A Site for Sore Eyes

With the possible exception of a first date – something for which my experience is over fifty years out of date – I can think of no other occasion that drives me to ‘breath test’ as readily as an eye examination. There is definitely a living to be made from setting up a mouth-wash stall immediately outside the opticians. It is hard to think of any other human activity that requires similar proximity without the exchange of saliva. I am unsure why it is necessary. I refuse to believe that a species that can put a man on the moon is incapable of devising a less intimate way of testing eyesight. Perhaps readings are inaccurate if the old man being tested is not made to feel acutely uncomfortable. It is hard to understand why nature has decreed that the only people who are interested in an ophthalmological career appear to be attractive young women. It is at best disconcerting. It is a happy fact of life that old men do tend to have a platonic affinity with young women, but it is difficult to maintain at distances usually reserved for face cream.

Cosseted away in the optometrist’s white-painted examination booth I also find it difficult to reconcile the desire to tally the vocation of designing the equipment for optical examinations with extreme height, but tall, such people all must be. “Rest your chin on here, your forehead there and look straight ahead.”
“Well, I could almost certainly do that if you could find me a booster cushion to sit on. Whoever designed this thing was not only very tall, but they clearly had a twelve inch forehead.” “Are you comfortable?” feels like some kind of optician’s in-joke, saved for the moment your neck is stretched far beyond the vertebrae’s capacity. Moaning “No, I’m bloody not comfortable, I am extremely uncomfortable and if I am forced to stretch my neck any further you will almost certainly be responsible for my untimely demise,” feels at best churlish given that the fresh-breathed vision staring into your eyes at a distance of probably one millimetre is undoubtedly genuinely concerned for your well-being. Even more ego-withering is the moment she looks into your fast purpling face and says, “Here, let me lower that a little for you.”

And it’s not merely physical discomfort I feel during the eye test, I am wracked by the agonies of indecision. I really don’t know whether the dots are clearer on the red or on the green, whether lens one is better than lens two. I pine for the days of seeing how far I could read down the letters chart stuck to the back of the door – although, the way things are going, it won’t be too long before I can’t even see the door. I wear contact lenses – I have done so for thirty years – and mid-way through the eye test the optician asks me to remove them. I perform this simple task most days without hitch, but under pressure I find it impossible without poking myself in the eye, causing fifty percent of the world to appear distinctly fuzzy for the rest of the appointment. Not that it matters much because seconds after the eventual lens removable the optometrist whacks a paper strip against my eyeball turning the whole world yellow whilst she examines my eyes. “Keep your eye on the red light,” she says, which is fine except I can’t help but be distracted by the green one. Why is it even there? “Now look to the left.” Yours, or mine? Not that it matters much, I have a particular problem with left and right so mostly I just end up guessing. Normally they just say “And now look the other way” when they consider that they have been waiting long enough for my retina to make visual contact with their equipment. “You will see a bright light,” they say. At my age I am generally waiting for the advice not to follow it.

And finally it is time to check the internal pressure of the eye. “You will feel a puff of air on your eye.” Well no I won’t actually because, for reasons I do not fully understand, I have a sixth sense that tells me that it is coming a millionth of a second before they press the button and all they ever manage to puff air onto is my eyelid. I try, I really do, and they repeat the test many times, but in the end it is better for everybody’s well-being if we all accept that if the pressure within my eye is anything like that in my arteries, whilst not in any way ideal, it will almost certainly not kill me.

And so it is finished for another year. This time my vision has actually improved and the proto-cataracts barely merit mention. I considered looking for new glasses but, having removed my contact lenses for the eye test and – feeling certain that any attempt to replace them under observation would almost result in temporary blindness – settled back into my old specs, I encountered the final dilemma. In order to try on the new glasses, I had to take the old ones off, at which point I could barely locate the mirror, let alone see my face in it. To try on new glasses I need either to be wearing my contacts or to be accompanied by my wife who can, at least, direct me away from the rack that says ‘Children’ and, in particular, the red plastic pair that make me look like Dame Edna Everage’s more gauche sister. I had neither. I went home and re-brushed my teeth instead…

All the Fun of the Fair

Photo by Ivandrei Pretorius on Pexels.com

We love a roundabout in this country. Not the fun, painted Mary Poppins horses on skewers carousel type, but the kind our American friends would, I believe, poetically call traffic circles. We have big ones, medium ones and small ones, ones with traffic lights on and many with lanes that disappear at the very moment you seek to join them. They all have one thing in common: nobody knows how to use them. The rule is that vehicles already on the roundabout have priority over those waiting to join. In principal any number of cars approaching an empty roundabout can enter it safely and simultaneously, a massive advantage over the crossroad where at least two of them have to stop. (Except in London providing at least one of them is insured and has not taken cocaine in the last fifteen minutes.) A driver knows it is safe to enter if the vehicle already on it signals their intention to leave at the prior exit, except nobody in this country ever signals on a bloody roundabout, ever! You will sit for a lifetime waiting for someone to signal and when they do you know that they have merely failed to turn the indicator off at the previous junction. The average British motorist spends thirteen years of their life sitting at roundabouts waiting for other motorists to indicate their intentions, most of these listening to the horn of the giant SUV behind them.

