Concerning the Forgotten Matriarchs

    Life is built on routine and monotony.  It’s impossible to fill every waking second with excitement and adventure so the majority of even the most interesting person’s time can very easily be described as ‘boring’.  However for most people, who never experience the thrilling lifestyle that seem commonplace in films and books, a small break in this routine, even if the event is more mundane than what they would normally be doing, is enough to keep the average person content with their lives.  Colin Shaw was no different.
    Admittedly, driving to a retirement home to visit your elderly mother on a September afternoon was probably the most tedious way there is to spend your time, but at least it was something different.  His car journey was constantly being hindered by regular traffic jams, as he eased into one more he looked up out of his windscreen.
    Above the shared congestion, clouds covered most of the sky, leaving only a few blue patches, constantly shifting with the motion of the clouds.  The 4th of September 2031 wasn’t exactly a hot day in Edinburgh but it was humid and Colin was wearing layers.  On the outside, he would’ve been cooled by the powerful winds but being trapped in his car was becoming more and more uncomfortable.
    A combination of the warm air surrounding him and the nerves he felt every time he went to see his mother was causing him to sweat.  Colin turned on the air conditioning as the convoy in front of him began to move once again.
    The radio had been on since Colin had first entered his car and was still piping out random background music.  The song that was currently playing was the generic warbling of the most recent short-lived pop star who would soon fade into obscurity in a few months.  Colin couldn’t stand this song so he changed the station and kept on changing it until he found something he liked.
    Colin liked to listen to music but unfortunately, he had very specific tastes so when he couldn’t find what he wanted he just left it on any station with talking.
    I’m still not sure what I think about this new law.  For those of you who haven’t heard, a new law has been put in place starting today.  Bear in mind that this wasn’t a spur of the moment thing, this has been talked about for quite a while now and, to be honest, I never thought that it would be really introduced.
    Colin in fact hadn’t heard about this, he turned up the volume and listened further.
    This new law allows all police officers to perform searches on any person, building or vehicle they wish.  This power means that they have the right to stop anyone they like on the street to search them and if they don’t comply, they’ll probably be arrested.  You’re probably thinking what I first thought when I heard about this, that it sounds like a severe breach in human rights but these searches are not unconditional.  Before a search can be taken place, the police officer must state what evidence of illegal activity they expect to find.  Then, if they do find it, this evidence can be used against the person but if nothing is found, then the officer receives a caution on his employment record.  Apparently, too many of these will lead to a disciplinary hearing.  This law is designed to ensure that if the police have a lack of real evidence against someone they can take the risk of a search to obtain it if they are sure that they will find something.  This law has both its critics and supporters, we will be taking some calls from both sides of the debate in just a few minutes.  
    Firstly, I want to discuss what I mentioned earlier, the sudden rise in firearms in this country.  We have all heard of these Scottish Nationalist groups who want to separate from the UK, they’ve been around for a while but things have become a bit more worrying now.  Police reports have come in that are saying that some of these groups have gained the possession of a number of guns, including automatic weapons.  Investigations are underway to uncover the source of this weaponry and find out exactly who has them now so that police can seize them.  Am I the only one who is deeply disturbed by this news?  The thought of these overzealous nationalist freaks being armed really frightens me, I’m even scared of them coming for me just for saying that.  Fortunately, though, police have already arrested some of these gang members and confiscated the weapons they were carrying.  They plan to increase their searches to get as many of these potentially violent people off the streets as possible and to get rid of all the weapons they find.  This actually links in with the new police power laws, our next topic of discussion and is actually swaying my opinion to be in favour of it, as it seems to have come at just the right time.  Now why don’t we go to the phones, lots of calls to do with these Scottish Nationalist groups and their newfound cache of illegal weapons.  Apparently, I’m being told that a lot of people waiting on the lines are in support of the various Pro-Scottish Independence organisations that are out there.  I find that a little strange but should mean some interesting discussions.
    Colin heard none of the discussion as he turned off the engine at this point, he had arrived.  He parked his car very near to the entrance to Wellfield House, where his mother resided.  Colin tried to visit her every few weeks or so and occasionally, during these visits, he would see an ambulance outside.  This was a disheartening sight by itself, but every time he witnessed it, his mind immediately rushed to the presumption that it was for his mother.  It wasn’t exactly a worrying panicky kind of feeling, he just thought about it.  However, there was no ambulance awaiting his arrival on this occasion.
