thanked me graciously for looking after his bike and took off to conquer the world. I felt sure I would see him next in an ad next Christmas for Giorgio Armani.

Speaking of heads I also did a bit of dead heading on the two hanging baskets swinging off the wall behind me and resisted the urge to help a young employee pick up around the place. He was about 17 or so with a pimply face and an attitude of lassitude. When I first caught sight of him, I sneered to myself at the desultory way in which he pushed his brush around the bricks of the forecourt. I was thinking ‘Ho, look at this buck. He can’t even operate a sweeping brush.’

However I am pleased to say that he proved me completely wrong and over the few hours, despite an appearance of not really moving at all, he got all manner of jobs completed. He shined the aluminium siding on the pumps, picked up all the rubbish, replaced the old bouquets of flowers in the bucket outside the shop with new ones, cleaned the outside tables and washed the outside windows. Admittedly he’d make a glacier look like it was in a hurry and he had an air of someone who yearned with every fibre of his being to be somewhere else but I was nonetheless impressed. I praised his work at one point but he wasn’t bothered having a conversation with a middle-aged woman in an anorak. This seemed to be a running theme I realised.

The most generous people who donated were the elderly who stopped to chat and ask me about Reek Sunday. Also women from thirty years of age onwards who smiled and rummaged absently in purses while children hung out of their arms.

I didn’t make a killing but there was a respectable heft to my bucket as I walked away to join the rest of my team members who had all been standing in different equally draughty parts of town.

Oh and the young employee came running up for a hug before I left.

Ha. Only kidding……..

I came, I saw, I dead headed……..