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…
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’.
The Custodian of Time sat, open-legged on the heavily brocaded settle, smoothing the creases from his satin pyjama trousers and picking the loose threads from the cushion on which he rested his arm. His movements were leisurely, but his eyes skipped around the room and he spoke as if time was of the very essence, which, of course, for its Custodian, it was. “I suppose he wants more does he; they all do?” The words jettisoned from his mouth without warning or prevarication, in a way that would have caused his attendant to leap from his skin – if only he had some. The acolyte was, in fact, a small ectoplasmic fog, slightly purple in colour – lilac possibly – and nervous to the point of dissipation. It was his/her’s (we’ll assume her for ease) very first day on duty and her first time alone in the presence of the Custodian. She had been told, “Pass on the request. Wait for the reply. Leave.” Simple. She hadn’t been led to expect a question. She hoped it was rhetorical. “Well?” said the Custodian. Obviously it was not. The attendant’s stress-level passed critical. She was aware that she was starting to precipitate. She coughed nervously (as only a lilac ectoplasmic cloud can). “Erm… that is… well… I think so. Actually no, not really. No. It’s more of an assurance he’s after I think, not more time, just an assurance that he won’t get less.” “Less than what?” “Well, less than he expects, I think.” The Custodian picked at his teeth with the corner of the written request (parts 2 and 3). His eyes betrayed no clue to the activity that whirred behind them. Eventually, with a sigh, he removed the paper from his mouth, flicked an errant sesame seed from it, before smoothing it out across his lap. “He understands, does he, that what I give to one I must take from another?” “I don’t know,” said the blob, emboldened by the hesitation he detected in the Custodian. “I don’t think that he wants more anyway. He just, as I understand it, would like an assurance. He was led to believe, from birth, that he could expect to live to one hundred years of age, and he just wants to be assured that that is what he will get. He doesn’t smoke, he’s a moderate drinker, fit and well. He just wants some certainty.” “Has he told you what he plans to do with this certainty?” “I’m sorry, I…” The gossamer orb was in full-fluster once again. “When he knows that after Wednesday he no longer has anything to lose…” “Wednesday?” “Wednesday? Did I say ‘Wednesday’? Just a slip of the tongue – probably. Not at all the kind of assurance he was looking for, huh? Tell him ‘Carpe Diem’ baby; tell him ‘Seize the day’. Tell him only one person knows what time has in store for him and, for every good reason, he is keeping that knowledge to himself.” “But, what if he wants to do good things?” “Then nobody’s stopping him,” said the Custodian and, with a wave of his podgy little fingers, he dismissed the cloud, which hesitantly turned (I think) to go. “Come on,” barked the Custodian impatiently. “Tempus Fugit, baby. Get a move on. Time waits for no amorphous entity.” And with an audible ‘Pop!’ the attendant disappeared. “Wednesday,” chuckled the Custodian. “Wednesday. I’m such a wag… Now, where’s the cloud with my supper?”
A little time ago I published a visitor guide for Cleckheaton despite the fact that I had never been there and for no better reason than I really liked the name of the place. Now here I am, on the way back from my house-move-imposed publishing interlude and ready to spread my wings. Today you get a country, next year the stars. I am not going to try and tell you that I am a Scotland expert. Despite my name, I am not. But I am interested, it is a magnificently beautiful country, and I am happy to tell you all I know about it because that’s just the way I am: give, give, give.
Scotland is a relatively small country tagged onto the north of England having come here in the far distant past from the coast of America for the good of its health. The subsequent collision of transient country and intransigent landmass threw up a mountain range between the two which the Scots hoped would keep the English out, but it never quite worked. Scotland is a verdant country – it is a green land, so much so that Donald Trump is attempting to occupy it one golf course at a time – everything is green, largely because it NEVER STOPS RAINING. It is colder than the rest of the UK and the rain only ever lessens when it can’t stop itself from turning to snow. In between periods of rain and snow, it sleets. Sleet can find its way through any amount of clothing. It is impossible to be warm in sleet unless you are on the outside of the water of life…(Uisge beath – Gaelic for ‘water of life – became shortened to Uisge – pronounced oosh gae and eventually ‘whisky’. There is no ‘e’ in Scottish Whisky (Scotch) because it is not American, Irish or Japanese – there is no other reason. Whisky is Scotland’s gift to the world, but don’t run away with the idea that all Scots drink it. We once spent a wonderful couple of weeks on holiday with a Scottish family who were the best company and, more importantly, introduced us to The Girder: vodka and Irn Bru – the true national drink of Scotland – which is impossible to put down until you fall down.
