Why does she insist on ironing my smalls? Jem Clarke prefers non-stiff briefs
Jem Clarke is in his very, very early fifties, is five foot zero inches tall and has never left the family home in Cleethorpes, which he still shares with his parents…
This is a time of year I can do business with.
What a joy to be between early autumn and ‘hard autumn’, with a potential job on the horizon – just when I think a job looks most beautiful.
Mother once supported my ambition to be a weatherman as I had, in her opine, all the necessary attributes – short; shifty-
looking; suit never troubled an iron. But recently her position has shifted: ‘He’s more a fantasist than forecaster.’
She’s referring to my broken femur, which, ever since it healed, gives me a two-hour warning before impending rain. During a period on pain-killing medication, I had vivid but accurate dreams each night of the next day’s weather. Unfortunately, by the time I had woken up, crutched up and got downstairs, the day’s weather was already upon us. So my predictions landed a little late to sway my parents I was onto something. Still, Father referred to my paisley dressing gown as ‘the Technicolor dream coat’ for a couple of unfunny months.
What’s put my now cross-seasonal joblessness into sharp relief is that my long-time friend Stefan has got a job after searching for two whole days. I explain this by saying to Mother, ‘Stefan’s got four functional limbs and the strength of a maddened ox – of course he’s employable’. Mother counters with ‘But he’s just come out of prison!’
Stefan, or to give him his unsubtle – and as it turned out chillingly accurate – nickname, Crazy Stef, surprised us all by emerging from prison way earlier than we ever expected.
During a catch-up in a Wetherspoon’s beer garden, Stef explained that his new job was in a food factory. I imagined that if I hired an ex-con with a King Kong-like frame, I’d have him breaking down really large cardboard boxes, or lumping blocks of ice, using all the skills he’d learnt on the chain gang.
Instead they’d apparently handed him a thimble-size plastic jug, from which he had to sprinkle a line of mayonnaise across passing pasta. Perhaps the factory-owners keep old lags away from any large objects. Still, I imagine a tiny plastic jug could in the wrong hands soon be re-tooled as an eye-gouger, should quality control come a-knocking about the consistency of his ‘drizzle action’.
I shared with Stef about my static job search. He even said he would put a word in at the factory. He said that, because of a tougher enforcement of certain right-to-work-in-the-UK small print, they were ‘down a couple of Slavs on the pizza-slicing table’.
I spent a few nights wearing a borrowed blue hairnet to bed, to see if I could stand it for seven-hour spells. (I have a sensitive scalp after overdosing on caffeine shampoo during a last-ditch attempt to reverse male pattern baldness.)
Then Stef measured the height of the pizza-slicing table and the game was up. I couldn’t reach.
It’s probably for the best, as my sole factory experience when I was a student ended in a brutal dismissal owing to a horrific medical condition, repetitive strain injury. In summer, my veins make an audible creaking noise. Some days, it happened just before we entered a heatwave. When I was actively pursuing my weather-predicting career in the noughties, that was something of a boon.
It also meant Mother has taken over all shirt-folding duties ever since. An unintended consequence of this is that she will constantly try and steal my underpants for a quick iron, by secreting them within my shirt pile. I have resisted her underwear-ironing; not just to do my bit to save the planet, but also because I just prefer a more relaxed brief.
I was explaining to Stef that sometimes, if I catch my mother at it, we will end up playing tug-of-war with my boxers, like some suburban ‘squid game’. If I win, she yells viciously, ‘Suddenly someone’s RSI has gone away, hasn’t it, you twerp!’
The word ‘twerp’ triggered Stef and he clutched his Guinness tightly, as if resisting some darker urges, muttering, ‘You shouldn’t have to take that from your mother. We’ll have to find a solution.’
I nodded, grateful for anyone supporting me in my endless parental Cold War. But eight hours later, I shot up straight in bed, wide-eyed with terror, reflecting, ‘Have I inadvertently hired an ex-crim to kill my mother?’
Thankfully Stef turned up a day later, with a shirt-folding machine he’d made for me from a YouTube tutorial video, and the sort of make-and-mend manufacturing skills Her Majesty’s Prisons could be proud of.
