The Wednesday Post

I do not know, although I would like to, how most of you go about writing your posts. I have a routine – I would never go as far as to lay claim to ‘method’ – which varies little from post to post.

On Monday I usually sit down with a fuzzy idea of what I want to say which, by some miracle, coalesces into something vaguely logical by the end of the page. Or not… I seldom know where I am heading with it, or how I intend to get there. I know that I am going to push the trolley over the brow of the hill and I know that it is going to go downhill fast, but I have no idea of the route it will take nor where it will stop. Sometimes it ploughs on down to a natural halt at the bottom; sometimes it hits a rock and turns over on the way. Mostly the dodgy wheel takes control and it veers off on a route of its own choosing, stopping only when it runs out of steam, still carrying somebody else’s kipper fillets. Wednesday is normally about pushing the trolley back to where I found it.

My fuzzy idea for Monday, for instance was ‘just get something down on paper for God’s sake (yes, I did say paper) you can tit around with it later’. Sadly it is Wednesday and I remain trapped at the pen gnawing stage. I suppose, in a blog about growing old, written by a man who is, himself, getting on, you might expect a little fuzziness of purpose. I must be honest: had I been writing during the great age of satire, I would have been the daft one who was never allocated his own desk, who contributed a decent line from time to time but wasn’t allowed within a nautical mile of ‘plotting’. As a journalist, I would have been the one who suggested an interview with Richard Nixon would only really work if David Frost ended it with a custard pie to his face. Trying to please everyone is all very well, as long as they want pleasing. I am the soft underbelly. I am a walking ‘but…’ I try very hard to understand and respect the views of others, but it does make decision-making very awkward. My super-power is probably vacillation. I have always felt myself to be supremely unqualified to express opinion. I do have opinions, of course, but I really can’t believe that anybody else wants to hear them. Most of the time I’m not too bothered about listening to them myself…

By the time I get to this stage on Wednesday I am usually – like untreated slurry through an Anglian Water sewage outlet – in full flow. I have picked up the feeds that I gave myself on Monday and started to run with them. Well, I say ‘run’… None-the-less Wednesday remains the most challenging of post days, picking up the baton from Monday and dropping it on my toe before I reach Friday. It is all about finding my ducks (plastic, I am not an animal) and lining them up, so that I can shoot them back down on Friday. Or hook ‘em… By Friday I do not have to worry about having nowhere left to go, because wherever I was heading, I am usually already there – generally, I must admit, in the middle of nowhere – but I can at least enjoy the ride, fuzzy as it is, not worrying about painting myself into a corner before Monday.

Because Monday is a whole new day…

The Monday Post

My first post of each week usually sets the tone for the other two, and those that do not fit neatly into my weekly triptych tend to find themselves plunged into the abyss that is my ‘Holiday Posts’ file, where they sit and wait for me to not be around for a few days. Generally I like these Holiday Posts because we both share the experience of sitting outside the fence, and also because they tend to be written as a consequence of not having to think about what I am about to write. Thinking things through is the bane of my life.

Today being Monday I should be writing the post from which, like ringworm, the other two will develop, but I am instead chewing the end off a cheap biro and staring at the unused face of a previously employed sheet of paper. I never actually write with the cheap biro: I have a tub full of decent pens (e.g. ball point is not hemispherical, plastic case is not broken into razor-sharp shards, end cap has not been masticated) for that. The cheap one is just for gnawing. It comes into use only when the others – even the most powerful green rollerball – have failed. I used to have pencils for chewing, but I kept swallowing the rubbers*. It can often take me quite a while to find the right pen for the day, but as soon as I do find it, things generally fall into place. Some days, though, none of my pens seem to fit and then cometh the hour of the plastic Bic and jaw exercises.

…And just in case you are thinking that my handwriting is some kind of Calligraphers wet-dream, it is not. It is at best a scrawl and at worst a scruffy sub-decipherable mess that I generally have to wrestle into some form of sense before it hits the computer. I do own, and occasionally use, fountain pens with which I stain my fingers, but most of my ‘special pens’ are ballpoints. From time to time they are ‘the right pens’ but mostly they are not: they are frustrating obstacles to my muse.

