Brewed
By Joby Bottoms
Copyright 2012 Joby Bottoms
Smashwords Edition
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Brewed – A Prologue
“Out of shit, grows flowers” – Big Sue 2007
Tea - The Beginning: From a young age I quickly became aware that any problem could be fixed as long as there was a cup of tea to hand. When someone had a serious issue that needed resolving, nothing would be discussed until our kettle called George had been filled with water, placed on the gas ring and whistled his way to boiling point, then one of my siblings, who would be stationed in the kitchen to keep an eye on the boiling kettle would shout, “George” at the top of their voices so that one of the adults would come and make the tea. Dear old George, he died aged seventeen, would then be used to directly fill up a number of chipped mugs (cups and saucers if Nan was round) or a cracked up old brown teapot (if guests were round). Discussions would then commence over steaming mugs of Sainsbury’s own brand tea, I think it was called Red Label.
Tea has featured in my life from an early age. Is it no surprise then that I write this from a 140 acre tea estate in the central hills of Sri Lanka, which used to be owned by Sir Thomas Lipton, of Lipton’s Tea fame? My Journey is one that started in humble beginnings (bloody poor) to an enchanted and enriched life on a working tea estate located on the Paradise Island that is Sri Lanka. This brings me nicely to my opening quote from the most wonderful human being who has known me since the day I was born, Big Sue. I went to live with Big Sue in East London when I was twenty-six years old. She divulged to me many stories about my childhood, giving me the full account from her “outsiders” perspective. If Buddha had been told these stories while meditating under the Bo tree it would have definitely come crashing down on his head. After enthralling and appalling me with the true stories behind the façade that formed my childhood, she concluded with, “As I’ve always said Joby, Out of Shit Grows Flowers”; my siblings and I being the “shit” who blossomed into beautiful “flowers”. Big Sue never disappoints with her post-modern poetic verse.
Before moving to Sri Lanka in February 2011 to manage the tea estate I thought it best to conduct some research into tea; how it grows, how best to maintain the plants to optimize on the yield, how much cow poo to put it in the ground to keep everything organic and all other manner of things that I thought were necessary to understand prior to taking on the job. I spent hour’s Google-ing, Yahoo-ing, Bing-ing, Wikipedia-ing and all the other “ing” things that need to be done to get adequate information from the various sources on the web. It was imperative to do this, I thought, as I had absolutely no knowledge or experience of tea (other than drinking it with milk and one sugar and as a medicine to cure a quarrel), farming, agriculture, nature, wildlife, biodiversity, carbon off-setting, organicasmatronic yielding and all of the other weird words that I’ve come across while doing my research that continue to make no sense to me at all. Actually, I made up organicasmatronic by combining “organic” and a slant on “Ana Matronic” from the Scissor Sisters because I particularly the band. It sounds agricultural though doesn’t it?
What I did discover was that there are hundreds, if not thousands, of books and articles that have been written about tea and the further I got into my research the more it marveled me how the authors of these books and articles described tea in celebratory, ceremonious, enriching and enlightening terms. I got fairly carried away with the illustrious prose on how hop, skip and jumpy tea was and still is, despite the coffee revolution. How joyous, I thought, to be involved with tea at a cow shit level. From dung to tea cup, I’m bound to become enlightened.
Now the con to being a romanticist is that nothing really ever turns out to be as romantic as the romanticist would have liked. Rose-tinted glasses always tend to lose their colour in direct sunlight and end up blinding the not-so-fashion-conscious wearer because of the lack of UV protection once the pink has faded. The downfall of my experience with tea however is not for this story. I am reserving it for another day, for a sequel perhaps. I’m thinking of calling the sequel “Drunk” because after something has “Brewed” (the title of this book if you hadn’t already noticed), I figure that the next logical step is to drink whatever it is that has been brewed.
For now, I hope you enjoy “Brewed”. It is a series of essays based around certain themes that form the story of my life, up until the point that I packed my bag, aged thirty, and departed for the unknown; employed by “the actress” and “the entrepreneur” who gave me a shot at looking after their business affairs abroad.
Namely Me
I entered the world on the 4th February 1981, I’m not exactly sure of the time that I was born and neither is my Mother, although she pretends to know in an attempt to show me that I’m special. To be fair to her though, how can she possibly remember, after all I’m the sixth one down from the top, or third one up from the bottom, depending on your viewpoint, out of a total of eight. That’s right; Mum has eight kids, which is rather a lot for the generation in to which I was born. It’s worth noting that my Mother is the eldest of eight children so I guess it was pretty normal for her to then produce eight of her own; it’s one of those “behavioral cycle” things that therapists talk about.