Not that motorists are totally to blame: the planners must take their share. How many times do you approach a roundabout and sit yourself in the lane clearly marked as the right turn with an arrow in the road only to find that it has become the straight ahead lane before you are half way round, the right turn lane having mysteriously found itself on the outside of a traffic island? Yes, me too. Not to worry, it’s no problem, you can always make a U turn at the next roundabout – which turns out to be about twenty five miles distant as, in an island full of the bloody things, there is never one around when you need it.

Whilst the rest of the world has a partially loaded revolver or a randomly poisoned whisky glass, we have the mini roundabout which, as the name suggests, is a roundabout that is not very large and is usually placed on a previously accident-free junction for no discernible reason. The rules are actually exactly the same as in the bigger roundabout and yet… Often, for reasons that are completely beyond comprehension, they are used to replace ‘T’ junctions and thus have three roads leading onto them. The normal process adopted for these junctions when three vehicles approach simultaneously is a) for everyone to stop and stare at one another until they all decide to chance their arm at the same time, or b) all three drivers close their eyes and just keep going in the hope that the other two have more sense. More often than not, they do not.

Anyone who has driven in the UK will know that this is a very small island, choc-full of roads, each of which carries many times more traffic than it was ever designed for. We have a very strict licensing system for drivers which, unfortunately, totally fails to weed out the incompetent and the downright mad before they sit behind the wheel and point themselves along the road to oblivion. There remains, nonetheless, a solid band of motorists who still claim that they enjoy motoring in the twenty first century. They wear string-back driving gloves, flat caps and struggle with the lead-induced brain trauma of ‘blowing out’ too many carburettors. They love the thrill of an open road which, these days, can stretch before them for anything up to five metres; the nostalgia of travelling at 70mph without wearing their bifocals and, most of all, a good old fashioned roundabout. It provides a sense of danger they can only otherwise recreate by deliberately refusing to wear their Tena pants for a night at the theatre. It’s all the fun of the fair, and everyone loves a roundabout.

DISCLAIMER: I am a British driver. I drive on British roads. The junctions and associated rules described in this article are also British. I can accept no responsibility for anyone giving way to vehicles approaching from the right on the roads of any other country. Circulating a roundabout in a clockwise direction is unlikely to end well anywhere else in the world. I can only suggest that for most of you it would be sensible to swap left for right and clockwise for anti-clockwise, but don’t expect the policemen to understand…

Simplify

“…I read your blog thing,” he said. “It was really long and full of long words. How do you even think of things to write about? It doesn’t seem to be about anything.” Ian (his real name) is one of my very best friends and his views are to be taken seriously. He will admit that on the odd occasion that he reads what I have written he doesn’t always ‘get’ it, but, I wonder, if he doesn’t, why should anybody else? Do I go on too long? Am I overly verbose? Do I make too little sense? Of course I do. It is exactly what I do and the only way I can think of ensuring that I don’t do it is to stop writing altogether. I don’t want to do that, so I think that the effort to change the way I do it probably ought to start today.

The main problem is that I write as I speak and I speak as I think. You might find it difficult to believe – and I certainly wouldn’t blame you – but I do write this thing well in advance and I do take my time over it. I write a lot and consequently I have a stash of unpublished posts at my disposal in preparation for fallow times. I have just read some of them and now I think that I probably need a lie down. They’re not all overblown nonsense full of self-obsessed twaddle, but many of them are and the worst offenders, beyond doubt, are those about blogging. Ask anyone to write a post about ‘the hardships’ of whatever it is they do and you are undoubtedly going to end up with a self-pitying litany for your troubles. I am as guilty as the next person – even if that happens to be Karl Ove Knausgaard*.

I have a plan. I have given myself a talking to. There will be no more self-analysis – well, at least not as much. That horse has already been flogged to death – an idiom I hear all the time, but one that I have only just realised is thoroughly unpleasant. I have excised it from my lexicon of phrases which, being a child of the sixties, is growing shorter by the day. Nevertheless, like an OCD bowel, I try to move with the times. Short and to the point (compendiously epigrammatic) is now my middle name. In the future I will tell you only about what I have done, what misfortune has befallen me, what I have made up, what I have just discovered (that I should have known for a lifetime), but definitely not about the contents of my brain and how I strive to make a blog out of it. Nobody needs to know what’s going on up there.

