Category: flash fiction

IT’S JUST ALL “ABOUT ME”

I started life as I meant to continue it, reclining in a bouncy chair while being fed free jelly sweets. When I got older I realised I was expected to buy my own jelly sweets which was a huge disappointment. I attended art school for a couple of years where I arted a lot and learnt to play the ukulele. Shunning fame as a George Formby tribute act and realising I preferred flip-flops to thermal socks I went to live in the sun. Not the sun itself you understand, my jelly sweets would’ve melted, but somewhere the great yellow ball in the sky made more frequent appearances than in my native England. My work experience is extensive, mainly because I’m in my fifties and still haven’t won the lottery.

DIPLOMACY AND PEOPLE MANAGEMENT

My employment spans a variety of roles, the longest of which being reception manager for a timeshare company in Greece. One of the main challenges of this particular job was to welcome and calm holidaymakers who’d been dragged in off the street to attend a lengthy sales presentation, while keeping my ten exuberant staff sober long enough to maintain a respectable level of professionalism and efficiency.

WORKS WELL WITH REPTILES

While backpacking one winter I bought a set of bungalows on the shores of Southern Cambodia which I developed into a thriving and popular business with the addition of a beach bar and team of wonderfully unique Khmer staff. My responsibilities were sometimes unexpected as anyone who has stood on a stool with a small bamboo broom encouraging a metre-long snake to exit a bathroom ceiling can testify. Construction and negotiation skills were key to this role, particularly when the government decided my beach bar needed to be demolished and moved two metres towards the sea to make way for an ‘Eco Pathway’ which subsequently never materialised. It is with tentative pride I can say I kept myself sober long enough to maintain a respectable level of professionalism and efficiency.

UNPAID EMPLOYMENT

I sold the business after five years and spent some time volunteering at a local NGO named “Let Us Create Futures”, which was a sobering reminder that free education and a fair start in life are not a basic human right everywhere in the world. My favourite day was spent watching the little rascals light up when receiving their school uniforms and a pair of flip-flops, purchased solely by charitable donations, which allowed them to attend a state school.

HELPING CURE INSOMNIA

Returning to Europe I found myself managing the screen-print operations of a print and embroidery firm in the Canary Islands, which was a skill I’d learnt in art college when I wasn’t busy sharpening pencils and my infinite wit. One of the few things more impressive than the process of taking artwork through to the final printed product is the speed in which people’s eyes glaze over when I start to talk about it. I worked alone for quite some time which allowed me to perfect my blistering dance moves and regale the neighbourhood with some particularly unhinged ‘singing’.

KINDNESS TO ANIMALS

Having spent the past ten years on the beautiful island of Tenerife with my equally stunning better half we recently took the bold move to pack up our lives into a couple of backpacks and slow-travel about Southeast Asia. So far we’ve been to Cambodia, Thailand, Vietnam, Malaysia, and Indonesia and I’ve survived with just the one pair of flip-flops. At present, I’m writing this on the terrace of a Balinese homestay being intently stared at by the landlady’s hilarious tiny dog. His name’s Rona but looks more like a Dave if you ask me. I’ve told Dave I’ll get him some treats once I’ve earned enough from writing, so if you’ve read this far you can contribute to his furry-faced happiness by encouraging my progress.

Dear Conforama,

We had been looking forward to your reply to my previous five emails, and after nine weeks got the news we were expecting, “sorry we can’t help you, you didn’t buy our extra 5 year guarantee when you bought your sofa”. The sales-lady at the time of purchase ensured us the synthetic leather sofa was of top quality, and would certainly not crack or peel. She was so sure in fact, that was partly the reason why we didn’t feel the need for a guarantee, what could possibly go wrong? We skipped joyfully out of the store. But here we are now, four years later, with the aforementioned item of furniture shedding layers like an over-enthusiastic erotic dancer.

I suppose it was doomed from the start. We had asked the delivery guys were warned that we live on the very top floor with many stairs, but even after being offered twenty quid extra, the delivery men refused to bring it up the last two flights. It then took two hours and the help of a neighbour to get the damn thing up and assembled.

