WONDERFUL ARE THE WORKINGS OF A WHEELBARROW

I have a magpie’s memory for bright little nuggets of prose and ‘Wonderful are the Workings of a Wheelbarrow’ is just one such phrase I picked up here on this site. Actually I think it came from UPL, or, now I ponder on it, maybe it was UPL’s Mother, who UPL was describing as wont to use it whenever a child got a little too full of herself and started to babble away like conceited children, high on over-attentive adult company, or the dregs of the wine bottle, are often wont to do. It struck me then as one of the most crushing put-me-downs that I had ever heard - devastatingly accurate and with all the deflating power of one of those 16 ton weights that used to appear regularly as extras in Monty Python sketches.

Wonderful, indeed, are the workings of a wheelbarrow! Exit, then, one sad and sorry child, tale between legs, eyes brimming with tears, lower lip trembling, the creative flights of fancy and newly acquired erudition shot down in flames and crashed to earth, the soul bruised, the spirit battered, the company laughing, the only hope left that the earth should open in one great enormous hole into which to tumble, down to oblivion and an end to the heart thumping pain of embarrassment. Death indeed could not come soon enough.

Of course, we don’t need UPL’s Mum (if indeed it was she for my memory these days is not what it once was) to administer such a coup de dégonflage. When one is grown-up (if indeed one ever truly grows up) there are enough gremlin mothers and teachers and stern aunts and railway stationmasters and policemen who inhabit one’s own head to stock a shop. And these are ready to unleash a flood of taunts every bit as excruciating and painful as the embarrassing put me downs of youth. The shame is even worse really because - as I say to myself - by the ripe old age of 62 YOU REALLY SHOULD HAVE LEARNT BY NOW WHEN TO SHUT UP!

So how did this most recent episode come about? While I am still in a manner of speaking ‘La dame aux etiquettes,’ or in other wise helping to run our somewhat pedestrian label business, I have been appointed, part-time and at bottle washer level to speak for the UK on a European project. And very flattering it is too, even more flattering when the horrible feeling of finding myself totally out of my depth did not materialise and I found that the waters were in fact not deep at all but rather shallow and that the project required (uniquely amongst all other work on this earth) the precise and eclectically random range of experiences that my wandering CV has to offer. Except labels, that is. At least so far!

So there I am in Brussels for a two day meeting, surrounded most stimulatingly by colleagues drawn from every state of the European Union with the wonderful advantage of not having to think via a second language as the project is conducted entirely in English. Hola!

Because I have a passing fluency in English - not perhaps as good as the Swedish guy’s or the Dutch guy’s or the lovely soul from Romania who confessed never to having set foot language wise outside Bucharest and yet who spoke English impeccably as though she had been born and bred in Guildford - they even put me on television. Well, not real transmitted television but sort of dummy DVD-making television to talk about no end of erudite matters of the moment. And whereas any hint of a camera lens - whether pocket digital or full-scale telecamera - normally makes me clam up and begin to do a fair impression of a long dead tree, this time the adrenalin flowed like water and I was high as a kite on it and everybody most kindly said how good I was.

So Fennie - dear - just why did you not quit while you were ahead?

Well, by the time I got on the Eurostar, I was ready to go home, but the adrenalin wasn’t. Out came the laptop, out came a sheaf of notes - had I not promised a report of my observations? Here were all sorts of things I wanted to say about the project, both good things and bad things - but I felt confident that the world and his wife would be interested in my musings for they were the best and most insightful musings in the whole wide world and they had to be committed to an email and had to be circulated.

So I typed and typed and typed. And as I typed I become more authoritarian, ‘we should,’ ‘we must,’ ‘I’m sorry but you can’t,’ ‘this is like going back to school.’ I could hear an internal dialogue in my head. “A bit strong this, isn’t it?’ says sensible me. “No, it has to be said, you know you are right. Don’t pull your punches. Don’t trim,” says the greedy child who wants yet another helping of chocolate pudding and a chance to win junior scrabble again before bedtime.

Anyway, clackety-clack, clackety clack - by this time I was back on bad old First Great Western and still typing, page after page. The following morning I was still high as a kite on the adrenalin rush. “Don’t you think, you’d better read through that missive?” asks sensible me. “No time,” comes the reply. “Must get on! Publish and be damned” and with that I hit the send button.

Immediately, the adrenalin evaporates. I wonder if it is now on the ceiling. I am hit with that truly awful “Oh what have I done?” feeling. The massed choirs of grim authority figures in my head hurl abuse and chant in unison “Wonderful are the workings of a wheelbarrow!” Worse, I wonder if I will now be sacked from the project for speaking out of turn. I am but a bottle washer. I am not Carole Vorderman! Ah well, at least people want labels.

I spent two miserable days. None of the colleagues had seemed to agree with anything I had said. But at least I had not been summoned to explain myself. And then the most marvellous thing happened. My main point, the one on which I had been most pressing and on which I had made myself most worryingly tiresome, was suddenly conceded. The project team had decided to listen to the batty bottle washer. I HAD WON!

So maybe, just very occasionally, and if I promise never, ever, to do it again - the workings of the wheelbarrow may just indeed truly be wonderful.

So God is back in his Heaven and all is right with the World. But gosh, I can be tiresome for England at times. And I think it was a near miss. Picture shows some of us in Brussels.