    Colin found the immediate gust of wind as he got out of his car highly refreshing and relaxed him for the upcoming meeting.  The rustling noise of all the trees around him was nearing deafening proportions as the powerful winds surged through them, their leaf-covered branches bending to the will of these mighty natural forces.  He looked up at them for a moment in an attempt to delay what he came here to do, and beyond them were the ever-moving clouds.
    Colin had always felt that clouds never looked quite right in keeping with any surroundings.  They had the exact same appearance as they did in portraits, as if they were painted on the sky by a great artist each morning before everyone woke up.  There was just a certain quality about them that meant Colin couldn’t stop looking at them, like they were missing a dimension.
    Eventually Colin did stop staring at them and made his way to the main entrance.  Before he went in, he still needed another moment or two to steady himself before he was prepared.  Whenever Colin needed to calm himself he would always use the same method, he would close his eyes and imagine himself in his relaxing place.
    This scene in his mind was a forest, a forest where the trees were sparsely positioned and the floor was covered in bark chips.  All the trees were tall, with their branches beginning far above the ground, out of Colin’s field of vision.  It was autumn, possibly winter, and a dense fog restricted the distance that he could see.  Every time he went to this place in his mind, Colin just kept on walking throughout the endless woodland until he opened his eyes.  He wasn’t really cold, he felt more along the lines of cool and refreshed and he was always a child in this place.  The reasons why Colin chose these settings were unknown to him, it did all seem very familiar, maybe he had a dream set in this place years ago or it could have possibly been a real wood he had visited as a child and had partially forgot about.  Nevertheless, it was the place he kept going back to in his head whenever he needed to relax, and it worked.
    He was now ready.  Colin opened the door and entered, he knew exactly where to go, his mother’s room was only down the central corridor, one left turn, a bit further on and was the third to last door on the left.  On the way, a woman passing him in the corridor who worked there said, “Hello Colin.”
    He was sure that he had seen her many times before and that she had once told him her name, but he just couldn’t think of what it was at the moment.  He knew he needed to reply so he hastily opted for a slight nod, a polite smile and a quick, “Hi.”
    Colin relaxed again and made the first turn, walking down this corridor, he shot a passing glance into the rooms that had open doors.  They were mostly very similar sights, retired people watching television.  One of the doors lead to what Colin had always guessed was an activities room, he knew that he would never find his mother in there but he peered in anyway to see the residents playing board games, reading and watching TV in the form of a group effort.
    Colin secretly wished that he would never end up in a place like this, an inert flatland at the end of his life.  He wanted to go out in a memorable and/or significant way, not just giving up and waiting to eventually run out of time.
    He arrived at his mother’s door, knocked twice and waited patiently for a response.
    “Yes?” the familiar voice of his mother called.
    Colin entered the room and saw his mother in her usual chair, watching the telly.  Her head craned round to see who it was and smiled slightly as she recognised the visitor.
    “Hello dear,” she said.
    “Hi mum,” Colin said as he closed the door behind him and sat down in the second chair by the television.  Behind where they sat, was her bed, covered in a dark blue and violet duvet and all around them were the medium blue walls with the white ceiling hanging over them both.  Between the two comfortable chairs was a small table with tea and cakes on it.  Looking straight ahead, Colin saw that his mother was currently watching one of those amazingly dull daytime adverts to do with either insurance, mortgages, loans or accident compensation.  They tried to liven them up with some bright colours but Colin still couldn’t tell them apart from one to the next.
    Colin’s mother was only in her late seventies, it wasn’t as though she couldn’t take care of herself, she only lived here because of economical reasons after her husband died.
    “You haven’t been around for a while,” she said to him.
    “Sorry,” he said.  “I’ve just been busy with the business and everything.”
    “How is the business?” she asked.
    “Okay,” he said.
    “Liar,” she said.  “You may think that I don’t know what goes on outside these walls but I do.  Victoria talks to me because you won’t tell me the truth.”
    “She says hi by the way,” he said.
    “How is she doing?” she said.  “Should I be expecting any grandchildren?”
    “We’re not having any children,” he said.  “We don’t want any.”
    “Well I suppose that’s your choice,” she said.  “Spending your energy on the business instead?”
    “Exactly,” he said.
    “Except that your energy doesn’t seem to be yielding very good results,” she said.
