Eddie’s Millions

“Oooh. Wheee. Wooah.”

There’s a guy walking across the street from me, headphones clamped to his head, exclaiming loudly at passersby:

“Whooo. Awwwww. Yeeee.”

Strange people on the streets are not unusual, even out here in this modest town  where I live, with its largely elderly and reserved population. I tend to keep my head down at times like this, stare straight ahead and get on with my business.

But this time my initial assessment was incorrect. A little further on, in a neighbouring street that narrowed towards the one I was walking down, there was a man with a child carried on his shoulders. This was the person I’d heard and he was merely entertaining his child by jogging them up and down as he carried them along and adding sound effects to compliment the actions.

 “Oooh. Yeah. Wheee.”

Last summer, on an early morning where the temperature was already climbing steadily and the sky was a piercing blue, I stumbled across a young man (clearly on some kind of substance or other) who was shouting the refrain (unsettling in nature) to a rap song over and over again. It was an odd juxtaposition, in a sleepy town with only a deserted car park and the local church in the background, and a pensioner walking slowly with the aid of a walking stick in the opposite direction.

Encounters like these always make me think of Eddie’s millions.

Eddie was a dour Scotsman. He looked a little like the then Liberal party leader Paddy Ashdown. He’d been a print worker for The Guardian newspaper, but newspaper printing had become mechanised and he’d been made redundant. Now he worked in the local tax office processing VAT forms.

This job attracted two types of worker, at opposite ends of the age range. Older people, retired (or in Eddie’s case made redundant) from full time employment. Earning a little extra income to supplement their pension or to tide them over until they were eligible to claim it. At the other end you had teenagers who’d just left school and were starting out at the bottom rung of the career ladder. They’d either quickly progress further up or else move on to something more interesting.

Eddie wasn’t the most popular person in our section of the office. Everyone else working in his vicinity was young. Even I was barely 25 at that point. He carried with him an air of gloom that couldn’t be shaken off. If there’d been a tragedy or a disaster that had made the news the previous night, that would be his opening conversational gambit. If no one else responded, he’d keep up the conversation himself, mumbling under his breath.

I don’t remember precisely where in Scotland Eddie came from, but he certainly didn’t have a light Edinburgh accent, more of the darker Glaswegian growl. I had nothing against Eddie. It wasn’t his fault he looked like Paddy Ashdown or that Rupert Murdoch had taken on the unions and beaten them (with the aid of a sympathetic government), thus hastening the decline of the print industry. He had legitimate reasons for being morose.

So where did Eddie’s millions originate? I can’t pin it down to a specific date, but it was early one morning. We had flexitime, so I liked to arrive at the office before eight so that I could leave by the middle of the afternoon. I was already at my desk, making my way through the piles of forms that needed to be checked, the cheques that needed to be reconciled with the forms. It was a thrill a minute job, for sure.

Eddie shuffled in and shrugged off his coat, sitting down with a weary sigh. He had no bleak news to serenade us with that morning, so instead he embarked on a monologue about the crazy people he’d observed out on the street. People that talked to themselves. There were by his estimation, millions of people out there talking to themselves. Crazy people walking the street, holding imaginary conversations within earshot of anyone that happened to walk past them.

It was a commentary on the way he felt the world was going. And the way he felt the world was going was not good. This monologue stuck in my head and it’s been stuck there ever since. Every time I pass someone that's mumbling or muttering (or even loudly declaiming) to themselves, I always think of Eddie’s millions.

I’ve not kept a count, but maybe he was right. Scale up my personal experience across the country as a whole, and across the past 35 years, and perhaps you would have a million. And Eddie would’ve been one of them. Leader of the pack. Even if he'd never considered himself as such when he made that observation.