What we seem to be doing at the moment is moving stuff from the loft into the garage. To create the room in the garage we have to box everything in there and move it into the smaller spare bedroom. The smaller bedroom stuff goes into the larger spare bedroom and the larger spare bedroom stuff goes into the loft. The only reason my office is spared is because you currently can’t get through the door unless you move stuff out onto the landing. I completely understand the need to feel as if we are doing something, I just wish that it didn’t so often come at the expense of undoing whatever it was we did the day before.
The further we get into the process of packing our house into cardboard boxes, the greater grows the fear of “What if?”: “What if we need something we’ve packed?”, “What if we break something we’ve packed?”, “What if we think we’ve packed something, but we haven’t and we forget about it later?”, “What if it all goes tits up and we don’t move at all?” I hope that is not the case, but I can certainly see the attraction in unloading all the boxes, turning the phone off and opening the doughnuts right now.
It’s strange how it gets to you. I went to get the guitar off the wall and I knocked over my Nerf gun so I spent the next twenty minutes trying to nerf the Low E string from the far end of the office. As an Olympic event it makes more sense to me than break dancing. In fact I may have stumbled onto a new sporting concept: The Moving Games. There are so many opportunities for sporting endeavour and competition. Matching box to content for instance. Easy with eg books or cd’s, but let’s try a hollow plaster duck, a ukulele, a microscope and half a dozen Victorian ink wells. Too big and they rattle about and break, too small and they squash and break. After an hour of searching for the ideal box it is a question of what breaks first, the packing or the packer? How about what goes on top of what? Does the big box go at the bottom, even if the small box is much heavier? Is it acceptable to pack a sturdy box on top of a flimsy one simply because it looks better? How long can you hold your temper when your team mate is quite obviously packing boxes of different heights together on purpose? Surely they can see that, at that point, the pile can go no higher without complete re-structuring. It is all about tactics, making the right decision at the right time. Given a plastic box filled with random seashells, bits of coral, pebbles, fossils and something that could just possibly be either a very large emerald or a very small portion of a sea-worn wine bottle, do you a) put the lid on and pour yourself a coffee, b) try to sort them out and separate them so that the shells don’t get broken or c) do as your spouse tells you and throw the whole lot in the bin (“yes, including the tatty bit of old glass, before you cut yourself…”)?
As usual, none of this comes without risk. I personally have just become the first winner of the “Bending over to pick something up, forgetting that wife has just removed pictures from nails that are still in the wall” award and, consequently, look as if I have been shot through the forehead. I would sit down until the bleeding stops, but I’ve got an idea that the chair’s in the attic…
Aware that we will be moving soon, I have been overproducing posts like some kind of hyperactive fence manufacturer. When we get to the new house it will take me some days to set up the office, sort out the internet and install the coffeemaker, so I will need posts in reserve. I no longer rearrange the chronology of the blog, so I hope that the nearly good/really bad cycle of my weekly blogging has been replaced with ‘moderately ok’ on a more consistent basis. I hope that you will not be able to spot the joins. I have always rated consistency very highly, but more often than not in blancmange¹. It is my ambition to produce a flummery of wholesome evenness and this I have decided to do by not twatting about with stuff anymore. I have, however, discovered one or two flaws in my current approach.
Posts do tend to clump (or possibly congeal) a little: the simple bug-bear does not dissipate in a single day with a five hundred word rant, it tends to linger for a week or more and poke its nose into anything else I happen to be saying. I will, as my wife will affirm, bang on about things of such insubstantial consequence that the scientists assigned to the Large Hadron Collider would struggle to invent them, until I have given them sufficient time to bore even me. Occasionally I write two or three posts in a day (sometimes my mind shifts into Little Fiction mode and I may make things up for days on end) and I often have to poke myself into variety – usually of style, but occasionally of arranging the words in a different order. It’s all very well to allow Monday to lead us into Wednesday, like a middle-aged, woollen-socked and back-packed pathfinder, as long as it doesn’t stamp straight back down the same path we tromped up only this morning. The terrain around here is bland enough without repeatedly tramping down the same nettles.
My office is currently devoid of all my usual clutter and is filled instead with cardboard boxes: I am not surrounded by inspiration; I am surrounded by scuffed walls and a strange musty smell that I can’t quite track down. If it is not cardboard related, I will have to open everything and search for what has died. Unshackled from editorial whim, I am no longer tied to word count so I do tend to let things take as long as they need, and these days some pieces – usually those with the least to say – seem to need a whole lot more than others.
