Consider animals that flock, Or congregate within a bloc; The fish that shoal, the wolves that pack And spare a thought for those who lack The need to be a species clone But need to spend some time alone, Who feel that it is quite absurd To be no more than part of Herd.
Consider too the beasts that find They’re not like others of their kind. Imagine please the problems that Befall the vegan vampire bat Who nightly flies around the wood Whilst others go in search of blood Who finds his twilight life a test Not being quite like all the rest.
Consider please this lone outcast Who lives his life in bloodless fast (Blood oranges would be his choice, But there’s no rhyme for that of course) And, like me, hope that he will find A space for him within his kind – I think that all he wants is that ‘Cos after all, he’s just a bat.
Being different is never easy, but sometimes it’s more difficult than others…
Having become confused over which animals I have, and have not, written a rhyme about, I decided the time had come to write a list, at which point I discovered that my last rhyme (Zoo #21 – Aardvark) is about the same animal as my first (Zoo #1 – An Explanation). The rhymes are completely different – so at least I think I am not going completely ga-ga – but now I have ‘the list’ it should not happen again. Well, it might, if I’m honest, but at least I’ll know…
For the second time in less than a year my left ear has gone into Lockdown. I have no idea why, but it is very unsettling. My hearing is generally exceptional and my right ear is still operating at its normal threshold, so I can hear ok overall, but I have no idea where noises are coming from. This is a very weird experience. Everything I hear appears to be coming from the same direction, that of my good ear. Bang a tray to my left and I spin to the right. Now I know what goes on with my Sat-Nav when I set off for Edinburgh and wind up in Llandrindod Wells. Stick a peanut in my ear and I would probably spin around in circles for eternity. I don’t know why a deaf ear should be so disconcerting.
In common with most people at the moment, my life has surrendered much of its usual routine. I am an inflatable flamingo being tossed around at the whim of the North Sea: like a middle-aged man, disconsolately following his wife around the aisles of Wilkinson’s, wondering what comes next. And what comes next is beginning to bother us all, isn’t it? What will be the new normal? It looks increasingly unlikely that we are ever going to return to the way we were. If we rid ourselves of Covid, we are still at risk from any number of mutations that might arise in any one of the hundreds of nations that are unable to rid themselves of it. The world feels like a jigsaw at the moment: one thousand pieces, pulled apart, rattling about randomly in the box, waiting to be reassembled. We all know that when we finally get around to it, when we can’t even find a repeat of Midsomer Murders with which to more profitably spend our time, there will be pieces missing. (I can’t help thinking that makers of 1,000 piece jigsaws should have to print a disclaimer on the box: 1,000 pieces, but probably no more than 999 by the time you have spent a fortnight putting it together – check inside the cat.) The world has changed ineradicably.
Some of the change may be good: nobody is going to fly around the world anymore for a business meeting that can just as easily be done on zoom. Conversely, nobody is going to fly around the world anymore to meet new people or to understand a different viewpoint. The world has become smaller, yet at the same time more unfathomable. I can’t help but wonder how people will meet in the future. ‘I knew he was the one for me the moment he unmuted.’ ‘Even at two metres distance, with his mask cockled-up over one eye, I knew we were going to get on.’ And as for the ‘other stuff’, how? Two metres apart, masked and gloved. ‘OK then, but I’ll just have to anti-bac you first.’ ‘Every head in the room turned as she entered, wafting the heady scent of Domestos behind her…’
Maybe I worry too much. Maybe you don’t worry enough. Each day the news offers cause for optimism, which it then cruelly snatches away. ‘We are making amazing progress with the vaccination process – by the time we finish, it will be useless.’ ‘New Zealand has successfully eradicated the virus – and consequently nobody can ever go there again.’ Even the good news has become depressing. It’s a perverse kind of comfort I feel knowing that both of my parents died before I had to worry about them catching Covid.
