The Six Weeks of Christmas

I put myself through this every year and I have no idea why. It is normally sometime in the middle of November when I start to consider what to do for Christmas and, more troubling, whether I’ve actually done it all before. Now, I enjoyed writing last week’s post, but one week out from Christmas Eve I must admit that it didn’t seem to be altogether seasonal, so I decided that something altogether more uplifting would be necessary to rebalance the scales this week and consequently – as I tend to write this kind of nonsense well in advance of publication – here I am, over six weeks out from the big day fretting over what I have to say and attempting to jot down some kind of list of reasons to be cheerful. It is currently wet, windy, unseasonably warm and just the right side of gloomy to be unconducive to such enterprise. It might say ‘Cheerful’ on the front of the bus, but I have no idea what route I have to follow to get there.

Cheery is my default disposition, but if I’m honest, maintaining an equilibrium is often easier said than done. As human beings we begin life as a relatively blank slate: contented = asleep; uncomfortable, hungry, or fearful = crying – and life slowly rounds-off our corners, chips off our edges and gives us definition until, eventually, it reaches a stage where the cracks begin to show, erosion sets in and bits start to drop off. Remedial care and general repairs become a way of life. Common sense tells me that there can be very few people of my age without any ongoing health issues to contend with. It is a common maxim that laughter is the best medicine, but when you get to my age, paracetemol certainly runs it a close second.

For me, frustration is the heaviest burden: that I am not as fast, not as proficient, not as amusing as I once was. I know that I have started to repeat jokes – a real grandad thing to do – I do not always realise that I do not necessarily share common experience with people who are half my age. I am not, by today’s standards, terribly PC. Oh, and I repeat jokes…

I feel as though I have always been a little behind the curve: I remember the other boys at school sniggering about Master Bates in ‘Oliver Twist’ and not knowing why. I remember similar tittering at the mention of Hymen in ‘As You Like It’ and the embarrassment of having the reason for it explained to me by one of the more worldly wise boys in the class who, incidentally, claimed to have actually seen one. It is the main reason I have never been into bandwagon jumping: I know I would miss it and fall flat on my arse.

Naivety is, I think, my Super Power. I am often completely oblivious to the contempt in which I am being held by the wiser heads who can chuckle at double entendres in Classical Greek whilst I am left agonising over whether Rich Tea is funnier than custard cream. Give me a short-sighted character and a banana skin and I am happy. I really don’t have much time for the kind of jokes that require an explanation: man falls down open manhole = funny; man goes on to explain that the open grate is a metaphor for sexual dysfunction, less so. I do though, have a high tolerance level. I do not necessarily dislike those with whom I fundamentally disagree, as long as we can share chocolate and laugh about it afterwards. Harry Secombe once said that he always suffered fools gladly because he was one of them.

I am foolish enough to love Christmas – not the lights and the glitter, the crap jokes and the over-eating, not the unwanted gifts, the mistletoe, the alcohol, the chocolate… ok, all of the above if I’m honest – and while people are very eager to inform me that Father Christmas is not real I would argue that he certainly is – in spirit. I love the spirit of Christmas. Not the Christmas Gift Top Trumps of ‘see how much thought/money/physical queuing endeavour I put into your gift’ but the ‘Wow! A Freddo Bar, thank you,’ spirit. It is the ‘I love a mandarin,’ spirit. It is the scattering fragments of walnut shell over an area roughly equivalent to half a football pitch spirit. It is the ‘Fetch a hammer. Nobody could open an almond with these crackers,’ spirit. I love the Salvation Army at Christmas (although I deplore the fact that they are still needed.) How emotive is the sound of a brass band? I always equate the sublime film ‘Brassed Off’ with Christmas, simply because of the music, in much the same way as I now equate The Beach Boys ‘God Only Knows’ with the season because of its use in ‘Love Actually’. I cannot imagine any of it without ‘Miracle on 34^th Street’ – The Richard Attenborough version obviously – because some things are non-negotiable.

Writing Christmas posts troubles me. For weeks before they trouble me, yet nobody actually reads the posts I make over the Christmas period, they – quite rightly – have far better things to do, like finding a thousand disparate ways of wrapping a Lottery Scratchcard; calculating the defrosted weight of a turkey sufficient to feed twenty (including three vegetarians, one vegan, two meat-eaters who just don’t like turkey and would much prefer chicken, a Scandinavian in-law who would rather have herring and the kids who will only eat it if it is minced and covered in baked beans) and getting the sprouts on. It is not December if your house does not smell of brussel sprouts and red cabbage.