Monday this week chewed up quite a lot of words and so, I have the opportunity to redress with a much pithier offering today, but you know my record with opportunity. It seldom knocks and when it does I’m always indisposed*. I never quite manage to make it to the door before it shoves its Golden Ticket back into its pocket, kicks the hydrangea and wanders off to find someone far more deserving. I feel like a mountaineer with acrophobia – everything starts to fall apart when I realise how far there is to fall from the top, and I head straight back to the sanctuary of Base Camp where I no longer worry about falling off, I don’t fret about pulling my friends down with me and I have, at least, an icy hole to crap in. I am able to obsess about absolutely nothing in complete safety. If I fail, then it is to nobody’s surprise and if I succeed… ah, what the hell, it will never happen.
¹Known, I see, as American Pudding in America. *Middle English for ‘on the loo**’. **Middle English for ‘having a poo***.’ ***Middle English for ‘having a sh*t’
Well now, here’s a pretty kettle of fish. Following on from my speculation about the reasons behind the paucity of readers for mid-week posts, I managed to plumb new depths with a Monday (traditionally my most successful day) offering: In Memorium Meliorum Dierum. The title was arrived at by the simple expedient of putting my intended title (In Memory of Better Days) through an English to Latin translator. It seemed to fit very neatly with what was for me a sweet and nostalgic post: not typical of my usual output, but then you’d have to read it to know that. What I didn’t bank on was the capacity of my readers to take one look at the title and think “Well, that sounds like a load of pretentious pap,” and consequently not bother with it at all. (If you haven’t read it, please feel free to think of it as In Memory of Better Days, Eating Chips on the Green or if it appeals Neutering Toads for Fun and Profit and give it a go.) I realised that I really needed to be a little more thoughtful (if not exactly truthful) with my titles henceforth, and it put me in mind of an article – How to Undertake a Futile Quest for the Ultimate Headline – I published way back in the mists of time (12th February 2019 – before either Brexit or Covid) when I tried to look at ways to improve my readership by tinkering with titles, and I decided to try again.
I clicked on the first website that came up in answer to my search “Improving Titles for Blog Posts” and this is what I discovered I should do:
1. Be specific about your topic – Well, that’s all well and good, but I think using the same title – Utter Tripe – one hundred and fifty times a year might not quite have the required effect.
2. Include an action verb – I am no great shakes at any form of grammar that pokes its toe anywhere beyond ‘extremely basic’ but my primary school education tells me that a verb is a doing word and what is doing other than action? It seems that I need to include an ‘action action’ in my title. I will consider consider it.
4. Use longer headlines (but not long-winded)– As a person who is more than capable of taking short and sweet and turning it into a three metres-long lemon, I am awaiting clarification on this one.
6. Add numbers when appropriate – If you are telling the tale of ‘Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs’ it is ok to say ‘Seven’. It is not permissible to say ‘Dwarfs’. Some people include a post number (I have checked and, for me, this will be 930, so I have included it in the title. Going forward I will almost certainly never bother again.)
7. Include relevant keywords for SEO (tastefully) – For me, first step was to look up SEO. It apparently means Search Engine Optimization. I do not know what words are ‘relevant keywords for SEO’. I should probably look that up as well, but frankly I have lost interest. I may put ‘Very Good’ in parenthesis after each title.
9. Avoid hyperbole and clickbait– I cannot avoid hyperbole in my titles unless they have no relevance whatsoever to my posts. I have written millions of them and not a single one has been without hyperbole (although I will admit that it was basic exaggeration until I bought a dictionary.) As for clickbait, I suppose I will have to re-think my plan (see 7 – above) and put ‘Distinctly Average’ in parenthesis instead.
The seven types of blog titles I should, apparently, choose from are
1. “How-to” headlines– “…waste an entire five minutes of your life by reading my blog”?
5. News headlines– Well I can do ‘topical’, but I’m not very good at publishing promptly. ‘News’ is ‘Old News’ within a day. Topical comedy, like almost all satire is seldom funny.
6. Controversial headlines – I will endeavour to employ a swear-word in every headline and I will try to say something rude about anyone I can think of who is universally loved. I will call my next post “Judy Dench is a twat.” We’ll see what happens there…
