Accountants, seagulls and a walk in Helsinki...
I was in a meeting with my prospective accountant recently.
I say prospective because I’ve never been good at keeping records - unless of course they happen to be twelve inches in diameter, mostly black in colour and made from vinyl - and we all know how much accountants like well-kept records. But that’s not the story I want to tell you. This is the story…
As I was sitting opposite my PA (prospective accountant), a large grey seagull flew past the third-floor window. It was a wet and windy, grey day outside and this guy was having a bit of trouble battling the stiff breeze coming in from the coast. If seagulls use expletives, which I’m sure they do, this one just opened his beak and squaaaked ‘f**k this for a game of pirates, I quit!’ and came to rest on the window sill opposite the office.
Meanwhile my PA’s narrative was continuing along the lines of ‘blah blah
blah blah receipts, blah blah blah blah big big trouble, blah blah blah
lengthy prison sentence blah blah…’ You get my drift. It was just then I
remembered an incident involving the largest seagull I’ve ever seen
which occurred in Helsinki some years ago.
It was late August in downtown Helsinki; its inhabitants hadn’t yet
retreated into the furs and woollen jumpers of autumn, but it wouldn’t
be long I guessed judging by the smuts of rust appearing on the
boulevard trees.
Helsinki is a town I like but I’ve never been able to figure out exactly why. Sure, the women are pretty, I always really digged those narrow, thick framed spectacles they wear, making them look like stern, but sexy, school mistresses. And that accent, it was always a big knee-trembler for me too… “Vud you like to come to my house and Vee can have some drinks, or sex, or maybe just Vatch some teleWision?” But what I think I’ve always really liked about Helsinki is the regard for law which people appear to have. You don’t park where you’re not supposed to. You don’t walk where you’re not supposed to and get this… you treat other people with RESPECT! How weird is that? But hey, that’s for another day.
I was strolling along the seafront near the Kauppatori – the old market that’s a real treat to visit, if you like that kind of thing. I don’t. I use the word strolling because that’s what it was; not walking, not ambling, not poking about, not pottering, not sauntering, not idling, I was strolling so that I wouldn’t look like too much like a tourist. The wind blowing in from the Baltic Sea was making me hungry for something fishy to eat; crab-meat, scallops, oysters or anything that once called the sea its home. It was then I happened across a man with the reddest face I’d ever seen and eyes that looked like they were about to jettison themselves from his head. But that wasn’t my business; the smell of deep frying was my only concern.
He was selling deep-fried whitebait - you know those tiny little fish they roll in a mixture of egg and breadcrumbs before frying them whole; eyes, fins, tail, guts, the whole shebang. So I ordered a bag.
I knew after the first fishy mouthful that they were not for me, but there were no litter-bins in sight, and so, I strolled along the sea wall with a bag of tiny fish in my hand wondering what I should do with them. A very, very, large grey seagull suddenly landed beside me with the grace of a helicopter landing in a hurricane. He opened his beak and answered my question. ‘Give me the fish you bastard!’ he demanded, ‘squwaaaaaak eeek eeek eeeeeek eeeeeek’.
But I remembered reading somewhere (or it could have been a dream I had) that seagulls are such gluttons they run the risk of over-eating and have been known to eat themselves to death when the opportunity arises. Not wanting to be the cause of death to a seagull whom I’d never met before I threw him one single fish. The seagull opened his yellow beak and swallowed the fish straight out of the air, then another and another and another. As I strolled the bird kept pace along the sea wall. As long as I threw fish, old Gully (we were getting close by this stage) would keep on catching and devouring them in his pterodactyl-sized beak. Eventually the bag was empty. Gully had just gobbled down more than a kilo of deep-fried fish and not doing his chances of avoiding a major heart-attack much good at all.
I left the sea-front, said goodbye to Gully and continued along the busy Esplanaden towards my hotel. The streets were busy with shoppers, each of them I passed, without exception, gave me a big Finnish smile accompanied by a polite guarded chuckle.
Immediately I checked my flies, no problem there. A child beside me laughed out loud sending me scurrying to the nearest window to check my reflection for the large lump of shit I expected to see on my face or head. No problem there either. Maybe I was breaking some ancient Finnish law by wearing a tee-shirt bearing the words ‘Get down on your funk’? I just didn’t get it. At least not until I caught my reflection in the angled glass of some futuristic building and there he was, my old friend Gully, waddling along behind me like a beloved wind-up pet.
I tried to evade to him by crossing the street, but Helsinki traffic posed no dangers to old Gully. No siree! People were laughing out loud by now. There was only one thing to do. I side-stepped in Stockmann’s department store and hid behind a stand at the perfume counter. Outside the main door I could see a bewildered looking seagull stare at his reflection in the glass. He peered first left, then right, then left again, but where was the nice man who had given him the fish?
Looking at his big yellow eyes and comically floppy yellow feet I felt like a true cad. A true cad hiding behind a Channel No. 7 display, in a department store, in downtown Helsinki.
Back in the accountant’s office I realised, as I laughed aloud with maniacal glee, that it was no real surprise my PA was too overworked to take on any new clients. Who could blame her?