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Date: 30th March 2025
Exeter, March 2025.
Sitting in a beautiful house, Mrs Caldwell looks round before picking up a pen to write a letter.
Old school.
Snail mail.
Sending things up the road to her mother is something that she does on a regular basis.
She likes getting the blue embossed Basildon Bond notepaper out from underneath the coffee table and to write something.
It means something.
Personal.
You have the opportunity to consider and think about what you’re going to write before you write it rather than fire off an email that will ping somewhere in the world.
She loved the opportunity to be old school.
Today she was sending a letter back up the road to Scotland to tell her about the recent grumblings and escapades of husband, Mr Caldwell.
Picture the Scene
It is an overcast morning.
Midweek in Exeter is just as dour and damp as it is in central London or indeed in flourishing Glasgow as Mrs Caldwell wrote the following.
Dear Mum.
All is fine and all is well down here. Gary has been … active over the last week or so.
We have been working on is inability to talk to people without growling or sounding as though he wants to kick off – but it continues to be a … challenge.
This week in Lidl, he ended up “conversing” at some poor wee boy no long out of short trousers about how he couldn’t get his favourite yoghurts. I swear to God, Mum, it was thoroughly embarrassing as he stood there, growling in his usual manner. I thought he was using the type of industrial language to chastise this poor wee guy because they had stopped doing the smooth toffee yoghurt he really liked.
Poor wee fella went away and got his manager who came out and tackled Gary, telling him that he was no better than some foul-mouthed idiot who had been in the day before and attacked the same member of staff. Apparently, this wee boy ended up with PTSD and every time somebody approaches him, has him running through the store trying to find a place to hide shivering after being triggered.
This time he had no choice because Gary cornered him in between the two fridges that housed the yoghurts and the milk.
On the way out Gary just said to me, I only asked him where the yoghurt was and I didnae say anything apart from that and he took umbrage and he started bawling and shouting at me – it wasnae my fault.
To be fair to Gary, sometimes can come across as being a little on the front foot shall we say but this time, I do think that he probably overstepped a mark and growled a wee bit too much.
Then we went off down to collect his dry cleaning.
You know Gary, always wanting to look his best and the dry-cleaning bill is beginning to get absolutely through the roof. Anyways, of course it means that I don’t have to wash so much so I’m not going to complain.
In the dry-cleaning shop, in goes Gary and presents his wee ticket. The man looks at the ticket and says part of it’s been chewed off or it’s fallen off or it’s been torn off or something so he cannae read the numbers properly.
Gary looks at it, looks at the man, and then starts to talk. To be fair he is just a wee bit confused and thinks he is trying to be helpful. I try to intervene but there’s no chance I’m getting between him and this man. The guy looks at him with fear in his eyes and runs into the back, brings out six or seven items and asks him to identify which one is his because he couldn’t work out from the torn ticket which one it would be.
Gary took a look at them all and none of them were his then the eejit looked back at the ticket and realised he’d handed him the wrong thing. He had given him the ticket from the machine at the butcher’s which tells you which particular number you were to get served.
But instead of apologising Gary of course went on the offensive. At least I think he went on the offensive. Nobody could really understand what he was saying as he mumbled and got quite embarrassed.
Eventually the guy behind the counter got the right ticket off him and went off got his stuff and couldn’t be quick enough, bundling us out the door to get rid of us and saying to me quietly as we left never to come back.
Of course, the tin lid on it all was when we went to McDonald’s to get a drive through.
I wasnae risking going into the restaurant and sitting down for fear of Gary going to say something and we were going to get tipped out of there and never be allowed to come back in again. The weans would be distraught…
So, we went through the drive thru.
Unfortunately, it was Gary who was driving so when we got to the wee box that you have to speak into it was his voice that they heard not mine. He asked clearly, in my view, what he was wanting and there were four or five attempts from the person at the other side to ask again and again what it was we were after until I leant across and took over.
I managed to get our order in and then we went round to the side to pay.
Gary again being in the driver’s seat it was him handing over his card which went through without a hitch. It was a wee win but a win, and feeling so good about the success of being able to pay using Gary’s card and not having to deal with talking to anybody we then got to where the meal was handed over.
They only ended up giving us the meal of the car behind us which Gary spotted immediately principally because instead of his calming down double espresso they gave him some orange juice which he was not for at all. It’s stuffed with sugar, he said.
And so, another wee “discussion”.
The third of the morning.
It began with Gary pointing out to the wee lassie behind the counter just exactly how many times he’s been there and how many times they’ve got it wrong. The wee lassie pointing out that she was new. This was her very first day in the job and was trying admirably to point out to Gary that he was being a bit unreasonable.
That didnae help.
Gary was having none of it.
Instead of getting a quick getaway, we ended up stuck there for five minutes with people behind us tooting their horns and screaming and bawling and shouting at us whilst the wee flustered lassie tried to get something organised to give us from scratch that would allow us to leave.
Eventually the order came, the manager came with an apology of sorts, until she met Gary, got grumbled at and then tellt us maybe we better to go to Burger King from now on.
And so here am I in the house Gary up the stairs, sleeping it all off.
I hope you’re well too. I do hope that everything is okay up the road and dad is feeling better than he did after his operation.
In the meantime, lots of love from us down here.
Mrs. Caldwell put her pen down put down the Basildon Bond notepad, folded over the sheets she had written, on stuck them in an envelope, wrote the name on the front with her mother’s address and name and decided that during the course of the morning she would probably allow Gary five minutes to go off on his own to wander around the library. You’re not allowed to speak in a library which is the safest place for him, so she could nip into the wee shop that was also the post office and sent this epistle off to her maw.
Gary meantime had woken up, was sitting upright and trying to work out why he was in such a godforsaken country that couldn’t understand a word that he was talking or saying. He’d even tried the Duolingo app to find a way of getting his language translated into something that people would accept. There didn’t seem to be a Duolingo for Gary Caldwell… What an absolute disaster!
Whilst the author asserts his right to this as an original piece of work there is no evidence, unless you know differently that Gary Caldwell’s wife writes to her mother using Basildon Bond notepaper, so this is clearly a work of fiction.
The fact is that Gary Caldwell got a two-match touchline ban and fined £2,570 because of the way he spoke to officials in a recent game against Wycombe Wanderers for the club he currently manages – Exter City. He explained what happened to the BBC thus, “I obviously went over to the fourth official, who is 20 yards away because that’s where the fourth official is at that stadium,” Caldwell explained to BBC Radio Devon. “So, there is no way to communicate with the fourth official unless you leave your technical area. I didn’t run, he said I was aggressive, people who know me, I’ve got a Scottish accent. Jen (Caldwell’s wife) complains all the time how aggressive I am to her, to the kids, to the dog – I think it’s the Scottish accent. It comes across very aggressive, but I didn’t swear, I didn’t run, in my opinion I wasn’t aggressive. My accent and my Scottishness is aggressive, but yeah, I got sent off for that.”
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