As well as being the birth place of the water of life, Scotland is also home to the most beautiful city in the world. Edinburgh is lively, peaceful, beautiful, ugly, modern and ancient; obviously wet and cold also, but it’s a place I constantly find myself wanting to get back to. If you live outside Britain well, obviously I am very sorry for you, but should you be able to visit the UK, please allow me to suggest that you forsake the lure of London, London, London for at least a few nights and visit the Scottish capital where you can enjoy the people, the city and especially the whisky after which, if you are assiduous enough in your endeavours, you will enjoy absolutely everything and love absolutely everyone.
As far as food is concerned in Scotland anything goes – as long as it is fried. There are few who would argue that the Scottish diet is the most healthy in the world. Real Scottish people – like all of us – eat a decent balance of foods, but the general perception is that they eat only foodstuffs that have been cooked in hot fat, pies and haggis. The Scots do not eat haggis. Haggis is just a joke against the English. Traditionally accompanied by ‘neeps and tatties (‘neeps’ being an abbreviation of turnips, despite the fact that they are not turnips at all, but actually mashed swede, and ‘tatties’ being mashed potato – together they are like the mush you first feed babies, but with absolutely nothing that would ever convince mini-humans to forsake the nipple) haggis is simply a bagful of all the stuff that can be dredged out of a dead animal that no-one in their right mind would ever eat drenched in sufficient herbs to disguise the flavour of a cadaver’s innards without actually making them in any way palatable. There is not a Scottish person alive that does not find the fact that English people actually believe that they eat haggis hilarious. Even funnier is that they have somehow persuaded the entire population of England that on the 25th January each year (Burns Night) we should all eat haggis, neeps and tatties prior to coughing our insides out thanks to the unaccustomed snag of whisky on the effete English throat. (NB I have drunk whisky all my life but it took a trip to Scotland for me to learn that it takes a couple of drips of room temperature water to bring whisky to life. Long, long ago I asked for ice in my whisky in an Edinburgh pub and the barman looked askance at me, shook his head slowly and said “Ice? Do you not know what it did to The Titanic?” The conversation went no further.)
Scottish men do not wear kilts – they laugh at the thought of everyone with the most tenuous of associations to Scotland leaping into a thick, woollen skirt at the faintest whiff of a wedding – and nobody, but NOBODY actually listens to bagpipe music for enjoyment. In fact the phrase ‘bagpipe music’ is a total oxymoron. Bagpipes do not produce music, they produce a kind of shrieking death rattle. It is no coincidence that the sound they produce originates through a drone. The image of the lone piper swirling down on the advancing, kilted hordes is the stuff of legend. If it happened at all, it is almost certain that the skirted warriors were just trying to get away from the racket.
And finally, my last ‘Scotland fact’ for this post is that its national animal is the Unicorn which – unless you are a five year old girl you will know – does not actually exist and, therefore, could not possibly wear a kilt. Not even after whisky…
When you realise – too late – that the image you had planned to use is copyright, and you have to draw your own…
Having passed pristine through the hands of Christopher Robin and relatively unscathed through those of his children, Winnie-the-Pooh was now in the hands of the grandchildren and feeling the strain. The daily bump-bump-bump of his head on the stairs was taking its toll. He did not find thinking things through nearly as easy as he used to, and now he thought about it, he had never found it particularly easy in the first place. ‘Perhaps,’ he thought, ‘that’s what comes of having a head stuffed full of kapok.,’ although he had not the faintest idea of what kapok actually was and even less of a clue if that was what a bear of a certain age had stuffed in its head at all. Whatever it was he had stuffed between his ears, he was pretty sure that it was not nearly as densely packed as it used to be. ‘Perhaps that’s why I can’t erhm… can’t… Oh dear, what is it I can’t?’ thought Pooh. ‘Oh dear, I can’t remember. What is it I can’t remember? I can’t remember. Oh dear…’ Pooh sat on the bottom stair to collect himself. ‘Kapok,’ he mused. ‘Was it kapok? Oh dear, I forget. What is kapok?’ To calm himself, Pooh hummed a little hum he had just composed.
