Going to town the other day, I was walking next to a tall gangly guy who does nothing all day but staring ahead and walking down the road to the end and then turning round and coming back up again, when I passed an old lady with her hair in two plats and two bright red circles on her cheeks, clinging onto a teddy bear. On the other side of the road there was a guy having a strole, wearing a pink dressing gown and a big straw hat with big plastic flowers stuck on top, nodding in the direction of a surprisingly normal-looking guy who can go through sixty different facial expressions per minute, staring at a big girl with an overpowering smell of vinegar, with headphones on and music blaring out, shouting at some frightened Japanese tourists for no particular reason.
Yes, there definitely seems to be an overabundance of nutters in our neighbourhood.
Don’t get me wrong, I absolutely have nothing against nutters. And I even believe that to be able to function properly, a neighbourhood needs a couple of nutters just as much it needs a bus stop, a chemist, a post office and a Chinese takeaway.
Now we have more than a couple, a lot more than a couple actually, which is great. The more the merrier, that’s what I say.
What does worry me though is that if we have so many here, there must be other neighbourhoods out there with no nutters at all. So in this season of goodwill, I have been thinking about how other neighbourhoods such as ours, with such richness of nuttiness, can share their great blessing with other, less fortunate areas of the country.
To start off this great spreading of joy, I’m offering my own services to any nutter-deprived neighbourhoods that might be interested (I come complete with a purple wig and a yellow pair of flares with red and blue flowers on them).
Let us hope there will come a time when every neighbourhood in the United Kingdom will have at least two nutters they can call their own.
Amen