Neutering Toads for Fun and Profit (Very Good) #930

Well now, here’s a pretty kettle of fish. Following on from my speculation about the reasons behind the paucity of readers for mid-week posts, I managed to plumb new depths with a Monday (traditionally my most successful day) offering: In Memorium Meliorum Dierum. The title was arrived at by the simple expedient of putting my intended title (In Memory of Better Days) through an English to Latin translator. It seemed to fit very neatly with what was for me a sweet and nostalgic post: not typical of my usual output, but then you’d have to read it to know that. What I didn’t bank on was the capacity of my readers to take one look at the title and think “Well, that sounds like a load of pretentious pap,” and consequently not bother with it at all. (If you haven’t read it, please feel free to think of it as In Memory of Better Days, Eating Chips on the Green or if it appeals Neutering Toads for Fun and Profit and give it a go.) I realised that I really needed to be a little more thoughtful (if not exactly truthful) with my titles henceforth, and it put me in mind of an article – How to Undertake a Futile Quest for the Ultimate Headline – I published way back in the mists of time (12^th February 2019 – before either Brexit or Covid) when I tried to look at ways to improve my readership by tinkering with titles, and I decided to try again.

I clicked on the first website that came up in answer to my search “Improving Titles for Blog Posts” and this is what I discovered I should do:

1. Be specific about your topic – Well, that’s all well and good, but I think using the same title – Utter Tripe – one hundred and fifty times a year might not quite have the required effect.

2. Include an action verb – I am no great shakes at any form of grammar that pokes its toe anywhere beyond ‘extremely basic’ but my primary school education tells me that a verb is a doing word and what is doing other than action? It seems that I need to include an ‘action action’ in my title. I will consider consider it.

3. Use emotional language – Too f*cking right I will. Just try and stop me fart breath.

4. Use longer headlines (but not long-winded) – As a person who is more than capable of taking short and sweet and turning it into a three metres-long lemon, I am awaiting clarification on this one.

5. Don’t include the entire story – War and Peace is 587,287 words long. It is about war and peace.

6. Add numbers when appropriate – If you are telling the tale of ‘Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs’ it is ok to say ‘Seven’. It is not permissible to say ‘Dwarfs’. Some people include a post number (I have checked and, for me, this will be 930, so I have included it in the title. Going forward I will almost certainly never bother again.)

7. Include relevant keywords for SEO (tastefully) – For me, first step was to look up SEO. It apparently means Search Engine Optimization. I do not know what words are ‘relevant keywords for SEO’. I should probably look that up as well, but frankly I have lost interest. I may put ‘Very Good’ in parenthesis after each title.

8. Convey clear benefits in marketing blog posts– This is clearly not relevant to me, but aimed at the kind of bloggers that follow me having never read a single post. I wish them luck!

9. Avoid hyperbole and clickbait– I cannot avoid hyperbole in my titles unless they have no relevance whatsoever to my posts. I have written millions of them and not a single one has been without hyperbole (although I will admit that it was basic exaggeration until I bought a dictionary.) As for clickbait, I suppose I will have to re-think my plan (see 7 – above) and put ‘Distinctly Average’ in parenthesis instead.

The seven types of blog titles I should, apparently, choose from are

1. “How-to” headlines– “…waste an entire five minutes of your life by reading my blog”?

2. “Why” headlines– “…bother?”

3. “Best” headlines – “…not, if I’m honest.”

4. Question headlines – I’m starting to. Perhaps I can do completely without them.

5. News headlines– Well I can do ‘topical’, but I’m not very good at publishing promptly. ‘News’ is ‘Old News’ within a day. Topical comedy, like almost all satire is seldom funny.