What is kapok? Goodness knows! It must be something I suppose. Perhaps it fills my head and toes And possibly my down-belows.
Or is it sawdust in my head That’s drained down to my feet instead And trickled out through loosened thread To join the fur-balls that I shed.
Whatever is inside of me Is falling out as you can see And taking consequentially What little brain there used to be.
Pooh was very happy with his hum and he would have given it a tune if he hadn’t forgotten the first verse before he hummed the last…
Some time later, Pooh was tramping across what remained of the Hundred Acre wood – a small area of scrubland, bedecked with broken bicycles, burned out cars and soiled and soggy bed mattresses, in the middle of a semi-derelict housing estate – when he bumped into Piglet. ‘Where are you going?’ asked Pooh. ‘Why,’ said Piglet. ‘I’m not sure, but I believe I am going to the same place as you.’ ‘In that case,’ said Pooh ‘I shall join you.’ And so Winnie-the-Pooh and Piglet tramped off together to find out where they were going. ‘How do you think we will know when we get there?’ asked Piglet. ‘Well, I suppose that after we get there we will start going back,’ said Pooh. ‘So then we’ll know.’ ‘Why of course,’ said Piglet. ‘I would never have thought of that.’
Presently, some time after Winnie-the-Pooh had stopped to pick some dog shit out of his fur with a stick, Owl fluttered down beside the friends. Having lost all of his forebears to poisoned rodents, Owl was attempting to embrace a vegetarian diet – and it was not agreeing with him. ‘In the old days,’ he moaned, ‘I could cough up a pellet the size of a Mars Bar. Full of fur and bone. You really knew I’d been there. Now what do I cough up? Don’t know? I’ll tell you. Seeds! That’s what I cough up now, seeds. Nature’s stealth bomber, that was me. The silent killer. The nation’s favourite raptor. And what am I now? I’ll tell you. A budgie, that’s what I am. A bleedin’ budgie.’ He swivelled his head evilly through 360°. ‘I miss the taste of pulsing flesh, blood and bone,’ he said and licked his beak in a way that only owls can do. ‘I miss honey,’ said Pooh sadly. ‘I’ve written a little poem about it.’ ‘Oh Gawd!’ said Owl. ‘Would you like to hear it?’ ‘No!’ chorused Owl and Piglet. ‘Very well,’ said Pooh, clearing his throat with a little cough.
Soft and yellow, sweet and sticky Eating it with paws is tricky. After just a jar or two I would be stuck up like glue
Long ago, in times that’s been I would lick my paws quite clean, But now everything I eat is Governed by my diabetes.
‘I hate flippin’ porridge’ said Pooh with a distant look in his beady glass eyes. ‘And I really miss honey.’ ‘And I,’ grumbled Eeyore, who had been following them quietly for some time. ‘I miss my tail.’ ‘Eeyore,’ said Pooh. ‘I didn’t know you were there.’ ‘It would seem to me,’ said Eeyore morosely, ‘that that is the story of my life.’ ‘What is?’ asked Piglet, who had been momentarily distracted by an earwig under his vest. ‘Nobody knows I’m here,’ groaned Eeyore. ‘Or cares…’ ‘I care,’ said Pooh. ‘You still owe me a fiver.’
Owl had fluttered around to the rear-end of Eeyore and was examining his rump closely. The button that had once held Eeyore’s tail in place was long-gone, leaving just a stub of severed threads. The tail itself, it was said, lay amongst various bags of assorted household effluvia at the local landfill. A small open seam close to its original location was held together with a rusting safety pin. ‘Perhaps,’ said Owl, ‘we could pin you a new tail there.’ ‘Oh could you?’ said Eeyore. ‘That would make me so…’ ‘Happy?’ suggested Winnie-the-Pooh. ‘Happy,’ said Eeyore. ‘Whatever that might be.’