I am aware though, that shorter isn’t always an option for me. Things tend to fill the space they need. Some short stories, for instance, require more time whilst certain very specific whinges require much less. Back in the day, when people paid me for doing this, I always wrote to a thousand words and whilst the majority of my posts today are a little shorter than that, deliberately shortening them doesn’t seem to be my thing: I love a good adjective. More to the point? I’m not sure, particularly as I don’t always have one. ‘A’ is my general departure point and ‘Z’ my final destination, but in between the two, all bets are off.

As for long words… I really do write as I speak so perhaps that explains why I have so few friends. I’ve always loved words: antidisestablishmentarianism was held in such reverence in my childhood that I don’t even have to think about the spelling. My mum was very keen on the difference between “Can I?” and “May I?” – a small peccadillo, but one that still makes my ears tingle at the thought of getting it wrong. My dad was a builder, so his vocabulary often veered towards the four-letter, but the correctness of his expletive-usage was exemplary. And words evolve anyway. ‘Correct’ does not mean what it meant thirty years ago, ten years ago even. It now means ‘inoffensive to absolutely everyone’, in a decade’s time it will mean bland, disinteresting and devoid of all humour. Perhaps it already does…

Anyway, too long, too complicated, too high-falutin’… I will try to correct them all. The effort, as I have mentioned, starts today, the results will be yours to digest in perpetuity – or for a day or two, whichever comes first…

*Look him up – I did…

The Wind

Photo by Philipp Fahlbusch on Pexels.com

There is something about the wind.

Neither extreme heat, intense cold, nor heavy rain feels anything like as threatening. Rain and snow can be exhilarating; heat – unless you happen to find yourself stranded in the desert with nothing but a knotted hanky on your head and an empty water can to suck on – can be escaped; cold can be wrapped-up against, but add a little wind and, oh dear, all bets are off: rain becomes doubly wetting and doubly cold, snow becomes lethal, cold air is scything and hot air becomes something that can persuade even a spotty Englishman to take his vest off. Rain might flood your cellar, cold might freeze your pipes, heat might wilt your roses, but wind can blow your bloody roof off. Look what it did to Dorothy in The Wizard of Oz*.

Atop my little garden office, which backs onto the village graveyard, I have a weather vane and it is hard to describe the kind of noises it makes when the wind blows. On my own, in the blackness of an out-of-town night, I cannot doubt the existence of Zombies. It sounds as if they are clawing their way up my walls. I have the kind of disposition that means that I am far more familiar with cartoon cowboys and space rangers than the undead, but I do know (at least, I think I know) that they eat brains and so I can’t help but think of myself as a healthy snack (in as much as no health-conscious zombie is ever going to be accused of overeating after consuming the contents of my cranium). It is a slightly comforting realization that as you are what you eat, any revenant foolish enough to snack on my grey matter is very likely to find itself with serious issues going forward.

I think that wind differs from other elemental forces in that it is never comforting. Even prehistoric humans recognised it: rain can be quite calming as long you are not out in it, looking out from a nice dry cave, warmed by a crackling fire, it must have been possible to feel serenely secure. Looking out onto a snow-covered hillside could possibly have been gently soothing and sitting around a fire ensconced within the relative warmth of a rock catacomb positively reassuring, but with the wind, all you can do is take shelter from it. You can see nothing of it other than the damage it is causing. Not even a hillside niche could protect you when it is blowing in the wrong direction. It will always find its way in.

I am a child of the late 1950’s. I grew up in the relative comfort of a brick-built house and, as a child, I do not remember being at all conscious of the privilege of being protected from the rain and, in the pool of warmth that surrounded the coal fire, the cold, but I do remember my mother’s constant battle with ‘the draught’. Thick curtains were hung, billowing across doorways; gaps in ill-fitting window casements were stuffed with newspaper; letterboxes sealed with brown tape and airbricks covered with plastic bags. Whatever barriers my poor dad managed to erect against the clawing fingers on the end of a gale’s arms, they found a way around them. At least according to my mum they did. These days we are so hermetically sealed and double-glazed that we have to deliberately manufacture ways of letting the air in.