6. Controversial headlines – I will endeavour to employ a swear-word in every headline and I will try to say something rude about anyone I can think of who is universally loved. I will call my next post “Judy Dench is a twat.” We’ll see what happens there…

7. Statistic headlines – A surefire way to ensure that nobody ever reads a single word you write.

There were also 25 headline templates to consider. I considered them (this is a blatant lie) but discounted the notion as I am not a complete loser. The guide went on to suggest that I prepared at least 25 titles for each piece, which could be whittled down to a Top Three with use of the title analyzer before settling on The Winner. As, contrary to all impressions, I do have a life, I did not try to write twenty five titles, but I did manage three which I ran through an analyzer. They were: How to Make Informed Decisions About the Title of your Blog Posts – part one (I’ll be honest here, there is little chance of there ever being a part two); Achieving Great Things Through Carefully Considered Blog Post Titles, and The Curse of Genghis Khan’s Anal Warts. I started with WordPress’s own little tool which refused to analyze any of my titles, saying ‘Cookie Check Failed’ to all of them. Stunned that software associated with WordPress should fail to work correctly, I none the less tried another analyzer. It said title 1 scored 85/100 (very good); title 2 scored 60/100 (good) and title 3, 51/100. Just before I turned it off I tried Neutering Toads for Fun and Profit (very good) #930 and it scored 86/100 so I used it here and, if you’re at all interested, that’s why…

Diary of a Hollow Horse

So here we are, Monday evening, thirty minutes before the Getting On witching hour and I have nothing at all to give you. I will be forced to improvise which means that, in the great tradition of comedy improv, I will undoubtedly make all the obvious jokes and miss all the funny ones. I will gurn a lot…

You are right to assume that I am no great fan of improvised comedy: like bomb disposal and brain surgery, I really would prefer somebody to have thought it through first. Because a joke has just occurred, it doesn’t necessarily mean it’s funny, does it? Look at it again. Does it still make you laugh? No? Then dump it. I know what the inside of my head is like; the thought of not reading through, of not whittling down, of not at least trying to make sense fills me with dread.

I believe myself to be reasonably quick-witted (in much the same way as David Icke believes himself to be an alien God) and I know that when I am off on one (nerves or tiredness are generally to blame) gags can tumble from me like sparks from a grounded exhaust pipe, but I also know that in the cold light of another day – after coffee and party rings – I will realise that most of them are just empty noise and the few that do work have to make their way through the catalytic converter before anybody else gets to hear them.

The point is – oh yes, there is one – that today I have to think on my feet and you, dear reader, may have to tolerate all manner of spelling mistakes and syntax that leaves much to be desired while I do so. (See?) I am often well into a piece before I have any idea of where it is heading. Transcribing from feint-ruled exercise book onto laptop screen offers me the opportunity to pretend that I knew where I was going all along. I do not. Often I can actually reach the end without knowing what I was banging on about and, working in this way, I cannot disguise it.

And choosing the title could prove to be a thorny knot (I hereby claim this portmanteau metaphor for England and the King). My little ‘headlines’ have all, so far this year, been song titles. Since I am more bloody-minded than a vampire bat it will continue until I have seen the intended year out, but I have noticed of late that the most simple titles bring along the fewest number of readers and, as a consequence, I have started to look for lyrics that suit the text in the hope that the associated song titles might be a little more attention-grabbing or, at least, interestingly oblique. So where do you go to find a song lyric that celebrates making it up off the top of your head? Who ever wrote a song to extol the virtues of saying whatever comes into the writer’s head without the pretence of forethought? Nobody ever won a Mercury award with a song about tossing the lyric off in thirty minutes.

My mind currently finds itself split into four: one part thinking about what to write; one part thinking about what to call it; one part thinking about not thinking about the house sale, and one part thinking about chocolate. I fear that twenty five percent of this poor, enfeebled sponge is not going to reach a conclusion any time soon, but hopefully, before Wednesday, I will have got back ahead of myself, far enough to know where I have been and exactly where I thought I was going before I changed my mind…

Way of the world for me and my kind
Far from grace and weak by design… Diary of a Hollow Horse – China Crisis

…and still he’s fifteen minutes late…

Sharing the Laughter

The amazing Hunt Emmerson cartoon that announced Our radio series in The Radio Times – long ago, before Time was born.