So, whilst Eeyore stood beside a rusting shopping trolley contemplating his posterior, Winnie-the-Pooh, Owl and Piglet began to search for something that would make Eeyore a new tail. ‘It’s a shame Tigger can’t be here to help,’ said Piglet. ‘He seldom leaves his house,’ said Pooh. ‘His top is still made of rubber, but it’s lost all its bounce. His bottom has no spring…’ ‘We should go and cheer him up later,’ said Piglet. Too late,’ said Owl, looking at a watch he kept tucked under his wing (God knows how). ‘He’ll be on the outside of a bottle of Scotch by now and sleeping it off under a tree as usual. We could try tomorrow.’ ‘Perhaps I could hum him a cheerful hum,’ said Pooh. ‘No,’ chorused Eeyore, Piglet and Owl, just a little too quickly for Pooh’s liking. ‘I think he just needs rest,’ said Owl. ‘But…’ began Pooh, when Piglet interrupted him excitedly. ‘I’ve found just the thing,’ he cried, holding up a short length of frayed, orange nylon rope. ‘It doesn’t quite match the rest of you, Eeyore, but it will hang down just like a tail.’ Eeyore almost smiled. ‘Do you think anyone will notice that it isn’t really a tail,’ he asked. ‘Me being grey and it being orange and nylon and all. Will it make me look younger? Will it turn back the sands of time? Will it make me more desirable to other donkeys?’ Owl polished the thick, bottle-glass lenses of his spectacles, rested them back on his beak and looked earnestly at Eeyore. ‘It will look,’ he said ‘just like it had never fallen off… in an orange, nylon kind of a way. And at a fraction of the price of a transplant.’
First Published 05.09.2019
I love these little parodies, but they only work when they keep as close to the original in style as possible. Winnie the Pooh was my go-to book right through childhood and I wanted this to be an affectionate piece, but I was aware that time had moved on…
So, here’s the thing: having almost certainly decided to reduce the blog to two new posts per week, I began using some of my newly acquired free time writing a new novel (I know, who knew there was an old one?) and if I’m honest, I like the way it is going; it amuses me. The problem is that this book is a follow-up to the previous one which, I now realise I have yet to do anything with. I have long-since grown tired of attempting to find publishers or agents who are willing even to pass a cursory eye over the kind of stuff I write – I believe that the genre of humorous fiction officially died with Tom Sharpe – and I have no desire to trek back along that road of summary rejection one more time. I am much too old to go in for self-publicity – my sell-by date passed years ago. I will, I suppose, eventually rouse myself to publish on Kindle and subsequently forget all about it whilst I settle fully into writing episode two. It is a total waste of time I know, but it beats sitting in front of the telly every night with a packet of Garibaldis and a tartan blanket, dribbling gently into a mug of milky tea.
It will come as no surprise to any of you who have made a habit of reading my witterings to learn that this presents a whole new avenue for me to explore. I understand that the manuscript will require re-formatting, which given that I have the IT skills of an over-sugared amoeba might just prove to be a little bit of a challenge for me. I think I will enjoy creating a cover – although Lord knows how – but I worry that all of the assorted housekeeping associated with preparing the old stuff may mean that writing the new stuff might find itself shuffled into the scarily distant future and I am not happy with that. (It is important, I feel to make the distinction here between thefuture [a very long time indeed] and my future [not].) I have no great desire to leave behind a written legacy of unread treasures, and my yearning for a life filled with sex, drugs and rock ‘n’ roll has long been superseded by a desire for woollen socks and Arctic Rolls. Never-the-less, my mind struggles with the imperative of getting the boring stuff out of the way in order that the fun bit can make some kind of sense so, perversely, book two continues to trundle on its way – by turns amusing and frustrating me – whilst book one lurks, unre-formatted, in its computer folder, having been read by no more than half a dozen press-ganged souls or, dependent upon what software has covertly wormed its way onto my pc, several million people in China and Russia. The brief enthusiasm for getting it out there evaporated quicker than a fireside whisky once the writing had been done.