The only day my mum was ever pleased to feel the breeze was on ‘wash day’ which would see the whole estate become a sea of flapping sheets and smalls. As far as we kids were concerned the wind served no purpose whatsoever. (Ours was not a kite-flying neighbourhood.) We would, perhaps, have the excitement of avoiding a few airborne roof-tiles on the way back from school, but the wind brought no equal to snowball fights, mudpies or lethal degrees of sunburn…

What the wind brings these days is the fear of watching on as an ageing solar panel disappears into the distance in the company of next door’s trampoline, the need to move the car away from next-door’s tottering fence, the scramble to close every possible window vent and a TV picture that looks as though it is being viewed through the bottom of a sieve. There is nothing comfortable about a windy night. Sleep does not come easily as my brain remains on full alert for any sound that might indicate that the roof is about to leave the building or, if I happen to be in my little office, that the neighbours are coming round for tea…

*I first saw this film as a child and it is fair to say that it terrified me. I have never been able to watch it in full since. The Flying Monkeys bring on the same kind of palpitations as The Child Catcher from Chitty Chitty Bang Bang and anything with Jim Carrey in it.

The Way of the World

Another outing for the photograph of the exceedingly modest fence which nearly drove me over the edge..

It’s been a peculiar week. Having slowly hauled myself back into the daily routine of spilling the befuddled contents of my head onto paper, I have all too suddenly discovered that the well has already run dry. Having reluctantly dragged myself away from what I was doing in order to conjure up something worthy of reporting from whatever lies behind the detritus in my head, I now find that I have completely lost my way back. The path between a basic, if slightly skewed, reportage of a geriatric life, back to my stock-in-trade ritual of making stuff up should be straightforward enough, but having temporarily drained the fountain of the motley I find that my capacity to fantasize has shrivelled up like a rubber duck in an air-fryer. It is a peculiarity of blogging that having found myself with nothing to either invent or describe, I fall back on reporting the void. This is me writing about having nothing to write about. This is me searching for sustenance in an empty granola packet.

The process is fairly simple and is probably best described as staring into space. I do a lot of it.

My life recently has centred around the attempt to remove two huge oak gateposts in order to erect a new fence (which you may recall from last week’s post is now in place.) It has been eventful, featuring a concrete breaker that I could barely lift, half a dozen paving slabs that had obviously seen previous service in the roof of a nuclear bunker, and a thumb that has emerged from a carelessly interrupted confluence of hammer and post, both the size and colour of an aubergine. The oak posts are of such a weight that they constitute a three-man lift and despite being both rotten at the base and full of worm, they blithely defy the attentions of the chainsaw. The ground level decay belied the fact that the two-foot deep subterranean stumps were steel-like, lead-weight and encased in sufficient concrete to preserve Donald Trump’s comb-over in the event of nuclear war.

Following an extraction campaign that involved a great deal more planning than all of America’s most recent military endeavours combined, I was left with two craters that future scientists may well decide must have been linked to the death of the dinosaurs. How I should go about setting new posts in these gigantic voids left me temporarily stumped. I felt that I might need to consult somebody. Where are the Ancient Egyptians when you need them? I persevered, I succeeded, but the quandary occupied the entire functional section of my brain for several days.

If I’m honest, being a man in possession of what transpires to be a Winnie-the-Pooh sized intellect, this is good news. Being more than fully occupied with a single, if complicated conundrum, means that there is no room for deviation without completely losing my place. In short, if I was to remain fixed on finding a solution to my post-fixing dilemma, I could not allow my brain to take off in any other direction e.g. to consider my inability to find anything even remotely interesting to say about having nothing interesting to say. I put words on paper, but the meaning is not always apparent. It is like the moment you open the consultant’s letter and realise that at least one of you completely misunderstood what the other had to say. I would love to be the voice of reason, but when I look in a mirror, all I see is an over-caffeined Norman Wisdom and I find it difficult to believe that my own beliefs will do anything other than give the man with the stick a reason to swing. I keep my opinions to myself and the buggers drive me crazy.

So here I sit and, despite a brain filled with jelly, I remain fully focussed, I will not be diverted. I determinedly keep my writing brain (the part directly behind the ‘Oh look, chocolate!’ bit) separate from the part that is in charge of managing DIY disasters. I will not rise from this seat until the page is filled and the path from beginning to end delivers some kind of logical progression and nothing, not even a world that is falling apart more quickly than a boot-sale bird house, can divert me.

On days like today I tend to edit myself into sense. I see metaphors (or possibly similies – who knows?) everywhere. It’s the way the world works. When enough of it falls over, the man with the biggest stick gets to hold it up. If I could lend him my gateposts I would.