I try to write pretty much every day: it is my thing, it is what I do, but I cannot deny that I have always found my greatest joy in writing with other(s) – especially when they laughed at my contributions. When they come up with a line that is better than your own, it simply spurs you on to come up with another yourself. The laughter associated with continually topping one another becomes infectious and addictive. I have reminisced on these pages before about the great joy of writing with my (almost) life-long buddy Chris (Crispin Underfelt) and laughing so much as we repeatedly ‘trumped’ one another’s jokes that we then had to take a few days apart to ‘get something down on paper’. We worked seamlessly because we both knew our strengths: Chris was the ideas man, whilst I just twatted about with the words. Together we came up with a thousand one-liners per hour. I jotted down as many as I could remember and ‘worked them up’. Sometimes Chris would fly off in another direction – anywhere from project B to Z – before project A was finished, other times he would doggedly stick to an idea long after I had given up hope. There were times, of course, when Chris would serve up a flat ‘No’ to lines that I thought were great and, as the person who generally did the typing, I would sneak them back into the script only to have them vetoed again at the next read-through. Similarly I would leave out lines I didn’t like, only to find that Chris’s own notes clearly showed that they were in. It always worked for the best and I don’t recall us ever falling out.

I have a boxful of scripts from that time that I flick through now and again and they always make me smile. Like all such things, it is impossible to revisit that time – we wrote a million sketches for the kind of shows that no longer exist – but that knowledge does not mar the joy of what we did then. Through the radio show – which we were absolutely certain would be our big break – TV sketches and a sadly ill-fated musical using the songs of ‘Hello Cheeky’, we operated as a single being: he was up when I was down, he was full of certainty when I was full of doubt. He always made me laugh and I always had a pen.

Chris is a natural performer and he began to drift in that direction as I plodded along writing a number of ‘close but no cigar’ sit-com pilots whilst continuing to contribute articles to any one of a number of humour magazines (all now gone – not my fault I swear) that would pay me for what I did. I am never happier than when sitting at the computer banging away without a care in the world (or, more often than not, an idea in my head) but I always miss the thrill of showing Chris the labours of my week (will he/won’t he laugh?) listening to his jokes, marvelling at the scope of his ideas, shouting at one another until we are hoarse and sharing the laughter…

Now, in case you are wondering why this piece seems out of place and out of time then, yes, I will admit that I have written it in the hope that Mr Underfelt might read it and be spurred on to give you one or two recollections of his own – of our time writing together, of his early attempts at stand-up, and of his own theatre productions of ‘Bouncers’ and ‘Little Shop of Horrors’ , anything. (There are, by way of explanation, links to numerous previous posts scattered throughout.) Maybe he’ll even tell you of our little trip to Hull to see a play called ‘Moose’ and an ill-advised stop to ask some young ladies on a street corner if they could tell us where to go. They did…

Some Days Are Better Than Others

Like, I imagine, most of you, I have days when I cannot write a single word, and I also have days when I write thousands (some of which are usable). I have days when I can write three or four posts which, weirdly, often need very little editing before use. I eventually publish them all as they fill in for the weeks in which I spend many days picking over the remains of a single article, looking for jokes, agonizing over syntax, trying not to sound too much like an AI Serbo-Croat translation tool. I have no idea why this happens. I can find no logic to it. Sometimes the darkest days guide me to the lightest posts. Sometimes my most devil-may-care days* lead me to the most angst-filled offerings which I often shelf for a while before I try to pick the darkness out of them with a coloured pen, although usually the initial mood manages to prevail.

In my days of yore, when people paid me for what I wrote and printed it on unsustainable paper, it mattered. Satire was happily encouraged, but soul-searching was not. I could be as mean as I liked about other people, but not myself.