Book One is called ‘Clean’ – a tale populated with characters totally devoid of any redeeming features, from which none emerge with any kind of credit: let’s call it ultra-realism – and Book Two – which features the same cast of unreformed ne’er-do-wells – is currently entitled ‘Clean Break’, so you can probably understand the need for book one to be read before book two, but I know that I am unlikely to attend to the practicalities of this because well, if I’m honest, I’m bloody useless and the writing of the second story is sucking me in like quicksand whilst the realities of doing something about story one weigh down on me like a hip-flask full of whisky at a Methodist wedding. Perhaps I can format this new book so that it is written in an appropriate manner for Kindle, but I would do so in the certain knowledge that by the time I have stirred myself into reformatting book one, the criteria will almost certainly have changed, and anyway, if I like the way that book two eventually sloshes to its conclusion, I will already be half-way through the first draft of episode three (possibly ‘Clean Away’, ‘Clean Slate’ or, depending on my mood ‘Fifty things you Never Knew About Microbes’) by then. It is the way I work.
The point is (oh yes, there is one) that I originally decided to reduce my bloggy output by one third with the intention of giving myself some extra time in which to decorate the new house, but as the move keeps getting kicked by the solicitors ever further into the long grass, the book has filled the time vacuum and will, when the paint brush is finally pushed into my sweating palm, be clogging up the ever expanding spaces between neurons. Getting book one ‘out there’ may well prove to be even more tiresome than ‘two coats of white across six ceilings’ and book two will find itself with nowhere to go, at which point a return to three posts per week will almost certainly follow. Just don’t say I didn’t warn you…
It’s an odd way of going on I know, but occasionally I write something that I really want to like, but for one reason or another (alright, usually for one reason only: it is rubbish) I just can’t. With most sub-standard posts – and there are many – a swift click on the ‘delete’ button, the single most used key on my keyboard, is al that it takes to rid my mind of them. A coffee or (if there is a ‘Y’ in the day) a whisky and a chocolate bar and I am ready to go again. Like all ailing software, my brain is washed of all detritus by a simple reboot (unless it has a virus, in which case it becomes fully engaged in feeling sorry for itself, at which point all scheduled tasks are put on hold and 111 is added to speed-dial). Every now and then these pieces just fall onto the page, blithely unusable, but refusing resolutely to vacate the synapses, clogging the gap between neurons with something that pops into my consciousness, like Sandra Bullock, whenever I let my guard down: I have to deal with it.
I do so by printing what I have and leaving it where it cannot be ignored. I lay my little 4-colour Bic biro (the single greatest invention of the second millennia) across the paper, ready primed on green, while I try to pretend that it doesn’t matter to me, at which point I decide (obviously) that actually it really does, and try to massage the words into some kind of shape (generally an amorphous blob) crossing out, moving, re-writing, adding, subtracting, adding again until it is impossible to make any sense of it, at which point I transcribe the whole sorry lot back onto the computer, print it up again and click down the red refill on the pen. (This whole process is intensified by a factor of approximately one million if I am attempting to write ‘a poem’, in which case I can spend up to three weeks fretting over a single word – usually the name of a biscuit – from a stanza that will almost certainly be completely deleted just as soon as I find another rhyme for ‘spanner’.)
By this time the post will most certainly have moved some distance from its original form: it may well have evolved a new ending which requires an entirely revised introduction and, perhaps, a mid-section that does not rely quite so heavily on the reader’s knowledge of Fourteenth Century Ship Building. It will no longer be funny, but the syntax will be less familiar to scholars of the Rosetta Stone. Red pen follows the same ‘add, subtract, move and rephrase’ routine as green, but in an altogether more ‘modern’ way: any jokes that remain are underlined and scrutinized in order to remove all possibility of causing offence and, on the basis that there is always someone desperate to be affronted, subsequently drained of all life and humour. Following a red re-writing – which can, by the way, take several weeks and three ethics committees to complete and deplete a pen refill by anything up to an inch – the now tattered document will read like an instructional briefing at the local morgue and could only be made less interesting if read aloud by Alan Titmarch. Transcribing the mess back onto the computer is like tip-toeing through a darkened room, the floor of which is strewn with Lego mousetraps, but eventually – in the brief moment that it agrees to connect to the network – the printer whirrs into life and the pen clicks onto blue…
It is generally about this time that I realise that I actually preferred the original version, but that I no longer have a copy of it due to my habit of shredding everything I do after I have despoiled both sides of the paper, the majority of which comprises the ‘b’-sides of official communications, red bills and ‘letters to self’. By this time, reading through the piece is like being forced to listen to a euphonium concerto after accidentally scrubbing ‘Stairway to Heaven’: it is like discovering that your copy of The Complete Works of Shakespeare was actually written by Dan Brown. I will often attempt to rewrite passages that I have long-forgotten and cross out everything that does not easily slip into my chosen category of ‘humour’ in order that I do not find myself being sued by someone who has read every word I have ever written but has never laughed once – especially given the deplorable condition of my grammar and capitalization bordering on the cavalier (Cavalier?).
