THE SAVOY'S SHORT STORY

Isn’t it strange that, when you’re “tuned in” to a certain aspect of your life, things that make you think about that particular thing tend to pop up in all sorts of unexpected places...? For years, people (and by “people” I mean that abstract notion of “people” which usually doesn’t bear close examination, but leads to a whole heap of people “reckoning” that they know what’s what…) have been remarking upon those slight coincidences that occur, like when you think of someone’s name after twenty years and then they suddenly ring you up out of the blue, or you when you walk along a busy high street far from where you live and you meet someone that you know from home.

I could dig out a whole lot of mathematical analysis that proves that these incidents are little more than statistical probabilities and that when you look into the number of times when this doesn’t happen then you’ll realise that they simply have to happen occasionally, but that would take all of the “fun” and “mysticism” out of it, and I spend enough time sucking the fun out of other people’s lives, do I not…?

Anyway, cynical old me would just like to point out that such coincidences rarely if ever happen to me, quite possibly because I hardly know anybody any more, but also because I seldom get out much in that “running in to people” kind of a way.

Oh, I’ll occasionally run into old pals in the supermarket on a Saturday morning, but for a great many people, that’s when you’re supposed to go shopping, so that’s no big deal, and I did go through a phase about a year ago when I kept on running into the same old schoolfriend for a few weeks in so many various localities that I began to suspect that they thought that they were being stalked.

Or I began to think that I was…

The look on his face when he arrived at the dentists for an appointment only to find me sitting there (again?) in the waiting room waiting for my own appointment was priceless, but happily, that was the last time that the seismic plates of coincidence shifted us into each other’s orbits and those strange unexpected meetings seem to have stopped again.

Either that or he’s diving behind handy bushes whenever he spots that I’m around, which is a possibility, I suppose.

Anyway, the reason I’m prattling on with all this preamble was that I was strolling around the old neighbourhood I grew up in the other evening and I happened to walk past the old picture house where I used to go and see films when I were “but a nipper”.

It’s looking a bit dilapidated now as it struggles along trying to survive in this brave new “multiplex” era which, like with digital TV, purports to offer you far more choice (and therefore be “better”) whilst actually giving you a far worse service and, ultimately, less choice than you thought that you were getting.

Not that it was its current state that struck me, of course. That all came later. I’m nothing if not blind to the plight of things during the actual moment, I need time to process and think about such things before I climb upon my own “high horse”.

No, it was the words posted up on the “current attractions” board outside that struck me. Earlier on in that week I had been giving some thought to what the shortest possible story actually was. I think that I even wrote about it in these unhallowed pages, but there, in massive plastic letters which were barely managing to hang on against the combined forces of entropy, neglect and gravity, was a short story in itself, and I grabbed the phototeffalone from out of my pocket and immortalised it for you:

“We bought a zoo.” (pause) “Muppets...”

Class!