My previous posts ‘My Unceasing Battle with Pratchett’s California’ (2019) and ‘Return to California’ (2020) demonstrate that nothing ever really changes except the words…

These Days

I guess that we all have these days: days when things just do not seem quite right, socks are on inside out, pants are back to front, contact lenses in the wrong eyes (that is the right eyes, but the wrong side) and fingers are on the wrong foot. These are the days when attempting anything even remotely challenging should be considered highly inadvisable. Usually I am happy to take on almost any task providing I have had time to think it through in advance, and space to readjust when it all turns to rat shit, but occasionally the ability to breathe seems to represent a step too far.

Today I have had the simplest of tasks to perform: to fix a fence post to a wall with four specially purchased frame fixings. (The bag actually contained six fittings although I only needed four, but more of that later.) My wife constantly accuses me of rushing into jobs, of not taking advice or reading instructions and generally busking my way through life, so before embarking on my post-fixing duties today I dutifully scanned the QR code on the hardware packet, and read and followed the directions to the letter. I drilled a hole through the post and into the wall using a single long drill bit that ensured that the holes were perfectly aligned, I gently pushed the plug into place with a pleasing ease and drove in the screw/bolt which immediately buckled over at an angle of forty five degrees. This was not part of the ‘simple fittings’ usage model. I cursed, removed and slid a second bolt into the plastic sleeve. I tapped away and inexplicably it slotted straight into place so, again as per instructions, I gave the bolt head a single tightening turn at which point the head sheared straight off rendering the bolt useless and the fitting hole unusable. Four fittings left, four fittings required. I am a grown man, capable of learning lessons. I can do this. Take it easy now Colin, take it easy.

I am not easily deterred. Whatever I am faced with I will keep on trying until I am completely satisfied that I am not entirely culpable for all disasters. Happily the first three of the remaining fittings went into place and tightened exactly as the web page told me they should, but come the fourth and another head shearing incident, the post was now drilled in six places and had three solid fittings and a further two which, like a politician’s brain, served no discernible purpose. A giant old-school screw and wall plug completed the job, followed by the cosmetic filling up of unused orifices – a little like getting Donald J ready for a TV interview. One more fence post, two gate posts, one gate and two fence panels to go: what could possibly go wrong?

I like to think that things are not always entirely my own fault; that I am, at times, let down by things that are specifically designed not to do so. Yesterday I wrote a blog post which I printed (because that is how I check that it all makes sense) and saved – it is there in my files with a time and date and yet, when I open it, I am presented with an empty document which I have subsequently had to refill by painstakingly transcribing word-for-word from my printed copy. I do not feel that I am in any way accountable for this happenstance, but I am nevertheless, the designated can carrier. I am pretty certain that in a previous life I must have seriously offended the God of inanimate objects.

Great age has given me the opportunity to look at a few household chores – principally those with the greatest potential for disaster – and say ‘I don’t think I can manage that’ without feeling that I am solely responsible for the fact that we live in the kind of home that would send Kevin McCloud pirouetting to his grave. It is only really in the last few months that I have felt able to ‘get a man in’ when faced with a task that, in my younger days, I would happily have taken on and beaten into whimpering submission. These days I am not massively keen on heavy lifting, electrical works, plumbing, or the erection of anything that requires it not to deviate from level. I have not yet found a way to talk myself out of shelf-hanging and, consequently, have to glue down anything that has the potential to roll. Not yet, but one of these days I will…

One of Those Days (from January 2020) probably highlights the fact that nothing ever changes… worth it if only for the Quentin Crisp quote.

Not much of a fence, but all my own (and the gate even opens!)

Frankie & Benny (14) – Seaside (Part 2)

This originally went up for posting in a single part yesterday, but I felt as if it had to split into two although I didn’t want to leave a week between them. I think this works, even if you missed yesterday’s post…