And should you be thinking ‘It’s a bad workman that blames his tools’ then you might well be right – although, to be fair, I do not blame my pens, the fault is all mine. I have a myriad of tools to use: laptops, iphone, fountain pens, ballpoint pens, rollerballs, pencils and when none of the above are able to meet my aspirations, bags of ten-for-a-pound biros on which to nag. They are all good, solid, workman-like pens. I, on the other hand, am a rubbish writer – except for the times when I am no writer at all, when I become a man who dines on thickened ink. Inspiration, when it does arrive, more often than not does so in the form of a giant block of Cadbury’s and a tumbler full of Scotland’s finest.

And if it doesn’t come until Tuesday? Well, maybe it’s time for another holiday…

*I’m not sure whether this is a purely British colloquialism for the titchy little pencil-borne erasers that sit, metal-encased, at the blunt end of the graphite rod: ‘rubbers’ because they rub things out. They will not prevent pregnancy or STD, but they might mean that you get an extra attempt at spelling colloquialism.

My Greatest Strengths

Questioning my own ability is often fruitful when writing this blog, because, let’s face it, there is so much for me to question. There is so little in this world that somebody could not do better, but just as nobody can be ‘all bad’, I must conclude that nobody can be ‘all crap’ and so, in a move that fully justifies my decision to write in a shorter format, I have decided to search for some of my good points, which I lay below for no better reason than I feel that somebody else ought to know about them.

I am very good at doing the right thing. It is, I would say, my best attribute. Unfortunately, picking the wrong time is probably – along with my inability to open jars – my biggest weakness, so the right thing tends to get overlooked. How quickly the right thing eg streamers, balloons, stripping policewomen, can become the wrong thing simply due to bad timing eg it is granddad’s funeral.

I am loyal, which providing I do not enter politics must be a good thing as long as I manage to find the right person/cause to be loyal to: choose the wrong one and I am ‘misguided’, choose it twice and I will be forever cleaning the dog shit off the front door…

I am reliable – although even as I write this I am not certain that it is always a laudable trait. When people say “Well, you can always rely on him to do that…” with a roll of the eyes, it’s not always meant fondly is it?

I am not competitive – with a distinct leaning towards the over-conciliatory: put me in a competitive environment and I do alright for myself until I realise that this is in any way upsetting my opponents, at which time I cease to be feisty and become, instead, a liability. There is no joy to be had from winning if your opponent is sobbing and telling their mum that “Grandad cheated”.

I can be amusing company – except when I’m not – but I do sometimes lack the filter to say ‘not now’. I do suffer fools gladly because I am one* – but I have very little time for bigots of any kind – especially those who rail against short, ginger geeks who don’t know when to shut up – because that’s what nerves do to me: put me in a room full of strangers and I stand, mute and unmoving in a corner, pretending to be some kind of art instillation with gin, or I gabble. About what? No-one can say. I am on autopilot, I do not know what is coming out of my mouth even as I say it and – presuming that they are not idiots – the people to whom I chat will almost certainly have not heard a single word I have said either.

But I don’t mind – it’s probably one of my greatest strengths…

*With thanks to the great Harry Secombe

Been away…

… for a few days and, whilst I can schedule posts, I have yet to find a way to do the same with comments. Please excuse my tardiness. I will try to catch up over the next few days. Bear with me…

Old Man/New Year

For those of you who have been around long enough to formulate the question, but not long enough to have gleaned the answer, I will myself embark upon the New Year Blogging Schedule by addressing the conundrum that I know will be occupying your holiday brains: why do my blogs so rarely tackle the issues of the day? Well, it is because what is topical on the days that I write these little nosegays seldom remains so by the time I publish. Time moves on and I post so far in arrears that it has often left the building before I get round to hitting the button. So, New Year/New Man etc etc and so on, here’s what I intend to do about it. Henceforth I will collect all my ‘musings’ (I hope you will excuse the word – propriety will not allow me to use the word that is closer to the truth) into two piles: General Twaddle and Topical Nonsense, the contents of the latter, I will be able to drop into the stream of the former like a turd into the Thames. It will be seamless: you will not spot the joins – even when a general topic suggests itself to me mid-topical rant, I will be able to accommodate it by instigating a third pile, a ‘somewhere between mis-understood topical issues and palpable tosh’ pile, which would occupy the space heretofore occupied by The Sun.

