George Grimley awoke at half past seven in the morning, a custom he had maintained even three years into his retirement. He sat up straight-backed, swung his legs over the end of his neatly-made double bed, and inserted his feet firmly into his slippers (he had only recently begun to dress after breakfast, rather than before).
He made his way into the kitchen of the Iffley bungalow he shared with his thin-lipped wife Marjory, whom he found bent over the cooker, making her usual breakfast of over-salty bacon and underseasoned scrambled eggs. He noted with dismay that she had once again insisted on not making toast, her ketogenic eating habits beginning to infect him as well. (‘Serves you right,’ she would say matter-of-factly if he protested, ‘your paunch is quite a bit bigger than mine!’) The stringy curls of her brittle blonde hair spilled over the top of the clip pinned to the back of her head.
‘Good morning, George,’ she said in her brusque, tight voice without affording so much as a smile. ‘Are you on your rounds today?’
‘I am never off-duty, dear.’ He sat down at the kitchen table expectantly, and a plate of bacon and eggs – without toast – was thumped down before him.
Marjory breathed out abruptly. ‘Well you can go to Westgate for me then, my M&S order’s come in.’
At this, George stoically ate his breakfast, got up, and went to get dressed. As he left the kitchen he said over his shoulder, ‘Have the shopping trolley ready by the door.’
A short while later, wheeling the trolley behind him on the way to catch the number 3 bus, he spotted his first offender just in front of him, lazily meandering onto the pavement to avoid the morning rush hour traffic towards the city centre. George gripped the trolley tighter and marched determinedly forward. When he was just behind the fiend, he shouted, ‘No cycling on the pavement!‘
The cyclist, a grim-faced morning commuter, gave a start and wobbled aside with cowed fear. He had not known that the self-appointed Detective Chief Constable of Unauthorised Cycling was near.
George scowled out the window of the bus – he and his trolley had taken one of the folding chairs, glaring so ferociously at a mother bringing her toddler to nursery that she was forced to fold her pushchair – counting the number of cyclists which passed beside him on the pedestrian pavement. At one point, the bus slowed in traffic, he had locked eyes with a timid wisp of a girl on her bike (no doubt a student, he sneered to himself), who had offered him an apologetic half-smile. He knocked hard on the window, wagged his finger reprovingly, and shouted ‘NO!‘ so loudly that he drew disapproving looks from his fellow bus commuters.
Unbelievably, the situation worsened once he got off the bus at Westgate. Making his way towards the Marks and Spencers, he crossed paths with a young woman mounted offensively on her bike, weaving slowly and carefully through the throng of shoppers in the specified walking-only area. As she passed him by, he said loudly, ‘This is a pedestrian-only zone! What don’t you understand!‘ She stared straight ahead of her, offensively ignoring his diktat, and George thought he even saw a quiet, yet still offensive, eye-roll.
He packed Marjory’s shopping in a huff, and made his way back to the High Street bus stop, thinking as he paused at a traffic light that he should like to have a good peruse of the Daily Mail when he returned home. His reverie was interrupted, however, by two things: the little red man changing over to green, and a harried cyclist, who had noted the sparsity of the crowd waiting to cross, outrageously attempting to run the red light before stopping a foot into the crossing to allow the pedestrians to pass.
This could not stand.
‘Excuse me,’ barked George in close proximity to the young besuited man’s face, ‘but your light is red. It is now the pedestrians’ turn to cross.’
‘Sorry,’ mumbled the cyclist under his helmet. The Detective Chief Constable of Unauthorised Cycling drew himself up to his full, but modest height, inflicted a final reproachful glare, breathed in sharply, and marched self-importantly across the road, where he waited indignantly to cross back over and retrieve his trolley, quite forgotten in the affray.
He sunk low and affronted into the bus seat reserved for the disabled and elderly, glowering at anyone who dared question the seating arrangement.
When he arrived home Marjory presented him with a coffee and the morning paper, and he lowered himself sullenly into his lounger. It had been another trying morning on the beat.
Sonya Blanck writings 