A Very British Affair

I have always considered this little potpourri (lit. ‘bowl of dried-up, odourless husks’) of mine to be a particularly British affair in subject matter, points of reference and use of language, particularly colloquialisms (try saying that with a face full of Mars Bar – or spelling it with a head full of cotton wool) and idioms. It has therefore always come as something of a surprise to me to find that my resident English readers are far from dominant. Australia, New Zealand and Canada I kind of understand – old colonial ties and extended families could mean that my turns of phrase might be slightly more familiar to the ear; that my use of extended metaphor might not sound quite so much like a message from Alpha Centauri – and to some extent I get (and am certainly very grateful for) the welcoming hands across the ocean from USA: we are separated by a common language, but I think we get one another most of the time. (With the exception of almost every word ever uttered by Donald Trump or Mickey Rourke, I can personally understand almost 90% of the American version of my language – most of which appears to involve dropping perfectly good letters from words and turning trollies into jockeys – providing it is not spoken by Joey out of Friends.) In India, Bangladesh, Pakistan and Kenya, Madagascar and South Africa a very satisfactory number of people manage to make a little space in the day to spend a moment of time with me. I am thrilled to find that I have readers all over the world, although I cannot help but wonder what some of you make of it all – please let me know – and am particularly bemused by my popularity in Romania, where, I think I might be becoming a bit of a cult (although I am not quite certain that I have translated that correctly). To my one reader in the Philippines, I would just like you to know that I have my suitcase packed – please send the address. I appear to have lost my Russian and Chinese readers recently and I am really sorry about that – we all need to talk to understand – and I presume that my single French reader peruses my weekly output with an ironic Gallic glint in the eye and the kind of shrug of the shoulders that assures me, however low my opinion of myself, I am completely right to hold it.

Now, I am sure that you are wondering what has brought this to the fleeting attention of my restless and febrile brain. Well, for as long as I can remember – depending on whether I have just entered, or left the room – I have toyed with the idea of writing a detective yarn with, should anybody have the slightest recollection of it, just the faintest hint of Adam Adamant* about it, (No! Not Adam Ant. That would just be silly.) although I’m not 100% certain I don’t mean Hadleigh*. The concept is not a difficult one – if you haven’t done so before, I can only recommend that you read Conan Doyle’s ‘Sherlock Holmes’ books** to enjoy the sly, and very clever humour that runs through them – my problem is that for as long as I have been mulling over this particular enterprise, I have had but a single name in mind for my hero: Armitage Shanks. It makes me smile every time I think of it, and then I wonder, would you get the joke wherever you may live? Would I have to employ a translator simply to work on a nation-by-nation version of the hero’s name? It worried me for a long time. It stopped me properly setting my mind to the task, but now I realise, that if my very good friends from Poland, Ecuador and Taiwan can get their heads around this little junket, then a man named after a toilet should be a doddle for them.

*Come on, you’re educated people, I’m sure you can always Google it.

**Gerald Harper himself, by the way, would have made a particularly fine Holmes.

An End to Introspection

Passing through a point in time – a point made all too accessible by advancing age – where every ‘ping’ of the mobile phone heralds news of illness or untimely death, I have found myself becoming (you may have noticed) increasingly introspective. I have been writing this blog now for four years: originally once a week, then twice, thrice and occasionally four-ice and five-ice and I have grown accustomed to the ebb and flow of it all. It has always been labelled ‘Humour’ even on the occasions when I knew that it wasn’t funny. I do try, but occasionally I have to get things off my chest. Like Ray Alan, I need to vent. Posting regularly means that I don’t have much scope for writing things that I don’t use. Whatever comes out of my head will find its way, in time, onto your screen. It’s not always ideal, but the only thing I have to offer you, dear reader, is me, and I am very often disappointing.

In order to lift myself from this recent slough of despond (literally shed skin in a lake) I have decided to take a closer look at why I started doing this thing in the first place and also why, as I seem unable to write a decent joke these days, I still do it. The obvious answer is vanity: the narcissism of a man who believes that everyone else wants to know all about him. (Do I mean narcissism or is that a little yellow daffodil?) If I’m honest, if you piece together everything I have written over the last four years – although God knows why you would, you could far more profitably pass your time with a jigsaw of The Haywain – you will find that you know far more about me than you would ever want to know. Having written over half a million words during my tenure – far more than even Jeffrey Archer would lavish on a single subject – I wonder what there is possibly left to tell.