Anyway, here we are, for me it is actually November 12^th and for you it is probably December 21^st; I am looking forward to it all while you are probably already up to your neck in it. I always presume that most of my readers are of a similar age to myself and anticipating a nap in front of Strictly rather than a seasonal tumble from a new skateboard, so all I can advise is that you try to enjoy it as much as you possibly can. It might not be quite everything that we want, but Lord knows, we may not have too many of them left in us and, let’s face it, nothing quite compares with the thrill of watching the grandkids start to learn about dealing with disappointment when they open the monogrammed handkerchiefs you’ve bought them…

Time Travel

I try to write pretty much every day, even when we are on holiday. I have a little notebook which is full of scribbled scraps which, in my current once-a-week posting regime, will give me posts for weeks to come. Today is actually the last day of our little autumn jaunt, so if I was to use my scribbled missives chronologically on our return home it would be full-on UK winter by the time this particular little nosegay reached you. It has just ceased raining here in Turkey, but it remains overcast and windy. It is none-the-less warm and I am writing on our little sheltered balcony in circumstances (and shorts) that will be a far-off memory come the cold, bleak days of December back home.

I don’t suppose the UK is uniquely placed in this, but I do find it quite strange that a mere couple of hours jack-knifed into an aircraft seat can bring us to a place that seems to be a world away from where we started: a place where the sun shines most of the time, people smile and the postman doesn’t drop your parcel into the water butt if he finds no-one in. Being such a distance away from home does seem to have the effect of quieting the worry demons for a little while: the house might flood, burn down, get burgled but, as there is absolutely nothing I can do about it from here, there is no point in worrying about it. My daughters will deal with any immediate fallout and the rest of the shit can wait for my return – because that’s what shit does. Much like the holiday tan, it will all come out in the wash.

Not that people of my skin-type actually tan. Even if I’m really assiduous with sun-cream application I will still become a prickly pink vision within minutes and my dermis will litter the bed sheets long before I have had time to regret the ill-advised street food or inform my wife that we cannot leave the hotel room as I require unfettered bathroom access at all times.

We come from a country in which the water is clean, drinkable and, by and large, plentiful. We are truly blessed (although it doesn’t always feel like it when it’s piddling on your head day after day). So complacent are we that we even flush our toilets with the very same potable water that we drink and bathe in. Wherever we travel in the world, we are advised by our elders and betters against drinking the tap water. I have no idea how much of the bottled water we drink is actually decanted from the self-same taps, and I do not know whether we, as a nation, have a particular problem with water-borne particulates that means that we are unable to drink the same stuff as everybody else, but I obey unquestioningly. An army, they say, marches on its stomach. Our nation, it would seem, collapses on its lower intestine. Steam power and the industrial revolution may have been our gifts to the world, but the greatest reward we gave to ourselves was the flushing toilet.

Of course catering standards are much more universally… well, standard these days. The expectation is that the food in a decent holiday hotel will almost certainly not be fatal – something that cannot be said of many of our own Saturday night kebab shops. I am fortunate to have what I believe is described as a robust constitution, but even I have been forced to visit, from time to time, toilets that I would really rather forget – I do not have a robust bladder. I have been in the company of rats, flies, giant wasps and cockroaches that I would definitely think twice about challenging to an arm-wrestle – although nothing quite as exotic as the funnel web spider my wife encountered in an Australian dunny some years ago – and almost always I have remained conscious that in such circumstances I generally have only two options and the second one involves unpleasantly damp trousers, so I go for the former and get it over with as quickly as a dodgy prostate allows. These days, although you wouldn’t actually want to eat in them – or, being British, drink the tap water – most public conveniences worldwide are by and large fit for purpose.

Being English I am, of course, very aware that wherever we are in the world the only language I will be expected to speak is my own mother-tongue with the simple addition of a slightly enhanced volume. I learn ‘Hello’, ‘Goodbye’, ‘Please’, ‘Thank you’ and ‘Do you have a toilet?’ in the language of everywhere we visit and other than that rely on the power of interpretive dance for communication – although the mime for “Two beers please” is somewhat more straightforward than “Are your veggie burgers cooked in the same pig fat as the chicken dippers?”