When I was a child I loved Look and Learn magazines. Not new ones, you understand. The only new reading material I ever got was the Beano. These were passed down to me, from where I am not certain. They came to me periodically, in batches, pristine as though they had never been read. I loved them. I learned about Ants and Bees and Romans and Kibbutzim and how a slot machine works and how a grasshopper ‘chirrups’ and I turned into the precocious little brat that I remain to this day. If Look and Learn was about today, it would know the answers. No disagreements between various world leaders, medical directors and WHO officials then: ‘Well, what does it say in Look and Learn? Simple, definitive answers – often with appropriate diagrams – so clearly the way forward. Not only that, but whilst we were waiting for the appropriate measures to take effect, we could follow the instructions on page 5 to construct our own formicarium from 3 pieces of wood and an old pop bottle. Look and Learn was the nearest thing we had to the internet. Not quite so quick, but much less likely to lead to your bank being cleared out by a Russian cartel based in Nigeria and definitely less likely to be full of porn – unless you mistakenly stumbled upon the vicar’s copy.
Our house was not full of books and yet I was an insatiable reader. I read food labels, fag packets, my grandma’s Weekly News and Titbits, my dad’s Zane Grey novels, my mum’s Agatha Christie and yet I remember very few ‘children’s’ books about the house apart from Winnie the Pooh and an anthology of Grimm’s Fairy Tales which I still have today. I had a library card, but the library was in town and I amassed so many late return fines that I feared having a criminal record by the time I was six. Most of my book reading was done at school. I was good at it. Ahead of the curve in a way that I have never been with anything else desirable.
Anyway, Look and Learn would know what to do about my ear. Google is a waste of time. It tells me to put olive oil in it, but all I get is a greasy ear. It remains steadfastly blocked. I guess sooner or later I will have to have a zoom meeting with my GP who will also suggest putting olive oil in it. I’m not entirely certain that it isn’t actually blocked with the bloody stuff. Last time it happened, I could actually go to the surgery. He peered into it and said he could see nothing wrong. I said ‘What? I can’t hear you. Can you talk into my other ear?’ and he gave me some drops. I don’t know what they were, but it cleared up after a couple of weeks, which is what he said it would do naturally. So I’ll give it a week or two for now and see what happens – and just hope that if I encounter a runaway bus, it comes at me from the right side.
It was in the nature of the Writer’s Circle that outside the core of permanent members, others came and went: some believing they were too good, some believing they were not good enough, some believing that Writer’s Circle was really just a euphemism for something much closer to their own interests. The latter were apt to be men and liable to attend only once. Most sloped away at the mid-evening interval to find a phone booth with cards offering the French Lessons that were more in tune with the horizons they wished to broaden. All new attendees fell under the suspicious glare of Deidre, unaware at this point, of the irony that, whilst she wrote of love and implied sex, she was herself, almost the very definition of an anti-aphrodisiac (whatever that might be): think of having to look at a plate of ready shucked oysters; think of the eventual fall-out from a passion-inflaming Vindaloo; think of Bernard Manning in his vest and pants*.
In truth Ms Desmond (Nee Desmond) had never been one for real-life romance. Having lived her formative years exclusively through the pages of Bunty and Jackie and later, as her hormones began to wreak havoc with her laced-in soul, Pride and Prejudice, she had consolidated in her head and loins the image of Man as Darcy, which she knew in reality no man could ever match. And so it was. No man ever did. Few even tried.
Even in her teenage prime, Deidre had been formidable. She vowed that she would never succumb to a man until he proved worthy of her attentions. She quickly learned that there was no such man. She never succumbed. Whatever the gifts she had to bestow, they were never bestowed to another – although her passions were, on occasions, fully sated in the company of Fitzwilliam – often with such gusto that eventually her mother had to sell the cat and buy earmuffs. The maelstrom of desire that swirled within her became, a churning sea of rage fuelled both by the men who failed so abjectly to measure up to her aspirations and by the women who were willing to settle for these less-than-ideal souls. That they all appeared to be so much more content than herself, it seemed, never occurred to her.
Some newcomers, obviously, did return to the fold and the circle expanded. Deidre was far more welcoming to female newbies whilst the men were occasionally too thick-skinned to be put off. The dark cold days of winter saw the numbers at their sparsest, along with the longer summer days, which saw potential members surrender to the siren call of beach and beer-garden. Accordingly spring and autumn were peak times, when the room often contained more bums than seats and more unfinished manuscripts than a journalist’s bottom drawer. Some never read to the Circle, some, almost certainly, never wrote, but despite the edginess that pervaded the room from time to time, there was friendship and laughter too. In many respects it was like a return to school – only without head lice and threadworm.