Well, let’s see: I don’t eat meat, I eat far too much chocolate, and the only way you would ever stop me from eating a roasted peanut would be by painting a cute face on it. I drink far too much wine, ditto gin, ditto whisky and I drink far too little water. I am sixty three years of age, frighteningly adjacent to sixty four if I’m honest, and most of my clothes, like my beard and my temper are becoming ragged. I am, none-the-less blessed with huge patience and more empathy than you can shake a stick at – as long as neither is put to the test. As I write this piece I have something in my eye. I can’t see it but it feels like a six foot section of 3”x2”. The only way I can stop it from hurting is to fasten the lid down with a length of sellotape (which I presume should be pronounced seal-o-tape) giving me the impression of being permanently mid-wink. I think the only cure is wine – but, if I’m honest, it is probably the cure for most ills. I have a friend who swears that it is the best cure for a hangover, but I have never dared to try it. Imagine hitting your good thumb with a hammer to cure the fact that you’d just flattened the other accidentally. I am gullible, but not that gullible. (Actually, I am.) I am also the most easily distracted person I know, with the attention span of a… what was the blue fish called in Finding Nemo?

I love people, but am uncomfortable in company and panicky in a crowd. I am very competitive, but I do have a tendency to give in when I’m winning. I love silence outside and hate it inside. Left alone in a house I will often have different music playing simultaneously in three or four rooms, with my mind seemingly able to keep track of them all at the same time. I am tone deaf like Donald Trump is unpleasant (e.g. very). I am what I write and what I intend to write here on in will be happy and definitely not introspective – it will possibly be outrospective – because, I have decided, introspection, like the door to a pub, sucks.

And my favourite word is probably widdle.

The Thread

You might just possibly have noticed it: during the course of each post I write, something suggests itself to me as a possible topic for the next one. It would be stretching it to claim that there was some kind of logical progression, but there is, I think, a common thread that somehow, through means known only to itself, binds this whole thing together; that meanders on from small aside to main theme along a passage all of its own making. Mostly, it is not a conscious thing, generally I see it only when I bulk-edit at the end of a week, and I do not want to try to deceive you into thinking that it is always easy to spot. I am notoriously easy to distract. My head is full of crazy paving, the next slab could take me in any direction. There are times when my imagination is tethered to the rational by a bungee rope. The bridges that exist in my brain are often unsuitable for heavy traffic. The building blocks are all in place, but the infrastructure has been designed by a three year old.

Nor, if I’m honest, is what occurs to me during the course of writing one piece necessarily anything to do with what is being written about. My brain is seldom in one place at any one time. What links one thing to another could be a delivery driver dragging me away from the keyboard, a news item enticing me away from ‘research’, a digger in the building site behind me that looks exactly like a praying mantis, ‘why is a bulldozer a bulldozer?’, ‘why do dragonflies suddenly appear to be the size of birds?’ Oh look, a squirrel…

Almost inevitably, when I go into a piece with something to say, it is that which is edited out in the end. This is intended to be a lightweight distraction, not a political or social tract, and I don’t do opinion very well. It is actually very straightforward: it is not about growing old but how the world looks to someone who is growing old. It is intended to raise a brief smile for those dozen or so brave souls who take the time to read it with any regularity. As the world grows increasingly bleak, I feel ever more conscious that, both for my own health and for the integrity of a blog that claims to be ‘humour’, I need to ignore this grinding reality. If you want news, you have The BBC; if you want gossip, you have social media*; and if you want to know why everything about the modern world is so shit, you have The Daily Mail. So if you wonder why, as the world is falling down, I am discussing my aching knees or questioning why my ever growing ears should be getting incrementally less effective (and, incidentally, more hairy), that’s probably why. And if you find yourself thinking ‘hasn’t he said that before?’ then the answer is almost certainly ‘yes’ and if I haven’t, well, you’ve got a lot of reading to do to prove me wrong.