Blue re-writes can involve much soul-searching, but more regularly feature something red which tastes as though it may have been strained through a docker’s sock and some kind of dry-roasted peanut induced mania. Another new beginning or ending may have been appended, making – like a Russian history lesson – a nonsense of everything that lies between. Blue edits are overlaid on green and red computer versions and a final reprint allows me to throw the kind of jokes that killed thehumour periodical at it – in black ink, because favouritism is never a good thing. (Perhaps now is a good time to reveal that I have four of these 4-colour Bics on the go at any one time and use them in strict rotation – or would, if only I could work out which is which.) Having exhausted all four inks there is, after all, very little left for me to do to improve a post which will almost certainly find itself gathering binary dust in the depths of my Documents File for the rest of its natural life, except that it is, after all, one of those posts and I need it close at hand in case I ever find a different colour to write it in and having just read it through again, well, it’s really not so bad now I come to think of it…
I presume that, in common with myself, most people pass through this life in possession of the certain knowledge that in many respects they are just not quite good enough: not good enough as either child, partner, parent, grandparent or Crazy Golfer. As we get older we all become acutely aware of each little deficiency’s drip-drip-drip. Some things we rail against (the slow decay of body, mind, tooth and the will to turn the TV off just because it is full of sh*t) some we grow to accept (fallen arches, a hair-trigger bladder and a sex-drive that keeps slipping into neutral) aware that, fundamentally, we remain – like the poorly disguised killer in an Agatha Christie play – completely unchanged. ‘Yourself’ is all you are ever going to be – even though you can’t help feeling that somebody else would be far better at it.
More troublesome for most of us are the occasions on which we suddenly become profoundly aware that we are actually not very good at something which, until that very moment, we always thought we were passably proficient at. This moment of enlightenment can occur as the culmination of a series of mild disappointments or as a single catastrophic, ego-sapping awakening, like the first time your children beat you at dominoes, but however it arrives it is crushing. This very platform has, on this occasion, been my portal to ambition-betrayed reality: whoever put Statistics on the Home Page has much to answer for.
I have always fancied myself as a decent – if underachieving – writer and consequently I believed that people may well want to read what I have written – certainly when it is free – maybe not in their millions, perhaps not even thousands, but surely if Katie Hopkins can rack up six-figure readership by the simple expedient of being obnoxious, I can pick up a few dozen by being amusing… you’d think… which would mean that as I don’t, I obviously am not.
I have spent the last five years of my life writing for my own entertainment and that of anyone who chooses to read my motley gallimaufry on WordPress. I gave up writing for profit some years ago, when I stopped making any. My readership over the five years has yo-yo’d up and down like Zebedee* on a pogo stick, but I have plodded relentlessly on – for no reason other than the joy of it – relatively unchanged, and I guess that may be my problem (there is only so much of me that anyone can take – ask my wife). This week – that is the ‘this week’ that I am in and not the one that you are in (they are currently about three weeks distant) – I have, as usual, published three posts of what I would loftily describe as being no worse than normal – and whilst I am waiting for the third to drop, I find that the first two have been read by a grand total of five people each (and, if I’m honest, I’m not entirely certain that one of them wasn’t me). They have both, for reasons completely unknown to me, been substantially outperformed by a post I wrote over four years ago (Muchios gracious. ?Como puedo iniciar session?) It’s a perfectly good post and, I may add, certainly worth a read, but I remain at a loss for why people have suddenly started doing so in numbers that dwarf the ‘new stuff’.