“…How was the cake Frankie?”
“Well, it looked very good.”
“You don’t sound too impressed my epicurean amigo. Was it not, perchance, exactly to your taste?”
“Dry as bird seed, if I’m honest and the buttercream was split.”
“Split? Can it do that, buttercream?”
“Definitely. Altogether too much carrot and not enough cake.”
“Well I’m sorry to hear that. I note that you ate it all though.”
“Didn’t like to be rude. It’s made me feel quite queasy.”
“Oh dear, we’d better get out into the fresh air then. I can’t begin to contemplate the effect of your weapons-grade flatulence in a confined space like this.”
“I don’t know what you mean.”
“Oh yes you do. You try to blame next door’s dog, but it’s been dead for three years.”
“Well that accounts for the smell then.”
“It doesn’t account for why you never do it in your own flat.”
“I don’t fill me full of roughage.”
“Roughage is good for you. The doctor told me that I have to get as much of it as I can since the heart attack.”
“Do you remember when we were young, Benny, and ‘roughage’ was just the polite name for all the crap we used to throw away? People peeled potatoes back then, they sifted all the brown crap out of the flour, they treated veg with all the respect it deserved by boiling the shit out of it.”
“Times were different old friend.”
“You’re telling me. No Caballero Nero back then, we just had kale and it was only suitable for feeding cows. Carrots were all orange, do you remember that? And beetroot was always red. You never saw the bloody stuff unless it was used to leach all over your mashed potato in school dinners. Why do you think foods are called ‘refined’ when you take all the junk out of them? Refined is altogether better isn’t it? The late Queen was extremely refined wasn’t she? And unless someone has changed the dictionary in the last few years, ‘rustic’ actually means badly made and smelling of pig shit.”
“Don’t get yourself agitated, Frankie. You know what it does to your digestion.”
“There is nothing wrong with my digestion, Benny. You are looking at a man who can eat three Traveller’s Rest pasties at a sitting without once feeling the urge to boke.”
“I can’t help feeling that’s not necessarily a good thing Frankie. You are, I will admit, a bit of a legend in rancid pasty eating circles, but I was your main challenger remember and look what happened to me.”
“You always had problems with your constitution.”
“Like what?”
“Well look what you’re like with tinned pilchards.”
“Tinned pilchards?”
“I remember at school you used to carry a note from your mum that said they were never to feed you tinned pilchards.”
“That, my friend, is because they look and smell like something that a penguin has regurgitated. It has nothing to do with my constitution. It is the result of knowing that I do not want to consume something that a seabird could not keep down.”
“Yes, well… How long did you say until the bus is due?”
“I said four hours, I think.”
“And?”
“I didn’t want to upset you.”
“So if you weren’t concerned about upsetting me?”
“Six hours.”
“Six hours? That’s a quarter of a day. A twenty-eighth of a week. I’ve had warts that cleared up quicker than that!”
“We could go to the arcade.”
“Have you got any pennies?”
“I don’t think the machines take pennies these days Frankie.”
“What then?”
“Contactless probably.”
“‘Contactless’ what?”
“You know, your bank card or your mobile phone, that kind of thing.”
“Mobile phone?”
“You know, your banking app and everything.”
“Banking app? Is that like a Post Office Savings Account, because if it is, I closed mine in 1969.”
“Well, in your case Benny, I think it probably is, and every bit as useful.”
“We’ll not bother then, hey. Come on, let’s sit in this bust stop here out of the wind and have a nip or two out of your flask before we go and find some fish and chips.”
“Good idea, because fish and chips, milky tea and bread and butter always sits better on a bed of whisky don’t you think.”
“I fully support anything that will overwhelm the effect of mushy peas on your digestive system. Sláinte my friend.”
“Here’s to keeping out everything bracing.”
“And keeping in everything ‘roughage’…”

These two are a quintessential element of this blog and I knew that they would have to be one of my first stops when I started back here. In case they are new to you, or you just want to catch up with their adventures to date, you can find links below:
1. Frankie & Benny
2. Goodbyes
3. The Night Before
4. The Birthday
5. Trick or Treat
6. Christmas
7. The Cold
8. Barry
9. Vaccinations
10. Anniversary
11. Dunking
12. Coronary
13. Jiggery Pokery

Frankie & Benny (14) – Seaside (Part 1)