7. Statistic headlines– A surefire way to ensure that nobody ever reads a single word you write.
There were also 25 headline templates to consider. I considered them (this is a blatant lie) but discounted the notion as I am not a complete loser. The guide went on to suggest that I prepared at least 25 titles for each piece, which could be whittled down to a Top Three with use of the title analyzer before settling on The Winner. As, contrary to all impressions, I do have a life, I did not try to write twenty five titles, but I did manage three which I ran through an analyzer. They were: How to Make Informed Decisions About the Title of your Blog Posts – part one (I’ll be honest here, there is little chance of there ever being a part two); Achieving Great Things Through Carefully Considered Blog Post Titles, and The Curse of Genghis Khan’s Anal Warts. I started with WordPress’s own little tool which refused to analyze any of my titles, saying ‘Cookie Check Failed’ to all of them. Stunned that software associated with WordPress should fail to work correctly, I none the less tried another analyzer. It said title 1 scored 85/100 (very good); title 2 scored 60/100 (good) and title 3, 51/100. Just before I turned it off I tried Neutering Toads for Fun and Profit (very good) #930 and it scored 86/100 so I used it here and, if you’re at all interested, that’s why…
The bus was empty, but I knew as soon as I saw him climb aboard, that he would choose to sit beside me. He smelled like a dump in summer and something of which he appeared completely unaware, was moving around under his coat. He tried to release a smile, but it merely flitted across his face like a leer in a convent and as he sat, he turned his entire body towards me as though his head had become fused to his shoulders. He licked his lips revealing teeth the colour of teak. He had eyes like midnight and breath like petrol, his hair sat atop his head like a hat, threadbare, unkempt and matted like a cat that could no longer clean itself, undisturbed since sleep. He pulled a slightly threadbare fur coat tight around his shoulders, just failing to cover the lace neckline of the nightdress he wore beneath it, in an overt attempt to create a small space between us. In his hand he carried a small stuffed toy: a penguin I think, it was hard to tell. His stare forced me to look away and casting my eyes down I noticed that his shoes were several sizes too big for his feet, that one sole flapped loosely, mouth-like, allowing fleeting glimpses of an un-socked foot as he moved his toes rhythmically, as if they were accompanying a song in his head.
I had seen him before walking around the town, unhurried and unbothered by both drunken youths and bored policemen, and I ‘knew’ his story in my head, his name and everything about him. His name, I concluded, was Geoffrey and he had a St John in there somewhere. His surname was double-barrelled, probably featuring a double ‘f’. He was definitely aristocratic, devoted to his mother who had died unexpectedly – probably from Lassa Fever or something equally romantic – leaving him alone, vulnerable and, eventually, here on the upper deck of a midnight bus with me. A mental breakdown between then and now I surmised, life in an institution surrounded by his mother’s furs and nightclothes, and his own childhood toys, but nobody to care when he wasn’t there at night. Nobody to worry.
I offered him a mint which he took with thin, elegant but grubby hands and a nod of thanks. His nails were long and grimy, but elegantly filed into shape. It seemed strange that he should take such care over the shape of his nails, but show no concern over the filth that had accumulated behind and around them. I wondered if he cared for anything else in his life or whether this was the last thing he refused to let go. I noticed that he had worn a ring until recently, the mark still palely traced across his finger, and wondered if it had been stolen from him or whether he had sold it to buy… what? He didn’t smell of booze or cigarettes, just decay. He wore nothing that could have been even approximately new and I remembered that when I had seen him around the town centre in the past he had often worn long, white satin evening gloves, the kind that are only ever otherwise seen on overdressed women at the opera or by the murderer in an Agatha Christie mystery. Where were they now? Had they been taken with the ring?
The bus slowed to a halt and he half-turned his body so that he faced the curved mirror that allowed a view of the bus’s doors below. He seemed fixated on the doors, but they did not open. I guessed the stop was one of those where the driver had to stop – do they call them ‘timing points’? – but I wasn’t sure: I had never travelled the route before. I would normally have got a taxi home, but it was a warm night so I had started to walk, unaware of the rainclouds developing in the darkness above my head. I was sheltering in a bus stop when the bus came along so I jumped on and asked the driver where would be the best place to get off. I won’t pretend that his first answer was altogether helpful, but eventually we found somewhere acceptable so I paid the fare and took a seat upstairs that was, as far as I could tell, out of his view and beyond any unwelcome conversation, where I sat, happily disengaged, until my ‘companion’ stumbled into his seat.
Eventually, after I’m not certain how long, maybe two or three minutes, the bus sighed, juddered into gear and pulled away from the kerb, and my companion dragged his attention away from the mirror. I felt a sudden pressure to speak, but I am the king of the non-committal nod. I have perfected the shy smile and slight eyebrow twitch to such a degree that I seldom find it necessary to actually engage anybody in conversation. It wasn’t going to work here though, was it? I knew I had to speak, but how to start? “You know, you really could do with a bath,” was honest, but not entirely tactful. “Excuse me, but is your name Geoffrey?” might lead him to think that I was confusing him with somebody else – I had no real basis whatsoever on which to assume that it really was his name. How do you start a conversation with a smelly, old man upstairs on a midnight bus that is not open to misinterpretation? “What’s a smelly old man like you doing on a shitty old bus like this and why, in God’s name, did you choose to sit next to me, putting me in this insidious position?” was probably not going to cut it. In the end, societal cowardice dictated my subsequent strategy. “Excuse me,” I muttered, half rising. “I think this is my stop.”