    Colin searched for a way to change the subject; he hated these lectures about the business.
    “So what are you watching?” he questioned, not really interested.
    “Big Brother,” she replied.  “The final is tonight, are you going to watch it?”
    “I don’t think I would get as much enjoyment out of it as you will, I haven’t been watching it,” he said.  “What number Big Brother is this anyway?”
    “Big Brother 32,” she said.
    “Wow,” he said.  “How long are they going to keep making it?”
    “As long as people like me are still watching I suppose,” she said.  “I suspect it will be here long after the both of us.”
    Colin reasoned that topic to be fully exhausted; he desperately attempted to come up with anything other than the business.
    “I hear that there’s going to be another vote on joining the New European Union soon,” he ventured.
    “It’s sometime in April I think,” she said.  “I’ve been watching the news too.  I can remember clearly the days of the Old European Union; they kept forcing these votes in various countries to reform the EU.  The referendum was almost universally rejected, the French said no, the Dutch said no, the Irish said no and yet regular votes continued.  It was if they didn’t care about democracy anymore, they just kept on asking until they got what they wanted.”
    “I don’t think I’d mind if we were all one country,” he said.
    “But it won’t be a country,” she said.  “Modern European countries are supposed to be democracies, this New Union is no democracy, it ignored everyone when they said they didn’t want to be a part of it and practically forced them to obey.  That’s what they’re now doing to this country; they’re going to keep forcing a vote until we say yes.  I hate the idea of being bullied into something we don’t want, as long as they keep making us vote I’m going to keep saying no.”
    “So we’ll be fine,” he said.  “That’s the whole point of a vote, if you don’t want something to happen, you turn it down.”
    “That’s not the point,” she said.  “These votes are just putting off the inevitable, all the other countries gave in, we will too.  One day, when situations change, we also will fold and give up our own freedom.  I just hope I’m not around to see that day.”
    “Don’t talk like that,” he said.
    “Face it Colin,” she said.  “I’m the past, you’re the future.  You’ll be in the future of this world longer than I will and the future of the business is in your hands.”
    “What do you mean?” he said.
    “Do you know what your problem is?” she said.
    “Please tell me,” he said flatly.
    “You have neither the focus nor the ambition that your father had,” she started.
    The worst comments that people come out with are never made with a scowl, they are said sweetly with a smile as if you are amusing to them, as if you’re not important enough to warrant a frown.  And Colin’s mother was definitely smiling now.
    “You spend so much time visiting me and not taking your job seriously,” she continued.  “Maybe that’s why you’re such a failure.”
    Certain people in our personal lives have more power over us than most, some of them know this, others haven’t quite realised it yet.  A remark made by one person might have no effect on you at all but if it is said by someone whose opinion actually matters to you, the result can be devastating.
    Admittedly, no one had ever called Colin Shaw a failure before, but if they did, he had a strong suspicion that it wouldn’t have hurt nearly as much as finding out what his mother really thought of him.  Colin didn’t fully understand why he was deemed a failure just because he didn’t make as much money as some, he didn’t understand why that was what modern society measured success by.
    In very early times, there was only one goal in life, to be happy.  If you achieved that, then you were a success.  Now it was basically installed in humans from birth that your entire life should be spent making as much money as you can.  The richer you were, the more successful you had become.
    Perhaps if Colin had done better at school, then he probably would’ve had a job with a larger salary.  Instead of failing his exams and just falling back to work on the family business, if he had tried to get one of those jobs that his friends were coveting, then maybe his mother would think of him as a success.
    As Colin began to think realistically, he knew that, knowing his luck, in that situation his mother would’ve probably complained about him not going into the family business to support his father.  His life would’ve been a lot different then, he probably wouldn’t have married Victoria, he wouldn’t live in that house and he wouldn’t know Ian or Clark.  All that change, possibly just because of the outcome of a few tests.
    Colin thought back to his school days, he could remember that time well.  What stood out the most in his mind regarding those times was his A-levels, he could recall that, while he was doing them, he became so disillusioned with the education system.  This was due to the fact that the time when he had been taking his A-level exams was also the same time when everyone, from the media to individuals, were saying how much easier they had become.  This left him little reason to work hard on them because even universities had begun to say how meaningless they were becoming, going so far as to disregard them altogether and introduce their own entrance exams to judge candidates.