“It’s very bracing, isn’t it?”
“Bracing?”
“The seaside: it’s very bracing.”
“I am no expert Frankie, but if ‘bracing’ means ‘windy, rainy and freezing bloody cold’ then bracing, my friend, it most certainly is.”
“It’s a little nippy I will admit, but it has to be good for you, hasn’t it?”
“Good for you? In what way?”
“Well it’s certainly brought the colour to your cheeks.”
“My cheeks? You mean the tiny patch of skin on my face that is the only area I have not been able to cover in multiple layers of clothing? I’m not entirely certain that blue is a terribly healthy hue, skin-wise, but it is indeed a colour my friend.”
“It makes you feel alive though, doesn’t it?”
“I’m pretty certain I wouldn’t feel this cold if I was dead. Remind me again Frankie, why are we here.”
“For a change of scenery, Benny. To get some fresh air into our lungs.”
“Fresh air? Have you forgotten where we come from Frankie. We’re not suited to fresh air. It’s like trying to revive a kipper by putting it back in the sea.”
“Well I’d love to make you feel more at home, but unfortunately I haven’t got a six pack of lager and a steak bake to hand. Here, have a cup of tea and a biscuit?”
“What kind of biscuit?”
“They’re called Puffins I think.”
“Puffins?”
“They’re like Penguins, but cheaper. A home brand. You’d never know. They’ve got just as much fake chocolate on them as the real thing.”
“Well, there’s nothing quite as likely to stave off a freezing nor’easterly as a massively inferior seabird I suppose. Is it your normal tea?”
“Yes.”
“I’ll just have the biscuit in that case.”
“What’s wrong with my tea?”
“Nothing, I suppose… at the start of the week, but by the end of it… how often do you re-use the bags?”
“I am not a rich man, Benny. My cupboards are not filled with Yorkshire teabags. I have to make the best of what I have.”
“I understand that, old chum, but you have to face facts: teabags are meant to be single-use, they are not designed to be dried out and used again.”
“I don’t do that!”
“Frankie, I have seen the little clothes line in your kitchen window. I’ve seen them hanging there. They’re not even decent teabags in the first place, they’re from the Mini-Mart Bargain Bin. Knowing the manager down there they’ve probably been used for the staff tea breaks before you even get them.”
“The boxes are sealed.”
“Are they though?”
“Well, not sealed as such I suppose, but there is always the right number of bags. I’ve counted them…”
“Yes, well unfortunately I have tasted them, so I’ll just have the cheap biscuit if it’s all the same to you.”
“Well I’m going to have a cup of tea with mine.”
“Look, why don’t we just go and find a café?”
“It might be warmer I suppose.”
“I’ll pay. I won a tenner on the scratchcards last night.”
“Did you? You kept that quiet. I’ll have carrot cake then, if you’re flush.”
“Fine, and I’ll have a little nip of whisky from your tartan tea flask.”
“What makes you think I’ve got whisky in my flask?”
“Because not even you, Frankie, would put that muck you call tea into a flask and risk drinking it three hours later. It’s not even a thermos is it? It’s just a tartan hip flask. I tell you what, we’ll go and get warm, have a cup of tea and when we come out we can have a nip or two on the prom while we’re waiting for the bus.”
“We’ve got four hours to kill before the bus home.”
“Four hours? What are we going to do for four hours? It’s the middle of winter, everything’s closed.”
“All the tacky commercial stuff is closed Benny, but all of nature is available to us. The sea breeze is free.”
“Of course it’s free Frankie, it’s very likely to be bloody lethal for two old men like us. I think I’m probably developing hypothermia of the nethers.”
“Never mind hypothermia. I’ve seen your underwear my friend, and I’d be surprised if you don’t have rising damp.”
“Well regardless of the state of my trollies, I’m tired of the wind blowing through them. I need to warm up. Come on, let’s try in here…”

Part 2 will follow tomorrow.

Pronounced Drah-ZHAY

Because inconsequential moaning appears to be such an integral element of this blog I have decided to present before you this week a short list of all the things that have properly got my goat over the last few days. It is not exhaustive – the daily rota of everything that puts my back up would require a blog with far more time available to it than this beleaguered beast – and it is in no order whatsoever other than that in which it occurred to me. It is a Polaroid snapshot of my disaffection complete with thumbprint over somebody’s face and a weird smudge on the bottom corner where the backing was removed too soon.

I do not expect, even for a single second, that anybody else will find themselves equally exercised over these minor peeves. It would be a strange world indeed if that were the case. Far more likely, I fear, that you will actually find me the triggering irritant. If that is the case I will do what all self-respecting Brits do in such circumstances: I will apologise profusely, remind myself to stop being such a boar and then carry on as if nothing untoward had ever happened. As far as bugbears are concerned, I am pretty sure that we Brits are at the very top of most of the world’s lists. Tally ho!

