I digress

I digress

Today I thought of the phrase " To beat about the bush", meaning ' to prevaricate', be indecisive or slow to do or say something. The reason this popped into my mind is because I saw a man in his mid- fifties, in the street , beating up a bush. He was throwing wild punches and high kicks, using some grappling techniques I recognised from wrestling and judo, sweating, and shouting something in a language I did not understand. ( He was from one of the southern former Russian republics, maybe the Caucasus. Just a quick word on that word "Caucasus", if you don't mind a slight digression?


In Britain, or, if you like, the United Kingdom, if you see a police officer chasing a shoplifter down the street near Tesco's, for example, you may see him stop, out of breath, put his hands on his knees, and say into his Walkie Talkie - " I am in pursuit of a Caucasian male, about 25 years old, very big feet, strangely big, as if he was wearing false clown boots, but he's run away , he was too fast for me, I couldn't keep up, please send some of our fastest officers to help me catch him...this man runs like the wind, how he can run like that with such big feet I've no idea...it's like one of those dreams where you want to run but can't...but I'm giving up now, I'm knackered...."


Notice how our friendly British Bobby used the word "Caucasian". This denotes that the man being chased was white, or slightly pink. It means 'not black and not brown, and not Chinese'. Now, isn't that strange, when you think about it? Why do we use the word 'Caucasian' to mean 'white male'?


Because (please let me start a sentence with 'because'), The Caucasus is a range of mountains near the Black Sea, incuding areas like Dagestan and Chechnya, where people certainly don't have white complexions, but are famous for being dark-skinned. Russians refer to them by many labels, but one of them is ..ahem...'black'. Anyway, I digress.
Back to the Bushbeater. His curses sounded like Arabic , his shiny head glistened with sweat , a bit like a date.


Now, in life, sometimes we should act quickly but we don't. We are much slower in reality than we are in our heads. In our heads we are capable of all kinds of things, and imagine that we would do 'this' and 'that' very quickly in the event that 'this' or 'that' happened. But it's not true. In reality, we are very slow, and when 'this' or 'that' happens, we seem to get stuck like in one of those dreams where you are being chased but you can't run, your legs feel like they were stuck in treacle, and then you wake up, just as 'this' or 'that' is about to catch up with you. This is, thank God, one of the few blesssings of such dreams, that we do wake up before 'this' or 'that' grabs us, it would be terrible for the dream to continue after 'this' or 'that' had grabbed us and proceeded to mutilate us slowly and deliberately. Thank God I never had such dreams, and may God spare me from them in the future.


Sometimes we should do the opposite of what we decide to do. Three months ago I was walking home to my old room in Avtozavoskaya ( in Russian, this means "District full of automobile factories), at about 6pm, so it was still dark and the streets were covered in ice. A soft blanket of snow was falling, it was like an typical idyllic British Winter scene from a Victorian postcard.
As I walked towards the front door of my block of flats, a family was walking towards me. They were all wobbling slightly, and I could see they had been drinking. The father was a big limbed man, two feet taller than me (I am just under 5 ft 9) with a black moustache. He was thumping his son, who was slightly smaller but still big, about 20 years old perhaps, in the chest. The mother was also big and was pointing at the father shouting at him to stop. The older lady was probably the man's mother, because she was pointing angrily at the mother, shouting "It's his son, he can hit him if he wants". Meanwhile the son was shouting "Don't hit me Dad". The Dad was shouting "I'll fucking hit you if I want, I'll fucking knock you out if you don't shut it...".


I could see something bad was about to happen, and it did. The mother poked the father in the chest and told him to stop. The father pulled his fist right back, as if he was getting ready to hit one of those fairground punching targets with a big dial, a 'punchometer', which shows how strong your punch is. She didn't try to move out of the way, even though the fist was held back for at least 2 seconds (which is further proof that we are much slower in reality than in our minds), and the man planted his thump bang on her chin. She dropped to the floor in a heap and the son bent down and started crying ''Mum, Mum....".