And it was then that I caught the unmistakable glint of reflected light from the knife blade as I felt it nestle uncomfortably against my side. I felt shocked at first, not by the action, but my reaction to it. I knew that I would not be unable to lunge past him and all that I could remember thinking was, “How has he kept that blade so shiny when he can’t even wash his bloody hands?” but I felt it unwise to enquire. I sat down heavily. Should I shout out for the driver who, without question, would not put himself in danger to help me? Strangely calm, I wondered whether this was how it was all going to end for me, on the top deck of a bus with a smelly old tramp, when a sudden realisation hit me, that he probably felt he was just protecting himself, that he himself had felt threatened by something that I had said or done. I raised my arms, palms open, as I believe it is done, and opened my mouth to speak, but he merely lifted one grimy finger to his lips and shushed quietly. “Money, phone and watch,” was all he said.
First Published 02.07.2022
I saw this man around town regularly. He was quiet, good natured, he went out of his way to avoid upsetting anyone, but I always thought he had a story to tell…
I spend a large portion of my life cosseted in my little ‘office’. It is actually the smallest of four bedrooms in our current house, but furnished with everything I need to concoct my daily shenanigans: I have a laptop, I have a printer and I have music – without which I could not function on any level – I have a room filled with bits of me and mine, and the time has come for me to pack it all away in preparation for the big move.
The office at the new house is an actual office, it is bigger than here and separate from the house, and I am now looking around me wondering “will I be able to fill it?” Oh dear me, yes. Let’s take a little look around. My shelves are full of CD’s – several hundred – books – ditto – DVD’s – thirtyish – and assorted crap (Victorian bottles, photographs, mugs – mostly containing pens – ukulele, Nerf gun, various stationery requisites, a brass sun-dial, a Marmite jar, a mini-drone, a remote-controlled Meccano car, a spelter chimpanzee staring at a human skull (not real), a plaster duck, a hand-forged nail and The Complete Works of Shakespeare.) In addition to the aforementioned laptop and printer, my desk houses a telephone, a fan, three reading lamps, two metal tins (containing more crap) 3 more mugs (containing more pens) a red plastic tray filled with scrap paper – for hand writing my (s)crap on – Sellotape, rulers, scissors, a globe, a book of Longfellow’s Poems (largely unread) and a microscope. My walls are bedecked with paintings, prints, a ‘stolen’ Wishbone Ash setlist signed by Andy Powell, guitars (real), guitars (photo’s of), guitars (models of), two now eerily empty cork boards, a giant brass lizard and a graduation photograph which has been turned to face the wall. It is all heading for boxes.
It will, of course, all find its way – via the auspices of the removals men – into the new, bigger office, but weirdly, now it is boxed, it all appears to take up much more space than it did before. It also weighs much more. I begin (in a fashion that even I find hard to explain) to understand the theory behind Black Holes I fear that a small tug on the parcel tape upon arrival at its destination may release another universe. One filled with even more rubbish than this one. I wonder how everything I have removed from this little space will fit into my new larger one. In a panic of doubt I typed ‘Quantum Mechanics’ into Google, only to find that it is a car repairer in Hull. My nerves were not calmed.
My wife told me to calm down and think it through – “Have you been eating that strong cheese again?” – “space”, she said, “is not relative” (I paraphrase. She actually said “What?” and pulled the kind of face that I last saw on Kim Kardashian when faced with a Rubik’s Cube) “what fits into a small space must perforce fit into a large one”. I thought, for a fleeting moment, that she might just be right, but then I started to think about shaving foam. I mean, imagine trying to get that back into the tube after you’d let it out – especially through that tiny little hole in the nozzle…
I was sitting on the floor trying to come to terms with the magnitude of it all – aided, I must admit, by chocolate – when she looked back in through the door. I think she ‘tutted’ (although it could have been thunder). “Do I have to pack the stuff in my office drawers?” I asked, hoping not to convey the complete helplessness I was feeling. “No,” she said. “The removal man said that we can leave everything in the drawers.” “Thank God for that,” I said. “I don’t think the Universe is ready for my drawers.” “I know how it feels,” she said…
Please note, in keeping with government policy, elderly people in the UK can no longer be referred to as ‘Pensioners’, ‘Old Age Pensioners’ or ‘Senior Citizens’. Henceforth the official designation is ‘A Drain on the Economy’…
I can’t pretend that it didn’t come as something of a shock to wake up and find that I was no longer affected by gravity.
There was nothing particularly amiss, except that the hand which habitually found its way under my head when I slept was there as always, but it was not touching the pillow. I put my hand down to find that the mattress was definitely underneath me, but my body was some inches above it. I threw the duvet to one side and, unencumbered by the weight of the bedding, floated gently towards the ceiling. This was not the start to the day I had anticipated. I wanted to believe that I was dreaming, but somehow I knew that I was not. My God, that ceiling needed painting.
I flipped myself over and looked down to the bed. Nothing untoward there. All was as it should have been. I looked around the room, but there were no clues to be found. Whatever was wrong here was wrong with me. I pushed myself from the ceiling and glided with pleasing ease towards the bed-head which I grabbed gratefully. I needed time to think. I knew I needed coffee, but I had no idea how I would drink it.
