Go Rest High On That Mountain

It’s Tuesday afternoon, 3pm when Vic blusters her way into the community centre, harried and flushed. Her usual shtick. She’s wearing black wraparound sunglasses and a voluminous red ski jacket. She looks like she has just stepped off of the Alps, and has missed lunch.

“Hello darling,” she coos, waggling her fingers at me through the office window.

Vic, the current Chair of our trustees committee, is a foul-mouthed, overweight TV producer in her late fifties with a thing for dramatic entrances. Many of the other board members are rightfully wary of Vic, whose hobbies include drinking too much and stabbing people in the back. Working darkly in the shadows Vic has orchestrated the removal and resignation of several of her fellow trustees in her ascent to the throne of Chair. We call her Cersei, after the conniving Lannister queen, for good reason. I’d trust Vic as far as I could roll her.

I know for a fact that she has been bad mouthing me to Colin of late so was braced for her two-faced performance today, but it doesn’t make it any easier to bear. Why she has decided to have it in for me, now, after all these years, I can only speculate. It might have something to do with a grinning photo of myself I recently put on the community centre website with me making the sign of the horns in an old school heavy metal salute. It is entirely possible that Vic, a devout Christian, has taken my tongue in cheek reference literally and believes that I really am in service to the devil.

“How was Austria?” I ask her. I can just picture her huffing and puffing around the Tyrolean Alps, retracing the Führer’s footsteps, admiring his beloved vistas.

“Wonderful!” she tells me before going on at length about it. Having to endure the trustees’ accounts of their holidays abroad is a part of our job description. Our company secretary is only in this country half the year. The rest of the time he’s either in Australia, the Bahamas or Silicon Valley where he has dubious connections in the tech industry. (The young Arab man he keeps under his stairs is a whole other story.) All the trustees remain wilfully oblivious to the fact that on our wages, Colin and I couldn’t possibly afford the same opportunities for broadening our horizons. Vic complains that she and her husband might have to downsize their home when their son finally leaves for university. She seems entirely oblivious to the fact that if they sold just one of their properties – they have several, including a house in France – their day to day cash-flow problems could be solved in a snap. It’s a curious thing that wealthy people whose money is tied up in assets don’t consider themselves at an advantage to the rest of us who own, literally, nothing of worth and struggle to even heat our own home let alone maintain several.

Entwined in an on-off, love-hate relationship with Vic is Gail, another similarly self-absorbed Christian do-gooder and veteran trustee. Gail drops into the centre unexpectedly this week having just returned glowing from five weeks in India. Parking herself in the office in her shocking pink bobble hat and matching lipstick, Gail tells me how the experience has fundamentally changed her and she can’t wait to get back out there again.

“You should go to India,” she tells me. “It’s such an amazing place.”

“Yes,” I reply. “So I’ve heard. I’d like to.”

“Hm?”

Like Vic, Gail is an appalling listener. A brusque and matronly ex-hospital ward manager who has just taken early retirement, when working she would frequently turn up late to meetings still in uniform, tolerating the other board members with arms folded and barely concealed impatience. I have never once seen Gail looking like she wasn’t thinking of something else she would rather be doing. Now I know where her mind was. Up a mountain in the Himalayas.

“I made so many lovely friends,” she crows, “and it’s so cheap out there. 20p for a cup of tea. I don’t think I ever spent more than £1.50 on my evening meal.”

She tells me how she spent the first two weeks of her trip teaching English to monks in the north of the country. Then she went south to what she describes as ‘her’ orphanage. I can’t criticise Gail for trying to make a positive difference in the world, only her holier-than-thou attitude. Whilst away she also turned vegetarian.

“I lost five pounds,” she says, pulling at the fabric of her trousers, “my clothes are all baggy now.”

Hardly. But as long as she’s feeling good about herself. The same can’t be said for her friends in the village she lives in, whom she is not feeling so positive about any more. Knowing that the last stop on her travels had been Singapore, none of them would come out to pick her up from the airport for fear of catching the coronavirus.

“So I sent them all a message telling them just what I thought of them,” she says. “I don’t need people like that in my life. ‘I expect I’ll see you around in the village’, I told them. ‘But don’t ask me for any more favours’.”

That’s the spirit, Gail.

Historically there have always been tensions between those members of the board representing the church and those representing the community. The community centre itself was set up by non-church going folk, the church’s presence on the board was a stipulation of the landlord – the local diocese. Back in the day, when there was a particularly zealous priest in the Chair for a while, yoga, astrology and tarot classes were all considered un-Christian activites and banned from the centre. These days the church-goers don’t pay too much attention to the groups we have in, they’re far more focussed on where they’re going next on their holidays.