Andy Richardson: Intelligence is one thing but common sense is quite another
The flowers were the big giveaway. And the cards. The gaffer’s desk looked like a scene from Simon Lycett’s – he’s the royal florist – as huge bouquets were extravagantly draped across her Logitech keyboard.
“Must be a devil to type with all those petals,” I said, missing the line that is required on such occasions: “Happy birthday.”
She dismissed me with a swish of her hand. “Idiot.”
I paused, trying to get to the bottom of the flower-thing.
There were cards. There were flowers. There were smiles. She’s a lady. The clues don’t get much bigger.
“Erm. Is it your birthday?”
My membership application to Mensa was approved on the spot.
“Well done, Sherlock,” she said. “You can bring my belated present tomorrow.”
She’ll be lucky. I’ve got an appointment with the dentist in the morning and I’m damned if I’m going to pay Interflora rates, no matter how much I might respect her.
“Do we need a column?” I asked, as though the answer might somehow be different this week to the other 51 weeks of the year. The Birthday Girl nodded.
“Is it International Women’s Day?” Her coffee arced out of her mouth as she spluttered her dismay.
“Don’t you read the paper.”
I looked at the floor, guiltily. I write bits for it. And I read it on my screen. But I don’t get my hands dirty, these days.
“You’re hopeless,” she said. On that, we did agree.
I ploughed on, a drunk fumbling for his keys on an unlit midnight doorstep.
“So is it Bananarama this week?” she nodded.
“I’ll do one on bananas.”
“You’re bananas.”
“How many bananas make a bunch?”
The answer’s two. All you need these days is a Sara Dallin and a Keren Woodward – Siobhan Fahey has flown the coop, or dropped out of the tree, or done whatever it is that old Bananaramas do when they’re no longer part of the bunch.
“Well done, Poirot. Now go and write your flaming column.”
I kinda think that intelligence and common sense are in inverse proportion. My online IQ test habitually puts me in the top two percentile, which means I could probably do algorithms and make a Findus crispy pancake from scratch, if I really wanted to. But when it comes to common sense, I’m as bright as a contestant on TOWIE.
Blissfully disengaged with the real world and floating somewhere in the ether, in a world of words, ideas and creative thought, I’m as likely to deduce that it’s someone’s birthday when her desk is caked in flowers as I am to get married and divorced twice in the space of five years. Oh. Hang on. Or have I just proved my point.
There were other clues about the ‘birthday thing’. Like the conversation we had earlier in the week when I said: “What did you do at the weekend?” And the gaffer said: “We went out and had a brilliant meal because it was my birthday.”
Like I say. When it comes to common sense, I am zip. Nada. Nolla. Insignificancia.
My boss shooed me away from her desk, with a gesture that said ‘Go away, little man, and play with your trains, or whatever it is you boys do’.
I retreated to my desk, wondering whether I could string out the Bananarama gag into an 800-word column or whether my one fan – thank you Clive, of Great Barr – would see straight through me and tell me I hadn’t cut the mustard this week.
Time was running short. And so is my hair. I’d thought I might revert to my wild days when I sported a ‘lion’s mane’ cut, only to be brought down to earth by a hairdresser who I met in a Birmingham restaurant.
“Are you growing your hair?” she asked. I mumbled something opaque about not having time to go to the barber’s.
“The grass doesn’t grow in the middle of the road,” she said, pointed to a follically-challenged area that has given up the ghost in the face of male pattern baldness. It was Cantona-esque.
“Are you going the full Leo Sayer?” she added.
The following day, I visited a Turkish barber and said ‘yes’ when he offered me the cutthroat razor.
But I digress. It’s the gaffer’s birthday and I’ve forgotten. And though she’s mumbled stuff about it just being the women who buy one another flowers on birthdays, I know I ought at least to have offered annual platitudes to her.
But I’m hoping that sharing her big day with 100,000 or so readers will provide some form or recompense. And if it doesn’t, there’s always next year.
I might make her a card with a picture of a banana. How many bananas does it take to…..er, no, I’ll just buy her some flowers.