I clambered around the room like a pyjama clad climber traversing some kind of self-assembly rock face. Occasionally I would lose my footing and find my feet dangling uselessly above me until I could find a drawer or a cupboard door in which to anchor them. Eventually I found my way to the wardrobe and an old rucksack which I stuffed with shoes, a pair of mono-lensed binoculars and a 1957 edition of Old Moore’s Almanac (foxed, but sound) and put it on my back, where it provided just enough ballast to weigh me down, although even with the weight on my back I found myself walking with exaggerated care, feeling that any stumble would once again have me ‘falling’ towards the ceiling.
In the kitchen I made coffee. The water still poured downwards, the milk still dribbled down my arm from the carelessly torn carton lip and the pieces of the cup that dropped from my fumbling fingers still cascaded across the floor and stayed there. The basic laws of gravity, it appeared, applied to everything but me.
For a while I had great fun, removing the rucksack and throwing myself, astronaut-like, around the house before adjusting the weight I strapped onto my back to allow me to hover just inches from the floor like a yogic flyer, like Wile E Coyote in the split second before the inevitable plummet. I worked out that by using my winter duvet I could pretty well anchor myself to the bed whilst, with my summer one I could hover some two feet above it, laying back as if in some imaginary hammock. I realised that if I were to ever have sex again, my positional variations would be seriously compromised. Within about a day I had got to grips with almost everything I needed to do about the house: as long as I wore my ‘ballast’ I could conduct my life pretty much as I always had; I weighed myself down with bedding at night time, content in the knowledge that, if I accidentally threw it off, the worst that could happen would be for me to wake up on the ceiling, cold possibly – although it always felt slightly warmer up there – and now I thought about it, not quite touching the Artex. Perhaps I might scratch my nose, but there would be no permanent damage. I laid a dressing gown by my bedside with a house brick in each pocket: just sufficient to hold me down for a nocturnal toilet visit. It wouldn’t be too bad. And then I started to think about leaving the house…
What would happen if I inadvertently placed my rucksack on the seat beside me on the bus, if I took my shoes off, if I dropped my phone? Achieving the exact balance between floating gently away and being crushed to the ground was crucial. And there were so many things I couldn’t easily do with a weighted backpack. Would I, so encumbered, for instance remain weightless in the swimming pool or would I sink like a stone? I thought about the possibilities of having lead-lined clothes made, but I had no idea of where to start. I checked the Next website, but there was no such option there. I pictured myself spending the rest of my life in a deep-sea diver’s wetsuit. I worried about where I might go if not weighed down: would I reach an altitude at which I would ‘stabilize’ and bob about happily with only commercial aeroplanes to worry about, or would I simply continue to rise out of the Earth’s atmosphere and off into space? I felt that I would still need to breathe, but could I ever be sure about anything anymore? Instinctively I knew that I could never reveal my problem to anybody without becoming some kind of circus freak: Science baffled by amazing floating man – I did not want to be prodded and investigated. I had absolutely no wish to become a living Believe it or Not. I had no desire to become anybody’s secret weapon. I would stay at home, order food in, speak to no-one…
But day by day, my need for basic human contact grew and with it, for no reason I could understand, my entire lightness of being. Each day I needed a gram or two more weight in my pockets than the day before to restore my contact with the ground and soon the effort of it all began to weigh me down – although not, unfortunately, in the way I might have hoped. I closed my curtains and allowed myself to float around the house, suddenly acutely aware of every little draught. I discovered a semi-permanent ‘gulf stream’ that would waft me effortlessly along the hallway and into the kitchen where, with a toe hooked underneath the tap, I could reach the fridge, the pot noodles, the microwave and everything else I needed to survive. I no longer bothered to anchor myself to the bed for sleeping but merely allowed myself to drift away wherever I happened to be. My dreams were of walking, of tripping over and skinning my knees; of lying on a beach and feeling the waves wash across me. My nightmares were of looking down on it all.
Somehow I knew that if I had a psychiatrist to speak to, they would tell me to just get out more, meet new people, to lighten up, which would, in the circumstances, have been singularly unhelpful. My mind was occupied with nothing but my predicament, there was no room for solutions. And yet it was on one particularly bleak evening that I saw my future – how it could be and how I could bear it to be – and I made my decision. Today I will open the door to my house shorn of all unnecessary counterweight, I will face the world and I will let the universe decide what will be. I must just let myself go. The sky’s the limit…
This little idea dropped into my head at the start of a long, four hour drive and I struggled to hold onto it all the way. It seemed to be full of hopelessness as I started to write it down, but it brightened up in the end…
I, to a similar degree as anyone else who over the last demi-century has ever attempted to shine a flickering (and lately, dying) light on to the eccentricities of the human condition, owe a deep debt of gratitude to the great Alan Coren: major wag and literary (as well as ‘literally a’) genius – for revealing to me, with frightening clarity and seeming ease, the heights to which I cannot even aspire. His gift for turning the mundane into something quite exotic with nothing more than a few hundred immaculately chosen words is, IMHO, unrivalled in the English language. His mastery in the art of wringing mirth from the bottomless pit of normality is something I have always sought to emulate, but never hoped to match. He was the very best at what I do so inexpertly, but his mastery of form and line gave me the impetus to at least try to, one day, write something worthwhile. He is, along with Spike Milligan, the writer I would most like to be like and consequently the writer I have to try the hardest not to be like.
