Bruised Plums

In August 2014 I visited Scarborough and had a run up to Whitby for a few hours. I found what purports to be Dracula’s final resting place (see last photo.)

Walking out of Whitby I passed an old man with a hunched back and walking sticks. How does someone get an arched back like that, I thought, as he plodded through queueing traffic. I don’t know if he’d dropped some plums or they’d dropped through a hole in the bottom of his bag but there were a few on the road. A man rushed to pick them up and the granddad dropped them back in his bag. For some reason he came back through the traffic toward me and I managed a photo (see below.)

Here it is made into a painting. I put in a few people on the street in the background and a red blob representing a telephone box. The true colour of red telephone boxes is BS 381C-539. The kiosk I’ve shown in the painting is the K6 type, the most prolific in the UK. From 1935 about 300,000 were strewn across the streets and lanes of Britain. When I went to Jersey on holiday I saw the phone boxes were cream and yellow.

I experienced the agony of bruised plums once. In my teens I used to do karate and after the class in the school hall we moved to a classroom to do some controlled fighting. One night my man-pack cushioned a hard donkey-like kick. A lad with hairs on his chest can’t show tears can he but I almost did from shock later on while we all changed in the toilets. Things had inflated. The karate instructor (whose breath always smelled of lager) said he had better look and in a cubicle I showed him something you’d see in the canon ball collection in a museum. He said he’s suffered the same a few times and I’d be okay. Thankfully the beetroot bruising faded over the next few weeks. I’ve never had a strong urge to have children so it doesn’t matter if things don’t work down there. If you don’t own a lawn you’ll never need to know if your lawnmower works.

In Whitby I found what purports to be Dracula’s final resting place….