Contactless healing: 3 (London)

Update 070319:  

Further to my blogs Contactless healing: 1 and Contactless healing: 2, another success!!

Spotted kitchen colleague Gikita’s swollen ankle Saturday last week while she was changing out of her uniform after finishing her shift.  As it was due to a hairline fracture, I couldn’t give her a massage (sprained ankles were my first speciality in massage, from the age of ten), so I asked her to try my L-shape remedy.

Went to do an emergency shift in the pub last night.  Gikita said she’d done the L-shape twice since being taught it last Saturday.  The swelling and pain reduced by 20% after just one session of the L-shape remedy.

(London, 2019) 

* L-shape remedy is my own invented label for it.  One doesn’t have to do anything, just lie down and get the body into the L shape, and stay in that position for at least ten minutes, or as long as one wishes.  It is the shape of the body bent into an L shape, with the vertical bit of the L being the legs, the turn in the L being the backside, and the horizontal bit being the torso.

Contactless healing: 1

https://piccola-chinita.blogspot.com/2019/03/contactless-healing-1-london_7.html 

Contactless healing: 2

https://piccola-chinita.blogspot.com/2019/03/contactless-healing-2-london_7.html 

Stereo-typing: 1 (London)

I once had an evening class student called Rob, who was in his twenties at the time, slim, with the sweetest little-boy smile and a gentle manner, and dark-skinned (being of Jamaican Indian parentage).

He is an international-class kungfu referee, and we used to have animated conversations about kungfu moves and training sessions in our post-lesson pub sessions.

One day, he nodded off on a very late train back home to Luton.  

At some point, he felt a tap on his shoulder.  Even in his dozy state, his kungfu training made him react instinctively.  When he opened his eyes next, he saw that he’d floored the man, who was lying in the aisle, saying, “Hey, man, I was only trying to inspect your ticket!”

The only other people in his carriage — a young white couple — then quickly moved away to another carriage.  

(London, early 1990s)

Stereo-typing: 2 (London)

Rob was refereeing a kungfu competition in Wapping, in the docklands of London, and invited me along to watch.

I got there late — as the docklands area was a bit of an alien territory in those days — so everyone was standing to attention, waiting for the signal for the competition to begin.  Rob and his two fellow male referees — both his disciples — were already seated on the stage set up for the judges.

When he spotted me, Rob waved me up to the stage, indicating the spare chair he’d reserved for me — next to him!

As I crossed the huge gym hall, and walked up to the stage to take the seat next to the three male referees (one black, two white), the whole hall went silent, with all eyes following my progress with awed reverence.  They must’ve thought I was the chief referee, being the only Oriental (and therefore the most likely person for kungfu!), and were probably also most impressed as I’m female!

(London, early 1990s)

Stereo-typing: 3 (London)

Another evening class ex-student of mine is a Gambian called Victor.  

Victor is very friendly and sociable, but he is very dark-skinned and has a tribal-ritual type of scar across each cheek, which makes him look a bit menacing.  Sure enough, he was cast as a baddie in a Jackie Chan movie (or two??)!

American ex-student Jason told me he was walking down Chinatown’s Gerrard Street one day when he caught sight of, ahead of him, a Chinese couple holding a young child, with a black man standing opposite them, apparently in a conversation with them.  As Jason got closer, he heard fluent Cantonese, but the Chinese man’s lips were not moving!  The fluent Cantonese was coming out of the black man’s mouth!  The black man was Victor.

Victor teaches kungfu and Cantonese.

(London, 1980s)

How to discipline the customers: 2 (London)

Customers often use the menus as place mats, which means they’re either ruined (if they’re the one-sheet paper menus) or we have to wipe them down (if they’re the harder, cardboard type) to get rid of sticky dried-up alcohol or food stains.  Either way, it’s a wasteful practice: un-ecological and un-ergonomic, not to mention uneconomical.

Professional etiquette prevents me from telling them that the menus are not place mats — let alone telling them off for leaving sticky marks on them and making extra work for us — so I try as much as possible to subtly raise their awareness by saying, when I approach a table with plates of food: “Let me clear some space for you.  Can you hand me the menus, please?  Now, that’s much better, isn’t it?”

Last week, I delivered food to a group of four men in their 40s at Table 14.  One of them, when asked to hand me the menu, said, “It’s OK.  I’d like to keep it here.”  I took the opportunity to sneak my message in, “Well, menus are not really place mats,” but he insisted he’d like to leave it there — this exchange was all done in a civil manner, by the way.  I let my eyes linger on the menu for a few seconds before putting his food down on the menu-turned-place-mat, then looked dolefully at the plate of food sitting on the menu before I walked away.

A few minutes later, when I went back to them for the routine check-back (for quality of food, in case there are complaints), I saw that the menu had gone from under his plate.  I said, with my usual good-customer-service bright smile, “Oh!  You’ve lost your place mat!”

He said, with a contrite look, pointing at the menu now sitting on the chair beside him, “You looked so unhappy about it, so I thought I should remove it.  I’m so sorry.  Will you forgive me?” 

Haha, the trick worked!!  I was very touched all the same.

(London, 2019)

How to discipline the customers: 1 (London)

One of the two elderly ladies at a table had left her small rucksack on the floor in the aisle.  I asked her if she could move it out of harm’s way, explaining that I’d tripped over someone’s rucksack strap a while back, incurring a fortnight of lost earnings as a result of the injury.  

This is what I’ve taken to doing — requesting and explaining to the customers — not only to avoid another accident but also to make them more aware of the consequences of their leaving their bags lying around with us moving in between the tables delivering heavy plates of hot food and collecting empty glasses.

The owner of the rucksack picked it up, thumped it down heavily under her table, and said in a gruff voice, “NOW you WON’T trip over it!!”

I told colleague Jennifer about this.  She said, “What I do is to deliberately walk into their bags, then go innocently, ‘Oh, I didn’t see that!’.”  When I first started at the Baker Street branch, I did use to purposely accidentally trip over outstretched legs and feet, just to raise their awareness, but I’m now six years older and don’t have the physical dexterity nor the confidence to do a fake trip.

(London, 2019)

Missed photo-op moments (Mexico and London)

A British woman on holiday in Mexico sent this:

QUOTE 

Mexico, 20 Feb

Was looking at this ice cream seller from my balcony yesterday when an ambulance screeched to a halt alongside and the driver and co-worker leapt out and bought themselves an ice cream.  They stood chatting for a moment or two, then the back doors of the ambulance opened and the patient limped out... and demanded an ice cream as well!

UNQUOTE

In the mid-80s, I was walking along Seven Sisters Road one evening.  In an alleyway, past a McDonalds, was a parked police van crammed full of policemen, all sucking on a milkshake each!  

(Mexico, 2010; London, 1986)