As an old person you cease to expect anything new to happen to you, and when it does it will almost always require a scan. I no longer embrace the new, I reluctantly adapt to it – like a new pair of pants. I find that life enhancing gadgets are almost always far too confusing to use and, in any case, almost certainly promise to enhance something that I was, heretofore, unconscious of even possessing. I suppose, in the fullness of time, I will let the fridge take over the food ordering, I will allow my car to drive me around and the banes of my life will become those of somebody else. What will I write about then? Doubtless a fridge full of pickled beetroot, waking up in County Durham when I was meant to be sleeping my way to the Co-op, the fact that inconti-pants are not what they used to be and whoever put my shirt on put the buttons at the back. I will give up trying to make a point, satisfied merely that I can finish a sentence without forgetting why I started it.

Does it bother me? Not really, because by the time it does, it won’t, and as long as nobody decides to delete my own last paragraph**, I’ll be happy…

*Whatever that is.

**In case you’re lost – and for that nobody would blame you – you could read ‘Lost in the Edit’ – it might explain, although somehow I doubt it…

Lost in the Edit

I have noticed in myself, of late, a dreadful tendency to take my own views very much too seriously. It is becoming an all too common practice for me to truncate a post by cutting out the entire final – and unbearably preachy – paragraph because I am aware of how easily the written word can be misinterpreted – especially with my own dreadful standard of grammar. A single comma in the wrong place can make the difference between irony and deep offence. I am constantly teetering just a semi-colon away from a series of ‘isms’ so grievous that some of them may well not have been invented yet – except, of course, by the lawyers, who will be primed to suck the life out of both sides at a moment’s notice. Whatever was in my head as these closing statements were written, had obviously vacated it by the time the words hit the paper and I am forced to burst my own self-important bubble by hitting the ‘Delete’ button on the final caffeine-drenched sentences for fear of finding myself (unfairly, I must stress) in the dock with Katy Hopkins and Piers Morgan. How can a single paragraph written to, for instance, express my utter loathing of, let’s say racism, sound like something that was summarily cut from Mein Kampf on the grounds of extremism a mere twenty-four hours after it was written?

I am mono-lingual, but it has become apparent to me that my grip on the one language in which I am capable of writing, is tenuous at best. The only blessing is that most of the time, I do manage to spot it before I publish. What leaves my head as a simple truth, an undeniable fact, could hit WordPress as an incoherent, pompous rant were it not for my gift with the Delete button and the foresight to never presume that saying what I really think will ever sound like what I really think. There are so many evils I would like to address, but I am painfully aware that I could only do so by sounding unbelievably pretentious or unforgivably glib. Occasionally a joke can make a point, but only if somebody else is willing to see it.

Somehow this only ever really occurs in the final, concluding few sentences and almost always I can get by perfectly well by just cutting them out. Reading my output commonly requires a kind of leap of faith that makes compensating for a missing paragraph an absolute doddle. I am certain that many of you will have spotted this before now: a penultimate passage pointing unequivocally towards a point being made, but, in practice, finding itself merely abutting the final weak joke that was originally intended to make it clear that I realised that, although well-meaning, I was perfectly aware of the fact that I was talking tripe.

Except that I don’t think I am. I think I am speaking the truth. I am just expressing it very badly – and that is what I will tell the judge..

Anyway, I just felt that you should know, that if you feel a piece ends unduly abruptly or (heaven forfend) in a sentence that appears to have little to associate it with all that went before, that is probably why. Embrace the fact that I have expunged it – not just from your copy, but also from mine – and it will never be spoken of again. My views will not have changed (if ever you want to know, just ask) but I may well have just grown up enough to know that they are mine alone and that nobody else is in the least bit interested.

And when it all winds up without a joke? Well I might have had to cut that too…

No Post Today

Holiday Posts

At some point in the recent past, present or near future, I am (have or will be) on holiday for two weeks with the certain conviction that I will not be following my usual writing routine whilst I am away. Consequently, I have to approach (or have already done so) the two week gap with six posts up my sleeve which I can schedule to entertain you in my absence. Some of you, I’m sure, will spot them (or you may already have done so) generally, I would guess, because of what they don’t say, what they don’t address, and although I will try (or possibly have already done so) through my lack of response to comments. For that, I apologise in advance (or possibly retrospect). OK, enough of this tense hopping nonsense. Whenever I am writing this, it is ‘now’ to me. Before, after or during, the more perceptive amongst you will probably have worked it out long ago anyway.

