My Best Post Ever

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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…

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…