Hello, my name is Betty and I have asked Problem Child Bride for the use of her blog to recount my recent experiences: my rise, my fall, and how I ended up in the Pleasant Glades Hospital for Insane Ojai People (Terminal Responsibility wing, which is south-facing and has a very pleasant porch – we like to say we have the best nurses here too (shout out to Nurse Jenny! Yay!); we’re very lucky in TR wing).

Where to start? With the British police.

British police have set up an FBI-style Serious Organised Crime Agency, or SOCA but, what has not been widely reported, is the fact that they based the idea for this new agency on one of my own brain-children, the Ludicrously Ordinary Crime Agency And League (or LOCAL) and its political wing, the Committee for the Naming and Shaming of The Uncivically-Minded. Our by-line was “There Ought To Be A Law!” I was the founding member and architect of our organisation.

Much negative spin has been attached to my vision, especially lately, and outrageous accusations have been made about how I wanted to radicalize a segment of the town’s retired population with a militaristic junta-type mandate. This is rubbish: I never once insisted on camouflage although several of our merry band were quite keen.

Anyway, I am a community-minded gel and I liked the LOCALity of our acronym (hohoho!). George , the treasurer, certainly made us smile when he pointed that one out. I can’t claim the credit, although I wish I could be as quick as George, who was a bit of a wag, I’ll have to admit, as well as a no-good, back-stabbing parvenu.

LOCAL patrolled Ojai regularly, and our nightly and daily perambulations uncovered much uncivic activity, of which the following is a sampling:

Poor Parking. For lazy parkers We would leave a sternly-worded message on the car’s windshield advising them that “Proper People Park Proper!”. Then we’d draw a chalk outline around the car and measure its angle of deviance from the parking lines. It was a bit fiddly ‘cos Mr. McTavish’s pocket protractor was very small (Mrs. McTavish, who was often along on our raids, complained about that quite bitterly, I recall, as did, interestingly, their neighbour Mrs. Wanton-Hershey, also remarking that “wee McT” liked to deviate from the norm, regularly – I didn’t know what she meant and didn’t know Norm either).

Abandoning of supermarket trolleys, mid-aisle: This was a lone-wolf operation, dealt with as encountered, but generally involved the apprehension of the offending cart and the restacking of its contents back on the shelves, so the perpetrator (LOCAL code word ‘filthy perps’) would learn a hard lesson in abandonment as they had to re-shop all the things we’d put back.

The only flaw in this piece of civic-minded guerilla warfare, was that, occasionally, as members of LOCAL emptied someone’s carelessly left cart, it would mean having to abandon our own carts and we would return to find our own cart had been LOCALed. Arguments amongst members often got heated about this and, the first time management had to be called was, in retrospect, the beginning of The Trouble and the slipping of my own hands on the reins of power. George, that black-hearted opportunist was always there though, to capitalise, murmering things like “poor organisation” and “no longer up to the job“. Git.

The psychiatrist has often tried to link this particular supermarket-trolley action of ours to my own chil-abandonment issues, but I will have none of it. I’m just not the sort to try to inflict my personal neuroses on the public at large.

But the busiest unit was, undoubtedly, the Wedneday morning The Rise and Shine Breakfast Bunch, as we liked to call ourselves. We met weekly, for a 7am breakfast-meeting at he Sunny-Side Up restaurant to discuss strategy and enjoy like-minded company.

The Breakfast Bunch were a team of crack-commando apostrophe-removers or adders and patrolled the town’s bad punctuation hot-spots frequently, with a large brush and tins of poster paint. We laughed about how we were ‘possessed’ by correct usage of the possesive and plural. Mea culpa – in my last Christmas round-robin I did urge everybody to “run-not-walk to for a fabulous twofer deal on hilarious elf apron’s at Barneys Noveltie Shoppe“. Didja spot them? George (that Judas) kindly pointed them out to me (although, at the time, I really didn’t think he had to do it in front of everyone in the Tuesday Pannakeuken House meeting).

I first noticed the heavy toll LOCAL was taking when the doctor informed me my cholesterol had climbed to unsafe levels, due to all the eggs and bacon breakfast and pancake-house meetings, and later, the stress of leadership and George’s coup were to give me an ulcer, a nervous tic, and the tendency to bark whenever George (God, how I hate him) was about. Arf arf woof! Where is he? Is he here now? Nurse!

Now that you have an idea of my background philosophy and circumstances – where I was coming from, if you will – I will retire to sob for a while over the good old days and, later, I will detail for you My Downfall and how I came to be a voluntary (now) resident of Pleasant Glades Home for Insane Ojai People.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, April 5th, 2006 at 6:42 pm and is filed under Fictionoids. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.