And time itself passes differently on holiday. When we settle on our sunbeds in time for my wife to complain that the sun has gone in, I often have to explain that it is now 8pm and we are currently decanting our gear onto the tenth sun lounger of the day. A day by the pool is one spent in perpetual motion, flitting between locations that are either too shaded or too sunny whilst my wife struggles to come to grips with the notion that the Sun does not loiter in the same part of the sky all day, but keeps deliberately hiding itself behind a palm tree as soon as we have settled down. My holiday needs are extremely modest: an exercise book, a pen, a book book, a crossword book and my music and I am happy. My wife’s need to reconfigure the entire nature of our solar system is somewhat more difficult to reconcile. If I could stop the earth from spinning for her, I would, particularly if I could do it at the time of our holiday ‘Sundowner’, which always descends into getting ready for dinner far too quickly.

Anyway, it will all be behind me by the time you get to read this. My life will be filled with winter coats, hiccupping central heating boilers and my wife’s desire to fit a door in the space where we have just removed a wall. Thick duvets, closed curtains and warming stews are not the province of Dr Who, but that’s the problem with travel isn’t it, time just slips away from you…

Making it Up

In as much as I ever make conscious decisions about anything, I think I might just have made one: despite the fact that readers are in short supply for such things, I would really like to tell a few more ‘stories’ in my blog. Tales of my daily life are all well and good, but they begin to grate on even me after a while.

That is not to say, of course, that a certain level of fantasy does not manage to poke its nose into my standard autobiographical tripe every now and then anyway. My recollections are truthful, but the finer details may well not hold up in court. I don’t lie – I’m sure I tried it as a child and quickly became aware of my limitations – but I am prone to exaggeration and when it appears in something that is obviously ‘made up’ I feel less guilty about it.

On a past holiday my wife went to bed and found, under her pillow, a tarantula. It was an actual tarantula and when my wife tells the story people look aghast and say, “Wow! What did you do?”, but when I tell the story they say “Wow! What did she do?” whilst thinking “Here we go again: Colin and another monster arachnid story.” I feel like the boy who cried ‘Wolf!’ (or possibly ‘Fenrir!’) I don’t exaggerate for any kind of aggrandisement. It is just the way I tell ‘em. If misfortune strikes me twice, it is generally not that funny, but if it does it twenty times… (Many years ago, a writer friend – a bona fide ‘writer’ – told me that even numbers are never funny. “Always go for odd,” he said. It has become my mantra.)

I think that all writers (and I include myself among them simply because I write, which is odd because I have just spent the last few weeks painting and I certainly don’t consider myself a decorator) express their own opinions through the thoughts and words of their characters. Given the original mission statement of this blog I feel that I should hear more from Frankie & Benny and, particularly when my bile is rising, from the Meaning of Life crew. I also have my own particular soft spot for the ever-bickering couple who are forced to spend five minutes together in the car so I will return to them and see how they feel about what will almost certainly turn out to be arthritis in the wrist. Other Little Fictions may well have run their course for now, but will no doubt gift me with another idea when I’m not looking for one and I will run with it. I am a slave to whim.

I would like to say that I have decided to stick more closely to my original intent of considering the implications of growing older, but there’s every chance that I will forget ever saying it by the time I write my next post, because this, for me, has become the age of enlightenment. Think I can do everything I used to be able to do? I’m almost certainly about to be enlightened on that score. Life these days enlightens me in so many ways. Can’t think of a single reason why I shouldn’t roll down the hill with the kids? Life will definitely enlighten me – probably the next morning.

I constantly find myself amazed at how much I thought I knew and how much I now realize that I never did… and if I did, I’ve now forgotten. Do you remember when you were young and people used to say “He’s forgotten more than you will ever know,” and all you could think was “Yes, but he’s still forgotten it.” What is possibly to be gained by asking someone what they’ve forgotten, they’ve bloody forgotten it! You now know just as much as they do – no matter how dumb you are.

My memory has a fairly unique outlook on life: It allows me to remember most of the ‘big stuff’: my name, my address, whilst becoming increasingly hazy on day of the week and what my wife said to me two minutes ago. I find I remember almost everything I don’t need to and forget almost everything I am expressly told not to. It is the stuff of fiction.

Now, where was I?