Ok, in acknowledgement of my Mum’s attempt at making me feel special, I was born on the 4th February 1981, at sometime around 11:30pm. I’m not sure how long after this that they decided to name me, but my Birth Certificate reads: Jubal Obadiah Bottoms. And don’t be mistaken that I am lucky enough to have even an inch of ethnicity about me; I am a Caucasian, thirty year old male with the name Jubal Obadiah Bottoms. My ingenious sister, Teresa (she managed to score a normal name), decided that to avoid confusion in the house because my Father was also called Jubal; they should come up with a nickname for me. She took the J from Jubal, the O from Obadiah and the B from Bottoms and stuck a Y on the end because at the time of my birth I was the youngest, resulting in JOBY. Thank you Teresa, you are a life saver, not least because I only had to learn to spell Joby Bottoms before starting school.
So I have only ever been called Joby. I was registered at school as Joby and I never had to acknowledge the full name that is printed in bold on my fading birth certificate. Of course, I still had Bottoms to contend with but I’ve always been a fairly resilient chap and learnt very quickly that the best form of defense was to attack myself first. “Yeah, yeah, Bottoms is my name, the plural of arse”, I would say to my lesser intelligent friends at Primary school (the word “plural” sufficiently baffled them so that they couldn’t quip back at me). It wasn’t always easy though and it didn’t help that I was rather chubby when I was younger. There were times when I’d be called Joby the Hut, after that fat creature from the Star Wars films. I later learned to turn this around by calling myself Joby Wan Kenobi, after the Jedi Master which was much more favorable. However this inevitably became an insult when one smart ass decided to add; “nobody wants to know me” onto the end of Joby Wan Kenobi, therefore creating a rhyme which would occasionally be chanted at me.
In the midst of all this, I did make friends at Primary school, I guess because I was the fat, funny one in the class. One such friend was Stephen Gracie and his family came from Glasgow so he had a Scottish accent. I remember him being a good friend to me in Primary school. I later became reacquainted with him at Secondary school and he told me that he used to laugh about my first name. I couldn’t understand why he would take preference in mocking my first name when my surname was so clearly humorous. He told me that when Joby is pronounced with a Scottish accent, it becomes “Jobby”, which is slang for a shit. Jobby Bottoms; just go ahead and call me Shit Arse for short.
Thankfully my Father died when I was twelve years old. Within two weeks of his death I asked my Mother if there was any way I could change my name. It turns out that for the price of five Great British Pounds; a minor can visit the Citizen’s Advice Bureau along with a Parent or Guardian and have their name legally changed by Deed Poll. With a skip in my step I accompanied my Mother and two younger brothers to this magical Bureau and legally became Joby Davies. No more Jubal, no more Obadiah (which as an adult I’ve really come to like) and no more Bottoms. At the age of twelve, I thankfully became Joby Davies, having taken my Mother’s maiden name. My cherished Change of Name Deed now accompanies my Birth Certificate on all official outings.
As an adult I have asked my Mother why I received such a hideous name when my siblings were named as follows, in chronological order from the top; Teresa, Peter, John, Donna, Michael, Jubal Obadiah, Nathaniel Mordecai and William. Of course, it would be unfair of me not to have some sympathy for Nathaniel (later known as Naff) who was always called Nathaniel Moldy Pie which rhymes with Mordecai, but he’s never expressed any anguish over his birth name and anyway, he’s far less sensitive than me. My dear Mother has only ever been able to respond to me by advising that she gave my Father the opportunity to name both Nathaniel and myself, and he wanted me to have his first name, like many alpha-males wanting to have a son named after them, which personally I believe is directly attributed to a man’s inflated ego. For this decision I cannot criticize my Mother, it’s most likely that she’d run out of name’s by the time she got to me.
However, there is one thing that continues to baffle me. At my Father’s funeral, his younger brother, Lorry; more of a large vehicle than a name, advised my brother Peter that my Father’s name was in fact George and not Jubal at all.
What’s in a name anyway?
Naturally I am not alone in the Bad Names Department. At Secondary school, there was a kid in my tutor group with the most marvelous of surnames. His name was Stephen Acock. I’ve often thought how wonderful it would have been if we could have collaborated on a script of some kind; “A Play by Acock & Bottoms” has rather a nice ring to it. Stephen was slightly introvert, in fact he would spend his entire break and lunch times walking the circumference of the playground with his arms folded until the bell rung at which point he’d return to class. Luckily for Stephen there was another chap in our tutor group, Will Evans, who went to the same primary school as him and he suggested that we befriend him as both of Stephen’s parents were blind. At the age of twelve there’s a natural, non-judgmental compassion that is instantly applied when you find out that someone’s parents are blind. So we started silently walking around the playground with him during break times.