Do you ever do things on automatic pilot, without thinking? I'm sure you do. Are there some situations where you just react with your instincts and do something, and then later wish you had done it differently? I'm sure you do. We all do, don't we? For example, if you're a parent and you saw a child being hurt, you'd try to help it wouldn't you? Or a dog being kicked, something like that, each person has his 'thing' that he reacts to. Sometimes it's probably wiser and safer to do nothing. Anway, I dropped my shopping and ran towards the father.

Time slowed down, and as I ran, it seemed my legs were stuck in dream treacle, not quite sure of what I was going to do when I reached him, he was much bigger, it wouldn't be a good idea to start wrestling with him, so I just did what came naturally and threw, from the side, an uppercut which missed his chin and caught him in the mouth. It wasn't enough to knock him out, but it made him very angry. Suddenly I was moving backwards on the ice, skidding and falling, the father, the son and the mother-in-law were coming towards me in waves, like in the dream, I couldn't wake up, my legs were stuck in treacle, my punch had failed, like a wolve's nip, to bring down the bear. And now the bear and his moustache were coming for me, and his cub, and the awful giant babushka. The mother was still out cold on the pavement.


Ice is a terrible surface for fighting on, perhaps the worst, apart from sand. Both are also shit for playing football on. I could never understand "beach football" for example.
The man was the first to reach me and grabbed my coat. I slipped and fell down, almost voluntarily, as if it was part of the dream, and was going to happen anyway. The giant babushka, who looked like Big Daddy, got me in a neck lock as I was lying on the floor, the son grabbed my leg, and the father took wild kicks at my body and head. The babushka was strong, by God she must have been a wrestler in her youth. The father shouted: " I'll teach you to poke your fucking nose in..."


They say words are weapons, well , at this moment, I had no others at my disposal, as I was gripped on all sides. It was time to use my language skills, but when I'm nervous, my Russian isn't so good. I said " You punched your wife, I wanted to defend her"
Big Daddy shouted: " WHAT!!!?? It's HIS fucking wife, it's NONE of your fucking business!".
The giant black Moustache shouted "Yes, it's MY WIFE, not yours...I'll do as I want". (As I looked at him, from below, it seemed like he wasn't a man, with a face, but just an enormous black moustache on legs).

At this precise moment I had a flashback to childhood, when I was woken in the night by a prowler outside my bedroom window, who also had a giant black moustache and turned out to be ( when I chased him barefoot up the road in my underpants), a local farmer by whom I had been given my first Saturday job, digging pig drains for 10 pounds a day. Rumour had it he was an ex-member of the Special Boat Service, which would explain all the fancy diving paraphernalia in his shed, and perhaps also the night prowling and stalking, but needless to say after that night I never showed up on his farm again. He was probably just lonely, his wife had died, or left him, I don't remember which, he had a small daughter who was very thin and pale.


I tried another approach, and felt I heard shades of Withnail in the pub when the homophobic Irishman threatens him:
" I have a heart condition, I'm a foreigner, I did't understand your customs, your ways, they are different from my culture, in my culture we don't hit women...now let's discuss this in a civilised manner...."
My words had their effect and they lost interest. A reasonable victim isn't much fun.


So, back to our Bushbeater.
As he was attacking the shrub, I wondered if it would be better to nip off to the right or left and not keep walking straight towards him. After all, he was on the pavement. I prevaricated in my head, but my legs kept walking words him. As he was 'beating up the bush' I was 'beating about the bush'.


As I was walking past him I heard him mutter something which sounded like : " By eck, the fucker deserved it", but as this is Yorkshire dialect I realised it must have been some Arabic sounds that were similar. An old lady approached him and told him to stop attacking the bush, as it had done nothing to him. I remembered a story my American friend Kevin told me about a Caucasian man punching his girlfriend in the face on a crowded Moscow bus. A right thumping whopper. No one did anything. So while it isn't a correct idiom to say "beat up the bush", in Moscow this will usually attract more attention and indignation than "to beat up your bird".

I digress.