Knowing When to Stop

…In which I tentatively dip my toes back into this big wonderful blogoverse…

As the building work has progressed I have found any number of little things that to my eyes do not appear to be quite right and which, thanks to my almost total inability to leave well alone, I have since managed to make immeasurably worse. Door doesn’t close quite as I think it should? No problem, slight adjustment, I can do that. So I do and now it doesn’t close at all. Or open. Surely that pipe just needs… erh, does anyone know where the stop tap is? Why is that electric socket wonky? No problem, I’ll just take it off the wall and… ‘Hello doctor. Exactly how long have I been unconscious?’ It is something I must address.

There are many things that I have discovered about myself over the last few weeks – principal among them: I am not as young as once I was. I had no idea that I even possessed this number of areas in which it is possible to ache. Having raised two children, I had no idea it was possible to feel this tired. My day begins at 6am so that I can be ready for the arrival of the builders, and finishes somewhere between 8 and 9pm having cleaned up after them and carried out all of the daily tasks I was unable to do whilst they were there.

The builders are not here at weekends, but fear not, I am awake just as early because, as my wife gleefully points out, we have only two days to fit in our between tradesmen tasks; chief among them slopping paint onto every conceivable surface: I had no idea there were so many types of emulsion. Nor did I know that so many people hold such strong, and divergent, opinions on the correct water/paint ratio for a mist coat on new plaster. I went for 30/70 but, if I’m honest, the measurements did become rather more slapdash as the day ground on and, in any case, the resulting mixture always appeared to congeal like school custard throughout its period of use.

Fortunately my ‘patience threshold’ has actually improved over the years. I do not get nearly as frustrated by things, people and, crucially, myself as I used to do. ‘Things’ cannot help it. They are just things. They have no sentient existence, they are manufactured or appropriated for a purpose that they either fulfil or fail and whichever way it goes, I now realise that I should feel grateful to make it through with all ten fingers. People have their own problems – I could well be among them – and their own ‘things’ to contend with. The biggest problem I pose for myself is knowing when to stop.

Ironically, my problem is not in knowing when not to start: I am more than happy to cast my eye over something and say, ‘No, I can’t do that.’ Knowing my own limitations greatly enhances my admiration for those who do not have them. But when I decide that I can do something and events (as they inevitably do) conspire to prove me wrong, I have a complete inability to let it go. Somehow I just don’t know how to give in. …And it’s not failure itself that is a problem for me. Lord knows I’m familiar enough with that. It is the depth of my own ineptitude that drives me on. When I can’t understand why I am unable to do something, I will bloody well keep trying until I can – even if disaster lurks around every corner.

Screwing up a shelf is easy work: really screwing it up is the job of an expert. Replastering the aftermath can be how hard? I’ve seen people do it. It looks so easy… mind you, they don’t have a wonky shelf set against a wall that looks like it has been created for a re-enactment of Paschendale. I do. I have suggested to my wife that I can make it better, but she is unconvinced to the point of threatening divorce. She will ‘get somebody in’ and I know that she is right, they will do all they can to make it as close to perfect as possible… and there’s the problem. There is bound to be just that 0.01% that could do with just a little restorative attention. And we all know where that leads…

The Dust that Obscures the Funny Side

Life, somehow, continues to crowd in on me and prevents my return to the regular blog posting I crave. The fevered ‘knocking about’ of our little bungalow continues at the builders pace and various problems requiring prolonged attention plop down around us with frightening regularity. I have completely dropped any attempt to plan my days and weeks: plans, it would appear, have no veracity unless they constantly change. The garden, driveway and street beyond look like a post-apocalyptical builder’s merchant. Somehow the building is rising from it all like a rose from horse shit and the promise of the finish to the ‘outside work’ draws near. Unfortunately that merely heralds the start of the dreaded ‘inside work’, a temporary kitchen in the wooden ‘lean-to’, a mini-sitting room in the smallest bedroom and constant ‘decision making’ (made in haste and regretted before the words have left the lip) whilst the living crap is beat out of the rest of the place. We have been here before, many years ago, and I’m still cleaning the dust out of my ears.