It was in its very nature that the Circle attracted single people. The only regular member to have a spouse was Frankie. Wednesdays (Circle Day) was his evening, whilst his wife played badminton with the Wilsons from next-door and Mr Pettigrew from 42 on Fridays. Dick Hart, it was rumoured, was married once, before he had a motorway flyover built on the bridge of the dearly departed’s nose. Elizabeth had been happily married for thirty years until she was widowed by a bus (driven by a young man attempting to raise a house deposit by working three consecutive shifts without break) and Louise had recently divorced a passive/aggressive nutter, who had burned all of her clothes and fed the hamster to next-door’s cat. At least, that is what she said. All of them were looking for friendship and they all found it in this little room above the Steam Hammer public house which overlooked the luxury flats that now occupied the red brick fortress, formerly the home of Chaste and Sons Foundry.
Of course, not a single one of them would ever admit that companionship was the reason for their attendance. They were all aspiring writers – even those who never brought a word to the group. None of them would be happy with the suggestion that they came here for some kind of comradeship. After all, few of them actually liked anybody else in their little literary company. The Circle was a sounding-board, somewhere to come and try out what they had written and, if they hadn’t actually written anything that week, well the others would miss them if they didn’t come along.
In fact, Deidre aside, who in truth cared more about what the Circle had to say about her books than she would ever admit, the only two members who ever wrote systematically, Frankie and Phil, seldom read to the group. What Frankie wrote made him money, but was simply not the sort of thing you read out loud to Deidre and Penny; what Phil wrote was only just coalescing into the form he wanted. It was his first novel (although not his last) and despite the image he sought to create, he was deadly serious about its creation. He would read when he was ready. He knew that a bad reception would stop him in his tracks. Of the most recent members, Richard Hart would, ultimately, become the most successful ‘author’ in the room without ever actually writing a single word himself. Both The Sun and The Star had offered to ‘ghost’ his lurid and bloody memoir in return for ‘exclusive’ access to its contents. Hart would eventually sign for the highest bidder, but not until he had checked with his lawyer. He had spent many years in prison and he had to be sure that none of his confessions would buy him more time inside. Especially since he had the nagging feeling that he recognised the newest member in the room – and he didn’t want to be interviewed by her again…
I am trapped at home. I cannot – dare not – venture out into the white-over world that surrounds me. I have to don the wellies just to put stuff in the bin which is six feet from the back door. Even then I require at least one spare hand with which to grip the wall. (I originally wrote ‘grip the world’ there – a Freudian slip I would like to think, but more likely a subconscious recognition of reality. I am currently having one of those mornings when I mis-type everything. I use only two fingers and the keys are fairly big; how can my aim be so flippin’ awful? I will tend to all of the bits underlined in red later – but not the British idioms to which the autocorrect is particularly averse.) I like the look of snow. It looks great, but why is it so bloody cold? Why is it so slippery? I realise that there are plenty of people who would be very unhappy to discover that it had ceased to be so – skiers, ice hockey players, kids on sledges, the makers of ‘You’ve Been Framed’ – but those of us with low-level, frost-generated stability issues would be more than happy to find that it had acquired a little more traction. I wonder if Velcro soles would work?
Anyway, the fact is that I currently cannot run and so, like some Guru that The Beatles revered, unaware that he was only riding them to fame, I have decided to impart onto you, dear reader, all that I have so far learned about running. The first thing that I have learned about running is that, after six months, I still don’t like it very much. I never wake in the morning looking forward to a run: I never set off with anything other on my mind than finishing it. However, whilst acknowledging that running offers me no enjoyment of whatsoever, I have grown to understand that it is essential to my wellbeing: mental as well as physical. It is my thrice weekly ‘reset’. Don the trainers and hit ‘Control-Alt-Delete’. Nothing occupies my mind whilst running other than the immediate issues associated with doing so: not falling over; not running into anything/anyone; not passing out outside the chip shop. It is a necessary evil – like a belt: you really don’t need it until your trousers fall down.
So, the second thing I have learned about running is that I miss it when I don’t do it. When I find an excuse not to run – and I have many: I can be very creative – I regret it almost at once. I have two choices:
Ignore myself. Perfectly feasible. Everybody else does it perfectly well.
Clean the drains.
