Rural Community Gateway

By Patrick Vickery

Certain situations have impact, you know, it’s a subjective thing. I was helping my elderly chum, ‘Bingo’ (a flamboyant character in his eighties who occasionally features in these Rural Ramblings) by spraying his roses with Jeyes Fluid one Saturday when he emerged from his conservatory in his Sunday best – kilt and all – gesticulating at me with a can of beer.

"There’s a widget floating in my beer!" he boomed in disgust.
"You look smart," I said, avoiding the topic as I knew that the next step might involve power tools and widget extraction to examine the offending object.
"Damn and blast, thought it was Sunday," he snorted, or words to that effect, followed by a dismissive shrug and a wry smile.

Good job it wasn’t Sunday, of course, not with that sort of language, otherwise the neighbours might be complaining. Anyway, that’s what I call impact: Sunday best on a Saturday, an offensive widget in your beer and a wry smile, nothing was going to faze him.

‘Bingo’, for those of you with a curious mind, is quite pleased to get a mention in the Ross-shire Journal and on the Rural Gateway website but has opted to remain anonymous for reasons best known to himself. And why not? ‘Bingo’, of course, is a pseudonym.

It was a close run thing, actually, between ‘Bingo’ and ‘Biggles’ for a viable name, but as ‘Biggles’ is a bit old fashioned these days – apologises to anyone called ‘Biggles’ -  I went for the more contemporary option.

Now if you spot an elderly gentleman buying more than his fair share of Ross-shire Journals on a Friday morning (he has many far flung relations), then it might possibly be ‘Bingo’.

A word of warning here: on no account holler ‘Bingo’ at him as the last time this occurred the offending hooligan (me) got a poke in the stomach with a packet of Tunnocks Tea Cakes at the local supermarket, which despite my provocation isn’t really the sort of behaviour one expects from a war veteran and a grandiose of the Ross-shire community. So who is ‘Bingo’, you might wonder? Well that, I’m afraid, is a closely guarded secret.

He emerged some time later after his Saturday/Sunday ‘senior moment’, ‘dwam’ or whatever you like to call it, from the conservatory in a pair of old jeans and a Vera Lynn t-shirt (a gift from a Grandson with a dodgy sense of humour) to debate the merits of how best to prune roses, a favourite topic of mine that leads me neatly onto my next ramble involving ‘Fleur’, another elderly notable of the district (with an equally dodgy pseudonym) who must remain even more anonymous than ‘Bingo’ or I’ll be in serious trouble: ‘Fleur’ and the rose beds!

There was a summer fete some years ago with a goodly smattering of the local population in attendance when ‘Fleur’, having scoffed and guffed her full quota of scones and tea, drove out of the car park via the blooming rose beds much to the astonishment of me and the other scoffing and guffing on-lookers leaving deeply furrowed tyre tracks in her wake.

The roses, however, were remarkably hardy and bounced back bedraggled, intact and with integrity despite having been run over by her jalopy. What resilience, don’t you think, what impact, and certainly not what you’d get from a bed of begonias or dahlias. ‘Fleur’, of course, had no idea that she’d trashed the rose beds as she made her getaway up the high street at a steady ten miles an hour.

So there we have it. Two situations with impact: two elderly notables with slightly preposterous pseudonyms, widgets in the beer, battered roses and far too much guffing for my liking (or should that have been guffawing?) Real life is stranger than fiction, don’t you think?

Copyright Patrick Vickery 2007

Published in the Ross-shire Journal October 12th 2007

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