    There was once a time when Colin wanted to do something creative with his life, looking back he supposed that most people go through a phase like that.  He had tried a variety of activities, most things he was terrible at but there were a few at which he was just mediocre.  He had never really excelled particularly well in one field; he had never found something he felt passionate about.
    If he had found a calling, he would have put all his effort into following it.  In theory, Colin liked the all or nothing approach, if he couldn’t do what he really wanted in life then he didn’t want to do anything else.  However, life’s not always quite as simple as that, especially since Colin never discovered what he was meant to do.  That was why he gave up and settled for going to work for his father.  In his mind he liked to believe that he still had time, a small chance remained that his search might not have ended in school.
    Colin always zoned in on the worst aspect of his life and obsessed over it.  This is common because human beings are designed to be constantly seeking to improve their own lives, to strive for perfection.  They search for things that are wrong so that they can fix them.  The problem with Colin, however, was that he saw the worst in every part of his existence.  When the negative aspect goes away, he instantly begins to focus on something else so, in his mind, there was always something wrong with his life.  This was why he found himself feeling miserable most of the time, even when there was no real cause.
    The only real way to fix everything, in his opinion, was to make a success of the family business; he needed to find some sort of impossible way to make the money that seemed so important to his mother and his wife.  In truth, the thought of being absolutely content with his life and having nothing to complain or worry about actually scared Colin, and he had no idea why.
    Colin had thought all this in only the few seconds that had passed from the time when his mother made that drastic comment.  He looked at her; she just sat there watching Big Brother.  Colin slowly got up out of his chair.
    “I’ll see you again soon mum,” he said.  
    She didn’t reply.  Colin left the room and proceeded quickly down the hallways to leave this place.  All these visits ended in the same way, with him feeling awful.
    As quickly as he could he left Wellfield House, got in his car and drove off.  Now he had the dilemma of where to go, he had originally planned to just go straight home but that talk had gotten him thinking about his work habits, maybe he should put some more effort in, maybe he should go to work.
    The way that he saw it, the two locations had the same emotion connected to them, boredom, but they were different kinds of dullness.  One was performing a basic task that you weren’t really that interested in just to kill time and becoming fed up with it, this was waiting for him back at the house in the form of watching television.
    The other kind of boredom was that feeling when you don’t actually have anything to do and you end up sort of milling around, not quite sure what you should be doing.  This was how he would feel if he went to work, not sure how to fix everything but at least it gave him a chance at coming up with something.
    In the end, he decided to go to work and make the extra effort.  Besides, it was closer anyway.
    Colin didn’t believe his business to be completely useless; he liked how his job sounded interesting to other people.  Most jobs had very long names and sounded incredibly tedious, but Colin Shaw was a ’Funeral Director’.  For some reason that he could never figure out, this job fascinated people and he would always get dozens of questions about it when he met someone.
    Of course, he couldn’t resist making it out to being something unbelievably interesting.  He found a little pretending now and then very entertaining and it wasn’t really pretending, he actually was a funeral director after all; it was more of a harmless exaggeration.
    On the way to work he couldn’t get what his mother had said out of his head, perhaps she said it because she knew that it would be good for him to hear, to make him work harder which it sort of was doing.  The only other possibility was that she was just spiteful.  It was true she wasn’t the most encouraging person in the world; that was probably her attempt at encouragement.
    Colin liked to think that she secretly wanted to be supportive, she just didn’t know how.
    When Colin arrived at his place of business he got out of his car just as quickly as he had entered and rushed round to the front of the building, he had a job to do.  Just before he got there, he shot a quick glance over to the low wall on the left to see if that kid from yesterday was still sitting there, he was not.
    Approaching the main entrance, he decided to look up above the door where the sign his father had designed still remained.  He didn’t often look at it when he entered this place, in truth the slogan made him cringe so most of the time his eyes were focussed on the ground.  However, seeing his mother made him think about his father and he wanted to see the sign that he put up before he had even been born.

Shaw Funeral Home
You’ll be Shaw of your decision

    It didn’t seem as bad to him this time, he shrugged it off and carried on inside, there he went straight for his office, this seemed the most likely place to get some work done.  He had the idea firmly planted in his head that he was going to revolutionise this place, fixing his broken business.  Colin sat down at his desk and was fully ready to work, he just wasn’t quite sure how.
    After spending some time milling around trying to come up with this miraculous idea, he eventually gave up.  Colin slumped back into his chair and existed for one more day.