The other day, as I lay sprawled on my settee thinking about... well, thinking about nothing really, I noticed that two vertebrae had fallen from my ostrich skeleton's pygostyle and had rolled onto the dusty parquet...

I was immediately reminded of Greek women playing with their astragaloi.

This statue of Greek women throwing astagaloi (330 – 300 BC) is in the British Museum

Astragaloi

Astragaloi (knuckle bones), when thrown as dice, have been used for gambling and diversion since ancient times. Casting them to see how they would fall was also a way of divining the future.

That was the future, this is the past;

Bruce Springsteen has sung of how he once worked in a car-wash “where all it ever did was rain”. Many years ago I too worked in a car wash, if I was to write a song about the experience I would not only talk of the “driving rain” I would mention also the “hot, desert wind” that dried the cars. Part of the reason Springsteen is an internationally acclaimed song writer whereas I am not is that he knows how to control a metaphor.

The car-wash where I worked was a plastic tunnel with Bruce's rain at one end and my wind at the other. Experiencing alternating weather conditions in the middle were Lenny and myself. Lenny was around ten years my senior. He was prone to violent outbursts, but was otherwise pleasant enough. We were equipped with soapy sponges with which we cleaned the passing vehicles. Both of us, being tall, were able to reach, with a bit of leaping, the centre of even a medium-sized van's roof. I think our height got us our jobs – that and the fact that no one else wanted them.

To one side of the tunnel's exit was a little hut inhabited by the owner of the car-wash. Though he didn't have a fast car he dressed like someone who did, and he certainly had lots of magazines about them. He would emerge from his shed in his stacked heels and tight trousers, and with the curly permed hair fashionable at the time, to take the money from the clients, and once a week to pay Lenny and me. On one occasion he implied that he couldn't pay us fully but when Lenny (who wasn't normally quick to infer an implication) took a menacing step forward our employer quickly reassessed the situation.

Otherwise we didn't see the owner often, his status required him to remain in his hut (as with a Samurai warrior a certain aloofness was for him important and loss of face unthinkable). When business was slow he would concentrate on his magazine perusal, which suited Lenny and myself as it allowed us each to pursue our own interests - I would daydream, Lenny would drop stones onto the brand new vehicles in the car lot that we overlooked. Once, on a particularly quiet day and bored with cathartic lapidation, Lenny had the idea of tipping all the liquid soap down a drain in order to ask the owner for more, the point of the exercise being to creep silently round to the hut door and suddenly bang on it to deafening effect.

But the incident that I think of most during that damp/dry time was when our boss performed a sort of miracle. I wish I could remember his name, but when I try all I come up with are those of footballers – Garry, Larry, Barry – due to the haircut. But what I really want to call him is Egbert. It's because the non-existent and onomatopoeic verb 'to egbert' would best describe what he did that day - he egberted his astragalos. At least it looked like an astragalos, but it didn't appear from his knuckles, it appeared from his mouth (hence the egberting – had it appeared from his knuckles I would have preferred to call him Albert – “he twisted his fingers and thereby alberted his astragalos”). Perhaps I should explain...

It happened one Friday afternoon when Egbert had come out to pay us, his smoker's cough suddenly developed into a paroxysm of some sort. Lenny and I didn't do anything, we just stared down at him assuming it was some kind of ruse to not pay us

After twenty minutes or so of croaking and writhing under our indifferent gaze, Egbert suddenly clutched his throat, and, well, egberted a white bony thing. It popped out of his mouth and landed with an awkward bounce between us. Lenny said later that he felt that it was part of Egbert's neck, an imaginative but unconvincing assumption - after all, had it been a cervical vertebra we would have surely noticed a reduction in Egbert's already modest height.

Thinking back, I feel Lenny and I were perfect miracle-witness fodder; Lenny with his poor grasp of anatomy and myself with my even weaker grip on reality, the two of us united in our easy credulity. If only Egbert had been charismatic, we could have been a cult... the “Charismatic Carwashers”... the “Carismatic Washers”... No, wait, the “Spongers”! That's it! The Spongers with their Rain Dances and soapy sponges and hedonistic ceremonies and... and...

Anyway, no cult, just three men, two tall and one short (and arguably getting shorter), standing outside a car-wash. I found it interesting that Egbert never referred to the incident, then or later - further evidence, I suppose, of his strict adherence to the Samurai code. As soon as he regained his composure he paid us and walked, a trifle unsteadily, back to his hut.

For Lenny, Egbert's auto-Heimlich routine generated an innocuous piece of neck, but for me it was clearly a cleromantic knuckle bone. I remember prodding at it with the toe of my Wellington boot; I noticed that whatever way I flirted the oracular astragalos it always landed the same way up. I was reflecting on this and its fateful implications (for whom?) when Lenny gave it a tap as well. We enjoyed kicking Egbert's ossicle back and forth for a while, in a sort of animated low-life rendition of the British Museum's Greek statue, until we became aware of an ashen face glaring at us through the condensation of the hut window – it was time to slouch back into the tunnel, where all it ever did was be windy with frequent showers.

 Another scene from Tangier, this time by photographer Roland Beaufre;

 Nice green, nice bookcase – in fact the entire caboodle's nice. I could imagine myself there, reading, writing – yes, finally writing, plucking mots justes from a recalcitrant ether – that's if I wasn't too disturbed by the sound of falling flowers. When in creative mood it doesn't take much to disturb me; I'd have to tell the lady there to keep the noise down.

 But would she be there if I was there? Impossible to say, given the ludicrous premise, but I hope so; I like the idea of those heavy blooms hitting hard tiles with silent thud and lazy bounce, a poetic trigger if ever there was one. Silent thud? The danger of course is that too many thuds, silent or otherwise, would break my concentration, especially as I'm very tall and would already be uncomfortable on that very short sofa.

 That's where I'd be, lying, or attempting to lie, on that sofa, or wide chair or whatever it is. Though perhaps the conduits of creativity would flow more freely if I stretched out on the cool tiles, my head, at a suitably receptive tilt, resting on a tasselled cushion. Mind you, taking up such a position would not be without its dangers; I'd have to ask the maid (assuming she is the maid, or even assuming she isn't) to be careful where she tosses those blooms - wouldn't want one dropping into my gaping mouth as I'm essaying the sonority of some hard won line. Especially as she looks to be in the mood to take aim...

Or the particularly pointless pursuit of-

 I watched a film of Charles Dickens' “Great Expectations” the other day, it was the 1998 version directed by Alfonso Cuaron. As a child I remember watching David Lean's 1946 version and being scared out of my wits when Magwitch grabs Pip in the graveyard, but it's the more modern version that I really like; it's a weepy, but more importantly, it's green.

 Many of the costumes are green, much of the décor is green. In Lean's version Miss Havisham's decades old wedding feast is covered in cobwebs (I posted a still of it three entries ago), in Cuaron's the banquet is bedecked in verdant ivy.

 Cuaron has been quoted as saying, “I have to say green is the only colour I understand. I can really frame it; I know how to work with it. I see other colours, and they feel alien. I cannot give you a rational explanation why”.

 I understand how he feels, though, not being a being a film director, I can't impose my taste on many others, just the handful who push open my creaking front door. Also, I'm more extreme than Cuaron, he's a fan of all greens; I'm a fan of one.