G-Dog Advises Me to Go Big on the Blackberries - a Tommy & Moon Story

It was a few weeks into autumn and I hadn’t had a hair cut since before the summer solstice.  My beard, long and straggly and in desperate need of trimming, was a week away from having birds nest in it.  I unpolished my boots and wore some old jeans that were ripped at the knees and dirty from digging a deep hole on a particularly wet day in Highgate Cemetery.  Hanging loosely over the top of those was a baggy grey jumper I spilt half a bottle of bleach over about three years ago.  I looked a bit of a state, but there was a method to my madness.  Today was the day I was going to ask Moon for a pay rise and I wanted to look as if I’d been trod on.

On the morning I was due to ask him, my bike got a puncture not twenty yards down the road from my house. It wasn’t a polite slow puncture so that I might finish my journey on a squidgy but rideable front tyre; the thorn tore through that poor inner tube like a javelin through jelly and it had me riding on a steel rim within seconds.  I turned back, wheeled my bike into the garage and walked to work.  I muttered obscenities under my breath, knowing that now I’d be late for work, on the very day I’d planned to ask for a pay rise.  But I didn’t know at the time what that thorn would do for me.

But I was pleased with my dishevelled look.  I’d considered eating nothing but soup for two weeks so that my jumper might hang a little looser on The Big Day.  I wanted to give the appearance I wasn’t eating, or couldn’t afford to eat, but there was a problem: I liked eating, and I could afford to eat.  The theory behind dieting was magnificent, and I tried my best to enter into it, deciding that biscuits were my downfall and by far my biggest weakness.  Attempts were made to eliminate them from my diet altogether, and it worked for two and a half hours, until elevenses came a-knocking.  I compromised: I managed to cut down by a quarter of a Hobnob biscuit per day, from three to almost three.  But the only way I could do that was by switching from plain Hobnobs to Chocolate Hobnobs.  So you can see how any attempt at looking emaciated was riddled with acts of self-sabotage and ultimately futile - signed Yours Truly, The Biscuit Monster. 

As I was thinking about this, quick-stepping it down the lane towards work, I bumped into G-Dog quick-stepping it in the same direction with her Springer Spaniel.    

I secretly called her G-Dog because her name was Gertie and she came with a dog.  She didn’t like the name Gertie so she insisted on her childhood nickname of Diddy or Doddy or Doody but I could never remember which one it was.  She lived in the next village and was a partner in a local firm of estate agents.  Her husband was a carpenter and had built Moon a greenhouse using the glass, door and doorframe of the previous one that had blown down in a storm.  Her dog’s name was either Dido or Dodi.  G-Dog was a prolific blackberry picker, as was I, and we had crossed paths several times over the years as we both went about picking at hedgerows around the perimeter of one particularly fruitful field close by.  We liked nothing more than free food.  And talking about blackberries.    

‘No bike?’ G-Dog said.

‘Puncture.  Shanks’ Pony for me today.’ 

‘Bad luck.’

‘Picking many blackberries?’

‘It’s a good crop this year.  I made some blackberry bread last night.  It’s delicious.’

‘How’s work?’

‘Hellish,’ she said.  ‘I don’t want to talk about it.  How’s the carving going?’

‘It’s going well.  Getting faster.  I’m thinking of asking for a pay rise today.’ 

‘Great!  Go big.’

‘Go big?’

‘Yeah, go big.  It’s the only way to go.’

‘How big?’

‘Pick a number on the blackberry scale.  Nought to one hundred.’

‘Nought being no pay rise and one hundred being my dream pay rise?’

‘Yep.’

‘I was thinking of maybe forty blackberries.’

‘No!’ She shouted.  It made Dido or Dodi jump. 

‘No?’

‘If you ask for forty, Moon will offer twenty and then you’ll settle on thirty little shrivelled old blackberries.  That’s not a lot.  It won’t be worth getting out of bed for.  Be ambitious.  Try again.’

‘If I ask for eighty blackberries, I’d wonder which one of his children’s mouths I’m taking food out of.’

‘No!  Be bold.  I’ve seen your work and I know what you do for him.’ 

‘Am I even worth a hundred blackberries?’ 

‘Who’s to say you’re not worth a hundred and fifty blackberries?  Remember: once you’ve given a number, you can’t negotiate up.  You can only negotiate down.’

‘I can’t ask anything over ninety.  That’d be rude.’

‘Balls!  Go big on the blackberries.  Ask for a hundred and ten.  He’ll offer ninety.  Split the difference at hundred.  He’ll think he’s got a bargain and you’ve got your dream pay rise.  But can I offer a bit of advice?’

‘Go ahead.'   

‘Promise me you’ll get a good hair cut before you ask him.’