My brother’s wedding, and my date with best-man speech-making duties, lies ahead. That date, at least, is firmly etched on the household calendar. Happily, behind me now is ‘the stag do’. I am happy to drink, but I really am not good at ‘going out drinking’: whilst copious volumes of alcohol are not generally a problem to me, a high litreage of beer does tend to put an unwelcome stress on a delicate prostate. Moreover, whilst whisky and wine leave me largely unaffected, beer in volume – the stag-do must-consume – turns me into a jellyfish. (I have a well-defined limit which I defiantly refuse to pass – until I have reached it.) This particular stag, comprising a small posse of men of my age was a daytime affair and finished by teatime – as, indeed was I. My wife drove me home whilst I babbled nonsensically beside her before giving me a meal and sending me to bed. I slept for twelve hours and woke up as if nothing had happened. My clothes were folded and in drawers – although not necessarily the right ones – I was in my own bed and my wife had slept beside me without once (that I am aware of) attempting to kill me. It would appear that the old ‘auto-pilot’ continues to perform perfectly through the beer-haze, just as it did when I was younger, when it was given very much more practice.

We are just over a week away from the wedding now and my speech is written. It seems worse with every reading, but I am at a loss to know what to do with it. I will learn it as well as I can, make myself some crib-cards and hope that everyone else is either drunk by the time I stand up, or overwhelmed by a sense of sober bonhomie. I was hoping that I might gather some ‘material’ from the stag, but all I really learned is that I am particularly bad at genitalia-themed crazy golf and that my brother is becoming ever-more absorbed by his hobby of fishing. There are a few double-entendres to be found there – but only if you know the names of fish.

I am writing this in my little ‘office’, surrounded by the boxes full of household possession we have removed from the upcoming dust tsunami. The builders have gone and will not return until sometime around dawn tomorrow. In truth, the builders are brilliant, engaging and pleasant to be around – even if the noise and mess that accompanies them is not. What is it they say about making omelettes and breaking eggs? Stick to porridge I think. I am writing this because I thought I needed to offer a little explanation for the sporadic nature of my contributions of late and I feel that I should explain that I have no intention of becoming an ex-blogger just yet. Sooner or later the funny side will flash its arse at me again and I will be back.

You have been warned!

Getting On

I stand at the portal that will allow me entry into a new age of discovery. The doormen of Nirvana have found me to be on the list and have grudgingly agreed to let me in. There are many benefits to belonging to the club that I will shortly join: I can take tea and biscuits with my fellow sexagenarians in the designated café; I can board the bus to Rhyl with a half-empty suitcase and a clear conscience; Lord knows! I may eligible for a discount on a stair-lift or a sit-in bath. I have reached the age when I understand that I should always smile sweetly at the dentist, because to gnash my teeth at his suggestion that I need several long-haul holidays-worth of dental treatment is merely putting money in his already bulging pockets. I have attained the maturity that allows me to comprehend that the true joy of an April day by the east coast seaside cocooned within fourteen layers of thermal clothing to protect against the unseasonal scything on-shore breeze and draped in a slightly too small cagoule that herds the interminable arctic drizzle into the large drips that run around the rim of the hood before depositing themselves into the ever-swelling puddle on my crotch, whilst I push fish and chips around the paper as they congeal in front of my eyes, is the knowledge that there is no point in doing it, other than knowing that I don’t have to do it – but, shit, while I can, I will. I have begun to appreciate the myriad joys of getting older. A whole new world of revelation has opened up before me. I have entered, in short, a second phase of enlightenment and realisation.

I have opened my mind to learning, although, truth be told, most of what I have learned is how little I know. My discoveries, such as they are, are modest – they are not of Newtonian proportions. What I have not discovered would generate a ‘to do’ list that could keep Isaac and his apple occupied for a very long time. I have not discovered, for instance, what makes me (or more appositely, they being on the bottom, Australians) stick to this globe of ours. I tend to adhere to the Velcro Theory. In fact, I find myself irresistibly drawn towards the flat earth theory, simply because I do not understand why, wherever I go in the world, I am always the right way up. Hold up a football and put something on the bottom of it; what happens? Yup. If the world is actually a sphere, what prevents the Australians falling off? Forget gravity. Gravity is everywhere. It can’t even hold my glass on the table after six pints. And also, if the world is a globe, how come all the water doesn’t flow to the bottom? Never thought that through did you Pythagoras?

