Money Made Man Mad 3

Gary picked up the letter that the postman had left under the windscreen wiper of the bright green van that was the location of his business. The address on the envelope was very simple.
"The Green Van, Piddledon Farm, Piddledon PH16 5EX." Matthew was standing behind him.
"I'm going to be your new CEO," said Matthew.
"What does CEO stand for?" asked Gary.
"I don't know, but it sounds fantastic, doesn't it?"
"Thanks Matthew, I need somebody to sort my life out." Gary opened the back door, and the two men sat down in the back of the van that was filled with paint brushes, paint pots, a small gas camping stove, a bread bin and lots of tins of mushy peas.
"What is it with you and mushy peas?" asked Matthew.
"You can make sandwiches with them," said Gary. "You can make soup with them. You can cook them in pasta and guess what? The pasta turns green. The Lord provided the Israelites with manna in the desert. The Lord provided me with tins of mushy peas for 15p." Gary opened the envelope and took out the cheque and the letter inside.
"Do you still expect your customers to pay by cheque?" asked Matthew. "That's old fashioned. We'll see if we can get a credit card account, or get the customers to pay into your bank account by credit transfer."

 

A woman arrived, wearing a green jacket, with a handful of Green Party leaflets.
"I'm Jill Vegan," she said. "I'm campaigning for the Green Party. Can I count on your support?" Gary looked shocked. "What are you going to do about children being taught about homosexuality in schools?" he asked.  Jill beamed at Gary enthusiastically.
"We're going to make sure that absolutely all children are taught about homosexuality in all schools, including primary schools."
"No," said Gary, "I mean, what are you going to do to stop it?"
"Stop it?" asked Jill. "Stop it? Why would you want us to stop it? We want a better life for gay people and a better life for you. We want people to have a minimum income of £400 a week."
"That's a lot," said Gary.
"We would say that you need £400 a week to live on," said Jill.
"I live on £100 a week," said Gary.
"It must cost more than £100 a week to run this van," said Matthew. "You have to pay insurance."
"Who said anything about the van being insured?" asked Gary.
"But you have to pay for the 10,000 mile service and the MOT." Gary looked amazed.
"Who said anything about the van having an MOT?" Matthew became very cross.
"Well Gary, you'd better make sure that the van has an MOT, and tax and insure it, because if you don't, the council will come and put a wheel clamp on it."
"Oh great," said Gary, "no one would be able to knick it."
"You must spend a fortune on diesel."
"I fill it up with diesel once a month," Gary explained. "Most of my customers are very local and I don't have many."
"How does anyone manage to live on £100 a week?" asked Jill.
"We live in a shared farmhouse," said Matthew. "That is roughly what it costs. We share bedrooms. It saves loads of money if you have 2 or 3 people in each bedroom. There's about 40 people living on the farm altogether."
"Not to mention the 20 people who live in vans and caravans on the site," said Gary.
"We want to build more social housing," said Jill. "Families don't want to be crammed into two spare bedrooms. Children need space to run around."
"We have 50 acres of fields," said Matthew. "The children have an enormous amount of space in which to run around. Communal living is good for the environment."
"Good for the environment?" asked Jill. "And the children have all that room to run around? Can anybody come and stay?"
"You can come here for dinner on a Thursday night," said Matthew. "I'll ask about you staying here for a few days."

 

Matthew sat on the back seat of Gary's green van with a tiny lap top computer next to some papers that were spread out on one of the seats. Gary was driving the van up to the farmhouse.
"Get a bit closer to the bedroom," said Matthew. "I'm trying to get the broadband signal. There's a transmitter just outside Louisa's bedroom on the ground floor. That's good. Yeah." Gary stopped driving. Matthew typed furiously into the computer. Then he closed the lid of the computer and put it on the floor while he picked up a pen and scribbled furiously on a piece of paper.  "We've registered with a company that allows us to take credit card payments." Matthew's phone wrang. He pulled it out of his pocket. "Hello. Oh, a customer who wants to pay by credit card. Great." Matthew picked up the computer from the floor, opened the lid on it and turned it on again. He typed into the keyboard furiously. "What's your name? What's your credit card number? Oh Hell. I can never get this thing to work. Could you just send us a cheque?"

 

On Thursday night, Jill stood in the lounge at the farmhouse, piling her plate with bread and salad.
"Is this all grown on the farm?" she asked.
"Most of it is," said Rachel. "I think the only thing we don't produce ourselves is the margarine on the bread and the chocolate in the chocolate cake."
"Wonderful," said Jill. "Your way of life is idyllic. I would like to stay here for a few weeks during the election campaign."
"Do you want to be a councillor?" asked Matthew.
"I am a councillor," said Jill. "I want to be your MP."

