He loved the smells and the feel of the sawdust-covered floor, the sounds, the chatting, the silly joking with his scrawny friends, the latest news and scandal and football analysis. Saturday mornings, were bliss to Uncle Alf, so that he happily walked the mile to Les Diamond’s butcher shop on busy Station Street. The habit defined for Alf, just who he was. A tatty burlap sack was to be seen slung over his shoulder, capacious and utterly practical; nothing posh about Alf. Not much in the way of panache with this local identity.
Mabel was irritable and unhappy, one winter evening, as they sat down to their meal of sausages and vegetables: “Look at these sausages, (she actually called them Snags, an old Irish name for them), thin as worms — and it’s not my only problem with Diamond’s meat: his steak has so much fat on it, an inch or more sometimes, and that chicken you brought home on the weekend was skin and bone. As for last week’s leg of lamb, tough as an old football boot.”
She went on and on: “I’m sick of it. I’m going tomorrow to see what the prices are like at the new supermarket. You can forget about Diamond’s butchery from now on. “
For several days, Uncle Alf worried and wondered and fought with the black cloud that hung over him. A part of his world was blown away. “I suppose I have to accept that Les Diamond is simply a bad man, a lazy operator, a rogue, a devious crook, a really nasty butcher. I just didn’t see it all these years,” he thought, as he picked up the newspaper, strode out to the verandah and slumped in his chair, his horizons so suddenly clouded by Mabel’s banning of the butcher, Les Diamond.
So preoccupied with his worry was Alf that he barely took in what he was reading. Yet, one small headline item, several pages in, caught his eye: “Butcher Fined. Cheats on Taxes.”
This set Alf to thinking. An idea emerged. He snipped out the news item and took it to the Xerox shop and had it copied on stout paper and enlarged slightly. At home, he pinned the copy to the wall in the hallway, right by his Aunt Aggie’s portrait. Mabel said nothing to Alf, but she bitched to her lady friends.
Almost every day, Alf found news articles about butchers, stories in which a butcher was the villain. If not, Alf would go to the library and read papers from around the country and copy bad-butcher articles and post them in the hallway. Mabel at first was quite unhappy, but then she decided that anything that kept Alf from whining all day about missing his butcher shop friends, was OK with her.
There were other pluses; the more she shared with friends what was going on, the more attention she received from folks: The choir group, the book club, the Ladies’ Football Auxiliary, the Village Greens Committee, the Temperance Union (symbolic, really, because she quietly drank at bit at home, and dosed her puddings with plenty of liquor). Meetings would pause until the members had been updated about the latest bad-butcher developments.
In short, Mabel was becoming acclaimed and celebrated; wherever she went, townsfolk waved to her from across the street. Her closer friends asked if they might drop by to inspect the growing collection, so she had to keep the bed made and the wardrobe doors closed. Nor could she leave dishes in the sink or allow tea towels to look grubby. She admonished Alf to keep the bathroom nice, with no dirty knickers lying about.
Butcher Swears at Choir Master Who Asks Him To Try Singing In Key
Knowing about what butchers did when they weren’t dispensing meat and making sausages, appealed to the people: Butcher Convicted of Bigamy; Butcher in Drunk Driving Outrage; Butcher Fined for Cussing at Children; Butcher Runs Over Prize-Winning Dog; Butcher Overcharges; Butcher Swears at Choir Master Who Asks Him To Try Singing In Key; Butcher Trims Street Tree Illegally (actually, he cut it off at ground level); Butcher Bribes Meat Inspector; Butcher Charged With Cruelty, to-wit, a Pig; Butcher Charged for Gazing Luridly at Nun. These examples were the lesser of hundreds of laws that butchers had broken across the nation.
More and more friends, relations, acquaintances, strangers asked if they might inspect the clippings; they trooped in to see the burgeoning collection. Space on the wall was becoming hard to find. The visitors took Polaroid snaps and showed them around so that even more folk asked to see the display. The Daily Snoop, that’s the local paper, came running and the journalist and cameraman got cracking; their work filled the front page. Next it was the evening news and the national papers. Parking in the street became a problem. The council parking inspector took over. The neighbors were perplexed and anxious. “Don’t Park Here” notices were posted all over the place.
The tour company brought busloads of Japanese holidayers. One company asked if it might add translations to each posted cutting. Mabel decided the situation had gotten out of hand; neighbors said that Alf and Mabel had a tiger by the tail. “More like having half the animals in Africa by the tail,” said Mabel. Alf just kept adding the cuttings. It became impossible. People sent clips from nation-wide. Alf started pinning them on the bedroom walls; he took down all the family portraits and holy pictures and stacked them in the garage. Alf had to get the front path concreted, because the gravel couldn’t handle the constant foot traffic. Mabel ordered heavy duty beige-colored commercial carpet for the whole house. All this time, money was rolling in. They didn’t even ask for it. Dollars galore just showed up.
The National Butchers’ Association talked constantly about the scandalous way butchers were being maligned. A delegation to the prime minister did no good, of course, but by this time, the Association realized that butchers were making a killing as hordes of shoppers deserted the supermarkets and returned to their local family butchers.
A few months later, Alf and Mabel were national figures. They were forced to hire all sorts of people, and they had less and less to do with running things. Gone were the days when Alf would tend his vegies and sit on the verandah, and Mabel had to get fitted for many new outfits and wear underclothes every day. Increasingly, they were asked to travel for TV interviews and to give silly speeches in strange places.
One long weekend, Alf came home late from a night of reminiscing with his veteran friends and found Mabel sobbing in the bed. He boiled the kettle and made tea and sat by her and they talked. Then Alf started sobbing, even more than Mabel.
To be continued . . .