Mind you, I must admit that physics was never one of my strengths. I can still recall the look on the face of my teacher when he read my test paper aloud to the class, with special emphasis on the question ‘What is resistance’, to which I had answered ‘Futile’. I thought I was being endearingly amusing. He thought I was being an arse. Guess who was correct? I would never discover a new continent, even if one were to exist, because that would almost certainly involve sailing off into the unknown and, quite frankly, I have enough trouble sailing off into the known – and only then when I have double-checked the catering arrangements. And as for finding a new planet, I can barely see the television in these contact lenses, let alone an infinitesimal blob at the far end of the universe. No, the things that I have learned are of a much more personal nature. I do not know if they will make a difference to the lives of others. I do not know if they were at any time unknown to others. What I am beginning to know, I think, is what everybody else has known all along.

I have discovered that stairs are arranged singly for a reason; there is nothing to be gained by ascending them two at a time. I know that escalators move so that you do not have to. I have learned that there are only two types of shoe; those that fit and those that look good: no single pair of shoes is ever able to meet both criteria. I have learned that rows of buttons are always to be fastened from the bottom in order to avoid having one left over at the end. I have learned that hats are for other people.

I have begun to understand that there is no point whatsoever in attempting to take a photograph with my mobile phone. Nobody is even faintly interested in a close-up of my nasal hair, nor do the staff of The Raj Palace want another silent call from me. I have grown to realise that I have lost the innate ability I once had to know instantly whether an acquaintance was older or younger than I. Everyone of my age looks so very old. I have begun to understand that no-one younger than me actually sees me as younger than I am. That the way I viewed people of my age when I was my daughter’s age is exactly the way that people of my daughter’s age now view me – eccentric; mildly amusing in a ‘let’s just humour him’ kind of way, but definitely to be kept at arm’s length as the risk of slight urine/saliva contamination is ever-present and increasing. I have discovered that the only thing more annoying than a younger man in an extremely expensive car is an older man in an extremely expensive car. I have begun to realise that nobody ever gained anything from arguing (except, for some, a lucrative career). Stealth is the answer. Age gives one the time to wait and the insight to appreciate that there is absolutely no finer moment than the acutely timed ‘I warned you that would happen, but you never listen do you? Oh no. You always know best…’

I have also begun to understand that advancing age is not to be feared, it is to be embraced. Embraced for its ability to allow me clearer vision than sight. Embraced for its ability to grant me the realisation that what is right for me, may not be right for anybody else, but quite frankly, that I care even less than they do. Embraced for the realisation that my appreciation of the world around me is linked, incrementally, with the paucity of time that I have left to enjoy it. Embraced because I have no choice. Embraced because it makes me happy.

First published 16.11.2018 – and from which this whole sheboodle got a title…

Mission Statement

After a week away from the pad and pencil I thought it wise, before I once again set myself against the wordy rockface, to remind myself just exactly what I thought I was doing here so, this week, before getting down to my usual weekly process of testing your patience as far as I dare, I thought that it might be useful for me to re-view the very first two posts I ever posted on this blog: my mission statement…

I feel that I should begin my first blog with an explanation of what it is, exactly, that I intend to do over the next however long I am given: it might give you an idea of whether you are going to bother with it, and it might help to remind me what it was I had started when I return to it after pouring a glass of red and half-eating a jam and peanut butter sandwich. My intention is to observe life through the eyes of an older person – I have no choice in this, I am one – and to lay what I have seen before you in such a manner that it might take your mind off the pre-paid funeral plan for a few minutes (unless, of course, you really want that free Parker pen). I do not intend it to be about getting old, but merely the product of a mind and body that is itself slipping inexorably downhill, gathering both speed and mass, clinging on to all the dignity it can muster whilst understanding that the inevitable pratfall into the dog-shit of life lays merely inches away. I do not intend to focus solely on the experience of being an older male, but being one, it might just go that way. Just think of it as a thousand words(ish) a week window into the soul. Actually, probably less a window into my soul and more a knot-hole into my psyche. I am aware that I cannot properly see life from the perspective of someone I am not. I try, believe me, I try, but almost inevitably just as soon as I think I have got this empathy thing licked, I unwittingly put my foot in it up to my ears and, having apologised for all I am worth, write myself a note to remind me not to make that mistake again… and then lose it…

There will be, I am sure, some nostalgic twaddle; some howling at the moon; some ‘how shit things used to be’; some ‘how shit things are now’; some ‘why can’t I remember what it is I wanted to say when I started this…?’ It is my hope that people of my age may be able to wring some scintilla of truth or recognition from it, whilst those younger people amongst you may regard it as some sort of instructional tract; providing nuggets of information that you may recall at apposite times when interacting with we vintage souls (and possibly mopping up after us).

