Free Highbridge by Phil Redmond Page A

by the font design and word shapes rather than the cluster of letters.
    Sean was reflecting on this as he finished the last bit of Red Dragon, then wiped the runny remnants of egg, beans and tomato sauce from his plate with a piece of toast. Something Sandra wouldn’t let him do at home. It was another of life’s great mysteries still to be solved, why no one had yet been able to bottle that extraordinary culinary mix that remains after a runny egg breakfast. Probably linked to individual preferences, Sean thought as he got up to go. One person’s amount of egg against another’s beans and sauce. These are the things that make us unique. As a species we tolerate conformity but we desire individuality. It is also what makes us survive. What makes someone at some time, somewhere, decide that enough is enough and go after change.
    It was, Sean thought as he headed off, like his brother Joey’s dog Roscoe, for the daily toilet patrol, what allows people like Glynnis to slip through the education and social net. Non-conformers who are either tolerated because of a uniform understanding of difference or, more likely, dismissed for not conforming. You can be tolerated outside the system if you don’t make trouble for the system. That was what Glynnis had opted for. Something had set her apart from the herd but if she didn’t make trouble, the herd would leave her alone. But what a waste of human potential. What a waste of a life.
    As he ticked the inspection sheet on his way out of the toilets he realised he was back on the same theme he had finished up talking about the night before, after his tales of boyhood mountaineering: wasted potential. His idea for local councils to take on recidivists had gone down, as expected, like the proverbial lead balloon, although, Sean smiled, at least he had left them with the question: how do local towns face the challenge, perhaps curse, of modern life and find local solutions to their local problems when everyone seems to be focused on national targets and benchmarks?
    He had talked about the issue of teenage unemployment being, as he thought, high on the list as a root cause of all the town’s social problems. Boredom. Teenagers bored with nothing to do or look forward to, but with an almost irrepressible energy and need to explore the world around them. That was what they were genetically programmed to do. If they can’t do it legitimately, then they will find other ways. Like the drugs problem the town was currently facing. Why had it got so bad in recent years? And why did he always finish his breakfast with these sort of thoughts? Better get on and get Santa’s Garden on the go.
    It was such a good idea he would tell Byron that it was Sandra’s. Byron had a real soft spot for Sandra. Well, so did most men of a certain age who still recalled her time as Rose Queen, but Byron was also one for his own ideas. Sean had appointed him as Manager of Rock ’n’ Shrub not for his people skills but because he was as straight as a die and a stickler for detail, process and procedures. Every bulb, cutting and bag of peat would always be meticulously documented and every timecard stamped, checked and kept up to date. He was, as everyone said, anal.
    It always made Sean smile. The five-foot illiterate café manager and the six-foot-five anal-retentive garden centre manager working alongside each other. If only he could blend them and split them down the middle. But as he couldn’t, he knew it wouldn’t be a good idea to tell Byron that the Santa Garden was Glynnis’s idea. Glynnis would understand. So would Sandra. She’d lost count of how many good ideas she had supposedly had, as well as the amount of times, as a consequence, Byron had told her she should be running the place, not Sean. He picked up his plate and took it over to the counter and shouted thanks to Glynnis as he went off in search of Byron, nodding to the wannabe Mohican haircut who was talking to the Coy Carp, as he did