I feel slightly ashamed of myself when I have made an excuse not to run. Especially since my usual antidote to shame is chocolate and whisky. I schedule a run for the following day which, short of thinking of another excuse, I take. Missing a run always makes the subsequent excursion more difficult: I am out of breath sooner, in fear of death earlier. I regret having missed my run the day before. I vow never to make an excuse again. I marvel at my own weak-will. I guess it could be my superpower. (These are the thoughts that actually occupy my mind.)
The third – and I promise, last – thing I have learned about running is that it has a totally unpredictable effect on me. Some days I breeze around my little course. I feel so good that I pop in an extra kilometre. I smile at people for goodness sake! Other days, I set off in the same state of mind, in the same state of physical disintegration, and find myself running through treacle. Every step is an effort and I have to resolutely battle against the urge to just give in and walk – which, sadly, could be quicker. Nobody appears able to offer an explanation for this. Is it a cosmic phenomenon, or the slice of cake I ate at midnight? It must have something to do with my metabolism I guess (literally, as I have no idea what a metabolism is) but, if that is the case, my metabolism is frighteningly unreliable. Perhaps the external white-out offers me the perfect excuse to find out why: a profitable way to spend the hours which, in less skiddy times, would be used tramping the streets.
Or I could just drink hot chocolate and move the bin closer to the door…
Of everything in the animal park The broadest of smiles is on the aardvark: Although theoretical, If done alphabetical It’s always the first on the Ark.
Do you ever find yourself wondering exactly how animals got their names? Why a Tarantula isn’t called an ‘Arrghh!’? Why a Lion isn’t called a ‘Shit!’? Why a giraffe is not called a ‘Blimey!’? Why a Platypus is not called a ‘Whatthef…’? Who decided that a dog is a dog and a cat is a cat and not the other way round? I’m guessing that Noah and his family may be to blame: ‘Look, we need to write something on all the gates or else we’re going to get well mixed up. Just write something, anything, so that we can tell them apart. The last thing we need is a duck mating with an otter or somesuch… Really? Oh I don’t know. Just write Platypus…’
I’ve never been good at keeping a diary. I have tried many times, but I have never really consistently found the time. My routine existence – although one that normally drags along at the bottom of a featureless rut – still manages to find a route that is determinedly eccentric, somehow swallowing all my time. Sporadic is, I think, the best I can claim for my attention span, and that’s not generally considered consistent with diary writing is it? It’s ironic (Yes it is, Alanis) that now I have the time to be a regular diarist, I find that I have nothing to say. Diaries are, for the most part, humdrum: they rely for colour on the little islands of interest that nestle in the sea of mundanity. I have a Pacific Ocean of the mundane: such interest as I can accrue is a coral atoll, sinking slowly below the waves whilst the sunbeds are folded and the coconut salesman packs away his stock. Is ‘ditto’ really a valid diary entry and, if it is, then ‘valid’ for whom? Who do I think will ever read my diary? The whole purpose of a diary is to write for yourself isn’t it – think of the teenage journal, locked and hidden away, for your eyes only – what does it matter what you write? Nobody else is ever going to read it, right? Well, that is clearly not true. Everybody that has ever written a diary has actually done so with a view to altering the world’s perception of them. A statement of, ‘Despite what you might have thought of me at the time, this is what I am really like.’ Well, sadly, this is what I am really like, and you’re very welcome to it…
…Awoke this morning – always a cause for celebration – and contemplated the day ahead, anticipating that it would be the same as yesterday and the same as tomorrow. It was. As every day in Lockdown. In many ways the world seems to have stopped turning. We are all living a lonely, socially-distanced Groundhog Day.
I think I may have a spot coming on my lip.
Having woken, I got out of bed. Lingering is no longer an option. Men of my age do not linger in bed in the morning. The discomfort associated with it far outweighs the lure of doing so. Nothing impinges on the joy of a morning lie-in quite like a geriatric bladder protesting loudly because it is full of God-knows-what. I am never quite sure what gets in there overnight, but whatever it is and wherever it comes from, I know where it collects – and that appears to be closer to the point of exit with every passing day. Shuffle to the loo. Can’t go. Shuffle back to bed and immediately shuffle back to the loo. Go. Decide that getting back into bed is no longer a viable option. Unsuccessfully attempt to squeeze new spot. Bottom lip now resembles a ripe aubergine augmented with a pig’s nipple.