We are all getting older. Life is a one way street and we are all heading into the same cul-de-sac. The people around you can erect speed bumps and you can apply the handbrake all you like, but in the end you’ll realise that the only sensible thing you can do is to floor the clutch and enjoy the scenery. And don’t think that science is going to save you. I’m certainly not going to argue with Einstein, if he says time-travel is possible, then I’m sure it must be… but I’ve seen the films: the Captains Kirk and Picard discovered, as did Marty McFly, that even when you travel back in time, you yourself remain the same age; still getting older. Wherever you sit on the space/time continuum, you plod on, just the same. Wherever you go, you become older just getting there. So, what could be the point of going back in time if everything around you got younger whilst you continued to plough on relentlessly through your allotted span? Very little – unless, of course you’ve got an unopened pack of smoked salmon that has gone beyond its sell-by date or your egg yolk isn’t runny enough…

We all claim that we don’t feel any different to how we felt twenty, thirty, forty years ago when, in fact, we are all that little bit weaker, slower and less able; incapable of stretching without farting. Getting older is not just about what you see, what you hear and feel, but what you do and how you do it. Do you wonder how Pooh and Eeyore cope with the associated problems of sagging kapok, slackened stitching and Christopher Robin’s animalistic grandchildren; how Sherlock Holmes copes with the diminution of a giant intellect; how James Bond copes with stress incontinence? I’ll look into it.

And age is not all about loss. Age also brings us gifts: the self-knowledge that we regularly mistake for wisdom. The ability to think ‘Actually, that is not what I would do, but, let’s be honest, what does it matter.’ The knowledge that you are not going to be hanged for wearing non-matching socks and that no-one will notice if you’re wearing your pants back to front may be liberating. I, myself, have heard the siren call of primary colour trousers and Velcro shoes, and like Odysseus, I am desperately clinging to the mast of sanity, attempting to resist them. To be honest, once you’ve passed 50, nobody takes a great deal of notice what you’re wearing. Wear what you have always worn and they’ll smile sweetly and enquire whether you have actually changed that cardi at all this year. Wear something different and they’ll think you’ve had a stroke. It is better to continually keep checking that you’ve remembered to zip up your fly than to wait for someone to tell you that you haven’t. Again…

Age will gift you an insatiable thirst for knowledge. All knowledge. A desire to learn all of the things you did not learn while you were capable of learning them. Infinite curiosity will keep you alive and vital and the desire to experience will drive you crazy. If you are physically capable of doing it, then do it. You may hate it, but at least you’ve tried it and you’ll never have to do it again – like eating oysters and drinking Saké, you’ll know better next time.

The accumulation of new hobbies becomes a hobby in itself. Never tried it? Give it a go. Immerse yourself; soak it up until you’re semi-proficient; pack it up; find something new. Don’t be put off by those who might say ‘You can’t do that’. They might be right, but bugger them frankly, give it a go anyway. If it doesn’t work, you can laugh about it over a super-strength gin and tonic and spit an olive stone at the back of their neck when they’re not looking.

Anyway, that’s what I’m going to do. Join me. If I cannot persuade you to laugh in the face of danger then at least I might encourage you to snigger in the ear’ole of adversity.

First published 15.11.2018 when I was not yet sixty…

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…

By way of an apology…

There are times – of course there are – when all I can do is hold up my hands and say I’m sorry. Scheduled posts create the impression that I am ‘in the room’ whilst, in reality, I am actually, for a hatful of reasons… indisposed, I suppose. My posts appear with a metronomic regularity (for which I can only offer an auxillary apology) whilst, by and large, I am unable to show even the basic simple courtesy of reading what you – my fellow word-wranglers – have slaved to produce. I can currently do nothing more than apologise for this – which I hereby do.

I always try to respond to comments – not always as fulsomely as they deserve – because I feel that they have required a very particular effort to post, and I am meticulous in my efforts never to merely ‘like’ a post I have not been able to fully read: it just feels like bad manners.

Soon I will be in a place from which I will be able to derive great joy in catching up with my reciprocal duties, and I will have the opportunity to comment more fully on what I have read. My word, you’ll regret having me back by then…

Let’s Talk About Blogging

I don’t know if everyone stumbles into the blogosphere the way that I did, but (for me) what started off as a slight diversion became an obsession: a world into which I fully invested. Self-obsession balanced by curiosity, empathy and (fancifully perhaps) friendship. If sixty-six years of life has taught me anything at all, it is that you can’t have too many of those.

