My face, google and a ghost.

I suffer from a curse. It's called approachability.

I seem, despite being slightly unsociable, to have a kind and open face – a face that people instinctively want to throw their freak at, like a bucket of boiling crazyGOOP.

I once had a man walk up and yell "ARMADILLO" right into my face and then continue to stand there, waiting for a reply. I yelled "yes? Um, OK!" and ran off, my back twitching with knife-fear.

Just today I was standing outside of a shop when an old man pushed his face in-between me and my phone. In a toothless and spittle drenched frenzy he bellowed “ISN’T SHE CUTE? OH I COULD KISS HER!”… So, what did I do next? I mumbled ‘thank you’ and pretended to clean my phone. Really, give it a good clean. This is apparently how I react now to uncomfortable situations.  

I have a face that has launched a thousand polite directions to lost tourists. Every time I’m in London I feel like a Celebrity Directions Giver, known and revered world over for my spatial finesse.

I have a face that tells people "look at my BIG EYES and general air of innocence, joviality and wonder. Come, smelly stranger, and talk to me about YOUR WHOLE LIFE STARTING AT BIRTH PREFERABLY, come now - DON’T BE SHY, I HAVE ALL DAY. AND NIGHT.”

I have the Mother Teresa of facial expressions. Generous. Patient. Selfless. Virginal? Possibly.

What probably doesn’t help me either is that I am TOO polite to simply tell someone ‘no’, or ‘go away’, or ‘excuse me you just spat some of your lunch into my eyes, I think it’s corn’. And no matter how hard I try, and I do try HARD - I cannot, for a single second, look mean, menacing and standoffish. The most I can muster appears to be “I’m a little sad, but don’t let that stop you!”.

Just FOR ONCE I would like to throw a magnificently potent look of pure, murderous, leave-me-the-fuck-alone HATE.

There is one story from when I was a teenager back in Australia. It was summer holidays and I was walking to the local shops. An old man stopped me in my tracks, apparently overcome by the desire to talk to me. He was short, leathery skinned, with a small, wobbling head and a thick European accent. He wore a slightly comical looking sailor’s cap and an old greasy tailored suit. He looked 102.

He had these incredible pale blue eyes that seemed… dead, but crazy: like a zombie’s. Those eyes brought with them the knowledge of my own mortality. They terrified me. I wanted to run away, far far away.

But I just stood there, as I do - and listened.

Within ten minutes he had pulled out from his breast pocket a little black diary which held within its yellow pages little mementos of his life: black and white photos, letters, old tickets and business cards from what were probably now defunct businesses. He handed each one to me and told me the story behind them. He questioned me about what I was doing with my life. I vaguely said I liked writing, when, in fact - I hadn’t written more than a few TERRIBLE and ANGSTY poems. He told me to write every day. In retrospect that was good, solid advice… which I ignored.

After that day, I saw this old man on a weekly basis. He would always stop me in my path, and enquire about my writing. Sometimes, if I saw him before he saw me, I would hide behind a hedge until he shuffled past. Once I crossed the road and walked down a dead end street, pretending to be VERY INTERESTED in someone’s letterbox. FYI: The letterbox was number 23. And Blue. And had a dent in it.

ANYWAY.

I am now, 10 very eventful years later, living in London and still most definitely NOT writing every day. The old man and his crazy eyes have been utterly forgotten, buried under the intervening years of my life.

Until…

Last week, due to a mixture of feeling nostalgic and bored at work, I had decided to Google my childhood house, and look at it on Street View. Clicking away at my mouse absentmindedly I followed that very same route that I would have taken as a teenager to the local shops.

Suddenly, something caught my eye to the left of the screen. I stopped, and zoomed in to take a closer look.

It was HIM.

The old man.

There he was. Immortalized. FROZEN IN GOOGLE like a fly in amber, mid step - with a newspaper folded neatly under his arm. I was looking at a ghost from my childhood. A kind of unusual electronic fossil, meaningless to everyone but me and only me - because its history it is intertwined with the fabric of my own. 

Seeing him made me feel sad, and strange, and like my childhood was very far away from me. I wondered what happened to his little black notebook when he died. Or his hat. Where is his little hat?

I should write every day.