 

A few weeks later Matthew came home from working with Gary in the van and went upstairs to his bedroom. On the landing there was a group of people praying loudly in tongues.
"You've been praying for a long time," said Matthew. "You were here when I came to collect my laundry at lunch time." Andy Pandy looked terrified.
"Matthew," he said, "you don't understand. There is a portal here."
"A portal?" asked Matthew. Stanley nodded.
"A portal into another dimension," he said. Lulu looked at Matthew as if she was very anxious.
"An evil dimension," she said.
"Does it have anything to do with the fact that Jill Vegan is staying in the room opposite mine?"
"Do not think she comes to do anything good," said Andy Pandy. "She comes to destroy God." Matthew laughed. "Andy, I don't think anybody could destroy God, could they?"
"You should take this seriously," said Stanley. "She's certainly trying to destroy anything that God does here." Matthew grinned as if they were all stupid.
"What convinces you that Jill is satanic?"
"She uses Satinique shampoo," said Lulu.
"She bought a packet of washing powder for the laundry room," said Andy. "It has this terrible symbol of the man in the moon surrounded by stars."
"She supports gay sex education in schools," said Stanley.
"She wants to help gay people."
"She's a member of CND," said Lulu.
"She's a pacifist."
"But CND," said Lulu. "The upside down broken cross. What is that all about?"
"Lulu, the person who founded CND had a Ford Cortina. The symbol was the shape of the rear light on his car."
"Watch this light," said Andy. He pressed the light switch. The light bulb didn't exactly turn on, it changed colour and flickered.
"The light bulb's faulty," said Matthew.
"But look at this," said Andy. He turned the light off at the switch. It shone for at least ten seconds after it was switched off. "What light can work without electricity?"
"It's the capacitance of the circuit," said Matthew. "Plus the fact that the light is using hardly any power."
"Definitely a demon sitting in the lampshade if you ask me," said Lulu.
"Look at the clock," said Stanley. "It's nearly an hour slow."
"The battery's flat."
"I changed it last week," said Stanley. Matthew was furious.
"Stanley, you used one of the batteries out of the tin box. It has been in my tape recorder. I keep them because they still have enough electricity in them to power my short wave radio."
"The battery I put in the clock worked fine on Saturday when I put it in. It should have lasted more than a week."

 

Angie sat behind the desktop computer in the lounge updating the records of the community house common purse. She opened her emails. There was an email complaining about her driving in the village. A piece of rock music began to play.
"What's that music?" asked Angie.
"Back in the Village by Iron Maiden," said Matthew. "The war is over but a lone pilot returns to drop some bombs on the village for the last time."
"They're saying that about my driving," said Angie. "There's a photograph of me in my car. Underneath it, someone has written, 'Long black hair, Long black coat, Big black car, Angel of Death.' What's on this attachment? Small pictures of children. 'Print these out on some sticky labels and you can slap one onto your windscreen every time you kill a child." Angie was almost crying. "This isn't fair. Just because I didn't slow down when I saw the 30 mile an hour sign. They're accusing me of mass murder. Speed cameras are only there to make money."
"Angie, speed cameras are there because people have had serious accidents at those spots," said Matthew. "If you drive past a school and a nursery at sixty miles an hour, that is equivalent to mass murder."
"It's a criminal offence to send abusive emails to people."
"Angie, it's a criminal offence to drive like someone who has escaped from a secure psychiatric hospital."
"I'm sending this email to Pastor Boris."

 

Matthew sat on the settee drinking a cup of coffee. Lulu presented him with a library book.
"Matthew, I found this very unusual book."
"It's a library book. The man in the square house. It's about a man who lives in a square house and he gets found dead and the police have to work out if it was an accident."
"Why do you fill your head with such things?"

 

Everyone was having dinner. Rachel looked at Matthew and began shouting.
"I can't get anything to print on that computer. Why won't it print?"
"It printed perfectly well for me."
"Well, it wouldn't print when I used to it. I've got to print all the reports out for the conference I'm taking part in this afternoon."
"I'll print them out for you."
"We haven't got time."
"All you have to do is copy and paste everything into an rtf file and then use Microsoft Print to Pdf to change it to a Pdf file and then you can use Adobe Acrobat to print the Pdf file."
"Nobody does that nowadays," said Colin. "No wonder people get confused."
"It's a perfectly valid way to print something," said Matthew.
"It was a pefectly valid way to print something in the 1990s," said Colin. "And even then, it must have seemed complicated."
"Rachel, we have turned our back on possessions," said Angie. "We have agreed not to embrace the latest technology. Our computers are old ones that people have thrown away."
"Well, that computer is just not adequate if we're going to have a conference about the future of the church and we've got pages and pages of written notes," said Rachel.
"Have a look at them on my tablet," said Matthew. "To turn my tablet on, you need to hold down the on/off button and the minus side of the volume control for 15 seconds. It's an old one someone threw away. But it's great, as long as you know how to turn it on."
"I need those documents printed out on paper," said Rachel, "I am not of the Youtube generation."
"You couldn't watch Youtube on the tablet," said Matthew. "Well, you could, but it has no sound, so maybe you could watch Tom and Jerry."

