I CAN’T SAY I HAVE
by Anton Wills-Eve
<a href=”https://dailypost.wordpress.com/dp_prompt/mentor-me/”>Mentor Me</a>
ever had a mentor?
I CAN’T SAY I HAVE
What on earth is a mentor? Oh dear I’ll have to Google it. It’s a what!? Strewth no. What would I want with one of those? You can’t teach an idiot to perfect the art of going mad, what use would I have had of one? I perfected my role in life by the age of , let’s just say much younger than usual.
But seriously. If you specialise in being an anomaly then you are in a sense unique. Now if there is one thing a mentor, if I’ve understood it correctly, could never do is duplicate unity. Apart from being a tautology wrapped in a contradiction, it would also mean the mentor would be unique as well. Think about it. That too is, an impossibility, isn’t it?
So if such a person should happen to be passing my door and on a whim knock on the bell and ask if I needed a mentor I would immediately invite her in. I certainly would not encourage a man to indulge in my madness. No, when it comes to the hard jobs in life I am definitely a feminist. – No! I said feminist! Tasks would have to be devised for me to master and I should like to start with a mildly esoteric form of insanity. I would like my mentrix to teach me exactly those.
If she had a good sense of humour as well we could think up some super situations. I could be asked to stop people in the street with a microphone and interview them for our local radio station. I doubt I would run out of questions pertinent to our locality, you know like “how far from here was the last open golf championship played? Nice try, but the answer is 987 yards not 216 miles”. You know the sort of thing. And the public love being on the radio. They always ask, “When is this going out, which station did you say you were?” It’s a perfect person trap. Have I ever done it for real as part of my work? Yes actually I have, often, but it was too tempting to last more than two or three minutes a person.
But all the time I was playing the fool with the mike, or taking the Mike with some fool, my mentrix would be scribbling notes about me on her clip board. Imagine people strolling up to her and asking, ‘what are you doing?’ To which her reply of
“Being a mentrix” would elicit the remark aimed at me,
“Lucky you, mister!”
Yes I am begining to see the sense in this insanity and starting to approach this prompt with more passion than jocosity. I might even advertise in the local paper, “Mentor looking for desperate subjects. I only charge a small sum and you’ll come out a new man!” But if the person advertising were a mentrix, this might not be the case. Oh, I don’t know though, if you think about it you still might.
AWE
Anton's Ideas 
I also had a problem is knowing actually what a mentor is or was, so I decided that basically I never had one, no-one applied for the job and I did it all by myself. Something completely different: you being a man of European languages and cultures perhaps you can help. I had a help cry from a German speaking asking what Feldsalat (in Switzerland Nusslersalat) would be in english as she lives in america and would like to buy some seeds to grow it. Any ideas? Mr. Swiss found lamb’s lettuce, and nut lettuce. I had never heard of it or eaten it until I arrived in Switzerland and we usually mix it with hard boiled egg in the salard bowl.
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Feldsalat is sold in supermarkets over here as lambs lettuce and is exactly as you describe. We use it as a green salad base. But never seen it fresh only packeted. Hope this helps. My daughter in law is a staff nurse (cancer ward) but for her last year for her masters in chemotherapy @ university she worked on a terminal care ward and the senior lecturer in charge of her (she got an honours 1st class) was called her mentor. Basically a hands on tutor who taught and kept an eye on her at the same time. My youngest Son also has one while he is finishing his doctorate in archeology. But the word only came. Into my world some ten years ago. Hope I’ve been of use. Anton
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