“Rebirth is for those
Whom hell cannot contain.”

From Writings on Wall
by Bachchoo

The French elections go into their second round with the incumbent President Nicolas Sarkozy (with his lovely and taller wife Carla Bruni — one may ask “who put him up to it?”) behind the socialist François Hollande. If Mr Sarkozy is to stand a chance he has to attract the votes of the third party, that of the fascistic, anti-immigrant, anti-European Union Marine Le Pen’s National Front.
Mr Sarkozy is Mr European Union and so has begun to make noises about getting tough on immigration and the “lawlessness” which the French perceive as coming from North African immigrants.
Britain, indeed all of Europe, has analogous problems. There is a strong current of opinion in the UK which favours restrictions on further immigration. In the last decades of the last century this animus was directed against South Asian, West Indian and African immigration. Today it is focused against immigrants from Eastern Europe who have a right to enter the UK under European Union law.
And so to a true short story:
I have had dormant back trouble for some time now and well-wishers suggested that I change the mattress I sleep on. There are the said well-wishers’ “orthopaedic” specimens available whose advertisements say would provide miraculous relief from backache.
I was persuaded and with some saved pocket money found myself floating (or whatever the term is!) the web. Eureka! I found and booked a mattress. The website promised delivery of the king-sized mattress (I sleep alone, but need latitude to thrash about — caveat emptor!) and demanded that I choose a day when I would be home. They also said that for a considerable amount more they would carry the mattress upstairs and for a further sum would take the old mattress away. No, I thought in a fit of chutzpah, I could install the new and get rid of the old myself.
Delivery day came and I waited in. The website said “they” would be there any time between eight in the morning and five in the early evening. At around 5.30, despairing of a delivery that day I went round the corner to the Sri Lankan shop to buy a pint of milk and some postage stamps. It must have taken me 15 minutes. It was beginning to drizzle.
As I got back home my Russian neighbour who was tinkering with his car said what I heard as “Your mistress is coming.”
It wasn’t what I wanted to hear.
“Where?” I asked and then realised as I turned into my drive that he meant “mattress” because there was the plastic-clad oblong monster deposited in the small frontage where memsahib’s car spends the nights.
“Polish guys!” the Russian neighbour, Slavcontemptsky, says and I fancy he is about to spit.
It was hell hauling the mattress in through the front door. The rain made the plastic covering slippery. It took me a good 20 minutes. Under the plastic coverings I could vaguely see handles stitched onto the sides of Pink Moby Dick. Hah! My kingdom for a grip!
I cut open two plastic coverings and disposed of them. I contemplated the long and winding stair, spat on my hands and got down to it or should I say, step by painful step, up to it. Believe me, getting a king-sized ortho-mattress up the stairs of an, albeit small, Victorian house is like persuading an aquaphobic rhino to climb a waterfall.
But an hour later it was done. And now the struggle with the old one. I remembered Mr Newton’s law of gravitation and threw it down the stairs, letting the mutual attraction between earth and mattress do the real work.
Gentle reader, if you think my trials were over, think again. They had just begun. I had given no thought to the disposal of old mattresses in very urban London. Or rather I’d given half a wishful thought to it, feeling I could bend it double or treble and pile it into the back of my old Mercedes and take it to the local municipal dump.
I dragged it into the drive; but fold it would not. I wasn’t going to admit defeat. I would go into the tool cupboard under the stairs and get a saw and cut it into 10 pieces and stuff them in the garbage bin. It took me a while to find a saw and when I got back the rain had turned relentless. I waited for it to stop and when it became lighter stepped out with my saw as St. George must have done when he exited the cave to confront the dragon.
The wretched mattress was soaked and drenched mattresses don’t saw easily. Any moment now memsahib would return from a hard day’s work and attempt to park her smart Audi in the drive. I knew I had to drag the monster to the back
garden.
One seldom thinks about the weight of water. Whatever Archimedes says, Dhondy’s law states that mattresses absorb 10 times their weight in water when left out for a few minutes in the rain.
No, the sawing had to work!
I got down to it. I made a cut of about two feet. The duck-feathers or cotton or nylon sanitary pads or whatever the stuffing was started oozing out and scattering. At this rate I calculated it would take me six hours to saw the sodden encumbrance to fit the bins and an hour more to clear away the debris.
I left the mess and went inside. At the bottom of the hat-stand where junk mail is cleared away I found the card I was looking for: “Handyman and Van — All Domestic Tasks Undertaken.”
Of course he was Polish. Of course he charged more than the delivery men for taking the new one up and the old one away. Of course I told memsahib I had done it all, effortlessly, myself.