Showered and dressed because I am deeply boring and far too old to spend a day in PJ’s. That is a job for the young – and people with PJ’s that are fit to be seen during daylight hours: with elastic that functions as intended, a sewn-up fly and a crotch that does not carry faint hints of an entire week’s spilled suppers. Pyjamas, it seems to me, are marketed by over productive manufacturers of tourniquets, who can find nothing else to do with the surplus*. They should be worn only when entirely necessary and then with extreme caution. I cannot bring myself to wear them through the day, even in these times of solitude. We have mirrors, and my constitution is not what it was.
Scrambled eggs for breakfast, because we double-ordered on the click & collect (will also be eating celery daily until well into the summer). Drank the kind of coffee with which they used to tar ships and, thus fortified, contemplated the day ahead, immediately regretted it, and made another cup of tar-like coffee. I prefer my coffee with a percentage of caffeine that would probably justify a skull and crossbones on the packaging. I have some concerns that I would never wake if I stopped drinking it. I drink it black and without sugar. I am not certain that I would notice if I was slipped creosote in the morning.
The day stretched out before me – and stretched and stretched. So much time, so little to do.
My to-do list for the day ran as follows:
Exercise
Mend leaking toilet downpipe
Er, well, I’m sure I’ll think of something…
So, exercise was straightforward enough. I went for my usual run, which takes one hour and forty minutes in total: thirty minutes to get ready – shoring up knees and donning several layers of totally inappropriate-for-the-weather clothing; forty minutes running a distance that, in my thirties, I would have walked in twenty and finally thirty minutes peeling myself out of inappropriate clothing (which is often more of a work-out than the running) and shower. I steadfastly refuse to buy any new running gear as I still worry that I might stop it all any day soon, so I continue to run in an accumulation of old beachwear, jogging pants that have long-since been pushed into the ‘painting’ drawer with several holey sweaters and withered T-shirts, and donated trainers. They are inappropriate for the weather, whatever the weather, and by the time of my return, stuck to me like glue. My wife will not have them in the washing machine.
Then, pausing only to give my wife the very stern warning that the upstairs loo must not be used whilst I worked on the pipe, up the ladder and to work. Disassembly was straightforward, if unpleasant and the problem looked like one that was to be easily solved – at which point my wife flushed the upstairs loo. I am sure that we will be speaking again before the century’s end.
Unable to have a shower until I finished mending the pipe, I spent the next half hour attracting flies and trying very hard to remember not to lick my lips. Having finished, I peeled my clothes off as quickly as I was able, as they had started to set. Once again my wife would not have them in the washing machine. Tried to put them in the garden incinerator, but the bottom fell out and the little chimney lurched to an angle of forty-five degrees. I may have to bury them in the field behind us. Do Ebay sell HazMat tape?
After another shower I decided that, to fill my time more productively, I really ought to think about getting myself a hobby. I thought about painting, then I thought about fishing and finally I thought about gardening. Thinking is a fine hobby. I think I will pursue it further.
And so, Dear Diary, the night is now drawing in and I sit here contemplating the warm fulfilment of a day well spent – whisky does that to me. Tomorrow, as my grandma always said, is another day – although I wouldn’t bank on it being terribly different.
*Should you wish for more detail on my uneasy relationship with pyjamas, you will find it in ‘The World of Pyjama Ownership’ from this time last year.
Billy Hunter rose from his seat, theatrically exhaling a cloud of toffee-scented vapour from his plant-pot sized e-cigarette and, pausing only to take a deep swig from his half pint of bitter shandy, began to speak. “Nah then,” he said, addressing the room, puffed up by the heady cocktail of feigned ‘northern-ness’ and perceived significance. Phil and Frankie rolled their eyes in unison. “Here’s the scene. It’s winter. It’s raining: winter rain, colder than snow, pinching at faces and drowning hope from the ground up. It’s windy too: too windy for umbrellas. The wind lashes the rain into the windows. Our two characters – they haven’t let me know their names yet, but we’ll call them Bert and Brenda for now – are the only two people on the upper deck of the number 12 night bus to Ashington…” Billy tapped his papers into shape on his thigh and plumped himself up further before he began to read.
“Bert: You’ve, er, you’ve dropped your glove love.
Brenda: Eh? Oh thanks. I’m always doing that. Lose my own head if it wasn’t… you know.
Bert: Screwed on?