Cut and paste is Bill Gates’ Prozac for the written word: a means of dripping sunshine into a rainy day. I will often remove more of ‘the guts’ of a piece than a drunken surgeon and have, very occasionally, attempted a complete cut-and-shut job with two otherwise unsalvageable pieces, but more often than not these little bolt-necked creations end up in a folder set aside specifically for articles I cannot save (although I’m not above plundering them for the odd joke now and then – there are occasional doodies in there.)

Perhaps, at this point, I should make it clear that I am no tortured soul. I have grown to accept what I have and what I am, and to be happy with it. Like everybody else I sometimes get overwhelmed by The News, but generally I look at the world around me and I’m very happy to still be a part of it.

I try not to blog about blogging too often – I enjoy being taken away from the day-to-day by the bloggers I read and I’d like to do the same for them – without dumping them back on the beach from which they swam. Singers often sing songs about writing songs, but writers writing about the hardships of writing – well, it’s not a good look is it? I suppose my own ‘style’ of two-finger typing could conceivably lead to a blister and, after sixty years I do have a slightly deformed pen-finger, but I’ve never broken a limb or saved a life. All in all, nothing to write home about. No typewriter tales to tell. Other than the time I accidentally inhaled too much Tippex, I’ve never really had any incident linked directly to writing. I’ve screamed at the laptop from time to time, usually in frustration, but never in pain and almost always on a ‘no-blog day’, when I write very few words and publish even less. And you wouldn’t want to hear about that…

N.B. This blog was brought to you via the medium of a cheap lilac gel-pen with occasional red and green contributions. You’re welcome…

*On the Universal Scale of Devil-may-careness, about a three.

Some days are honest some days are not
Some days you’re thankful for what you’ve got… Some Days Are Better Than Others – U2

Echoes

Sometimes I begin this thrice weekly little tarradiddle with a title, sometimes with a subject and sometimes with nothing at all. Sometimes I stride with purpose and sometimes I wander with nothing but peanut butter between the ears. Mostly I wander. As I get older it becomes increasingly obvious that there are very few new places to go, all that I seem to be able to do is alter is the route that I take to get there. My mind has become a SatNav which has, in addition to Fastest (slowest), Shortest (any route that passes via a sink estate in which mine is the only car that is not on fire, along an overgrown bridle way and across a twelve foot deep ford) and Eco (via Penzance) has Meander, which takes me from A to B via something that was inadvertently chipped off the Rosetta Stone, for the three miles per journey in which it has a signal. When you realise that there is little left to do that you have not done before, you start to search for new ways to do it. In every nano-second of life, there is an echo of another. There is comfort to be found in the familiar, but too much comfort – like malt whisky and the moral highground – can become disorientating. When destination becomes secondary to journey, it is time to take the bus.

At the time of writing, the post-Christmas/New Year tidy-up is in progress and I am forced to make a number of disconcerting trips up into the attic. Attics, like belfries, are uncomfortable places full of fractured memories and bats: filled with webs, but devoid of spiders. Mine also houses the ancient Christmas tree, a lifetime of baubles, the emergency chairs and a howling gale on the stillest of days. The attic is where the house goes to die, and it is where Christmas spends eleven months of the year.

Most people are pleased to see the back of Christmas by the time it is all packed away, but I find it unbearably sad: Goodwill to all men stashed in an old cardboard box and stacked underneath a moulding set of curtains you never quite got round to hanging three houses ago. There is something very forlorn about the rows of threadbare trees awaiting pre-mulching collection. There is a horrible finality to the departure of the holly and the ivy: peace on earth in a bin bag…