Of course, his normality was never quite my own. He was a successful columnist, magazine editor and television personality. I am not. Things happened to him – often in exotic locations. They do not happen to me. I cannot relate the story of, for instance, losing a brand new cashmere coat at the Garrick because, frankly, I can afford neither. I can, reveal a little of my skill at losing tickets for things after I have left them to go for a wee, and my subsequent battles to be allowed back in, but it’s not quite the same: such incidents might be normal to me but unfortunately, even with the eccentricities of my telling, they are probably normal to everyone else as well. Nothing special.
A.C. came to mind because I have just realised how I use two of his words – he attempted, and failed, to get them attributed to him in the Oxford English Dictionary – ‘wossname’ and ‘narmean’ far more than I probably should, but they amuse me and they allow me to very quickly portray a character without ever having to actually… describe them. Someone who spends his entire wossname, life, searching for the meaning of it is unlikely to ever find it, narmean?
I started to wonder if I could lay claim to any words of my own. I remember on many occasions having used words that Spellcheck is quite adamant do not exist. The problem is that, in general, I only ever use them once, and the rest of the world not at all. That they are not admissible demonstrates to me a hidebound adherence to outmoded custom that does the OED no credit: that a word once made up on the grounds that it sounded just right at the time, should need to be used more than once and by other people before it can enter the wossname, dictionary, is anachronistic… I think.
…And as I wondered, I began to realise that all this introspection would not put the kettle on the hob: that I had work to do of my own. Five hundred words worth to be precise (or imprecise if I’m honest for, though my aim is for five hundred, my eventual shot normally takes me much nearer to six). It’s all very well recognising my own shortcomings, but it’s far better to do it after I’ve written the post for the day. All I needed, it transpired, was a suitable starting point: somewhere to launch the tarradiddle whence I could watch on with curious detachment as it drifted off to where… and why? Easier said than done apparently. Each attempt to step nonchalantly from the pier-end onto the boat destined to drift me serenely and amusingly to the bottom of the page, left me up to my neck in the rising tide. The surface of a body of water, I have found, is always best when viewed from above. Knowing where I don’t want to go does not make it any easier to get to where I do want to go, especially when I don’t actually know where that is. Great journeys, it occurs, need meticulous planning but, if you’re only going to the end of the road to find out whether last year’s bargain shoes still turn your toes blue, it’s ok to busk it a bit.
I think what I’m trying to say is that I don’t always know what I’m trying to say, but I go ahead and say it anyway… and I think there must be some kind of a word for that.
Things were not quite as Gerald had expected. Trouble was, Gerald didn’t really know what he had expected. The coach was lovely. Real luxury job: air-conditioning, on-board video, tea making facilities, proper flushing loo….. Looked almost brand new too. He had to admit that he hadn’t really taken it in as he got on. He didn’t know what colour it was. Somehow he couldn’t even remember seeing it from the outside at all. He remembered climbing up the steps and being surprised by all the happy faces. He had been the last person to get on and all but one of the seats were already occupied. He had walked the length of the coach to reach the seat, the other half of which was occupied by an angular-looking elderly lady. He had taken in the welcoming smiles of everyone aboard as he had made his way along, but he had paid particular attention to the face of the person with whom he would be sharing a seat.
The face was angular, but not hard. Its lines were softened by an almost permanent smile. They had hit it off almost at once. She giggled and laughed throughout their conversation, her face occasionally breaking into an almost childish grin. She clearly enjoyed every aspect of her life. She spoke lovingly of her family; of her children, her grandchildren and great-grandchildren. She spoke too of her mother and father, and it seemed strange to him that she made no distinction between those who came before and those who came after her. She pronounced upon them all with obvious affection, but with a curious distance which he did not quite understand. She became reticent only when he asked about her own life. “You must ask others about me,” she had said and would be drawn no further. Still she smiled. He became intrigued, wanting to ask questions and expecting to receive the kind of answers he knew he had no right to expect from so new an acquaintance. The close proximity of fellow travellers always engendered such curiosity within him. She spoke quietly, warmly, but carefully, refusing to become irritated by what he knew was his over-persistence. He felt ashamed at his ignorance yet angered by his own shame. She listened attentively, answered quietly, speaking with an aura of certain knowledge, and the smile, an expression of pure serenity, lingered.
