HERE COMES THE BOGEYMAN

One thing that I have recently discovered about life is that we can never really be certain what it is that we’ll be remembered for, or if indeed we will even be remembered at all. Few of us, it seems, make enough of an impression that we can’t only be described in the loosest, sketchiest terms after we have gone, in such a way that we might not even recognise ourselves from the description, unless we are particularly well-known personally to the Minister who may very well be fatigued from being in the middle of a sequence of six of such occasions spread out over only nine days.

Back in the days when I was not quite the bundle of joy I have since become, I used to walk around amongst the gravestones in any given cemetery reading the short descriptions of the life or lives of the people supposedly beneath the various grave markers about being fathers, husbands, wives and daughters and wondering “Yes, but what were they really like? Were they funny, witty, cruel, dour or just a little bit dull? Is this someone I would have wanted to know if I had met them?”

Recently, after a funeral, when I was standing around amongst a group of people who’s lives I had briefly dropped back into after a couple of decades spent, well, not even on the periphery, but somewhere way, way beyond that, I got an unexpected opportunity to find out about how I am remembered in certain circles.

Such times are odd enough anyway. Emotions are running high and those vital, indestructible people you used to look up to when you were little more than an ankle-biter yourself, have slipped away into the shadows and allowed themselves to age gracefully without letting you know about it.

All around you, slightly familiar looking grown men and women mill about and you realise that these people who resemble your friends are their children who you last saw bawling away in a sand-pit or a supermarket when they were little more than knee-high to you, and they’re now on the brink of acquiring university degrees, or old enough to arrest you, or take your blood pressure.

Meanwhile, your contemporaries have all somehow either lost more hair than you’d like to point out, or, at the very least, developed more than a few grey hairs amongst the more familiar hues, and are now presenting slightly more lined versions of the faces you once knew, as if some portrait artist has suddenly gone overboard with their pencil strokes, and, when they start telling you how much you resemble your father, you suddenly realise that you’ve been doing that yourself and they’re looking at you in much the same way.

He was at least three inches shorter than me, by the way, and much balder, and portlier… In fact, I struggle to see the resemblance at all… after all, I didn't get his sun-friendly complexion or his easy-going charm, either.

Anyway, the reason I mention this, is that, once upon a time, and obviously at least nearly one lifetime ago, I acquired a second-hand ginger cat called “Tango” although I didn’t name him that. We were together for more than half a decade, and in at least three homes, before he disappeared one day and was never seen again.

Now, “Tango” and I got on really well, although I have few pictures of him because his life preceded my digital era by a couple of years and, during the bleak, empty, lonely pre-Beloved years, I wasn’t much of a one for recording my days, but he was, basically, a bit of a villain, an archetypal “bad cat”, and this was why I got him.

He’d been, you see, jealous of the baby when she was born, and had been causing a problem and, because the “new parents” weren’t the sort to just go off to the canal, bag up the cat, and drop him in, they wanted to look for a “good home” for him, although, instead they found me.

Which brings me back to how I am remembered.

You see, to explain to the small child about where “Tango” had gone to, they told her that because he had been a bad cat, he had been sent away to “Uncle Martin’s” and, as I realised whilst standing next to the two woman who so resembled each other last week, this may have become one of those standing threats throughout their entire childhood, like I had become equivalent to some kind of bogeyman in their household.

“If you don’t behave yourself, we’ll send you to Uncle Martin’s…”

Oh well, I supposed that being talked about is still better than not being talked about, even if I will have to paint myself green and growl for the kiddies every once in a while…

“Grrrrrr!”