But Spring is just around the corner: a world full of new shoots, new colours, new lives… already the lawn looks like it could do with a mow. The WD40 sits with a rising sense of expectation. It is impossible not to be changed by Spring: the first frost-glistened appearance of snowdrops, the colour-splash of crocus and aconite, the full-on joy of daffodil and tulip, the sudden greening of a beige hemisphere. Hope* in every tree. What’s not to love about a season that heralds falling energy bills, thinner coats and longer days? Perhaps hormones might start to stir – not always a good thing for fifty percent of the species – and loins begin to gird. As one gets older, it becomes frighteningly easy to anticipate bad outcomes and almost impossible to perceive good, but the echoes are always there, you just have to choose to see them…

…oh, and put the postcode in the SatNav very carefully…

Strangers passing in the street
By chance two separate glances meet
And I am you and what I see is me
And do I take you by the hand
And lead you through the land
And help me understand the best I can… Echoes – Pink Floyd

*Hope is the thing with feathers… Emily Dickinson

Time Travel

Having made 780 posts over five years, by and large all about the same thing – me – it is little wonder that I inadvertently repeat myself every now and then. I fight against it, although I know that it creeps in, but what I have just discovered is the great pleasure that WordPress itself takes in highlighting it. A few days ago I published Guess Who? a fragrant little nosegay about the joys and otherwise of contact lens wearing and touching on my inability to recognise faces whatever I might have thrust into my eyeballs or balanced on my conk, and some clever little algorithm plonked a long forgotten little piece from over three years ago into the ‘More in Getting On’ slot at the bottom of the post called Social Contacts: a fragrant little nosegay about the joys and otherwise of contact lens wearing and touching on my inability to recognise faces etc etc blah blah blah. I had of course – it being well in excess of fifteen minutes ago – completely forgotten about it.

I decided to reacquaint myself and, thankfully, discovered that it was sufficiently different to the later post to mean that reading both is not, in itself, completely unbearable, but bafflingly, I also discovered that in the ‘More in Getting On’ section at the bottom of Social Contacts (published October 2020) is Guess Who? What kind of black magic is this? Some kind of time travel linked to the 60^th Anniversary editions of Dr Who which are currently dropping onto our screens?

I would love to be able to enjoy Dr Who like everybody else, but it blows my mind. “Oh look, there’s a Dalek. Weren’t they wiped out years ago? Oh, I see. (I don’t.) They were wiped out centuries before their evil inventor had actually invented them, after which they also had actually travelled back in time to prevent themselves from ever having been wiped out in the first place by someone who was quite unlike he/she currently is/was/will be, with a Sonic Screwdriver – a gadget that started life as a… well, as a screwdriver but now appears to be some kind of hi-tech Swiss Army Knife/Light Sabre hybrid – it was before they could get upstairs I think. And what do they do with the little sink plunger again?…”

Of course, I am of an age for whom there is only one true Who – Tom Baker, of course – in much the same way as there is only one Bond (Roger Moore), one Batman (Adam West), one Wonder Woman (Lynda Carter) and one Willy Wonka (Gene Wilder). It might be an age thing – although I would make a shout for Benedict Cumberbatch being the ultimate Holmes – but no-one will persuade me that there is any other Tarzan than Johnny Weissmuller. No amount of time travel would ever persuade ten year-old me that he was not the one and only, and don’t think for a second that anyone will ever take you seriously again if you believe that there is any other Robin Hood than Richard Greene.

There are certain things that bear repeat – none of them, unfortunately, written by me – but there is an ‘age’ for them all and whoever assumes the role when you yourself are of that age, will forever be the one and only – unless, of course they are George Lazenby…

On the Hoof

As I get older, I seldom write like this because, if I’m honest, I am neither bright enough nor reliable enough to make a success of it. My posts are often written ad hoc, but seldom last-minute. Blether they might be, but they are almost inevitably drivelled in advance.

You see, if I write for today, then I also write of today and, Lord knows, that gives me so little to write about. I’m not sure whether it’s ‘an age thing’, but so little happens to me – or even adjacent to me – these days. Today, for instance, I have patched up some ropey paintwork, replaced a dodgy light bulb, sealed a draughty door and shifted a plant pot with a weight somewhat in excess of a Chieftain Tank: nothing to make jokes about; little to say. If only I’d dropped it on my toe… I am The Marie Celeste of happenstance.