And then silence fell between them. Not suddenly, but softly, like the dying leaves of autumn. Like a gossamer blanket, it smothered confrontation and quelled exasperation. It did not put a space between them, but drew them somehow closer together, like an invisible thread, yielding, but unbroken. It was a silence unburdened by guilt or envy. A silence without rancour. A silence between friends.
Gerald gazed through the window as the countryside sped by. He was unable to remember when he had become aware that the coach was moving. It seemed always to have been so. He did not recognise any of the landscape through which they were travelling, but he was not troubled. He tried to focus his mind, to envision his destination, but he could not. He tried, in vain, to recollect his reasons for being here, heading….. where? And where was he travelling from? How could he not know? How could he not care? Strange, but his mind had always been so acute before… before?
Some strange Mystery Tour this, when, having driven for hours through an alien and indistinct landscape, he found himself being toured around the streets of his youth. He was amazed at how much he remembered: every house, every street corner, every face. He was intrigued to find that everyone else felt the same. How little things had changed.
Children played in streets, curiously devoid of traffic. The coach travelled quickly, but the children seemed almost unaware of its presence. They rode antiquated bicycles with asymmetrical wheels, wooden scooters with nailed-on pram wheels, and shared roller skates, two to a pair. They played cricket with a scrap of wood and a ball of newspaper bound with sellotape. They played football with a bald and punctured tennis ball. They played Hare-and-hounds, chasing around the streets, in and out of high-walled back yards, over part-demolished houses and derelict factories. It looked like a bomb site.
Familiar smells assailed his senses. Smells that brought back fragments of memory. Displaced and disjointed, but with a clarity that startled. The morning must of a used gazunder, damp clothes drying by a smouldering coal fire, bacon fat and beef dripping. Boiled cabbage. The warm, almost sweet, odour of damp walls and carpets, dark coal-houses, cool rain on hot concrete. Boiled cabbage. Oft-worn, unwashed woollen socks, the wooden floors of school house, school meals. And cabbage, cabbage, cabbage. Each fragrance carried a picture, like a photograph; sharply focused, brightly coloured, a moment frozen in time. The images over-laden with emotion; pleasure, pain and heart-ache, so that it seeped from them and overwhelmed him more acutely than the present. Yet with it all came a sense of warmth and well-being, a feeling that, come what may, all would be well. And cabbage.
Around him his fellow passengers stared into the middle distance, each caught in their own reverie, dreaming their own dreams, recalling their own past-lives. How could such a disparate bunch share such common memories? What was it about coach travel that encouraged such nostalgia and introversion? How strange that the general hum of conversation that had filled the bus throughout the opening miles of the journey, should have died so suddenly. It was as if a switch had been thrown. Conversation on/ conversation off. All communication drowned in a sea of remembrance and boiled cabbage.
Beside him the old lady (Why hadn’t he asked her name whilst she was still awake?) breathed softly and slowly. He could see the peace behind her eyes and he envied such tranquillity. He surveyed her features as if for the first time. They no longer seemed angular. They were strong; calm and assured. Reassuring in a way, but not angular. He closed his eyes and tried to remember her as he had first seen her, how long ago? He tried to assemble her face, like a police ‘photo-fit’, but she would not form. He kept seeing his own mother, his own grandmother, his wife and he could not tell them one from another. The features mingled, softened and became as one with his fellow passenger, so that he had to shake his head to try and clear the image from behind his eyes. He felt nervous. Hair rose on the back of his neck, his cheeks flushed, heat prickled along his back. Why could he not remember? He concentrated his mind, attempting to create a mental picture of somebody, anybody, from his life, but all he could see was a single conglomeration of everyone he had ever known. When he opened his eyes and looked into those of his sleeping neighbour he saw the same face and he knew that behind her darkling eyelids, the face that she was seeing was his.
His mind whirled with bewilderment and he began to feel panic welling inside him. Why did he feel so confused? Why did he find it so difficult to remember his reasons for being aboard this coach? Where was he going, where was he coming from? How could a normal, well adjusted person forget such fundamentals? Perhaps he was dreaming. This journey had all the ingredients of a dream, but somehow he knew that it was real.
All his life had been like this. Lurching from one uncertainty to another. Never knew whether he was coming or going, his mum had said. God, she’d be rubbing her hands together if she was here with him today. He could almost hear her, “I told you so.”
The old lady stirred beside him, sighed deeply and stretched her creaking limbs. She saw him staring at her and smiled. “What’s your name?” he asked. He was aware that he should have given her time to collect her thoughts, to wake peacefully and gather her senses, but he had to know. He had to know now.
“Is it really so important to you?”
“At the moment, yes, I think it is.”
“Do you know why?”