Today’s little time-waster is itself almost topical – a chance to wish you all a happy, peaceful and primarily healthy New Year – but already I have managed to drop a full day behind. I am no great fan of the New Year Celebrations – it makes me too aware that the years that lay ahead are very much fewer than those that lie behind – and it takes me until today to resign myself to the bloody-minded rationalities of the year ahead. First among them is my birthday. I am 64 years old today. In the days of my youth, that would have put me just one year shy of my pension (and judging from those at that time around me, probably two years from death) but what it does today is make me wonder exactly when it will be that I actually start to feel my age. When I was a boy, men of the age I am now had worked much harder and for much longer than I have. Most of them had fought in the war. Women had kept the home fires burning, brought up the kids, controlled the purse-strings, managed house and home and husband and lived with the knowledge that they deserved far more than the second-class status that they then endured. They had definitely all earned the right to feel a whole lot older than I do today: old enough for a young Paul McCartney to assume that 64 was as close to ‘end of life’ as it gets.

Now don’t get me wrong here, I do not feel like a spring chicken – probably just as well given the current avian flu situation – I start every morning with an array of pills that serve to remind me that my blood pressure and my cholesterol levels are not at all what they should be and that the little time-bomb inside my prostate is still ticking, but I don’t actually feel anything like as old as I expected to and I worry that this just could be the year when it all drops in on me.

I’m doing what I can, but I don’t want to allow staying alive to take precedence over being alive. What I most desire from this year is that I can end it in the same kind of fettle as I head into it and that the world, itself, is still there for me to be part of on my 65^th birthday. It’s not too much for an old man to wish for is it?

Anyway, I wish you a Happy (belated) New Year one and all. May your God/Boss/Wife/Mistress/Children (delete as appropriate) grant your every wish.

Family Blog

I was idly searching for ‘growing older’ information on Google* when I stumbled across one of my own blog posts and then a completely different blog by somebody using my name. I was taken aback. Am I not the only Colin McQueen on the internet? Well no, indeed I am not. I am, for instance, not the Colin McQueen who publishes the aforementioned ‘Family Blog’, who drives a camper van and plays classical guitar. I am not the Colin McQueen who publishes a ‘Stratum Security Blog’ (although I could well be the only one who has no idea what that means) and I am not the Colin McQueen who is ‘a finance professional of over 25 years experience’ and therefore (obviously) attempting to flog you insurance online. I am not the artist on Twitter and I have never published a ‘Fund Manager Fact Sheet’ although I might well do so as soon as I discover what it is.

Shaken by the knowledge that there are multiples of me out there, I decided to click on ‘Images’ in order to check out what I look like and glory be, I appear to be a dozen different people, none of whom look anything like me.

Now, part of me wants to follow the McQueen Family Blog – they look a decent bunch – particularly since I see that Colin is just a year older than me and drinks beer in the sunshine, but it feels uncomfortably like stalking, so I’ll give it a miss… just as soon as I’ve finished reading one last post.

This ‘Other Colin’ it transpires reads and reviews books, paints and, as far as I understand it, has extensive conversations with God whilst he is driving. Not by mobile phone, I hope – I don’t wish to share my name with a law breaker! Just for the record I should, perhaps, point out that I (for the sake of clarity, I will henceforth refer to myself as The Original Colin McQueen) am unlikely to review the books I read, not because they are unworthy of review, but because I am unworthy of reviewing them. I have not painted properly since ‘A’ level when, if I’m honest, I still didn’t paint properly. I scraped a pass because, I fear, nobody could actually prove that it was bad. And finally, I do not converse with God whilst I am driving, although I do have fairly protracted conversations with myself from time to time (not to mention the occasional somewhat shorter and louder conversations with other drivers). Please don’t get me wrong here, I most certainly am not saying that taking the opportunity to chat with the almighty whilst the tarmac whistles by is a bad thing – I’m just suggesting that ‘Other Colin’ might want to check that he is not actually in the midst of an on-going chatting with the Sat-Nav scenario.