Now, I have said before that having nothing to say has seldom stopped me from saying it: it is, in as much as I have such a thing, my stock-in-trade. As much as I would like to believe that it is a treatise about the anti-ageing properties of positive thinking, I have the uneasy feeling that Getting On may well, in fact, be all about inertia. I would kind of like it to be about mountaineering, round-the-world yachting, sky-diving, yak-riding, off-piste skiing, all that malarkey, but what it is actually about is the fear of heights, the fear of water, the fear of falling, the fear of wild, hairy creatures, and the fear of making a tit of myself on a hillside – even if covered in so many layers that I am completely unidentifiable to all but those who know me… however vaguely. (I think that people would, by and large, be able to identify me from my gait, my mannerisms, and the fact that, placed on anything even vaguely slippery, I will inevitable end up on my arse.) Fear is the ultimate driver and, as you get older, getting older becomes the penultimate fear (we all know the ultimate one: a long weekend in a tiny Cleethorpes flat with David Icke). Most of us will do whatever it takes to stop feeling old. Most of us feel that we are nothing like as old as other people of our age.

One of life’s great pleasures is in encountering someone who appears to be very much older than yourself, only to discover that they are, in fact, younger. It never crosses the mind that they look old for their age, but simply that you look young for yours. Until – as happened to me very recently – the ancient-looking, wizened old homunculi turns to you and says “So we’re the same age huh? You must have had a very tough paper round!” Bloody Yoda thinks that I look old! Ridiculous! And then…

How do you gauge it? What looks old to whom? If I ask a loved one, “I don’t look that old, do I?” are they likely to say, “Well, as a matter of fact…” or would they lie? Platitudes become meaningless. “Of course you don’t” becomes a dagger to the soul. “I look like an old man to them, and they won’t even admit it! I’ll go and climb a mountain. That’ll show ‘em.” Actually, all it will show them is that I am losing my mind.

…And that’s another thing about getting older…

My Best Post Ever

Photo by RODNAE Productions on Pexels.com

Last night I wrote the best post I have ever written. When I woke up, I couldn’t remember much of it, but it was ok because the parts that I did remember were very good indeed. Now, with a couple of coffees behind me and a bowl of porridge that could, otherwise, be used to fill potholes in the road, I do not remember a single word, but the recollection that it was a truly great passage of prose haunts me. It may be the best thing I have ever written and it almost certainly will never be read. (So, not entirely different to everything else I have ever written.)

I stumbled into the morning with steely resolve to recreate it, but it quickly dawned on me that I had no idea of what it was about. It was profound, I knew that, it was smart and funny and… the more I thought about it the more I realized that it must have been written by somebody else. Someone who writes while I sleep.

I’ve been writing this little blog for more than five years now and it’s amazing how often I stumble across an early piece and think “Did I really write that?” Well, of course I did. I live with zero fear of ever being accused of plagiarism because I know that if anyone was to ask Google to check out anything I had written, it would probably blow its logically ordered little cyber-mind. I feel fairly certain that should cyborg Arnie actually drop in from the future, all threat to the human race could be avoided by passing him a random selection of my posts and saying “Just try and make some sense out of those could you.” The smell of overheating micro-circuitry would be setting off smoke alarms worldwide. My grasp of logical pathways is similar to that of whomever oversaw the design of the human nervous system. Toothache is bad enough, but just wait until you discover that it is a symptom of heart attack.

I don’t think that it is any secret to anyone who reads me at all frequently, that it is almost certainly possible (I guess, I’ve never tried – life is far too short) to cut and paste paragraphs out of and into any of my other posts, at any point, without ever leaving a visible joint. At least, no more visible than anywhere else.

