Bullshit Baffles Brains.

I was about 16 when my father passed on this nugget.  From the hall came my mother’s protest wail.  Followed by a muffled giggle.

The only other Wise Words I can remember my father passing down were “Never trust a Teetotaler”. But those two have been enough to see me through many a tricky situation.

However, I realized after we had moved into The House here that several fathers must have entrusted their progeny with one, at least, of my parent’s rules for life.  So committed to the proposition of b.s. being the key to life had some of these obedient sprogs become that it become their work ethic when they reached man’s estate – it was obviously blu-tacked to the walls of Mears construction team’s office.

I first realized this 6 weeks after we had moved in and I awoke one morning to discover that my mattress, duvet. pillows and the wall behind my head were wet.  Stripping back the mattress to investigate I found a healthy mushroom colony thriving in the carpet and blue-green mould of an interesting shade breaking down the monotony of my white wall.

A stray plumber who happened to be visiting another tenant came in, inspected the bathroom  which lay on the other side of my newly renovated wall and explained that my shower-stall had not been sealed.

Well, hey, that I could understand.  The House, which was supposed to have been ready for occupation the previous December, was still not finished even though we had been moved in and it was now April. Obviously small matters such as finishing a bathroom get overlooked in such a situation.

But also on the premises that day was the horny handed Lower Management Mears project bloke.  He strode into the room, admired the growth, shook his head, rubbed his bristly chin and informed me that the reason we were now having to drag all my ruined bedding down to the skip was squarely my fault.  I looked at him enquiringly.

Apparently sealing a shower doesn’t rank very high in the prevention-of-flood scale. What causes deluges up and down the length of England – if not the whole world – was people going for the Japanese look and putting mattresses on the floor. I must have looked somewhat astonished until he came up with the clincher:

“Well, waddya think bed frames were invented for?” (To prevent unsealed walls leaking? Really? Who knew?)

Meanwhile, down in a basement flat where mould flourished like the green Bay tree lived a mother of a newborn and another, slightly older baby.  This canny mum hadn’t made the mistake of Japanese décor and so her beds weren’t the cause of her problems.

 Nope. Drawing upon his years of experience and arcane engineering knowledge this same genius told her triumphantly that all her  watery/mould problems were due to the fact that she had a tumble-dryer in her home.

Gawd.  Bloody Council tenants, eh?

At one stage someone compiled a list of all the nuggets of indispensable knowledge which Mears construction passed on to us.  Even the fact that our fire alarms got triggered every few days was, in fact, down to us.  After all, it appeared, all over the rest of the country, people who slipped a couple of slices of bread in a toaster  took the sensible precaution of opening each window  and door in the premises first.  Fully. A spot of frost-bite was no deterrent to others intent on Marmite toast with their brekkie.

So for the first 6 months it seemed that my father had been right.  A lot of baffled tenants were indeed wandering the halls wondering whether to report the results of shoddy workmanship, or to simply let a million-pound investment fold damply in upon itself and give final proof to the fact that million-pound investments were wasted on bloody Council tenants.

Until I finally realized that it was a question of semantics: in my father’s interpretation bull-shit was clever.  It was a scatological smoke-screen arrived at with wit and ingenuity.

But to someone unfamiliar with wit and ingenuity “bull-shit” was unambiguous.  It had only one meaning. It was a two-syllabled synonym for a four-letter word for those who think polysyllabics are more imposing than single syllables.  All it meant was “lies”.  As in other two-syllable synonyms. Porkies. Whoppers.  Untruths.

So that was when we finally decided, my father’s words notwithstanding,  that none of our brains were going to accept this kind of bull shit.

And that was when we finally declared the whole issue unacceptable.