A baby is like an access-all-areas pass in Italy and I walked boldly to the front, just to check that we weren’t in a queue for a wake or something. The young lady was writing things down in what looked like a register and I could see the word ‘potatura’ which means pruning, written on her sheet, so this really was it. The reason the queue was moving so paralysingly slowly was that these old people were taking an aeon – each – to write their names and phone numbers on it. The weight given to each signature was as slow and deliberate as a judge signing someone’s death warrant. Then it occurred to me that for some of these old geezers, their name was probably the only thing they could write, a theory borne out when the breezy man who’d been and gone, came again and, with scolding words, made a spelling correction to one of the old men’s scrawlings.
When we got to the front of the queue, we realized we were in more-or-less the same illiterate boat as the rest of them. First of all we got in a muddle trying to explain that we didn’t have a phone number – one of those situations where I always say too much. Where ‘non telefono’ would probably have got the message across, instead I decided to try to explain that we were redoing our house and still waiting for a phone line to be put in; what came out was something like ‘The house, yours, is being reseeded and we are late for the string.’
Then we got in a pickle about where to put our first names and where our surnames, and also whether we needed to put Rosie down (London habits making us think that this list might also serve as a checklist should the place be bombed). In the end I put Cathy where I should have put Rogers and Jason where I should have put Gibb – with everything leftover going in the column for first names. The result was that for that evening and for the duration of the course, Jason would be known as ‘oceantelfordgibb’ and I as ‘androsierogers’.