I seldom approach a blog post with a plan (and if I ever do, it never gets followed) because the end of each paragraph almost always coincides with something else bouncing into my head, so, instead, I have a starting point from which I stagger away and, in the end, I am as surprised as anyone else to discover the route I have taken – like my wife with a Road Atlas.

I may be the only person in the world who loves his satnav. It may have the habit of taking me through point Z on a simple A-B journey, but it doesn’t yell “I don’t know!” when I ask it, mid-roundabout, which exit we should be taking before the articulated lorry joins us through the rear windscreen. It never says, “Erh… you should have turned right back there… I think.” And I do derive great pleasure from totally ignoring Doris from time to time (oh come on, everyone names their GPS, don’t they?) and just plough on my own merry way. It doesn’t matter where I find myself in the middle, I will always reach the end… in the end. The joy is in finding myself somewhere I never expected to go, whilst knowing that I will, eventually, wind up exactly where I’m meant to be.

Mind you, it’s generally not a big deal to me because, if I’m honest, I always feel that wherever I am is where I am meant to be. I can only be in one place at any time. Except, of course, in my dreams. In dreams I can be in any number of places at once. And I can be anything I want to be: I can be a footballer, a rockstar, a filmstar or even a great writer…

Of course, when I wake up in the morning, it is to discover that I am none of the above and my midnight achievements, whatever they might be, are no more real than my best ever post…

…which, I feel certain, is yet to come…

Missing the Point

I took some time off from this bloggy world a few weeks ago and when I eventually settled myself into the ‘getting back on the bike’ groove, it struck me that these pages had started to become a little bit me-centric: that there is a limit to what anyone wants to know about someone they have never met and, more importantly, are probably unlikely to ever meet. You would still recognise me from my WordPress avatar. The beard ebbs and flows, but I remain five feet seven tall and red haired. Everyone (ok, if I’m honest, mostly very elderly women) tells me that I look young for my age. I have skin like limpid lard and bright, blue eyes, occluded only by the very earliest onset of cataract, crowned by eyelids that look as though they have been through fifteen rounds with Tyson Fury; rimmed with the kind of skin that screams of insufficient sleep and a vitamin intake that stops at A. You’d spot me at the airport – you wouldn’t need to know what I was thinking about or why. (Clue: it is generally chocolate, whisky or Sandra Bullock – the order is unimportant.)

So I decided that I should perhaps ring the changes a little bit – leave me out of it now and then – although not, I have to say, altogether: I’m much too fascinated by me to let me go completely. In truth I learn more about me by writing about me than I ever would by growing a goatee beard, sitting cross-legged on a black leather swivel chair, clutching a clipboard and asking myself about my relationship with my mother (not, you understand, that I would possibly be able to afford me.) This is my real-time Adrian Mole moment. I write about the inconsequentialities of my life in the hope that you might find something profound to think about them although I assure you, there was absolutely nothing profound about them when they left my head. Colin McQueen – specialist subject, ‘Missing the Point.’

I will continue to search for something new to tell you about me: whenever I manage to do something (or more likely – truth be told – think about doing something) that I have never done before: refuse a family-sized bar of Galaxy chocolate, pass up on the opportunity to be centre of attention, or go on a run just for the fun of it, you will probably be told. At length. But I won’t bore you with things that I am merely thinking of doing because a) the percentage of those that make the transition from brain to reality is miniscule and b) they just might be illegal, immoral or impossible to perform without a neck brace and the promise of a new hip.

I decided to let my brain off the leash a little more, and what you seem to be getting from ‘new me’ as a consequence is a lot like old me, only shorter. Like the earliest posts of this almost five years-old blog, the new ones feature snapshots from my mind, but with far fewer ‘selfies’ than you might have grown used to. I’ve, perhaps realised that I don’t need to explain, nor explore everything. If there is one thing I have learned about me, it is that there is so little to learn. It is pointless for me to try and debate the whys and wherefores: all I know is that when I write whatever-it-is that I write, it amuses me and when I post it, I hope it might amuse you too. Mutual disappointment, that is the glue that holds this whole thing together.