 

Matthew and Stanley were sitting in the back of Pastor Boris' car on their way to a meeting. His wife Valerie was driving.
"I wonder why so many people have left the church," said Matthew.
"Pastor Boris has a magnetic personality," said Stanley. "He repels people."
"There's not many people in this church who can't give up smoking. If people can't give up smoking, they seem to leave this church."
"Yes, I remember giving up smoking," said Stanley. "The craving for a pleasure that you can't have, the feeling of climbing up the walls, your nerves so on edge that you feel like punching somebody. People who can't give up smoking would never be happy in this church." Valerie pressed down the accelarator and wound up the car engine to a high speed as she pulled away from a roundabout.
"See a gap, zoom into the gap," she said, thinking aloud. "What speed is this bend? Is it a 30 mile an hour bend, a 40 mile an hour bend? I know, it's a 55 mile an hour bend. I should do 55 miles an hour."
"She's done her driver training," said Pastor Boris, "and that's what you're all going to do. I'm fed up with having to pay so much money for the car insurance. Too many accidents. I'm fed up with having to pay speeding fines and getting angry emails from villages around Piddledon where somebody has been driving like a psychopath."

 

Angie climbed into the car at 10 o' clock in the morning on the way to be assessed for her driver training. She turned the ignition key and the radio came on. It was playing a song she had not heard since she was a child.
"He drove his car to the racing ground,
He was the youngest driver there.
The crowd roared as they started the race,
Round the track they drove at a deadly pace.
No one knows what happened that day,
How his car overturned in flames
But as they pulled him from the twisted wreck,
With his dying breath, they heard him say,
'Tell Laura I love her, tell Laura I need her
Tell Laura not to cry
My love for her will never die." Angie wondered if this was going to be a bad day. The instructor got into the car and they drove off into the country side. Angie swerved to avoid a small red hatchback and ended up going through a hedge and came to a stop in a ditch.
"That is the best driving in the world I have ever seen," said the instructor.
"Who, me?"
"No, the guy in that little red car. I don't know how he's still alive. I don't know how you didn't kill him. Angie, I just became a believer. There must be a God. You drive so badly, and you haven't killed anyone." They drove on into a village and the instructor told Angie to park in the street. "Can you read the number plate on the car over there," he asked.
"I can't."
"Well, I can read it, and my eyes aren't perfect."
"I had my eyes tested 6 months ago," said Angie. "My eyesight is fine. I wouldn't drive if I couldn't see. That is a lot more than 25 yards."
"I've got a tape measure," said the instructor. He took the tape measure from the glove compartment, left Angie's car, and walked up to the parked car in the street. It was on the opposite side of the road. The man who owned the parked car appeared.
"What are you doing?" he asked.
"Can I just measure the distance to your car number plate?"
"Why?"
"I'm a driving instructor."
"No, you can't measure the distance to the number plate on my car. I'm just about to get into it." The man got into his car and drove away. The instructor looked for another car on the same side of the road. He fastened the metal hook on the tape measure to the caravan towing hook that was on the car and walked back across to the other side of the road. A bus stopped. A car and a land rover stopped behind it. A driver angrily honked his horn. The instructor walked back to Angie's car with an excited look on his face.
"Exactly 25 yards," he said.
"FG94EHN," read Angie.
"Excellent," he said. He wound up the tape measure and got back into the car.

 

Matthew thought he had driven reasonably well, although he was aware that the instructor had had to keep prompting him. Matthew and the instructor came from the car back into the office and sat down.
"You're high risk," the instructor said.
"But I haven't had an accident for 20 years."
"That's because other people are good drivers. They're looking a hundred yards ahead, they're planning 30 seconds ahead, and that's how they avoid crashing into idiots like you."
"That doesn't make me high risk."
"You are high risk. A high risk of annoying the person behind you."

 

That evening, back at the farm, Jill Vegan was in the dining room, having dinner with everybody at the big table. She was eating a baked potato with margarine, salad, and an assortment of beans.
"What a lovely stay I've had," she said. "I would really like to live here permanently."
"No!" shouted Andy Pandy.