The Soggy Syndrome

I started this blog to write about my frustrations with my mum and dad's stupid bed and breakfast and their annoying GUESTS who have made my life HELL this summer and turned me into a REFUGEE who doesn't know from one night to the next where he is going to sleep, except I know it won't be in my own room.

I've written quite a few of these postings now, and I've realised that they're not just about my mum and dad's B&B, but about what it's like to live in St Ives which most people think is idyllic and tell me how lucky I am to live here, but which is actually a daily purgatory of annoyances and frustrations which in my small way I am constantly fighting against. I feel like that little kid on the trike in The Shining most days, you're just going about your ordinary everyday life and then the lift doors open and a massive tsunami of something not right bursts out and totally innundates you.

In the local paper, The Cornishman, this week there was a story about an end-to-end family (that's a family doing John o'Groats to Land's End) on bikes for charity, which turns out to be raising money for their local Scouts. That's not much of a real charity if you ask me and more like a middle class form of begging, but that's not the point of the story. This family had this teddy bear called Dexter who was like their mascot, a really scruffy bear with an eye patch, dressed up in a tee shirt, and having done 955 miles of the journey they stop off for an ice cream in Penzance, that's about 10 miles from Land's End, according to the paper 'leaving their bikes parked opposite on the railings to be guarded by Dexter.' Well, Dexter turns out to be pretty shit at his job, because surprise, surprise, when they come back the bikes are still there but somebody has nicked him. Haven't these people heard of the Pirates of Penzance, or do they think because we're lucky enough to live in a lovely place we don't have any deprivation, crime or people opportunistic enough to nick teddy bears from emmets' bikes?

According to the paper, Dexter had already been lucky to make it this far, his 'adventures' en route having included 'almost losing him when he fell into a waterfall in the Lake District.'

Now, this idea of a teddy bear having 'adventures' is the problem isn't it? If a teddy bear falls into a waterfall, it's not that it's being 'adventurous', but that the kid or whoever is supposed to be looking after it has been careless enough to drop it over the edge. And if a teddy bear is left to 'guard' a family's bikes while they go off to enact some Famous Five fantasy involving ice cream, it's not surprising that when they come back it's going to have gone missing. Not because it's having an adventure, not because it's chased off a gang of thieves who were trying to nick the bikes, help a seagull with an injured foot or rescue a mermaid from the fish counter at Tesco, and then got itself lost, but because somebody has nicked it.

Which brings me to the real subject of this posting and the question who is responsible for all this? It's Soggy the Bastard Bear, that's who. This summer it's been impossible to walk past the bookshop on Fore Street without having to push your way through throngs of emmet kids dragging their dads (usually their dads) by the hand to see the window display of the latest cash-register ringing 'adventure' of Soggy the Bear, the local teddy bear hero, who despite having a Parkinson's sufferer's inability to stand up in a moving boat without falling over the side, manages to beat off pirates and find buried treasure before washing up in St Ives, with his stupid, smug self-satisfied smirk and his spiky Bjorkish fur. This anthropomorphic nonsense gives emmet kids the impression that by randomly chucking their teddy bear off the back of the Scillionian or Old Man's Head or burying it in a hole on Porthmeor Beach and waiting for the tide to come in, it'll eventually turn up just when they least expect it, dripping seawater on their pillow as they sleep, but otherwise, none the worse for its 'adventure'.

My guess is that Dexter has either ended up in the harbour or possibly is being held to ransom by someone who saw an opportunity to make a few quid out of some gullible end to enders who'd been daft enough to leave their teddy bear in charge of some bikes that no doubt advertised the fact that's what they were. I wouldn't be surprised to see a story in next week's paper about Dexter having been 'kidnapped', perhaps with a photo of him holding the paper with the date on it, and a ransom demand for £100 to be paid to a charitable cause, and it all ending happily with the family reunited with their adventurous teddy bear. In the Stockholm Syndrome (which would make a really good film title) hostages start to empathise with their captors. In the Soggy Syndrome, kids are lied to to prevent them from realising that some grown ups, their parents included, are actually quite manipulative and irresponsible tossers.