Brenda: Aye. Screwed on. Daft as a brush, my mum always says. Although, I’m never sure… What makes a brush daft do you think? They don’t seem particularly daft to me. Not bright, I’ll give you that. Not particularly bright, but I don’t see as why folks always assume that they’re daft. Have we passed the abattoir yet?
Bert : No, next stop is the cemetery.
Brenda: Do we go past the cemetery?
Bert: Eventually love, eventually yes…”
Billy’s eyes scanned the room, keen to gauge whether the other members had taken in the profundity of his line, but there was no reaction. “It’s real, you see,” he said in exasperation. “Conversation. Not dialogue, it’s conversation. Real conversation, full of repeats and silences. Sometimes the silences are the most profound.” “I’d definitely have to agree with that,” whispered Phil to a grinning Frankie. Billy tapped his papers against his thigh once more, whether out of habit or as a means of drawing attention to himself it was impossible to say – although it was clearly the latter. He scanned the room again before continuing.
“Brenda: Oh heck, I don’t want to go to the cemetery. I need to go down Thesiger Street. I don’t think the man in uniform at the bus station really knew about the buses at all. He told me the number 12 went to the abattoir – I’ve got an interview.
Bert: I don’t think they actually wear uniforms do they, bus men, these days? I mean, I don’t think they wear uniforms these days.
Brenda: You know, I think you’re right. He could have been a sailor now I come to think of it…
Bert: Upholders of an imperialistic hegemony!
Brenda: …Or a milkman. Whatever, I should never have listened to him. I’m going to be so late.
Bert: Look, I don’t want to speak out of turn, but this is the night bus. It’s eleven o’clock. It’s a bit of an odd time for an interview, isn’t it?
Brenda: He said it was too noisy there when everybody was working, so he thought it was best if I went after they’d all gone home. He said he’d find it easier to get ‘acquainted’.
Bert: Look, I hope you don’t think that I’m… you know, sticking my nose in where it’s not wanted, but are you sure this bloke was actually… you know…?
Brenda: What?
Bert: Well, do you think he was actually in a position to offer you a job?
Brenda: He had a suit on. He said he was a big cheese in the abattoir world.
Bert: Right. So, where did you actually meet the big cheese.
Brenda: I was working behind the bar. He came to get his free lager – on account of how they’d all had a drink paid for – and he said I was wasted behind the bar. He said I should be working in a nice, clean office. He said something about me being more than adequately built for desk work.
Bert: Where was this?
Brenda: I work in The Fighting Cock in town. We closed off both rooms for the funeral party.
Bert: A funeral party? So would I be right in thinking that all the men were wearing suits?
Brenda: Well, now you come to mention it…”
The silence around the circle was, if anything, even more jarring than Billy Hunter’s dialogue. Eyes, mostly cast at the floor, lifted briefly to look at other members. Some stifled yawns, checked their watches, shifted uncomfortably in their chairs. Frankie and Phil appeared to be attempting to suppress laughter, but at what, nobody, least of all Billy, appeared to know. Sensing that the meeting was beginning to lose focus, Deidre clapped her hands and prepared to thank Billy, hoping to press on with some other offering – preferably her own – but Billy was not to be stopped. “My plots,” he said, “Do not feature the contrived machinations of the cheap, pulp detective novel.” He looked sourly towards Phil Fontaine. “And,” he continued, shifting his glare towards Frankie, “My characters do not exist for the promotion of hollow laughter. They are real characters, with something to say.” He was irate. He tried to tap his papers into shape one more time, but succeeded only in reducing them to a crumpled pile. He smoothed them on his leg and read on.
“Bert: If I were you, I’d forget about the interview. You’re probably miles too late now anyway. Stay on the bus. When it reaches Ashington, it turns round and goes straight back to the depot.
Brenda: You’re probably right. I’m probably not suited to office work anyway, not being able to type and all. I just wanted to better myself, you know. Anyway, what about you, where are you going at this time of night?