When I have the time and my mind is in the right place – e.g. not turning itself inside out over things upon which it can have absolutely no influence (everything) – I can write copious amounts. It doesn’t make it good – for me passable is always a triumph – and editing out the bad bits and tarting-up the decent takes much longer. Pieces that I like might hit the blog on the day of writing whilst more troublesome pieces can take many days and much ink before they pass muster (e.g. I’ve got nothing better). Consequently, the pieces I have left to post whilst I am away are generally those that I have been fussing over for weeks: adding jokes, removing jokes, cutting, pasting, deleting, retrieving, unknotting Gordian Knots of syntax, trying again until I lose all sight of whether they have anything to offer or not. Because I have rewritten the gags a thousand times, I see them coming (which is just as well as most people don’t see them even after they have long gone) and the whole thing becomes polished, but lifeless (like Donald Trump’s head). You understand what you are looking for now? Good luck with that.

The strange thing (for me at least) is in realising how different my tastes are to your own, because very often these holiday pieces are received very well, getting more likes and comments than the pieces that, in my excitement, I can’t wait to get out there. I have tried sitting on everything whilst I work on it, but that generally means that by the time I post it in all its polished glory, time has completely passed it by. I am seldom topical, never on-point and there would be no point in publishing a tract about, for instance, the insanity of a country having a complete buffoon for a leader, when the two biggest have already gone. (You work it out.) Topical gags, like a summer oyster, have a very short shelf life and can, in retrospect, have similarly distressing after-effects. Things that are funny now, should remain funny for all time and that can be accomplished by avoiding topical gags, demeaning language and satire. (Ladies and Gentlemen, I give you Father Ted, Fawlty Towers and Dinnerladies*) Sexism and racism are never going to win you friends (except, of course, the kind that nobody wants). I try very hard to avoid satire as it has a troubling tendency to appear spiteful in print (and I’m not bright enough to fully understand the difference between satire and sarcasm anyway) and I am not: I am chilled, relaxed, laid back, happy and on holiday (or was, or will be…) You decide.

*The Office, Dad’s Army, Extras, The Royle Family, Blackadder, One Foot in the Grave, the oft forgotten Rev and the truly wonderful Mum

So, Should I Remain Truncated?

I am by nature a bit of a windbag; a short, fat sockful of inconsequential whining. It is my sole gift and I giveth of it freely. And that, as you will be fully aware, is my downfall. At least I think so. I have been told many times and by many people – some more politely than others – that I do bang on a bit, and so, of late, I have been trying to bang on a bit less. I have tried to reduce the word count in my average blog by something around 50% (a bargain in anybody’s books) and it is now time to take stock. I earned a crust (or more accurately augmented my topping) for many years by contributing a pithy one thousand words a pop to any magazine that would pay me (for my younger readers, these ‘magazines’ were numerous sheets of paper, containing prose and pictures, lovingly stapled together, folded in the middle and sold through the newsagents that used to be where the takeaway now is) and it became a rut into which my brain happily fell. I have many different ways of writing these little nosegays, but whichever way I choose to approach them, they always resolve themselves after the allotted one thousand words (+/- 10% for good behaviour) which is, by all accounts, far too long for a blog post. It’s a peculiar thing. Being very old I write in longhand before typing onto the laptop, I then print a hard copy which I proofread and correct in various hues of felt pen, before editing on the laptop and posting. I read through the printed article many times before I post it and it always appears to be much shorter on paper than on the screen. It is the transition onto LCD – or whatever it is that forms the images on my laptop, tablet and phone (phlogiston for all I know) – that makes them too long and, quite obviously, nothing to do with me. My inability to use one word when twenty will do is not to blame.

