Profile – Rainbow

When it comes to jobs, my friend Rainbow – who happens to be Sebastian’s sister – is not the luckiest person on the planet.  I put it down to her winsome nature.

I should qualify that a little. Rainbow has a voice that sound like a windchime. It tinkles it’s way into your ear with all the strength of a dragon fly’s fart. She does however loose her voice from time to time from excessive ‘om’ing. It’s an occupational hazard for yoga teachers like herself.

Rainbow would be much happier in the pages of an Agatha Christie novel. She’d surely be the twenty something girl falling in love with the son of the gardener in her father’s employ, looking after the family manor. She would be the quiet girl looking into the distance and ‘musing’ over things.  I don’t think I’ve ever ‘mused’. It’s just the kind of gurl I am.

Nonetheless, Rainbow has been a diligent employee when she’s had to be. This is clearly evidenced by the recent debacle when she applied for a job somewhere remote during the lockdown. It did seem wise at the time to move out of the city. That would be what inspired her to apply for a position up north that entailed a little light housekeeping. One wouldn’t think that could be so very hard. What could possibly go wrong, after all?

Well, it turned out that ‘a little light housekeeping‘ turned out to be manning the remote North Rock light house in the far north coast of British Columbia. There are more remote places on the planet, but I can’t think of any right now.

Needless to say her stint up there provided her with some much needed seclusion during which she could examine the inside of her head. You wouldn’t think she’d need long to do that, but there you are.

I would have liked to have avoided mentioning this, but the seclusion was something she felt she needed, after the scandal surrounding her at her favorite yoga studio. I don’t know the full details, but the short version is something to do with her being accused of hoarding kamboucha by one of her fellow yoga teachers, following episodes of panic buying the stuff which had lead to a citywide shortage at the start of the pandemic in 2020. Falling foul of an estrogen fuelled wave of group anger, poor Rainbow was basically run out of town by her enraged yoga class.

“They called me ‘The Ovarian Barbarian’,” she sobbed down the phone to me, as she waited for an Air Canada flight to the middle of nowhere.

“Perhaps a little break’s a good idea,” I suggested helpfully.

After a long spell up there she’s returned and is able to fall back on teaching yoga. Fortunately people have short memories, though she did for a short time work for a local vet. She’s rather soft in the head about small furry creatures. Sadly the job didn’t go well. Having made it her practice to cuddle each of the pets who had been kept overnight, she fell foul of the manager of the place. Finding her stroking a kitten one morning he shouted at her, “For god’s sake Rainbow, put that kitten down.”

Well, you wouldn’t think that a very good phrase to use. Of course, Rainbow probably shouldn’t have take then instruction quite so literally. Needless to say there were some awkward apologies to be made, and then a mutual parting of the ways. Whilst Rainbow was traumatised by the entire process, it’s pretty fair to say that the 9 year old owner of a new kitten that had only been there for a vaccination was traumatised too.

These are the sorts of things that happen to Rainbow with startling regularity. And she just carries blithely on. I don’t think she’ll ever change. I don’t think she can.

I suppose I wouldn’t want it any other way.

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