Being Better, One Cranberry at a Time

Number 1 - Stop holding grudges

Some random woman in a supermarket blocked the dried fruit and wouldn’t move. It was a week before Christmas, I was stressed, supposed to be working full-time, shopping, hosting, planning, preparing, wrapping, being civil, having good will, being happy, not stabbing people’s faces with sporks in the queue for fish and chips. I had my niece, Whisper (yes, I told my sister it’s a stupid name, especially when shouted), in tow. But they’re excuses, I know that my behaviour was extreme and entirely my responsibility. Still, when I challenged her, she did put the entire tray of cranberry packets in her trolley, that wasn’t called for. I only wanted one. Rude cow. Not that it justifies my actions. Following her to the checkout, then her car, then ramming said car with mine was not proportional. I also forgot my niece in the process, left her alone in the supermarket. She was totally fine, but not the point, I caused harm to her and my sister, her mother, who was rightfully pissed. (Although, there was that time as a newborn that Sally left her in the back of her car, went for her optician’s appointment, got lunch, all without cracking a window. I’m not her mother or anyone’s, I don’t even have a pet. Not that it makes it right, of course.)

That happened.

Sally went on about it, told everyone over Christmas dinner, Aunt Midge called me ‘heinous,’ and the kid played it up, over and over, like she had PTSD over being given free sweets by a hot customer service dude for ten whole minutes. It did get me thinking though about how angry I got, it was rage, and like eating bad prawns, it was coming out one way or another.

I’ve always had a mental hit list, ever since I was a kid. You do something to annoy me or insult me and you go on it (like Mrs Peterson who dropped my matchstick model of the Eiffel Tower into the class rabbit’s play pen and it splintered into a big cluster of poop, I refused to answer a single question in class for the rest of the year, scooped rabbit droppings into her desk drawer at least once a week, I didn’t even forgive the rabbit, regularly binning its food and praying for its death. When it happened, I didn’t even feel sorry about it, just smug and temporarily religious).

I can’t let it drop either. It’s like this fire burning in my head I’ve got to keep alive for survival, it’s cumulative. Each incident stokes it, adds some dry branches and the flames get higher, spread further. Now I’m thirty-six it’s taken over the surrounding woodlands, invaded counties. That’s sort of the problem, because an incident can be relatively small (like taking my cranberries) but the fire is Satan worthy.

My grudges have kept me company. Little internal monologues that repeat themselves, like hype-men, bolstering their certitude in my thoughts. Trying not to create new ones has been challenging. Last week, Christine, my neighbour pushed her bins out onto the pavement next to mine and I saw her take stuff out of her overly stuffed bin and put it in mine. Isn’t there some law about tampering with other people’s rubbish, there bloody should be. I watched her do it, couldn’t stop thinking about it, no matter how much I tried distracting myself with cat videos. It wasn’t enough that I waited for the bin collectors to come, went out and questioned them (it’s post, not bins). I ruminated about it for a whole week, then on collection day, I crouched on the floor under my bay window and waited until her pink track-suited butt dragged her bin to the curb. Leaping to action, I pushed mine next to it, took out a bin bag and stuffed it into her bin. Then another. Then a big pizza box that I had to fold and beat down with my sweaty, dirty fists.

Christine was stood on her doorstep watching me do it, she took photos. I haven’t been invited to wine and cheese night since.

Number 2 – Stop being so judgemental

Maybe related to my vengeful thoughts, who can tell, is my capacity to find faults in others and refuse to overlook them. A super-size, historic one is about my sister, Sally. Not the leaving a baby in a car thing, that’s idiotic but doesn’t concern me. It’s to do with her kid’s dad.

Sally is blonde, curvy, she’s got freckles that run across her nose and dimples. The sort of person who gets called ‘adorable,’ and gets called. By men. I’m not. Yet, from the choice of any of the wide range of average looking, ambitionless, no-hopers in our town she could have chosen to father her child, she screwed the only man I’d ever fancied both with and without facial hair, our parents’ window cleaner’s son Rob. We’d had drunken sex four times in the year before it happened. He’d have left his wife eventually. Instead, Sally skips in with her ample bust and whimsical vagina and boom, baby bump.

She’s ruined him for me, forever.