I don’t think that I have ever published anything purely to fill an empty slot. In my head, at least, everything I have ever published has had some merit. I really try – it might not, I admit, be immediately evident, but I do. Maybe nobody wants to be diverted anymore. Perhaps life’s journey has become too tiresome to even consider a little trip off-piste now and then. I realise that three posts a week for five years has, inevitably, led to a little retreading of old ground, but I have always tried – like the squash ball that randomly thwacks you in the ear – to do it from an unexpected angle.
I have attempted to analyse what pulls in readers and what does not, but, like a dyscalculia sufferer at a Sudoku convention, I can find no pattern. Other than offering ‘blogging tips’ – which I could not possibly be less qualified to deliver – or health tips (which would preclude me from ever attaching an accurate avatar to my work) I can find no reliable means of tempting readers in, and, if I didn’t enjoy both you and it so much, it could all feel like an unfeasibly large amount of effort.
So do I stop doing what I do? Well no, because it is what I do. Most evenings I totter into my little office and spill my life out into my note books. Each day is different in detail, but identical in substance. If I stop now, I don’t know what I will do with it all. I would, I fear, like Monty Python’s Mr Creosote, explode. In truth I am not big on explosions – I am an emotional damp squib – so I will undoubtedly carry on doing what I do, hopefully with a little variation in tone and style thrown in every now and then, until I stop, full stop.
Mind you, if any one of my remaining five readers leave me now, I might have to reappraise…
*This is a reference that, I fear, will only mean something to British people of my age, but for anyone who’s in any way interested, here’s a link that might explain it.
This blog has evolved over the five years of its existence; starting life as a platform on which to publish what, in former days, would have been magazine articles: take a subject, run with it for a thousand words before spending the following few days searching for every little nook and cranny into which to cram a joke, and publish; it has since ‘progressed’ into what I can only describe as a repository for Charles Pooter’s rejected diary entries. I no longer paw over the manuscript in search of ‘gag opportunities’. Generally I read through what I have written and simply excise the most mawkish passages with a red felt pen in an attempt to prevent it all from becoming one long, terminal whinge; hoping that nobody will challenge me on listing this farrago under the category of Humour. I tried to become a bit more immediate, but have sadly discovered that ‘immediate me’ is no Billy Connolly.
Which is disappointing because I have always believed that people like having me around – at least they say they do – because I lighten the atmosphere: like hydrogen, only slightly less combustible. I am not, by nature, maudlin. Quite the opposite; I am mostly annoyingly cheerful. Perhaps I am only just realising that all I actually am is annoying.
So my immediate plan is to return to being a little less ‘immediate’ in what I post. What this actually entails for a failed hack like myself is that I write one day, edit the next, throw a bucket-load of jokes at it a day later, take most of them out the following day and end the week in the kind of panic that would see me publishing the shopping list if only I could find it.
I have just written, coincidentally, for the first time in many years, a Best Man’s Speech and it reminded me that I am perfectly capable of writing jokes, just as long as they don’t have to be funny. Get a laugh at the end of each line – or, at worst, a pregnant pause – and then plough on to the next: we’re not talking The Booker Prize here. Heckling is not entirely likely at a wedding and, by the time I speak, all the custard pie should be long gone.
On a British Double Act scale of funny I would put myself right up there with Hope & Keen; Bob and Alf Pearson on a good day. The thing with jokes is that even if they’re good ones, not everyone will find them funny. I just cut out the doubt.
The problem is that although the blog continues to evolve, I do not. I just sit down every day with a note pad and a pen and – no longer having anyone to tell me what they want me to write – find something to say. More often than not I am well over half way through before I have any idea of where I am heading. I am like a SatNav that decides on the destination only after I have arrived there. But that’s ok: people always say that it is about the journey rather than the destination. They’ve never been to Bognor. This blog is still about growing old and finding joy in it. The most important thing is that the joy remains – although almost inevitably the government is intent on taxing it – after all, we don’t have a union, do we? “Why should old people be able to laugh when this mother of six from Swindon can barely raise a smile? It’s a scandal. All pensioners should have their sense of humour capped. That’ll stop the buggers grinning.”