They (who?) say that you should never Google yourself – although, to be fair, I didn’t: I Googled something I wanted to know and, Google being Google, it decided to throw one of my own blogs into the mix and, having done that, decided to throw half a dozen namesakes at me. I suppose with a Christian name like Colin, they would all have to be the same kind of age as me – I can’t imagine that anybody has been given that name in the last 50 years – and I’m pleased to report (in my mind at least) that none of them look as young as me, nor anything like so much fun of course!

Oh, and in case you’re wondering what I Googled in order to find myself vicariously delving into the life of this fellow Colin McQueen (Blogger) well, if I’m honest, I forgot for a second the title of my own little bloggy potpourri and I typed ‘Getting On’.

It’s an age thing…

*Other search engines are available – although nobody uses them.

Nothing to Report

I have spent so long writing about what happens to me that I have quite forgotten the nub of my problem: nothing ever happens to me. I am not an adventurer or a socialite, I cannot report from the centre of the Amazonian Rainforest nor the shadow-lit back booth of a reality star lined nightclub. I do not move in the kind of circles that would allow me to report on the foibles of the great and the good. I walk about a bit, occasionally I trip. I don’t have much to say. If I start a post with ‘It rained this morning’ it is not the prelude to some fantastical recollection of a financially overloaded neighbour building himself an ark on his back lawn, it is merely a statement of fact. End of. I don’t know anybody who has been into space: most of my friends can just about manage the Co-op. If I made attempts to ‘drop names’ they would not hit the ground with much force.

I have a steady readership that just about troubles double figures and the nearest I have ever been to going viral is when my wife had a cold sore. I have never attempted to make money out of this thing – I fear, if I did, I might end up in negative equity. For all those bloggers who decide to ‘follow’ me in order to sell me the means to make my fortune out of blogging, I can only say that I really wouldn’t bother if I were you; this is exactly all this blog will ever be: an exploration of nothing in particular, the odd trip into wishful thinking and an occasional wander through the land of make-believe. All I can do is meander around anything that I think might amuse you and allow you to do the same for me. I won’t change what I do in order to make money because a) I have nothing to change it to and, b) nobody in their right mind would pay for it if I did. Anyone that actually reads this over an extended period will already know quite enough about me, thank you very much. In the case of yours truly, less is definitely more.

I run, but I am not a runner. I am not going to buy protein drinks, mega-vitamins or super-shoes. Try me on Mars Bars. I don’t need professional counselling or well-being advice. I need chocolate and wine and diversion. I do this thing simply because I want to. It’s what I do. I’d like to think that I occasionally raise a smile, but I seriously doubt that it is anything that anyone would ever pay for. (How would I charge: a pound a grin? Would I have to offer refunds to the straight of face?) If I could become rich through people laughing at me, then I think I might already be loaded. I would be very happy to ‘make $millions’ from this twaddle, but unless thousands of people suddenly decide that they want to learn about everything that never happens to me, it’s just not going to happen.

I will carry on telling you about the meagre salmagundi of my life, about the dustbin men, the gas fitters, my maladies and my hobbies; I will continue to bore you with my rose-tinted recollections and half-baked theories. I will implore you to educate me whenever bafflement with daily existence proves to be too much for me to process. In short, I will continue to report at some length on my vacuous self and you can choose whether you wish to read it or not – and all without charge.

One day, I’ll write a post about it…

Monochromatic Me

Despite the fact that I know nobody will read them, I cannot resist the urge occasionally to write ‘guides to’, be it History, Subversion or Gardening; I just can’t pass up the opportunity to expostulate on what I know nothing about whilst my readers showing, as usual, far greater insight than I, do not bother to read in their droves. (Earlier in the year, having decided once again that I just ‘couldn’t do this anymore’, I stopped posting altogether and still scored more readers than I did last week!) I love to write these things but, weirdly, according to WordPress, what my readers most want to read about is me – and there is so little of it to go around. My life is so uneventful that it could be a Zoom concert by James Blunt: why anyone would want to know anything about it I cannot imagine. None-the-less, my life is an open book – albeit full of empty pages. If somebody were to make a film of it, I would be the intermission – Pearl & Dean would not concern themselves with the insertion of various advertorial mini-epics in preparation for my main event – never-the-less, every now and then, as fascinating as I find myself, I have to take a break from it and, ironically, the cinema is the ideal place to do so – isn’t it?