Stephen became our silent friend and we shared the journey through Secondary school together; albeit with the minimum of conversation. When we all hit the Sixth Form to study for our A-level exams, something remarkable happened to Stephen Acock. Completely out of the blue, he announced that he was going to change his surname. The remarkable thing about this was that he asked everyone in the Common Room to write their suggestions onto small slips of paper and to put them into a bag, one of which would then become his new surname; this coming from a boy who’d rarely spoken in the five years that I’d known him.
Later that day, we had the “name-draw”. I devilishly wrote “Bottoms” on my slip of paper and I nervously waited, hoping that I would be able to give the gift of my old name to my dear friend Stephen. There was a wonderful feeling of excitement in the Common Room as Stephen put his hand into the small bag that had been filled with perhaps fifty names; one of which would accompany him to the Citizens Advice Bureau to be entered onto the most marvelous of official documents, the Change of Name Deed.
That day, Stephen Acock put the beginning of his adult life into the hands of his peers and luckily for him he pulled out the name Maverick. Fittingly this had been the choice of Will Evans; it was the name of his favorite chocolate bar.
I lost touch with Stephen Maverick after school but if you are reading this Stephen; I want you to know that I am very proud of you for the way in which you chose to change your name. Rest assured though, you’ll always be Acock to me.
A name helps to define a person. I once read that people choose their professions and careers based on word associations linked to their names. Apparently there are many Dentists called Dennis. Seriously, I read this in a book and the evidence put forward really stacked up. In fact someone was giving a discussion on this at a lecture somewhere in America and afterwards some wise guy from the audience said that he knew a man named Dennis who wasn’t a Dentist. The lecturer asked the audience member what his friend’s occupation was, at which point the wise guy let out a big sigh and admitted that his friend Dennis was a Demolition worker.
After reading this I wanted to put the theory to the test so I thought long and hard about how I may have subconsciously chosen my career based on my name, Joby. The fact is I’ve had a varied career, a large portion of which has been spent within the business development arena of the Parking Industry. I couldn’t link J to either Parking or to Business Development so I decided to go a little further back, to the beginning of my work life. I’ve been a Milk Boy, an Assistance Carpet Fitter, a Bar Tender, a Table Waiter, a Call Centre Operator, a Window-Glazing Broker, a Tele-Marketer, a part-time Removal Man, a Recruitment Consultant, a Parking Attendant, a Bid Analyst, a New Business Surveyor, a Business Development Manager and I’m now a Director of two Investment Companies in Sri Lanka. None of these positions link even remotely to the letter J. I have looked over these roles again, trying to link Davies, but again this seems to have failed. In desperation I have even tried linking my birth name of Bottoms but this only links to Business, so I’m not sure that this is correct either.
After spending far too long on this, I suddenly hit clarity. I just needed to look a little beyond the length of my nose, which is a Roman nose and therefore requires good eyesight in order to see beyond it. The reason that I believe this name linking theory to be correct and therefore the reason that my career has been so varied, why I’ve seemingly been landed in a wide variety of positions in a mixed array of companies and why I am now working in Sri Lanka overseeing the development of two large projects, is because my name is Joby. I have JOB in my name. I have the luxury of being able to subconsciously and therefore practically link myself to any job!
And for this I have my sister Teresa, the Citizens Advice Bureau and my Change of Name Deed to thank.
Disg-racist
I didn’t realize this until I was around eleven or twelve years old but up until this point in my life I was a racist. It’s a really horrible thing to realize about oneself. Once this realization hit I started looking at the way that I behaved and felt towards people that were of a different color to me. The truth is that my behavior was absolutely appalling.
When I was in Infants school, aged about six, I took a pen-knife into school with me. I found the pen-knife the evening before, underneath my Brother Michael’s bed, so I stole it and packed it into my school rucksack ready for my plan the following day. There was a boy in the same year as me, although in a different class, whose name I shan’t provide for fear of reminding him of what a shit I was (how vain of me to think he’d even be reading my story). I’m not sure where his parent’s or their family were from originally and although he was born in Britain and therefore British, in my six year old brain I simply remember thinking of him as a “paki”. In addition to this I perceived him as my rival. I considered myself to be the toughest kid in the Infants. I’m not sure why I felt this or who had put it into my head that I was a tough-nut, but I remember feeling pretty convinced that I could absolutely deck anyone that picked a fight with me. The problem for me was that the people in this other boys class all thought that he was the toughest kid.