He shook his head sadly and gazed beyond her and through the window to the trees and fields and buildings that flew past in a hazy blur. He could see nothing, yet he could see it all. “Why am I so confused?”
“Sssh,” she said. “Watch the video.”
The video screen glowed into life. “How did you know? Have you been on this trip before?”
“I think you understand at least, that you can make this journey only once.” He did know that. He did not know why.
“Perhaps some of us have more time to prepare,” she said.
He raised his eyes to the screen above his head, it was alive with colours. They swirled and twisted, forming convoluted patterns of light and texture. Familiar sounds surrounded him, overlaid and entwined; a cacophony of noise, overwhelming and enveloping. Slowly, but slowly, both sight and sound resolved, reformed and coalesced into something recognizable. The pictures were of the streets through which they had passed earlier in the day. The sounds were the same. It was as if the journey had been filmed and was now being shown on the bright video screen. Only the pictures were brighter, even clearer. He was certain he could detect the smells. Cabbage. And he could see faces. He could see his own face in amongst the children, hear his own voice. The pictures overwhelmed his senses, the sounds reverberated inside his head. His whole life was there before him.
With a huge effort of will he dragged his eyes away from the screen and looked at those around him. Each of them was watching the ‘movie’ with the same mixture of fascination and bewilderment etched upon their faces. He knew that what they were seeing were scenes from their own lives’ and that they too were just beginning to understand the full implications of this journey. He was overwhelmed with the realisation, and yet he was at peace. He knew that soon this transition would be ending, the expedition over. He could not comprehend the nature of his destination, but he knew it was a place from which he would never want to leave.
He turned to the old lady and she saw understanding in his eyes. She smiled, as she had smiled when they first met, minutes, hours, a life-time ago.
“Muriel,” she said. “My name is Muriel.”
First Published 16.11.2019
I don’t even remember why I first wrote this, but I do remember that it lay around, unused for quite a while before I showed it to Crispin Underfelt who liked it. So I used it…
Image created by AI based on the phrase ‘Oo-de’lally’. Answers on a postcard please.
I would love to have something – anything – insightful to say about anything – something – but such thoughts as I have are seldom more than flotsam & jetsam (the long-absent Crispin Underfelt once explained to me the difference between them and if you were to contact him – mayhap with a plea to get his sorry ass back on this platform more regularly – I am sure he would probably do the same for you) tossed on the seething froth of the storm-lashed waters that slosh between my ears. Sadly, I do not. If I’m honest, I find it hard to believe that I have anything to say that has not been said, let alone thought, by somebody before me. Check out virtually any memorable saying and its notable sayer on the internet and you will almost certainly find out that somebody else actually said it first.
I am a little tawdry in my reading habits. My ‘schedule’ is easily deflected at the whim of wife, children, grandchildren, sunshine, peanuts and cider, anything that pricks at my curiosity. I often tune in to my favourite blogs some days late and I find them with dozens of comments already attached. I tend to briefly scan them for names I know and add my own few words before inevitably finding out that somebody else has said first, exactly what I have said second only seconds before. Great minds may well think alike, but mediocre ones clearly get there in second place. Witty asides appear somewhat less witty when a greater wit has made them first.
I should, obviously, read all the other comments before I throw in my own tuppence a’penny but I tend to read the post and comment before it occurs to me. Besides, it’s particularly dispiriting to find that you cannot find anything to say that hasn’t already been said. Occasionally I manage to take a breath and I find myself commenting on the comments of others – usually only to find that somebody else has done that before me too.
It is often said that there is no such thing as original thought: that everything has been thought before, but surely, at some point, somebody must have been the first to have thought it. Also, how could any man have ever thought to himself “I’ll have to watch myself with that,” before e.g. the zip fly had even been invented? And, I’m guessing here, but doesn’t it stand to reason that somebody must have been the first to suspect that cryptomnesia was a thing? The thought that I could have heard something before and then forgotten about it to a sufficient extent that I could say the self-same thing myself, believing that I was the first person to do so, would be a little hard to swallow if I wasn’t aware of how quickly I can forget what I had for breakfast this morning.
My point is, of course (oh yes, there is one) that everything I write is suddenly taking me twice as long as once it did, riven as I am, with doubts over its provenance. Who might have said it first, who might have said it better? So I have decided that I will not believe in cryptomnesia (if I don’t believe in it, it does not, of course, exist) – it is the only way for me to get things done – it is one small step for a man…
When invited to consider my favourite Disney song on a blog some time ago, I instantly remembered this one from Robin Hood. I have no idea why it lodged in my head, but the title has been with me ever since, so – despite it having no relevance whatsoever to today’s fol-de-rol (or does it?), I thought I’d use it here…
Reminiscing this and that and having such a good time Oo-de-lally, oo-de-lally, golly, what a day… Oo-de-lally – Roger Miller
Getting On 