Scumbag

The Prompt

Write about what your occupation would be if you were born in a different historical period.

Read all about it here

By different historical periods Vocal means a past historical period. I watch Doctor Who so I am aware there are future histories as well as past histories, they just haven't been written yet. The image we are given is of a knight's armour so they are expecting someone successful no doubt, but this is me writing, so you know that is unlikely to happen.

I included a fun scene from "A Knight's Tale" introducing Geoffrey Chaucer, maybe that's me 😁.

Scumbag

Never successful at anything, I would be the same in any historical period, scavenging, stealing, and being the worst small-time scumbag that you could imagine.

The human equivalent of a jackal, hyena, or vulture, living off the equivalent of roadkill. Not much different to me now.

If I were in the stone age I would wait for the tribe to bring down the prey and then wait til they had stripped the good stuff before scraping bits to feed myself. I would always offer to help, and offer advice, and I would always be ignored and pushed away, especially when I was right.

People would see me as untrustworthy mainly because I wasn't dressed properly or seen as dirty. There would be times when I helped someone or stopped something bad happening and my reward would be that I wouldn't get beaten up, or would escape the stocks or whatever the public punishment or humiliation was for that place and period of history.

I would always try and talk with folk and tell tales in the hope of some food or drink as a reward, a little like a wandering Chaucer or Shakespeare, a scumbag bard.

That would probably be my only way to earn a crust.

Through every age I would be there, on the streets, in the shadows, not allowed entry into the good alehouses and certainly not private abodes. I would be the one that men warned their wives about, though it all honesty no respectable wife would come within a hundred feet of me for fear of what I might do or what they might catch.

Although I would be a scumbag I would also be a survivor, I would know how to survive, live off scraps and avoid irate people. That's what scumbags do.

I would be jealous of the rich and the hoi polloi, well anyone who had a roof over their heads but as a scumbag I would know that they would never be my people and would never accept me.

Wherever and whenever you are in history there will always be scumbags. We have them today, and we had them in the stone age.

Amazingly some of them actually make it into positions of power, usually because of family connections, but that is something that I have never had.

So here am I on the street skulking in the shadows, waiting for a mark to steal a wallet or handbag, a leg of lamb, or a chicken. That is the practical limit of my ambition, to survive.

Being a scumbag, you don't have to achieve anything apart from making it to the next day. You may see kings, queens, presidents, and prime ministers but you are just there to make up the numbers, just one of a million scumbags on this sceptered isle.

This is me today, this will be me tomorrow. This was me yesterday and it will be me next week.

Your archetypal scumbag, that's me!!