The World According to Manager Mark, page 15
I started to panic and never mind delivering the bloody papers, I couldn’t find my way back to the paper shop and, even worse, I couldn’t find my way home! I had visions of being stuck out all night in the cold and wet and I became really scared, to the point where I started to cry. Just then I saw a light at the end of the road… was it…? Yes, it was! It was shining and red and welcoming and brought joy to my heart. It was a telephone box – a TELEPHONE BOX! (For younger readers, mobiles hadn’t been invented back then either.) I reached into my pocket but found… NOTHING – not even a 2-p piece! Well, of course, I didn’t have any money. That’s why I’d taken the bloody job in the first place!
Fortunately, I remembered that you could ask the operator to reverse the charges, which is exactly what I did, and it wasn’t long before my dad was on the phone.
‘Where are you?’ he asked.
‘In a phone box,’ I replied, still sobbing.
Dad reassured me: ‘Stay where you are and I’ll come and find you!’
About thirty minutes later, having driven up and down every road in the area, my dad appeared. I’d never been so delighted to see him. ‘Come on. Let’s get you home,’ he said.
‘No… I can’t,’ I said, still tearful. ‘I’ve still got all these papers to deliver.’
So good old Dad drove me to each and every house on the list until all the papers had been delivered – albeit a bit later than planned. Hooray! I gave my notice in the following day but finished the week’s work and managed not to get lost again.
A couple of months later, in the summer holidays, I got a real job working in a café, operating the dishwashing machine and it wasn’t long before – at the tender age of twelve – I was clocking up sixty hours a week, and have never really stopped since. I’ve set up and run a string of businesses since then, including a painting-and-decorating company called Van Gogh and a fish-and-chip shop in Blackpool, famed for its twice-battered, 18-in ‘Monster Fish’.
I have, of course, considered other jobs: I considered becoming a physiotherapist but, although I’m used to hard graft, I really didn’t fancy working my fingers to the bone. If I was going to work in a hospital, I’d have been better off being a dietician – that way I could have lived off the fat of the land!
But I couldn’t imagine any other job than what I do now. I love entertaining people and seeing them enjoying themselves. What a lovely way to live and work!
X
XYLOPHONE
Could someone please explain why xylophone starts with an ‘x’? It just doesn’t make sense. It should start with a ‘z’. I wouldn’t mind, but the word doesn’t even have a ‘z’ in it. Xylophone has to be the daftest spelling of a word in the entire English language and yet it’s used to educate children when they first learn the alphabet. No wonder children are confused. I mean, that’s about the worst example you can get for the use of the letter ‘x’! And what about words that sound like they should begin with an ‘x’, like ‘expectation’, ‘express’ or ‘excite’, which actually start with an ‘e’? It’s bloody illogical.
Why don’t the authorities just be honest and ‘xplain’ (see what I did there?) that no proper words – well, none that you would ever use unless you’re some kind of scrabble champion – actually begin with an ‘x’, apart, of course, from the TV show X Factor!
If it was up to me, we’d simplify the entire English language. We could go through the complete dictionary, correcting all the misspelled words, especially those ridiculous silent letters, which we could get rid of and then spell everything as it sounds. It would make life much easier for children and adults and, of course, for foreigners coming here. I think it would be a bit like when decimal coins came in – we set a date and, for a while, put both spellings in till everyone gets used to it. Quite simple really. Sometimes I surprise myself with my genius and (K)NOWLEDGE!!!
P.S. I would just to like to add, however, that I’d keep the ‘s’ in The Grosvenor Hotel but move it to where it should be: GroveSnor!
Y
YORKSHIRE PUDDINGS
Despite my strange eating habits and lack of interest in food generally, Sunday lunch has always been a special time for me and something to look forward to – not just because, when the children were younger, it was often the only meal that we would all share together as a family.
As we are now on to the letter ‘y’, you will have gleaned that I only eat meat without vegetables and certainly nothing green. I had to add some other delicacy to my Sunday roast, apart from the gravy, of course. Yes, you’ve guessed it: the wonderful Yorkshire pudding! And, of course, it is so delicious that we didn’t just keep that pleasure for when we had roast beef like you were supposed to: on Sundays it was Yorkshires with everything. Hooray!