The cracks started to show after a year, and then the flaking, until now where the sofa just sits there openly mocking me, randomly dropping bits of itself whenever I so much as look at it. It sticks black vinyl fragments to whichever body part it comes into contact with. Once it successfully recreated a map of the Canary Island Archipelago on the back of my leg.

To reupholster the thing costs more than the €624 we paid for it, those stretchy covers look and feel like your sofa is wearing a pair of tights, and wrapping throws around it makes the living room look like a crack den. We considered peeling the remainder ourselves and living with the fabric revealed beneath, but unfortunately, even that material has about as much integrity as a politician.

I’ve found this isn’t just an isolated incident of one rogue villainous sofa, as last week I saw on facebook marketplace another poor soul offering up the same Conforama skin-shedding sofa in white. He was not asking for money, just that someone please take it away for free.

These sofas modus operandi is for larger pieces of crappy vinyl to rise up and dangle seductively, enticing you to peel them, while the smaller particles form a dust cloud akin to a pyroclastic flow from an erupting volcano. The daily clean up of this black dust caused my vacuum cleaner, after an all too short lifespan of dedicated service, to one day emit a burning smell, followed by a squeal, before heroically choking to death.

Now I see you are still selling these vinyl sofas and I do believe you are missing a trick. Why not make covers to fit them? That way if customers fail to buy the guarantee at the time of purchase, you’ll at least be able to flog them something else later on when their dogs poop has started coming out wearing little synthetic leather jackets.

Now, I could protest outside your stores, I could start an online campaign about your peeling furniture, I could take the issue up with consumer rights, or I could print t-shirts with a picture of my sofa and rant about it outside my local supermarket until I’m taken away, but in all honesty, I doubt I’ll do any of those things. Instead, I shall just mourn the loss of my vacuum cleaner, continue to sweep up the mess, and just make this statement to bring me a slither of solace:

CONFORAMA, YOUR SYNTHETIC LEATHER SOFAS ARE SHITE

Dear Sir/Madam of the Thurrock Gazette,

Would you be so kind as to print this in your esteemed publication.

Myself and two close friends were recently participants in the New Years Eve celebrations at your local disco ‘P’zaz’, which to the best of my recollection was thoroughly enjoyable. However, on the walk home following the festivities, alcohol, stiletto shoes, and gravity conspired against me and, in short, I had a problem staying upright. I managed to stumble on a non-existent obstacle and with all the grace of a blind giraffe falling off a treadmill, landed in a crumpled heap in the middle of a road. My ‘friends’ found this outstandingly funny. One in particular bent double with hysterics, lost her balance, twisted strangely, and disappeared through one of your good resident’s hedgerows and into their garden, her laughter still audible from the street.

I had twisted my ankle quite badly when I’d fallen and couldn’t quite manage to pick myself up. The hilarity of seeing my friend’s feet sticking out from a garden hedge also limited my capacity for movement. While I was sprawled out in a rather unladylike fashion across the street, with one friend now in desperate need of a bathroom and the other trapped in dense foliage, I felt two hands beneath my armpits, guiding me back to a vertical position.

My hero had arrived.

The gentleman kindly helped me up and I turned to face him with the intention of thanking him profusely. I stared into the face of a six-foot white rabbit with huge pink floppy ears. In my intoxicated state my initial reaction was one of abject fear at my hallucination so I did what anyone would do in my situation and wailed like a klaxon. The white rabbit tried to reason with me but I couldn’t hear what he was saying at this point as I was shouting quite loudly directly into his fuzzy face. My friend’s elder brother and several of his rugby pals suddenly appeared from around the corner. The last I saw of the heroic White Rabbit was his fluffy tail bouncing in the moonlight as he ran, followed by a large bunch of hefty lads who had assumed we were being attacked by an oddly dressed pervert.

The reason I’m writing this letter is, if you were the White Rabbit who helped a crumpled mess of a woman up from the road next to P’zaz nightclub last New Year, I would like to say the following:

-I now understand you had been to a New Year’s Fancy Dress Party.

-My friend’s brother refuses to tell me what they did to you when they caught you.

-I am so very, very sorry that your good deed inevitably lead to an unpleasant physical encounter.

-I am incredibly impressed that a man in a rabbit suit can run that fast at 3 o’clock in the morning.

I would like to offer you my sincerest apologies, and wish you a very Happy New Year.