In general I find humour in drifting off-piste – something which, in my current abridged form, I may be unable to do quite so often without falling off the edge – and if I’m honest I have no idea of whether the shorter pieces work at all. I am fully aware (I would like to give thanks to my wife and children etc etc) that where I am concerned, less is definitely better, and writing these curtailed pieces is certainly less taxing. A single idea is easier to follow and the knowledge that wherever I may get lost, the end really is just around the corner is a comfort. If I’ve lost anything in this process, it could be that it is something I should have lost years ago. I’m keen to know what you think, is 500/600 words a better target for me? Maybe you think zero would be more appropriate. I must be honest, if you tell me that I should pack it all in, I will probably ignore you.

After all, what is the point in being choc-full of hot air if you can’t share it with the world?

Pallets

Photo by Frans van Heerden on Pexels.com

Last year I procured a couple of wooden pallets from which I salvaged sufficient wood to make my grandchildren a mud kitchen and a bug hotel and so, flushed with success – something which, of course, would generally only happen to the contents of a toilet – I managed to bag a couple more with which I planned to make some Rustic (badly finished and not put together properly) Garden Planters with which to keep my wife similarly happy.

I have only a very small car, but having removed the child seats and dropped the back seat I pushed and cajoled the pallets into the space created, having previously spent no more than a couple of hours assuring my wife that they would contain no spiders with plans to transfer their silken little abodes into the space underneath the passenger’s seat, from where they might startle and alarm a woman of delicate disposition. (For the record, I am assured that in this country spiders do not, by and large, bite humans, but merely frighten them from their tuffets.)

Some time later, having pulled into the front drive of my house with a suspension that gave up the ghost several miles away, I discovered that I have now unearthed two absolute truths which I can reveal about pallets:
1. They hide spiders very well
2. They are much easier to get into a car than out of it.

In the end I spent some considerable time pondering the options: either take the pallets to pieces inside the car, or call the fire brigade to remove its roof. Eventually I did manage to remove the pallets complete from the car which, as it turns out, is even more fortunate than it sounds as I have since spent several hours armed with an arsenal of hammers and jemmies, attempting to retrieve usable timber from the aforementioned frames only to be left with a mountain of splintered firewood and more cuts and abrasions than a Saturday night in A&E. As it turns out, disassembling the car may well have proven more practical than dismantling the pallets in situ.

So, now I have two giant wooden trellises on my lawn that I am totally unable to strip down into constituent parts, due to the manufacturers decision to use what appear to be six inch nails hammered into place with 81mm mortar rounds, and after the merest sprinkling of rain I am now unable to lift them without an unprecedented hike in the NHS physiotherapy budget, a surgical truss and the loan of an industrial grade crane. I may leave them for the bugs to eat, they are, after all, making a perfectly passable job of my shed, but they are currently a) somewhat mid-crease in my grandson’s cricket pitch and b) preventing me from getting the lawnmower out so, sooner or later I will attack them with an axe and, pausing only to put any severed limbs on ice for later reattachment, set fire to what remains prior to having the lawn re-laid. I will get the seed whilst I am at the Garden Centre buying Rustic Planters…

Rain, Rain Go Away, Come Again Another (Or More Likely Later in the Same) Day

Upside: this is a beautiful, lush green place in which to live.
Downside: it rains – a lot*.

As a nation, we in the UK are used to rain, but we are never prepared for it. We have a national summer sport which relies heavily upon something we very seldom get: up to five consecutive rain-free days. The enduring image of an English Test Match is that of the covers being pulled over the wicket and water being pumped into the drains as the last few sturdy supporters struggle to make hats out of soggy newspaper. How often do we get through a fortnight of Wimbledon without a long and excitable TV discussion about how efficiently the courts are covered at the advent of a downpour? These are sports that rely upon dry conditions, and the only logical place to play them here is in the pub. When Test Matches and Wimbledon coincide (as oft they do) the price of tarpaulin goes through the roof. Insurance companies withdraw all investment from North Sea Gas fields and search for an umbrella manufacturer to support. If it is essential for us to have an outside national summer sport, we should consider bog-snorkelling or mud wrestling, but no, we have cricket and tennis, the only two sports known to humankind that become totally unplayable in the rain.