It's been causing a wedge in the family since. I haven’t done anything wrong; she has, but they’ve got a point it’s bad form to call her names in front of her kid. And the letter on her windshield was too far. So, I’ve been trying to do better. 

I took a bit of a back step last Tuesday. It’s obviously not just Sally that gets my negative summations, I do it to everyone. My most frequent offences are (a) quickly deciding someone is stupid and not taking in anything that comes out of their mouths, (b) speedily concluding someone is full of shit and not taking in anything that comes out of their mouths, and (c) rapidly determining a person is up to something malicious and not trusting anything that comes out of their mouths. I came across a triple-strike. A bloke that instantly struck me as having the intellectual capacity of a toilet-brush, lied like he breathed and was trying to scam my parents out of my future inheritance. Old people need protecting, they don’t know how to navigate today’s world because they grew up in the war when people didn’t have anything to steal, bombs exploded off their door locks, and so everyone was trustworthy, it’s why so many of them naively tell bus drivers their bank account details and give money to donkey charities.

Anyway, I turned up to my parents’ bungalow on Tuesday.

As a sidebar, they moved into that one-bedroom bungalow six years ago because they wanted me to move out and not, as my dad said, because of my mum’s double hip surgery making it hard to manage stairs. I saw her drag herself up and down those stairs, one at a time, grunting with the commitment of a born-again zealot when I said I’d left a half-finished pizza under my bed a week ago and it smelled a bit weird.

This lad was sat in the kitchen with mum and she was cleaning a cut on his arm. He was holding a bag of frozen spinach to his head and dribbling some pitiful nonsense about a car accident, not wanting to be any trouble, his mobile being smashed, using their phone. Classic long game ploy. Soon there would be a tiny baby whose heart had fallen into its own lung or a phantom wife in a permanent sit up, impaled on her own femurs, needing cash to get them the lifesaving operation they needed in Timbuctoo, or some other made-up destination.

Having seen through his ploy, I grabbed the closest, largest stainless-steel knife from the block. It was big, pointy, and surprisingly easy to clean being dishwasher-safe and, without conscious volition, pointed it at his neck. Poking it in a few millimetres so he understood I would not be trifled with, I used the expression ‘Sonny Jim,’ my rock bottom moment, my plea for help. After threatening to ‘shiv him’ (not even technically accurate), the boy pissed himself and stuttered. The police arrived; my dad having called them before my arrival and notified the man his wrecked car had been located and towed.

A simple mistake with good intentions.

Number 3 - Stop telling lies

The phrase ‘web of lies,’ is over-used and I never understood how it was a bad thing. I mean, if you are the one lying then you’re not the one getting all up close and sticky, that’s everyone else, the little people silly enough to see a huge, creepy silk doily and go, ‘I wonder what it’s like if I just jump into that?’

Also, people are assuming lies have intentions propping them up. I find myself telling fibs about all sorts, don’t know why I’m doing it, or even that I’m going to do it, until, pop, my mouth gives birth. Some examples of the random untruths I’ve told this week alone: whilst ordering a Big Mac, I explained I’d been a vegan for ten years but had an epiphany in the form of a dream instructing me to abandon my values; I told my taxi driver I was going to ask my hairdresser to shave my head in solidarity with my best friend who had alopecia (I got highlights and a trim, but at least I was actually going to the hairdressers this time); told a random stranger in the bus queue my pony, Topdeck, had just died when they asked if I was okay (my contact lens had slipped to the back of my eye).

It's almost a year since I set this resolution. I admit, it was a bit of a knee-jerk reaction to my sister’s bullshit at Christmas. She kept listing all these innocuous things I’d allegedly said, like telling Whisper she was named after the chocolate bar, telling Whisper her real father was Mr Hershey, telling Whisper she had a ‘real father.’ People on the table gasped over their pigs in blankets and I swatted it away by promising to change.

Here I am, nearly a year later, it’s Christmas Eve and I have some understanding of the web thing. Safe to say, I didn’t take this one seriously, mostly because I don’t see the correlation with being a better person but also a bit related to the way they spurt off my tongue like it’s lubricated and leaking. However, in the spirit of honesty, it’s more of a mass ecological chain of disaster than a tacky spider doily.

