Troublesome Proverbs
Proverbs? Bah! Load of rubbish, I take no notice.
At the orphanage, Sister Mavis was full of ’em. Trotting out ’omespun wisdom she’d likely read off a cross-stitch.
“Many hands make light work.” Huh?
“Let sleeping dogs lie.” I don’t like dogs, they bite.
“At the end of the day, it gets dark.” Well, that’s obvious innit?
I ain’t overly clever, and I like things said plain and simple. One of the bigger kids called me Captain Fingerpaint, which stuck.
“Sticks and stones,” the Sister Mavis comforted me.
“Whassat mean?” I asked.
”Sticks and stones may break your bones, but words will never hurt you.”
That’s fine for ’er, but when he said it, and everyone laughed, that made me cry.
When I finished school, I didn’t pass no exams. At the job centre, they sent me along to work as a labourer on a building site.
First thing, the Foreman told me to knock up some cement. I loaded two sacks of cement powder into the mixer and turned it on. It made an ‘orrible racket. The Foreman came running.
Huh! Nobody said I ‘ad to open them and add a bit at a time.
I overheard ’im tell the boss if I was any less intelligent, they’d ’ave to water me twice a week. Whatever that meant. He sent me ’ome with ’alf a day’s pay.
“I’ll never keep a job.”
“In the land of the blind, the one-eyed man is king,” Mavis told me when I visited ’er on Sunday.
“Whassat mean?” I was baffled.
“It means if everything is bad, but one thing is less bad, pick that over the others, it’s the option to choose.”
Her words confused me, but her stew was good, so I dug in and quit asking questions.
Then I got a new job, as a groundsman in a home for the blind.
“Cushy!” I thought, ’cos I remembered what Mavis said.
Maybe for once things would work in my favour; I could line my pockets. The residents can’t see nothing, and I can.
But it don’t ’elp. Turns out blind people ‘ave damn good hearing.
They ’ave all this flash stuff, but I can’t nick anythin’ cos they ’ear me coming. “Bummer!”
This was originally written for ‘Short & Weird’ a publication on Medium.