Bert: Me? I’m the conductor. Have you paid for your ticket by the way?…”
Billy breathed deeply, as if he had been involved in some form of strenuous exercise. “It’s just a start,” he said at last, “but I think it has something. It is going somewhere. It has something to say. It speaks of our time. It could be great. It could be important…” If Billy had a bushel, he most certainly was not going to use it for hiding his light. “What do you think?” The candour took the room by surprise. Nobody ever asked what the others thought of their work. Far too dangerous. The silence lingered, far longer than was seemly: somebody had to say something. The members of the writer’s circle looked at one another, desperate not to catch Billy’s eye, each urging the other to say something. To say anything. Eventually Phil, who was growing desperate for his half-time drink, decided to take the plunge on behalf of them all. He coughed quietly and raised his hand. “Ah,” said Billy, “The Private Dick. Well, what do you need to know then, Sherlock?” Phil grinned affably, stretching tight lips over dry teeth. “I was just wondering,” he said. “Knowing how much you prize realism. Does the number twelve night bus actually go to Ashington?’
This post is not about being fashionable, it is about wearing out. Something is going on with my hip with which I am not altogether comfortable. I fear ironmongery is just around the corner. I am currently teetering, arse just millimetres above the sharpened tip of the horn of a dilemma. I cannot deny that my hip aches after I run, but it aches more when I don’t run. Do I keep on running, bearing in mind that I just might be doing more harm than good, or do I stop running and just let the bloody thing seize up? (Time to point out, this is a rhetorical question. I am as stubborn as a very very stubborn thing. I will continue to run as long as I am capable. In my mind, keeping all of my failing joints moving can only be a good thing. Sooner or later, something will stop me – probably an ill-judged bus – but until then, I jog on.)
I get no pain whatsoever from my hip whilst I am running. It is one of the few smug joints that does not give me gyp during exercise. It waits until three A.M. and then begins its toothache throb. I am very stubborn about painkillers as well. I do not take them. I remember my grandma telling her doctor that she did not want to take painkillers because, if she did, she would have no way of knowing that the pain had stopped. I kind of get that: you will almost certainly still be taking them when you don’t need to. Occasionally my knees demand that they remain encased in supports throughout the day, but generally they are much more robust than they were six months ago. My ankles are almost strong enough to support the rest of me unaided these days. Also, I think that it might help all of my movable lower bits and bobs that there is quite a lot less of me for them to support now – and running is the only way, that I can actually think of, to maintain that. I eat crap, I drink too much and in all other respects I am a total sloth; running is my only vice.
Also, I must report that spring is definitely just around the corner. I ventured out today in nothing more than shorts (over leggings) and a T-shirt (over a sleeveless vest and under a long sleeved ‘T’). I have shed the fleece joggers and the fluorescent jacket – although not yet the hat and gloves. Snowdrops stand in clumps around the base of trees, peeking out from winter-long grass, trembling in the breeze; daffodil buds are pushing through the soil; all around me the birds are doing whatever it is that birds do in the spring. Doubtless, somewhere, the bees are at it like knives. Spring always seems to me to bring about the fastest transformation in the planet. Suddenly everything that is not turning green, is mating. The world renewed. Except this year it all seems somehow wasted. All of this wonder to witness and nobody to witness it, unless it is happening within whatever is perceived as a suitable distance from your front door step.
My run today took me over the swollen village beck, bereft of kids with nets; across the village sports field (technically known, in these covid times, as the village field); through the empty pub garden and finally the village churchyard – suddenly ablaze with the colour of dozens of new bouquets in vases – and although my heart sank at the emptiness of it all, my hip did not complain at all.
In keeping with my pledge at the start of the year, I changed my avatar yesterday to a slightly more hairy Lockdown version of me and it made me think that it is time for a new photo to accompany the Running Man. I think that I probably should make it clear, in order to forestall any threat of litigation, that the legs in the photo are not mine (that’s never going to happen) but they do, at least, appear to be running…
Elephants never forget, From January through to December, But I’m happy to bet, Although with regret, There is nothing they need to remember.
The perils of a pampered zoo life. You don’t need to remember how to cross half a continent in order to find a dry-season water hole when there’s someone to turn a hose on you every day. Maybe you just need to remember that this is not quite as it should be – and wait for the zoo keeper to leave the gate open…
Now don’t get me wrong. This isn’t going to be some kind of ‘Woe is me’ whinge. I have a house to be trapped in. It is warm and it is dry – if annoying at times. I can still do the three things that I like most in the world: I can listen to music, I can read and I can write this twaddle, but Lord knows, it’s hard enough to find something new to say sometimes even when you’re not trapped at home all day, doing the same things, in the same order, day after day, and working on the theory that you are not too interested in my toilet habits, my tooth-cleaning regime, nor the order in which I put on and take off my clothes each day, I must admit that even this – my thrice weekly psyche-shredding – has become something of a challenge. This last week has been filled with floundering attempts at finding something new to say about porridge, daytime TV (with special consideration to ‘Loose Women’) and the vagaries of the bin collection. If they were successful in any way, it was merely in teaching me that I have nothing amusing to say about any of them. I even tried to cut and paste pieces of them together, but I wound up sounding like David Icke on crack. There is only so much neurosis it is seemly to cram into a thousand words.
