Ramadhan - Creativity Twenty-Four

Twenty-Four Day

If I had time to take a photo of this I would have. As it is, I didn't. Today, or rather, this morning, a man came to deliver something to the house. This happens often in my house. This was a large delivery, not for me, but as many will probably know, the delivery man doesn't seem to care who you are, as long as you sign his piece of paper. He was a nice guy, quite young and eager to talk. He had a shaved head and kept on calling me 'boss' which is something some Englishers do, a bit like 'bro' or 'man' or 'mate'. Boss. I'm not sure if I like it, but there it is. He handed me the sheet which I had to sign, attached to a clipboard and with a pen balanced cleverly on it, then he walked off to get the parcel from his van. This was a little unusual for me, since usually they have the parcel already in their hand or at their feet. Parcels for me tend to be CD-sized. They tend to be CD's. I correctly presumed that this was a larger parcel, and also that his van was not parked just outside my house as it usually would have been. He had to walk to almost next door to reach his van. In that time, I looked at the paper, which I had signed already.

It strikes me as funny that in such a controlled, sterilised, tightly wound country as Britain, a country which is very stiff on its laws and regulations (even, or especially, the everyday laws) compared to most of the world, these delivery men (if they have to go away for a few minutes) always trust you with that sheet of paper. It somehow doesn't seem British to me. Not British in terms of the spirit of the people, but in terms of the way British companies are. They don't tend to trust you with anything, they make sure that nothing which belongs to them is misused. They're like paranoid old-men. I could give examples, but I'm too tired to do so. Perhaps they trust you because it's just a piece of paper, and what can you do to vandalise or damage a piece of paper? Surely if a company can trust you with anything, it's a sheet of paper right? Fortunately, they were wrong to trust me, however my intention was not vandalising.

There I was with the piece of paper in my hand as he went off to get the delivery from his van. I stared at the signatures above and below mine- he had already done a lot of work today. I turned over to the next sheet of paper on the clipboard, full of empty boxes and printed names- he still had a long day ahead of him. I imagined some manager or secretary-type checking over all these signatures in the office come the end of the day, late afternoon or early evening, another routine day at the office. I suddenly had the urge to insert some life into it all, knowing that everday these boxes would be filled with signatures and nothing else. I wanted to colour that world, which was so black and white. If a world needed colur, it was this kind of world. Not the proud egotistical graffiti you see all over Brighton's walls, but something perhaps only one or two might ever, ever see, but those one or two might need it more than all the cosmpolitan people walking the city-streets and marvelling at the increasingly meaningless graffiti. I wanted to give flavour to a truly paper-ish, potatoe-ish world. The world of offices, post offices, working men, dried up men. I spend a lot of time in post offices. I wanted that boss or that secretary to go through the paper expecting the norm, and then find something different. I wanted to disrupt normality, be responsible for derailing or re-routing a thought-process. So I went to the end of the sheets, where there was enough white space to write in (I am forever looking for spare paper or white spaces in which I can cram a few lines) and, taking the pen he had given me, his pen, I wrote this:

Everybody's laughing.

Everybody's happy.

Here come the sun king.

I did it to create a reaction from him or anyone who might work with him, any kind of reaction would have satisfied me, I hope I succeeded, and if I didn't, the small thrill of doing something I wasn't supposed to do created happiness in me for a morning. Therefore, creative impulses should be followed. Before anything else you might aspire to, it's important to remember that creativity is its own reward, first and foremost.

Y.Misdaq, Ramadhan 24, 1427