Well no, of course it isn’t. Somebody – possibly the God of Pissing Off Older People – has seen fit to change it all. There was a day – almost certainly pre-decimal currency – when I loved a diversionary couple of hours at the pictures. It was while I could choose my flavour of Poppet by the scoopful; before anybody even thought of salting the Butterkist; before some bright soul changed a Mivvi into a Solero. It was a lifetime before a trip to the cinema became the stress-fest it is today.

It starts with buying the ticket. I don’t want to choose where to sit. I want to be given my ticket by the en-kiosked, pinch-faced woman with the creosoted hairbun and all the charisma of a mackerel fillet. I am happy to be told where I will be sitting. Just give me the simple choice, ‘Stalls or Circle?’ I do not want the pressure of selecting row and seat number. I’m going to wind up seated behind a giant anyway. I really don’t need to choose where I’m not going to be able to see the film from. Just give me a ticket stub and a woman with a torch to light my way. Just give me a pack of Olde English Spangles to suck in peace.

I don’t want to sit behind somebody eating nachos through a megaphone. I really don’t want to sit in front of a family of four sucking eight gallons of Coke through a sump. I do not want to sit aside two people who are determined not to let the main feature get in the way of a perfectly good conversation. Who goes to the flicks to watch a film: that really is not the point at all. Who wants to focus on a screen that is smaller than the TV in an average student flat? Who wants to surrender concentration, even when the volume is cranked up to nursing home levels? I honestly do not need to know what’s coming up soon – I won’t be coming back.

And tedious my life certainly can be at times: it is not destined to be next year’s big blockbuster. It cannot be CGI’d into a Technicolor rollercoaster. Watching it through bi-coloured spectacles will not make even the slackest of jaws gape. The kind of mini-incident that punctuates its steady progress will not trouble a stunt double. The only thing that ever breaks it up is exactly the kind of thing that nobody wants to read.

And all in all, I’m probably happy with that…

Idle Speculation

It’s all part of a normal cycle for me: a few weeks ago, fresh back from the Aegean sunshine, my carefully curated backlog exhausted, I was writing my posts on the hoof and fretting constantly over what to do when inspiration did not come to call. Today, I sit with a pile of essays in front of me, wondering if I should start to publish every day in order to get rid of them.

I won’t, of course, because I know that the days of nothing to report are just around the corner. It is, as I say, just part of the normal ebb and flow for me: sometimes I can write this hodgepodge in abundance – it just oozes out of me – whilst on others I can spend an evening staring at a semi-colon, trying to decide whether I can do without it. I am consistent only in my inconsistency. I think that the knowledge that there is ‘work’ in hand gives my head the latitude it needs to wander off in all the wrong directions. Torpor sets in and the cardigan comes out.

It is, for reasons I have not yet managed to identify, a quiet day on the building site behind me. All work appears to have halted and silence prevails. I swear I can hear birdsong. I am sure that if I were to half close my eyes, I would be able to see soldiers playing football in the mud and the puddles. I wonder, should the work actually stop today, how long would it take nature to reclaim the land: to subsume the proto-roads and infrastructures, to re-establish homes, not for humans, but for beasties of all types and sizes?

Idle speculation of course because, even now, I see herds of hi-viz approaching me from the left and a lorry (presumably a Brobdignagian tea-urn) disappearing to the right. A casual glance from the window finds me staring into the jaw of a giant digger.

Half a century, or more, ago I read a story in what well could have been ‘Amazing Tales’ or ‘Astounding Stories’ which, unusually, did not centre on the Aliens living, undetected, next door. It supposed that the Solar System was a molecule, each planet an atom, a tiny fragment of a reality that was infinitely bigger than our own – the Universe as a coffee table – and I can’t shake off the image of all the giant machinery around me as vast insects, themselves part of some huge colony, simultaneously building and pillaging.

