Eccentricity

I suspect that 'eccentric' appearance or behaviour these days is often manufactured to create an effect, but my childhood experience of these things was unquestioning and direct.

I remember the man who only came out after dark because he had a birthmark half way across his face. The shock of seeing him suddenly illuminated in the Belisha beacon of a zebra crossing somehow etched itself on my mind. More than anything horror fiction could later throw at me. This was real.

Another man moved around the streets on a weird, Victorian invalid tricycle, his legs thin and limp, while his hands slowly turned the front wheel via a long chain.

He always wore black. His stare was unnerving.

One mother and son toured the town for decades pushing a heavy cart with nothing in it. A lady was evicted for keeping a donkey in her kitchen and another bought fish and chips every Saturday, ignoring a hideous facial deformity that nobody else could.

It was all rather alarming, and put paid to my infant school preconception that everything was parents, toys and lessons. The future and happenstance began to hang over my world like a guilotine.

It was not entirely negative though. I recall walking behind an elderly bloke who looked very like the cartoon character Andy Capp (flat cap, tweed jacket, cigarette and big boots). Unexpectedly, he stopped in mid stride and expelled a huge reverberating fart which billowed out his baggy trousers like a ship's sail.

He then walked on.

And so did I.