I may have started with a bigger fib, like a natural disaster the size of a volcanic eruption in 1160 BC. This led me to a sizeable side-effect, equivalent to an ash cloud obscuring sunlight for ten years, this made me eradicate crops, followed by trees (there was no dialling it back at this juncture). The flowers just died (I figured, in for a penny) and I’m stood on the precipice of family dinner tomorrow, where I either fess up to failing at this resolution or I keep going and potentially massacre all life.

Number 4 - Be charitable

On my way to catch a train, on a busy street a volunteer wearing a garishly coloured tabard stepped in front of me with his clipboard and asked me a ridiculous question. I am still not convinced there are creatures called ‘pangolins,’ he may have been confusing them with penguins. Even if they do exist, no-one has persuaded me of their value, given you can ask everyone in a room and no-one has heard of them, should they be a priority? But, at the time, I was in a rush and I just tried stepping around the short, spotted man waffling on about musical penguins.

He followed me, shouting behind me about ‘allowing the slaughter of thousands.’ Compelled to engage, having resigned myself to missing the train, I did not hold back, following him and barking equally ludicrous questions.

With hindsight, some statements were careless, such as having to euthanise babies in intensive care to pay for pangolin rescue, demanding the volunteer give me an acceptable ratio of babies to pangolins. There were also references to the homeless working as crash test dummies I was using to illustrate my point, not because it was representative of my views. But I acknowledge, I said these things, I’m not arguing that fact.

Videos of it went viral. I featured on a weekend primetime clip show. My employers felt like sensitivity training was necessary. The thirty-minute e-Learning package and quiz at the end were illuminating, hence ‘be charitable’ made my resolutions list. That, in itself, shows personal growth.

Having been ordered to do community reparation for threatening that man with a knife (following his suspicious behaviour, which still hasn't been totally verified), I have now completed one-hundred and fifty hours of litter picking. Retrieving used condoms and crisp packets (it’s astonishing how often these items co-occur, particularly cheese and onion, the crisps not the condoms - it’s difficult to tell if they’re flavoured, plenty of ribbed ones though and some glowed in the dark like withering jellyfish) is proof of my charitableness. This is sufficient for two years, at least. Resolution aced!

Number 5 - Be kind to others

I’m ignoring the plural on this resolution. I wrote it back in January. The year has exhausted me and I’m ready to call it. Therefore, I’m going for one massive act of kindness. Something so generous and benefactory on my part I should get a ruddy award. 

There were people who I could have been nicer to and may have caused some loosely defined, tenuous ‘harm(s).’ According to last year’s Christmas dinner conversation, this should include my sister and her poorly named offspring. For completeness, Christine my neighbour, the charity volunteer (if it was a real charity), the car crash man I threatened, pangolins, my parents for misusing their knife, the motorcyclist and van driver I almost forced off the road. That’ll do. I can always add more later.

The person I have been the least kind to all year is Ms Dorothy Janet Smythe. I was very uncharitable (resolution 4) when she took all the cranberries from the supermarket shelf last year. During the same, or several closely connected incidents I shouted, ridiculed, and threatened her, I also followed her on foot and by car, colliding with the back of her vehicle as vengeance for the cranberries (resolution 1). When we were trading insurance details, I lied (resolution 3) about it being an accident and being pregnant and abandoned by my husband (for sympathy). When I discovered, in October, my car had been sprayed with the graffiti ‘crazy bitch,’ and what looked like excrement smeared across the windscreen, I judgementally (resolution 2) assumed she did it, in response to a letter I sent her claiming to have whiplash and psychological trauma after the accident where she stopped suddenly and without indicating.

Having learned subsequently that this attack on my vehicle was Whisper and, also, from the work I have been doing all year to become a better person; I have been trying to be overwhelmingly compassionate to Ms Dorothy Janet Smythe. This is at great risk of personal detriment. Tomorrow is Christmas day, and I would like to release Dorothy from my out-house. She simply must agree to accept my apology for these past three months of false imprisonment, the unfortunate bundling of her into the van I borrowed from Jim at the pub and the confiscation of her personal belongings (I will obviously return most of these, retaining only the minimum required to ensure she doesn’t renege on the no police rule). If not, I will be forced (by her) to fail my commitment to achieving these resolutions and commit further acts Aunt Midge could label ‘heinous’ and lie about them to my family over dinner.