I don’t believe that I have any immediate cause for worry. I don’t see any government ministers amongst my readers and I’m pretty sure that none of them would see the joke if I did. Funny thing really, politicians were so old when I was younger and now they’re all bloody kids. I expect, given time, they will evolve – probably long after you and I have become extinct – and they’ll look back and maybe even laugh about it one day…
I am, in one way, a very lucky blogger: nobody I (physically) know – with the notable exception of Mr & Mrs Underfelt – ever reads a single word I write. I can say anything I like on here and nobody I know will ever be any the wiser. Certain people (most markedly my wife) say that they read my posts, but they don’t. I never question them, although I know that I could, to catch them out: ‘What did you think of Wednesday’s post? Always good for a laugh, modern slavery, don’t you think?” I could, but I never do. Occasionally I will drop a little ‘fact’ into the post knowing that if my wife, for example, were to read it she would be honour-bound to tell me that I had got it wrong, but she never does. It gives me a problem. I am essentially – I think – a decent person and decent people don’t gossip behind other’s backs. Fundamentally, anything I ever say on this platform is ‘behind the back’ of those I know and love, but none of them would ever know it. It is very limiting.
Not that I have any desire to enter into a world of public back-biting: I would not say anything here that I would not say to a person’s face – it’s just that, in the real world, they would almost certainly have gone before I thought of it. My enemy has normally packed away his sword and headed back home for tea before I have formulated my riposte. I would be the deadest of Musketeers. (Although, I have to be honest, I have never quite understood why The Three Musketeers spent so long fighting with swords when they were… well, Musketeers. Why didn’t they use muskets? Much quicker, I would have thought, and nothing like so perilous. Why, indeed, were they called The Three Musketeers when there were patently four of them – a new member is still a member. I mean, how could The Famous Five be four plus a dog? It puts me in mind of the beloved Blake’s Seven, which latterly featured five members and none of them called Blake.) Fiction and numbers are fickle bedfellows.
Settling scores will inevitably make the ‘settler’ appear petty; do it on the internet, giving the ‘settlee’ no right of reply and you are merely going to appear bitter, no matter how just your cause. You think the bonehead that tried to make your life a misery at school is going to be reading your blog fifty years later? You think he can even read? He will be leading a life full of sadness and remorse. His family will have turned their backs on him. His penis will have shrivelled and dropped off, been eaten by dogs possibly. His firstborn will have boils. His life will have been without merit and joy: unfulfilled and empty; full of dhobi’s itch and haemorrhoids if there’s any justice, so there’s absolutely no point in being bitter. It’s been a long path, but everybody knows who won in the end…
…Anyway. As I was saying, the internet is not the place for recriminations (unless they are delivered by skateboarding cats). It is too easy to get carried away. As certain as I am that the internet is full of hateful idiots, I am equally sure that it is also full of the well-intentioned, but maybe too easily-led. It is so simple to believe what you are told, swallow gross exaggeration, read The Daily Mail, eat people’s pets… When you are in a group of people it is easy to gauge what is, and what is not, an acceptable point of view. There is no harm in disagreement – it is, like Olympic standard bickering, a fundamental of a successful marriage, but most of us would quickly back away from saying anything actually hurtful. Very few want to see the pain and distress they might cause. Unfortunately, from the other end of the World Wide Web, this is no longer a problem: the aggressor quickly finds that there is nothing – not even conscience – holding them back. There are people out there with a vacuum for a soul and, sooner or later, they are bound to get clogged up with muck. Hate can so easily fester in a world without consequence.
So I tend to tell you here about things, rather than people, that annoy me. (The people get woven into stories, and seldom come out of it well.) I am happy that I don’t rattle any trees – generally because when I do, something almost always drops on my head. Whether I know you or not, I have no great urge to offend – unless you are a politician or a Social MediaInfluencer, in which case I almost certainly do. I believe in humanity. I believe, almost certainly erroneously, that good will prevail and when it doesn’t I will, I hope, be strong enough to confront evil, maybe not with a gun, but perhaps a custard pie, secure in the knowledge that nobody I know will ever find out…
Getting On 