It becomes painfully when, through no fault of your own (in as much as you can ever be totally absolved of blame for what happens in your life) you miss – as I have just done – posting, and possibly more importantly, reading (blogging being an all-round participation sport) for a few weeks.

Today I feel a little like a footballer (non-league obviously) who has ‘come back too early’ and broken down almost immediately. I came back to the blog after an enforced lay-off, I wasn’t very good and then I disappeared again. I blame the physios.

Two weeks on the treatment bench afforded me the opportunity to review. Getting On is about getting older, not about being old. It is about how the world looks through an older person’s eyes and it has, incidentally, become about the old person himself. Life (a seventy year progression from one nappy to another) is short and the end of it becomes ever-closer day by day, ill-advised meal by ill-advised meal, speeding driver by speeding driver. Life becomes increasingly fragile. Run into a lamppost as a child and you simply have to laugh off an ‘egg’ the size of a football on your forehead. It won’t slow you down. Do it at my age (a possibility made all the greater by failing eyesight and the tendency to become distracted by irrelevances) and you will almost certainly wake up on a trolley in a corridor in A&E with an overworked junior doctor attempting to reconcile your injuries with somebody else’s case notes.

For reasons I do not understand, my retirement having offered up the potential (fully embraced) for seven-days-a-week working has led to a to-do list that has grown exponentially. For each job ticked off the top of the list, two more appear at the bottom. The need for a drop of oil on a door hinge will lead inexorably to the need for new hinges, new door ‘furniture’, a better lock and – oh bugger it – let’s just change the door. Maybe brick up the hole and move it a foot or so to the left… DIY imposes a kind of pyramid selling scheme: each little job necessitates two more. The butterfly effect in bricks and mortar. Knocking in a nail is like firing the starting pistol on an obstacle race of such fiendish complexity and Gordian intricacy that not even Victoria Coren Mitchell* would be able to map a way through. My wife’s ever-shifting hierarchy of urgency ensures that the task I am currently attempting to complete is never the right one.

But that’s ok. There is little I do these days without thinking, ‘could I write about this?’ When it all goes tits-up, it’s ok, I can write about it. That is what blogging has done for me. I don’t beat myself up for making a mess of stuff, I write it off. Somehow that gives me the space to think myself through putting it right. Not that it means my second attempt will be any better, just more considered. Knowing where something has gone wrong does not mean that I won’t fall down the same wormhole again. Generally it just means I get straight there without the initial meandering. I have always been comfortable with my ability to write. I am no Shakespeare, but then, he’s dead and I’m not. I feel that I would read, and enjoy, what I write, but… you know… I wrote it. And I’m old. I am what I am writing about. Would young me enjoy it?

It bothers me because, if I’m honest, that’s why I write it. It’s kind of a warning for the young: live long enough and you will end up just like this! I understand that you might find me saggilly repulsive, but I am envious of your drum-tightness and the fact that you can stand from the squat without sounding like a lovelorn hippo. I am envious of all the time you have left, but I am mindful that – as much as I moan about your woke sensibilities and your sense of entitlement – we are fundamentally the same. It is life that has changed. You have mobile phones, you eat out, you drink out, you have a social life that does not revolve around home-brewed wine and canapés featuring Dairylea Cheese Triangles, but you cannot (and you really cannot) afford the deposit to buy a house. We bought a house when I was twenty. We definitely weren’t rich, we were both shop workers, and the interest rate on our mortgage was 17% (I know, I’ve just looked it up) but our expectations were so very different. I do have a house and I do have a pension, but I fear for my future. I have no idea what – if I have one – it will bring me. We will scrape by, and then we will die and you (young people) will do the same. You will retire much later, but also live much longer and (I sincerely hope – I have grandchildren) in much better health. We all work a life away in the hope of a happy autumn and a comfortable winter. I am in my autumn – ok, late autumn – and winter is much closer than I ever thought it would be, but there is one thing that I am just as good at as I ever was: finding joy wherever it is hiding. It is much better at hiding these days, but I have lots of time to find it. Stay tuned, I will tell you all about it. It is what I love about blogging…

*Daughter of Alan Coren: razor wit and stellar intellect, professional poker player and presenter of the most obtuse of all game shows ‘Only Connect’.