In fact, to fill up my plate so it didn’t look quite as lonely as it usually did, I’d often have four or even five of them. Now, these were proper Yorkshire puddings. Homemade too! Well, when I say ‘homemade’, they obviously came out of a packet. But there was some cooking involved, as you still had to mix in the egg and water and, naturally, half the fun was wondering whether the batter would rise or not.
The secret was all in the amount of oil in the baking tray and the temperature – the hotter the better! You also had to get the mixture just right and it didn’t always go to plan. To be honest, my wife wasn’t the best of cooks and sometimes they’d turn out like mini pancakes. Other times they’d stick to the tin tray and, by the time you scraped them out, what you could get onto your plate resembled some sort of scrambled egg. But no matter: we were never deterred from our weekly tradition because we always had next Sunday to look forward to!
The trouble is that things have now changed and I blame ‘Aunt Bessie’. What was once a weekly treat has become an anytime, any-day option with the introduction of the frozen Yorkshire pud. There is no more guesswork or tense trial-and-error experiments – it’s out of the freezer and into the oven. Three minutes later they’re done. Of course, these frozen replicas of ‘real’ Yorkshire puddings taste a bit ‘rubbery’ to me, but it doesn’t seem to put people off. In fact, ‘Aunt Bessie’ (does anyone know her real identity? I reckon it might be Gordon Ramsay in disguise) has actually gone a step too far and introduced those giant ones. Apparently, the idea is that, once you’ve put them on your plate, you can fill them with huge portions of food and your whole dinner is surrounded by pud. Must be a Northern thing…
I must admit, however, a few weeks ago, when my oven broke, I was grateful to ‘Aunt Bessie’ (or Gordon). I was so desperate not to miss out on my beloved Sunday dinner that I devised a cunning plan: I went out and bought some cooked slices of beef and a packet of Aunt Bessie’s frozen Yorkshires and, while the microwave was heating up the meat and the kettle boiled to make the gravy, I flattened out the frozen Yorkshires and popped them in the toaster. Brilliant! Worked beautifully. Next stop, MASTERCHEF!!!
Z
ZOROASTRIANISM
Now, I know I could have found another word and a far easier topic for the letter ‘z’, which is one of those letters wrongly pronounced by those lazy Americans, who tend to take the easy route and, as such, have taken the ‘-ed’ sound off the end of ‘z’ and replaced it with two or maybe more ‘e’s, so that zebra no longer sounds like ‘zedbra’ and is pronounced ‘zeebra’ instead.
But I thought I’d like to finish this book on a high and prove once and for all to those doubters that I am, in fact, far cleverer than I look and that this book is certainly worth far more than the paper it’s printed on. I think you might agree with me that this A–Z is, actually, a true hive of knowledge, a huge font of wisdom and a gigantic lexicon of insight – as well as a treasure trove of clichés.
Zoroastrians, as they’re commonly known, are followers of an ancient religion known as Zoroastrianism. Zoroastrianism is, in fact, an ‘ancient semi-dualistic monotheist religion of Greater Iran’, whatever that means! And so what really impresses me is that all that time ago, in ancient times, the spelling capabilities and range of vocabulary of the earth dwellers was obviously far superior than it is today. It must have been if they were able to use words like Zoroastrianism and actually knew not just what they meant but how to spell them – and all without the benefit of Google or even the Oxford English Dictionary!
So I suggest, in order to impress your friends at dinner parties, book groups or Party Nights, you make a note of the definition of Zoroastrianism and carry it with you at all times. And there’s always the chance that one day you might find yourself in a surprise game of Scrabble in which you spot the word ‘Trains’ on the board with at least a seven-letter gap in front of it and you have the letters Z O R O A S as your final ones. Your opponent probably won’t know how to spell Zoroastrians and you’ll amass hundreds of points, especially if the ‘z’ is on a triple-letter score or, better still, if the lot gets you onto a triple-word score. You’d become the toast of the Scrabble world and probably end up in The Guinness Book of Records and this would all be THANKS TO ME!
Well, that’s it – that’s the end. I’ve run out of letters. If you’ve enjoyed this book, please tell everyone and if you didn’t… then just keep quiet. But I bet you didn’t think you’d learn so much from reading this book, did you?
I reckon I could be in for the Booker Prize.
Blimey! That really would be unbelievable. HOORAY!!!
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Mark Jenkins, The World According to Manager Mark