How things might go in the future, I have no idea. I am the world’s worst chess player. I seem only to be able to plan behind. I cannot plan ahead. Yesterday is gone, tomorrow hasn’t happened and today I have to try and shake off the image of a chocolate-coated Ms. Bullock from my mind.

I’ll let you know how that goes…

The Friday Post

These days the Friday Post can drop onto my doormat as early as Saturday afternoon…

You see how things go? A couple of posts whingeing about whingeing posts: a couple of days with nothing to say before it occurs to me that a) the actual physical post has just been delivered and, for once, it includes something that is not advertising material. It is a bill. It is for somebody else. They live in Somerset, and b) other than it is not what it once was, I know very little about the British Postal system. So I had a little dig…

It would appear that Henry VIII was the founder of the Postal Service in 1516 and declared himself Master of the Posts. However it is not clear who might have used this service and it may well have been simply for the use of the King himself, who found himself sending out so many Christmas cards by the time he had tied himself to his sixth tribe of in-laws, that members of his own court could no longer cope.

In 1635, Charles I made the system available to the public for the first time. The postage was, at this time paid for by the recipient, which led to a mini financial crisis as nobody ever had the change required to pay the postage on Final Demands. The state Monopoly was farmed out first to Thomas Witherings and later Edmund Prideux who, despite the fact that the vast majority of the country was illiterate, managed to make himself very rich, presumably by allowing men to mistakenly send pencil sketches of their genitalia to every woman in the village who hadn’t already seen them e.g. the cobbler’s blind daughter and the blacksmith’s tattooed assistant who, it was rumoured, performed satanistic rituals with a variety of root vegetables.

In 1660, following the Restoration of the Monarchy, Charles II re-branded the service as the General Post Office and the British love of queuing was born.

1784 saw the introduction of the first Mail Coach followed, later that year, by the first bag of post being ‘eaten by the horse’.

1830 saw the introduction of the first Mail Train, between Manchester and Liverpool and is, incidentally the first recorded instance of all of yesterday’s mail being redirected through Crewe.

Rowland Hill proposed (1840) that mail should be paid for by the sender rather than the recipient – meaning that no-one ever again could be accused of being ignorant of the Co-op’s latest BOGOF offer. The uniform fee was one penny (approximately thirty eight million pounds in today’s currency) and in May of that year the first stamp, the Penny Black, was introduced to show that the fee had been paid. An early example of this system has just been found at the bottom of our local postman’s bag.

As Britain was the first country to issue postage stamps, it is the only country that does not show the country name on its stamps, which rather leaves me wondering why I have to specify ‘English (UK)’ on every Microsoft product I attempt to use, in order to stop the spellcheck facility automatically changing ‘aubergine’ to ‘eggplant’.

Britain’s first Post Box was erected in 1852 and went almost a week before somebody ‘posted’ dog shit in it.

A two-tier postal system was introduced in 1968 which meant that the Royal Family and members of the aristocracy could have their mail delivered the next day, whilst the rest of the country, paying for the Second Class, might as well deliver it themselves quite frankly.

2004 the Second Daily Delivery was abolished meaning that anything not delivered in the morning post would not arrive until a week next Tuesday, having been redirected through the Falkland Islands.

2007 saw the end of post box collections on Sunday so that postal workers would be able to observe the Sabbath by watching the football with a curry and half a dozen tins of lukewarm Stella.

2010 Royal Mail was privatised, at which time it signed a Universal Service Guarantee that expired in 2021 – the last time it was known for any mail to be delivered on time.

The current Postmaster General (now known as Chairman) is Simon Thompson, who was also managing director of the NHS Test and Trace programme in the UK, which offers me great assurance every time I drop something precious into the post box…