Dragées*. Those rock-hard little sugar cake decorations that look like ball bearings and, given the current fragility of my dental apparatus, might as well be so. I can see neither purpose nor joy in them. They are almost certainly sponsored by Denplan. Like kidney in a steak and kidney pie, dragées are designed simply to be removed and left on the side of the plate. Unlike kidneys, they tend to roll off, stick to your sock and leave you lame on the walk home.
Specimen boxes in the doctor’s surgery which are almost always placed close enough to the reception to ensure that you have to edge past the doctor’s queue with your little urine-filled bottle in order to drop it into the slot indicated by three foot high letters and a fluorescent arrow.
Car park spaces that are not ‘square’ meaning that however you park your car, it looks as though you have just abandoned it.
Anything that describes itself as a ‘sport’ but relies on opinion to decide a winner. Winter sport half-pipes, big airs, figure-skating; posh people on horses doing four-legged ballet; gymnastics, high-diving, surfing, break dancing… the competitors are incredibly skilled and rightly lauded, but sport requires a defined winner: ran fastest, jumped furthest, scored most goals/points, lifted most weights, took most performance enhancing steroids etc etc. The result in sport should not rely on opinion, it should rely on results. There is no place in sport for ‘Yes, of course, Usain Bolt crossed the line first, but the man in second place was much prettier and the third place athlete has tiny feet so we’ll reverse the result.’ This is not sport. This is politics.
“Your call is important to us…” No it bloody isn’t! I was prepared to believe so before three quarters of an hour of Moby on a loop elapsed, followed by an automated switchboard which did not have the option I required, but now…
Coffee machines that require more regular maintenance than a Norwegian Forest Cat.
Updates to previous updates that buggered up the computer just the night before.
Young people who walk very slowly for no discernible reason and block the entire pavement whilst doing it.
The certain knowledge that whatever I buy, it will have to be replaced because nothing ever works in the way it is supposed to.
Decaffeinated tea, coffee, cola, chocolate and life.
Babe – the term of endearment, not the film.
Dissatisfaction.
Entitlement.
“It’s all so much harder now.”
“It was all so much harder back then.”
“It was before my time,” as an excuse for not knowing something e.g. who was Martin Luther King, who were the Suffragettes, why was Adolf Hitler such an unpopular dinner guest?
The last song playing on the radio as I get out of the car.
Someone, somewhere near my house, walks a dog every day which shits, as dogs do. This person picks up the offending object, places it in a poo bag which he – I feel certain that it has to be a he – carefully ties up before dumping it on the ground alongside the animal’s previous forty attempts on the same blind bend in the bridle path – the path being, at worst, ten metres from the nearest poo bin. I don’t know who you are, but when I find out I am going to use your letter box as a composting toilet.
Me.

*Pronounced drah-ZHAY for no conceivable reason.

Vagaries

I’m not fishing for sympathy here (although it is, of course, always welcomed) but I have not been well.

Now, being unwell, you will rightly suggest, is nothing unusual – certainly nothing to write home about for someone of my age – but I am now staggering into month three and, lassitude in hand, facing certain facts for the first time in my life: a) although this is almost certainly not something that will kill me, it is nonetheless, something that I will most probably die with; b) I feel certain that it is not something to which I would so readily have succumbed in my previous six decades on this earth and c) that it has been able to knock me so low is almost certainly due to my advancing years. I don’t like it.

In common with most people I imagine, whilst I have always known that old age would be coupled with increasing ill-health, I was pretty certain that I was well-equipped to sidestep it. I am not, after all, most people. I am perfectly aware that my eventual fate is the same as everybody else’s, but if I am asked I cannot picture it at all. Infirmity is for other people. Death will call on me, but I do not plan on being around to meet it.

I have retained a child-like brain that refuses to envisage a future without me in it. Unfortunately that self-same brain is in charge of my less ageless body and when my grandkids say, “Can you do a roly-poly grandad?” it answers “Of course,” before I have the opportunity to talk some sense into it and, let’s face it, once you’ve told the grandkids you can do a roly-poly, you’re bloody well going to have to do it even if it means taking your vertebrae home in a sack. You can surround yourself with kids, or you can surround yourself with people of your own age, and we all know what they are like.

It is hard to pinpoint the age at which we start to regress, but it is there for all of us: the second childhood; the age of ‘To hell with it. Why not?’ The age of resenting being told you can’t do something to such an extent that you will resolve to do it, no matter the price you will pay. Consequence disappears from view like a five-year old with a skateboard on Ben Nevis. The ability to foresee the consequences of your actions is something you do not achieve until puberty, at which point it is trumped by the ability to ignore them. Everything bad will happen to somebody else.

Once we have children, our lives become ruled by cause and effect and the fear of death becomes far more potent, not because a foreshortened existence is any more terrifying than it ever was, but because the thought of leaving the kids to fend for themselves is something we are all programmed to resist. Risk is something taken by those without children. Until, for the rest of us the grandkids come along. They are your joy, but they are the responsibility of your children and if their abiding memory is of you dying whilst doing something monumentally bonkers for a person of your age… there is a certain appeal in going out to a chorus of “Doesn’t he realise how old he is?”

For the last few weeks I have been robbed of all potential of behaving in a thoroughly age-inappropriate manner and the sooner it sorts itself out the better. It is very easy to tire of being a pin-cushion. I have things to do that would be considered extremely foolhardy in anybody else of my age. I have a life to live that does not embrace illness and is more likely to involve a stolen half-hour in a soft-play than Sudoku on a river cruise.

I may have aged a few years in the last few weeks, but I have decided to leave consequence behind me.

Now, find my stick and oil my truss, I’m going for that roly-poly…