Occasionally, one of the kids from his class would say to me, “He can have you” (meaning he could beat me up easily). The combination of this taunt along with this boy being brown, and therefore immediately hated by me, was enough to send the six year old version of myself into a rage. On one particular day, this taunt came more than once from a few different people in his class. I remember replying to these little shit-stirrers, “Tell the paki to come and try then”. A fight between him and I did not ensue that day simply because (I realize now) that he was from a very good family who I guess must have taught him that the bigger man need only to walk away and not to get involved with horrible children (like myself at the time). I remember feeling really annoyed that the children in his class wouldn’t recognize that I was the hardest kid in the Infants so when I found the pen-knife under my Brother’s bed, I felt like I could really prove myself the next day at school.
Armed with my pen-knife, although not too sure how to get the blade out of the little off-white colored holder, I skipped (how camp) off to school ready to tell everyone just how tough I was. When it came to break-time, I went up to the children in the playground who had been taunting me the previous day and told them, “If he wants a fight, tell him to come and I’ll stab him.” Then I very proudly produced my pen-knife, with the blade still stuck in the off-white colored holder, and showed it to the taunting kids. I distinctly remember one of them looking at the pen-knife holder with a very blank expression and saying, “What’s that?” to which I replied, “It’s a knife stupid, how else can I stab him?” this was rapidly followed by, “Ohhhhh, I’m telling”, at which point he ran away to get the teacher. Then the bell rang signaling the end of break-time.
Within ten minutes, Mrs. Campbell, the Head Mistress, had come into my class and had whisked me off to her office so that I could explain to her the reason that I had brought a pen-knife to school. Naturally the knife was confiscated and I remember really panicking because how was I going to explain to my Brother Michael that I’d stolen his pen-knife? This, I hasten to add, is a lot of pressure for a six year old to be under. My Father and Mother were called to ensure that they were both available to pick me up from school at the end of the day as Mrs. Campbell wanted to have a meeting with them. When my parents came to collect me from school that afternoon I remember thinking, “Who is at home looking after my other brothers and sisters?” When my parents arrived, I couldn’t lift my eyes from the floor and I really wanted to cry but I held it together and explained that people were picking on me and that I needed the pen-knife in case anyone started a fight with me. My Father told me off, Mrs. Campbell gave the pen-knife to him, my Mum remained silent and then I was taken home. Now that I reflect on this episode I wonder what Mrs. Campbell must have thought about my parents. Is it normal for a six year old to be aware that a knife can be used as a form of protection, as in the case of my well rehearsed answer as to why I took the pen-knife into school? I was never allowed to stay up beyond 8pm on a school night at this age so it certainly wasn’t television that influenced me, unless of course during an episode of “Rainbow”, George had become annoyed with Zippy for stealing too much of the bed sheet and had proceeded to stab him!
Sadly the pen-knife episode ended there. I wasn’t corrected properly for my behavior and it never really came to light that it was a brown skinned boy that I had the problem with due to his being a different color to me. I must have been aware at that age not to admit to my Father that I had intended on having a fight with this boy, but I was too young for the realization that I was a racist to take a hold of me at this point; I was simply aware not to use the word “paki” in front of my Father. This is the irony of the whole episode.
My Father was a racist. In fact he was so racist that if a dark skinned person was on the television, he would switch channels. Well, he would switch channels most of the time. If he were watching the Athletics or the Olympics and Linford Christie, a black British runner, or Daley Thompson, a black British athlete were competing, he would rise from his worn-out, sunken armchair and stand directly in front of the television set (on lease from Radio Rentals), he would bend forward so that his nose almost touched the screen and he would then rather aggressively raise his fist into the air while yelling, “go on you black bastard”. This was his contribution to the cheering that was already taking place inside the stadium. I think that he honestly felt that his shouting at the television screen would assist the competitor to win.
If we were walking into the town and a black or an Asian person were to pass us in the street, he would wait until they were just out of earshot and say something awful like, “bloody niggers” or “bloody pakis”. I mean, why wait until the person is out of earshot? Is this the meaning of passive-aggressive?
On one occasion, we went to visit Iceland, a new store that had opened in the town that provided the most scrumptious of food offerings; all frozen and packed in boxes that could be cooked in a few minutes in the Microwave. We had a Microwave. Opposite Iceland was Marks & Spencer’s but we only went there to do the old lady’s shopping from over the road as she couldn’t get out of the house herself. Iceland was more fun than Marks & Spencer’s as the aisles consisted of rows of large freezers that you could open and run your hands along in order to scoop the ice out, which I was then able to make into a small ball and throw at my Brother Nathaniel.