Of course, there are two of us in this house, circling around one another like all-in wrestlers waiting for the bell to go. We have been married for forty years now: there’s not much new that we can find that’s grating about one another. But we’re both trying. I, for instance, have been on this earth for sixty two years without once, until this point, realising that I talk too much, eat too much, drink too much and, quite frankly, breathe too much. We are currently both considering self-isolation – from one another. Not because we have any of the symptoms of Covid, but because it saves us having to be civil all the time. We have developed our own entirely new method of communication based solely on the grunt. Why waste precious syllables when different types of guttural expectoration will serve just as well?
I don’t watch a lot of TV, but my wife does – usually involving people being patched up, cut up, giving birth, or occasionally all three. Sometimes, whenever she decides to watch something that is not dripping in blood and pain, I join her in front of the telly screen, but I think, if I’m completely honest, my presence is not entirely welcome. She doesn’t really like me there. I ask too many questions. I have to be honest, if left to my own devices I would watch little other than old sit-coms and Columbo. I’m not good with the concentration required by TV programmes. How on earth am I supposed to remember the name of the detective’s third cousin by the time that part two comes around and there has been an advert for chocolate between it and part one? I had no idea that I am so annoying: I had no idea my wife would be so good at telling me just how annoying I am. I wouldn’t mind, but she’s got some really bad habits herself – I just can never bring them to mind when I need them. The mid-row, ‘Well you…you…you…’ is normal for me. All my carefully rehearsed rejoinders cast, stuttering, onto the breeze. All my irrefutable facts refuted…
It’s like cabin fever. Three hundred years ago, we would probably have murdered one another by now; be using the other person’s scooped-out cranium as a candle holder. It is Friday deciding exactly how he could fricassee Crusoe – the house is our desert island (although with running water, flushing loos and a distinct lack of coconut and swamp rat in our diet): it is Lord of the Flies with a cast of two; it is a recording session for Let It Be. We both cringe every time our partner reaches for the carving knife. I insist on pouring my own drinks. I have just checked whether it is possible to be poisoned with vitamin D**.
I get out of the house to run, it gives me space and air, and it saves me from going completely stir crazy. I have asked my wife if she would like to run with me. To give you an extremely truncated version of her reply, the answer was ‘No’. There were many reasons – principle amongst them, apparently, the lack of a sports bra. Obviously an excuse. I manage perfectly well without one. My wife walks instead. Unfortunately for her, I too like to walk and I generally go with her. Once again, I fear that my company is not always fully appreciated. I get my coat and hat and she gives me the kind of look that normally accompanies the realisation that your sixteen year old daughter is having a bra fitting carried out by Jimmy Savile. Surely she could try to pretend. We get on really in the fresh air: barely a bicker. Just a sixty year old couple out for a stroll – nothing much to write home about. And yes, that is where we came in, nothing much to write a blog about. If only one of us could fall and break a bone of some kind. Nothing essential, you understand. Nothing too debilitating. I’m pretty sure I could manage without the use of one of the fingers on my left hand for a little while. I could manage the inconvenience I think, if not the pain – my pain threshold occupies the same kind of space as Donald trump’s humility – long enough to write a post about it at least. It would give my wife the opportunity to roll her eyes at me. With any luck, that might be considered as a second period of exercise and we would both wind up in a police cell. That’s bound to be good for a couple of hundred words isn’t it?
*Elbow – Grounds for Divorce ** Exceedingly fair skin means that the sun and I are extremely uneasy bedfellows, so, unable to absorb it in the normal way without assuming the colour of a ripe raspberry, I have taken a vitamin D supplement for many years. It is the only vitamin I take that is not a constituent part of either chocolate or whisky and the only thing I can find about the house that might be snuck into my food without me noticing.
Getting On 