Doors, Pants, Elephants And A Visitor From God

Some years ago I had one of those rare mornings when I couldn't unstick my tongue from the roof of my mouth even if I'd wanted to.  I'd slept the night through, without disturbance, but felt that another twenty-four hours sleep wouldn't go amiss.

My usual ability to bounce out of bed and be instantly capable of taking part in a political debate or cracking half a dozen jokes before my first cup of coffee had stayed in bed that morning.

I wandered around zombie-like; in a semi-daze. I didn't have the where-with-all to figure out complicated things such as taps, kettle or making coffee, so I dumped myself onto the sofa and waited for the fog to lift.

The doorbell rang

I opened the door in my pants.

Yes, I DO know what you are thinking.  That's a strange place for a door! 

I would like to point out that I most certainly am not an exhibitionist ... I gave all that up after a rather unfortunate chance meeting with a female graffiti artist and her spray can of green luminous paint.
That stuff was really difficult to remove, but on the plus side, it meant that for two weeks or so, whenever I needed to pee in the night, there was no need for me to turn on any lights in order to hit the 'target'!
 
No, I can assure you that the door I opened was firmly embedded in the front wall of our house and not actually in my pants, which sported a pretty cool picture of an elephants head on the front.

I just wasn't thinking.  Someone was at the door, so I went to see who was there. My apparel, or lack thereof, didn't seem to be important at the time.

Anyway ...

... I opened the door (embedded in the front wall of our house) and standing on the doorstep, looking away from me towards a parked car, was a smartly dressed, elderly lady.

"Yes?" I said.

"Ah! Hello! I'm from The Holy Saviour Church ..." she said as she turned.

"I'd like to talk to you about ..."

She looked down at my elephant head.

"... JESUS CHRIST!!!" she shrieked.

At that point, I was awake. The 'fog' was lifted as the sudden realisation that I was standing at the open front door, visible to the whole wide world and it's dog, in my underwear hit me.

"Sorry!" I said stepping behind the door, which unfortunately is mostly glass.  "I'm not a believer!  Thank you. Bye!"

I slammed the door, most ungentlemanly, in her face and ran for the safety of the kitchen as the build up of shame generated, furness-like heat, burned my face.

After all this time, I can still feel some of that heat when I remember the incident.

The Elephant On The Roof!

We decided, my client an I, that an elephant jumping from the roof of a six storey building would make a very big splash on the road below.

We also decided that we would not like to be in the clean up crew that had to deal with it.

At the time we were eating bacon sandwiches in a small cafe just up a side street of a welsh coastal village.

I no longer remember how we, in our minds that is, managed to get the elephant on the roof or why we would want it to commit suicide, but somehow we did.

I remember my client had just told me about a row over a cup of tea and the ownership thereof.  There were words, the tea was spilled and, for a while, he and a friend stopped speaking to one another.

Then suddenly .... there was an elephant and it was on the roof about to jump.

But how we got to that point is a mystery to me. I must have dozed off!

When working with people with learning difficulties, you have to be ready for sudden changes in conversational direction.  A degree of mental agility equal to that of a gymnast is required in order to keep pace at times.

One moment, as was the case recently, I would find myself discussing the benefits of a nice cup of tea on a cold day, only to have the topic of conversation change in mid sentence to election manifestos and why none of the major parties include a policy of 'being more helpful to people who have lost their train ticket'.

You never see the changes coming ... but you have to try to react as if they are normal when they do.
You have to make the flow from one subject to another seem .... well, seamless, and although you may think the conversation you are having is illogical and disjointed, you have to remember that to your client it is all logical, well thought through and in need of being said.

Meanwhile, back on the roof, the elephant is still teetering on the edge.

I have to admit that I made no attempt to talk the elephant down to safety as our topic had already been changed to the subject of buses (why do they have to go down narrow lanes?) and had moved on to post offices (why is the government closing them all?).

I wonder if the elephant is still up there?