We know what to expect from the British Climate – it forms the basis of all conversation in this country – and yet the vast majority of any summer sporting audience will turn up with no method of fending off a downpour other than the plastic bag in which they brought their sandwiches. I have myself spent many hours at Silverstone draped in a black plastic bin liner watching a slow motion procession of Formula 1 cars locatable only from the dense cloud of spray that follows them and totally engulfs all that is behind them. Have I ever had a hat that does not disintegrate in the rain? No. Instead I have had mirrored sunglasses and jeans that are capable of absorbing a bathful of cold water until the moment I sit in the car to drive home, when they release it in an instant.

So, what do we do when the sky turns black and the heavens open upon us with a force that has not been experienced for… well, sometimes for days? Well, we sing. We do that a lot. Loudly and tunelessly. We troop off to get a pint of beer that refills much quicker than we can drink it, and then we return to our seats lest we should miss something should the monsoon ever abate. We carefully observe the people in charge of the covers, reading the weather forecast with every twitch of their readied sinew. These people can get the covers off – and often on again – even quicker than the weather can change. They are highly tuned athletes in their own right. They are capable of 0-60 in less time than it takes a sodden F1 crew to change a tyre; they can drag a huge tarpaulin faster and further than Ben Stokes can swipe the ball; they can raise a court-covering canopy quicker than a normal mortal can fortify a watered-down Pimms with a swift glug from the hip-flask – and all whilst wearing shorts and a T-shirt. When your only job is to be prepared for the rain, why on earth would you possibly wear a coat?

*Normally. The current heatwave has been accompanied by a long dry spell that has left cars unwashed, hanging baskets unwatered and everybody else’s lawn looking as bad as my own. Every cloud…

Having My Cake

Photo by Quang Nguyen Vinh on Pexels.com

I’ve never been able to quite understand why, when a cake is cut into equal portions, I always manage to get the smallest one. It has to be a matter of perception, right? When I was a child, my brother and I had to share most things – it was just the way it was – so my mum had a rule: one of us got to cut the portions, the other one got to choose. I was the eldest so, naturally enough, I got the knife, and no matter how hard I tried to make the segments exactly equal, my brother always got to choose the biggest one. (Unless, of course, I was portioning tinned sardines when, not unreasonably, my brother would choose to take none on the grounds that I had ruined them, and I would be left with the task of finding somewhere to hide the whole can of fishy mush. Something which I managed so successfully that we never had any visitors for about six years.) It is very much a sign of age that, when somebody offers a slice of cake, you may say ‘Could I have a slightly smaller piece please?’ (That is ‘you may say’, of course, because I would never say such a thing.) Those words would never pass the lips of anybody under the age of sixteen.

I am very much of the ‘Are you leaving that?’ generation. Anything left on a plate (unless it was green, of course) was fair game to anybody around the table who had already finished what they had been given. It was definitely not advisable to take a short rest during meals: one break for a contented sigh and by the time you looked down your last sausage would be long gone. We were not encouraged to rush meals – that was definitely frowned upon – but we did need to keep our wits about us at all times. I was not around for the end of rationing – it ended in 1954 – but I was no stranger to privation. Waste was definitely not tolerated and children were right down the pecking order – with women – so you took whatever you were offered. A slice of bread soaked in gravy often took the place of the meat – which only stretched far enough to feed the men who ‘put it on the table’ – at Sunday lunch. There was loads of veg – every back garden was full of it – but nobody ate just veg did they? It was always meat and two veg (at least one of them, sometimes both, being the ubiquitous spud) or three for the overtly rich. They were definitely the Harrison & Starr of the gravy dinner world. If I’m honest I can still to this day eat just about anything if you put enough gravy on it.

And gravy dinner – Sunday Lunch – brought with it the only pudding of the week: occasionally jelly, but more often cake and, if we were lucky and the cake was on its second week, custard. I remember that a decent sized cake could take quite some time to transit from moist, to just about palatable, to palatable with tinned (evaporated) milk, to needs custard. I didn’t care. I could (and can) eat cake in any manner it is offered to me and, as I am now a mature adult, in any portion size I am given. Although it doesn’t mean that I don’t still envy the person with the biggest slice.