Joe and Dan, Part One

Joe and Dan are two brothers that I know from the pub. In fact they
are twins. Well, not twins in the traditional 'born on the same day to
the some mother' sense, but they seem like they should be twins. People
often confuse them for each other, not because they look particularly
like each other, but because they are both very confusing people.

Dan is the younger one. Or, as the case may be, the older one who looks
younger, but still very similar. He is the 'artistic genius' of the
duo. 'Artistic' because he has never had a proper job and because he
paints the occasional watercolour of the Oxfordshire landscape. The
watercolours don't sell to the old ladies who buy watercolours because
his perverse artistic vision forces him to insert imaginary volcanoes
in full flame into these otherwise charming Cotswold vistas. He also
dabbles in sculpture, using a variety of media, ranging from soaked
beer mats to discarded dog-leads and a recurring motif in one red
fingerless glove that he found on the railings of the University Parks
last autumn.

Dan's status as 'genius' lies largely in the fact that his behaviour
and unwitting 'life-as-performance-art' scares most of the people in
the pub. Marry this unease with his unrelenting conversational
non-sequiturs and you have the makings of some kind of folk hero, or at
least a benign village idiot. Bernie, the landlord of the pub, would
often refer to Dan as the local 'idiot savant', always putting strong
emphasis on the 'idiot' part and saying the 'savant' part as 'Savlon'.
Dan, the idiot Savlon.

His artistic achievements to date reached their zenith with his
remarkable "Jesus on Calvary" which was crafted from a few
pipe-cleaners (where he got these from and why remains a mystery), an
ashtray and an empty pack of Marlboro Reds. This particular piece was
composed of Jesus, cross, hill (upturned Foster's beer ashtray),
Barabas and Pilate (wearing a silver foil crown) handing 30 tiny specs
of silver-backed fag packet paper to a flip-top red Judas. Sadly this
piece never reached the audience it deserved because Miranda, the
classically trained barmaid, scrunched it up and chucked it away while
Dan was away from his corner table, taking a leak. Nonetheless the
piece had already gained some interest from the local pub art critics
largely due to the way that Dan's inadvertently placed roll-up ciggie
had set pipe-cleaner Jesus' head on fire.

Joe works outdoors and has grown to love it. He has to work outdoors
because none of his indoor jobs have been able to survive his terribly
destructive clumsiness and cruelly mortifying effect on office morale.
What he does outdoors and why he is paid to do it remains unclear to
all, though some have speculated that he has to keep a job on a farm
until he pays off the damage he did on his first day.

On that first day a local farmer had spent the best part of an entire
morning explaining the basics of running a tractor to the polite,
attentive and well-spoken new addition to his staff. He hadn't seen Joe
for what he was by then, but he soon would.

Most people think that driving a tractor is like driving a slow,
powerful car. Whilst to some extent this is true - the basics of
steering, braking and acceleration are fundamentally similar, there are
many other considerations to driving a tractor. For example, a tractor
driver has to think carefully about the line to take across a field,
what ratio to use and exactly where and at what speed to brake and
turn. This was the area that Joe initially found very difficult. Due to
an earlier 'drinking accident' - Joe used this term to explain damage
to his person that he had no recollection of - Joe only had one, rather
dirty and thick lens in his chrome aviator-style glasses on this first
day at the farm. Vision per-se was not really a problem, but the
discrepancy between what each eye saw made it hard for Joe to be sure
that he was driving in a straight line on each run across the field. He
had already made a few practice furrows with little success when he
decided he needed a plan. In order to make the trajectory of the
tractor true he placed a white plank that he had found at the far end
of the field and drove the tractor at it. This didn't work too well and
he quickly realised that he needed to make a fore-sight to aim with
like on his .22 air rifle. He duly fashioned a sight from a piece of
board and mounted it on the tractor cab window. He started proudly
across the field, using the 'V' in the fore-sight to keep a bead on the
plank at the other side of the field. He was so confident about the
success of his plan that he put the tractor in a low gear, lit a
Marlboro Red and hopped out of the still-moving cab to look down the
furrow that he was ploughing. It was perfect.

Joe hopped happily back onto the tractor to find that the steel and
reinforced glass driver's door had locked shut behind him. A
psychologically scarring four minutes passed as Joe and the farmer
tried to break into the steadily moving tractor to stop it from
continuing down on to the motorway that ran noisily past the farm.
Sadly they could not stop its progress and the tractor duly cartwheeled
down the bank onto the motorway. Luckily it only landed on a
fully-laden milk float that was trundling up the hard shoulder. The
milkman who was driving escaped unharmed, though he did later convert
to Hinduism in an attempt to try to make sense of it all.