A change is as good as a rest…

66 years of age: you think I would have realised before now that nobody gives a tuppeny cuss about what I think.  I have opinions – of course I do – but most of the time I have sufficient common sense to keep them to myself.  Nothing good ever comes from me speaking out.  My views are unlikely to surprise.  I am Middle Man: I sit with one leg to either side of the fence, one testicle to the left and one to the right, and nothing worthy of mention going on in between.  It is a small joy that, being my own editor these days, I can publish what I like – it really doesn’t matter because hardly anybody ever reads it – so I just plough my own furrow.  I am a one man band yet, somehow, I still manage to be Ringo Starr.

I’ll level with you, when I was young I had total confidence that I would make a comfortable living from writing, but it never really happened.  I planned to feed the world, but I became a subsistence farmer.  Never mind, it is the process of writing that is actually important to me: it gives me purpose, it clears my head and you get the snotty tissues twice a week.

I have written many times before about how these little nosegays actually develop from a bundle of scraps – bubbles waiting to burst on release, but sinking without trace.  Well, for the next few weeks it is all going to change because I have come to realise that potential readers actually decide what to read with little more than a title to guide them and so that is where I plan to start for a while, with just a title to guide me.  We’ll see where it goes.  A change is as good as a rest they say (who says?) unless, of course, you’re recovering from running a marathon in which case, bugger ‘change’ – a rest is the only thing that is truly as good as a rest – so, in a spirit of adventure, so rare for me that not even a cat would eat it, I am ready to give it go…

Mind you, I have to be honest, it has not been much of a leap today, as the whole idea came along with today’s title, but going forward… we’ll just have to see.  In the grand scheme of things it’s not much of a challenge and, for a man in his mid-sixties, far sterner ones lay ahead, but it’s something…

Since we moved to the new house I have started to tootle my ancient body about on my aging bicycle, but lately I have been dismayed to find that, far from getting easier, the short incline to our house is becoming increasingly energy sapping.  I mean, it’s not the north face of the Eiger, and the bike does have gears –although I do not have the brains to use them, but today, as I free-wheeled down the hill at the start of my jaunt, I ground to a halt half way down and realised, for the first time that my front brake was firmly stuck on, where I think it probably must have been since we moved house, leaving me pedalling like one of the exercise bike idiots at the gym who is unable to decide which way is ‘turn clockwise to reduce resistance’ because their fitness tracker is digital. All I have to do now is to find out how to free the brake and I will feel immediately fitter.  In the past, that would have been easy: find a little screw somewhere roughly adjacent to the brake cable and loosen it, but not now.  This thing has a disc brake and more callipers than an obesity clinic.  Loosen the wrong one and the seat might fall off…

…At which point my butterfly brain flits onto Monty Python’s Flying Circus and the Bicycle Repairman sketch (If you watch it on YouTube, try to find the slightly longer clip that morphs into a short John Cleese ‘I hate communists’ skit delivered by a very proto-Basil Fawlty.) and I am lost to the real world for a few minutes.  Why can I remember a fifty years-old comedy sketch with striking clarity while the details of today’s breakfast menu completely evade me?  Many years ago, when the world was young and Donald Trump was little more than a gleam in his father’s wallet, an early reader to my infant blog contacted me to congratulate me on the way I was coping with my dementia.  I felt really bad having to tell her that, despite all contrary appearances, I did not have dementia, just a slightly eccentric brain and, sadly, she ‘unfollowed’ me the very same day, which was doubly troubling because, firstly it meant that I had lost a fellow traveller so very early in ‘the journey’ and secondly it had planted a little seed in my brain – what if she knew something I did not?  Was it possible that she was actually a dementia specialist who, having stumbled across the obvious symptoms of the condition in my inane ramblings, was embarrassed to have broken the news to me in such a clumsy fashion?  Or maybe she had just grown bored with it all.  The truth is, fittingly, that I will never know the answer.

Not that it makes any great difference.  What I have to offer is what I have to offer: not much, but mine own.  And that is where things have changed over the years.  At the start of this blog, I was very capable of picking over pieces for days, raising threads and patching in jokes like the invisible menders of my youth whose painstaking work was always slightly marred by the fact that the darn was never actually invisible and the suit was never worth the mending in the first place.  I very deliberately worked at arm’s length to what I was writing; trying very hard to work on the ‘gag per line’ principal of the great Eddie Braben, and even if the jokes weren’t great, I usually managed to get them in there (like a Carry On script finished by Jung because Freud was having one of his turns).  These days I go over things two or three times – as opposed to the hundreds of the past – mostly trying to make sense of my fractured grammar and correcting a frightening tendency I have to start on a new line of thought before the old one has reached any kind of conclusion.  Current posts are far more me, far less funny.

Which is where I find myself in real life these days: no less socially inept than ever I was, but far less likely to try and cover it up with a non-stop stream of jokes.  I have no idea of whether I am better or worse company, but I’m certainly less tiring.

Mind you, should you know anyone who needs a stream of senseless gags, I can still do it – and remarkably quickly it turns out – with the right incentive (money, chocolate and whisky) and a deadline to ignore.  I am also very cheap.  Sometimes a change is as good as a rest, but sometimes things just never really change…