Self-Help

A sideways look at age, Colin McQueen - writer, Getting Older, Humour 2 Minutes

Its therapeutic sometimes to just gaze out of the window and write about what I see – although merely spelling the word ‘therapeutic’ actually seems to raise my stress level by several notches – but on the occasions when there is nothing to see, I have to turn instead to what I have done.  This is problematic in a man of my age because all too often the question ‘What have you done today?’ has to be met with the answer ‘Not a lot’, even though I have managed to fill most of the day doing it.  Occasionally, of course, I have to resort to ‘making things up’, but sadly, as what happens between my ears tends to operate on the same principle as ‘The Chaos Theory’, I’m never entirely certain of what will emerge. It’s difficult to remember which was what (and vice versa).

In truth, few of my posts – except for the Little Fictions which are based, of course, solely on fact – are exclusively any of the above.  I will freely admit that, when relating the truth, I do have a tendency towards what Spike Milligan described as ‘jazzing it up a bit’.  Things often drift off to a place where they will be happier.  Reality has, occasionally, to bend to accommodate a funny line (Come on, if you search hard enough you’ll find one.) and I’m pretty certain that most of you will feel as though you can spot the joins anyway.  They bother me sometimes – these little stitching togethers of reality and embellishment – but mostly they don’t, I just let them be.

It is a major failing that, if I don’t watch myself, I write as I speak and if I’m honest, my conversation can be, at times, a little difficult to follow.  I do tend to require a certain minimum level of concentration and I have a brain that registers useless minutiae in preference to the pointlessly necessary.  At least, I suppose, when it’s written down you can go back and read it again – although I can’t for the life of me think of why you would.

From this side of the page I can see the difference between real me and on paper me: on paper I can play a few solitary chords on the guitar, but in real life they are only the ones that were long ago misplaced by Sir Arthur Sullivan. On paper I write about life because, in reality, I don’t have one. What I don’t know, I make up in the confident knowledge that few of you will be able to point me out on the bus. I see the point at which fact is tagged with fancy and I know that it doesn’t matter because, frankly, I’m not writing a text book. This is, I suppose, in the way of self-help: it helps me – I have no idea what it does for you. It is, I think, some kind of therapy – whenever there’s nothing going on outside my window…

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17 thoughts on “Self-Help”

  2. More and more, it seems to me, all conversations are hard to follow. Conversation is a skill I never acquired and since I retired and “withdrew” I find having to converse very stressful so basically I sound like a babbling idiot. 🙂

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  3. I would have thought that there is quite a bit going on outside your window. There is, after all, a walloping great housing estate taking shape. Surely as a man of a certain age and temperament, shouldn’t you be on some sort of protest committee, or pacing up and down the grassy patch that passes for a garden, ranting and raving at the digger drivers and the brickies playing Radio One at full blast? I can’t believe that you are missing out on these once in a lifetime opportunities, or at least firing of a barbed missive to the local rag.

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    2. Trouble is, the walloping big new housing estate is now all I can see from my office window. Nose picking, arse scratching and standing around looking down holes only provides a limited supply of inspiration

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  4. The good thing about writing is you can edit. In real life, if you you self-incriminate yourself by way of your own stupid real-life conversations, unless you have a tricked up time-warping deLorean you are going to have to accept looking and sounding like a dork.

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      1. Well, mmm, if you say so. I own and cultivate my dorkiness. Everyone says I’ve perfected it. The one thing in life I want to fail at and I’m a dorking natural. Sigh.

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