At which point, doubt kicks in: do I mean pillaging? Wasn’t that a Viking thing alongside names like Bloodaxe and helmets with horns on? Always makes me wonder how primitive we English were back then that the Vikings could be regarded as civilising. We had plenty of Vikings around these parts and the influence still persists. I know that the suffix ‘by’ simply meant ‘village’ (hence Ingleby – the English village – and Normanby – the Norman village) and that Thorp(e) meant a village of lesser importance e.g. Thorpe-on-the-Hill, Thorpe-le-Fallows, Thorpe-near-the-Bus Stop and Thorpe-where-the-old-village-pub-is-now-an-Old Tyre Dump.

What I’m hoping, of course, is that they might dig up Viking remains behind me, a Viking village perhaps, fatefully named Colinby or Thorpe-on-the-Back Field, accompanied by pots of gold and enough ancient artefacts to keep Baldrick* happy for months – just long enough for a Preservation Order to be slapped on the whole shebang.

Fanciful? I guess so, but the thought has kept me occupied for a while – even if it does mean that another day has gone by with nothing for me to say…

*A hugely popular character from Rowan Atkinson’s ‘Blackadder’, played by Tony Robinson, who later hosted ‘Time Team’ in which all manner of things were dug up by a team of people with whom you would love to spend an evening in the pub, but probably, all things considered, would not want living next door.

First and Last

I hang onto first sentences. I hoard them about my person, on my office notice board and, more often than not, on torn pieces of paper crumpled in the midst of snotty tissue, conker shells and secreted Daim wrappers in the darkest recesses of my trouser pockets. They are normally scrawled, semi-legibly on to whatever paper is immediately available, with whatever writing implement comes to hand and, by the time they are dredged from the lint-lined depths, have lost all relevance to whatever train of thought they were intended to precipitate. I like to think that this is a good thing. I somehow write a post that follows on from this disembodied little nosegay and, more often than not, like yourselves, have no idea of where it is likely to take me. I hope that it’s exciting, but I fear it is merely confusing, like mistaking episode three for episode two, when you fell asleep half way through episode one of what turned out to be a completely different series which actually followed on from series two, most of which you missed altogether. Like Blade Runner, The Matrix and ice hockey…

Over my time on this platform I have fielded more questions than I would like to admit about my writing process. The general consensus appears to be that I have a theme to work to and various bullet-points that I meet on my way to the conclusion. Sadly I do not.

Generally I am aware of my theme only after I have finished writing and I only know what the conclusion is because it comes at the end. Bullet points would only provide me with something to miss along the way. The ‘grand idea’ almost always comes after the writing is finished and I know the ending only after I have reached it. It is a ridiculously amateurish way of writing, I know, but it is all that I have. It is like knitting a blanket and deciding that it’s a pullover only after you discover it has sleeves. Most of my time is taken up in trying to get the sleeve out of the neck-hole and the pattern running in the right direction.

On the rare occasions that I have a point to make, I have forgotten it long before I have worked out how to punctuate the first sentence. The content of my brain generally just overflows onto the paper – the basis of my conviction that shit floats – and such concentration as I can muster goes into making some sense of it all. It is seldom the sense that I intended.

It works like this: I pick one of my paper scraps and write whatever it says at the top of a blank sheet of paper. I stare at it for a while. I write a second sentence to stop the first one getting lonely and stare at that for a while. I decide not to worry and I allow my mind to wander about for a few hundred words. I stop. I attempt to conjure up a final sentence that has some connection, however vague, to the first. I transcribe the whole thing onto the laptop, convinced that the right font and line spacing will sort it all out. I read it through and realise why I have worked in a shop all my life. In a panic, I attempt to add some jokes, but quickly realise that putting a red nose on a pallbearer doesn’t stop him delivering the coffin.

I despair. I eat chocolate. I stare at the first sentence. I formulate a plan to hang on to last sentences too…