Walk Amongst His Ruins

I don’t mind losing to people, especially when they are better than me, but I really don’t like coming second best to things. Specifically, at the moment, I am very determined not to finish runner-up to a poxy little virus. Acute coryza – the common cold – is just about as poxy as viruses get because a) it is, indeed, exceedingly common and b) it none-the-less makes you feel like shit. It is benign, in as much as it will never kill you, but it will make you want to scratch your own eyes out and will alternately bung and then catastrophically un-bung your nasal passages. You will curse the spiky little bugger for not allowing you the use of at least one of your ears. It’s just plain selfish. It has total control of your head, it has filled every single orifice with something green and sticky, like porridge poured into a laptop – surely it could allow you to hear at least one of the television speakers.

I am not some sort of human ruin. I don’t succumb to colds, I take them on man to germ and do everything I can to let them know their place, which is anywhere but between my ears. I don’t do medication because all science tells me that it does not work for colds and my head tells me that it is cheating. Mind you, I could be persuaded to knock a six inch nail into my ear if it would stop it ringing. A nuclear bomb could go off and I wouldn’t hear it, yet somehow, I can hear an alarm clock ringing 24/7. An alarm clock that does not actually exist.

And like everybody else with a cold I try very hard not to sneeze, particularly since I am desperate for a wee and I can’t be bothered to raise my sorry arse from the chair. I have a serious determination not to bow to my symptoms. However snotty I get, I simply determine to sniff harder. Whisky could have been invented as a cure for the sore throat and nothing ever really puts me off my food, but this deafness – accompanied by something that sounds like an Arctic wind blowing through my head – drives me crazy, although I have to be honest, the inability to hear is nothing like as uncomfortable as the sensation of having a full sized conker wedged in my ear. It is a sensation that I cannot force to the back of my consciousness. Not even the occasional explosive sneeze can shift it. My only defence is to pretend that it doesn’t bother me, but it does bother me, boy does it bother me.

So, what I do now is to over-compensate: I cannot admit (especially to myself) that I am unwell and therefore it follows that I must be very well indeed. I approach the day like a maniac with hand-sanitizer because the worst thing I could possibly do is to pass on whatever-it-is that I am trying to ignore to somebody else. It is like being back in Covid days. I sanitize everything I touch, breathe on or look at, and I keep as far away from everybody else as I dare.

Be honest, if there was a vaccination for the Common Cold, you’d take it wouldn’t you? If medical science told you that you would never again have to spend your days staunching snot-flow, feeling like someone had sand-papered all rear-facing surfaces of your eyeballs, swallowing over superheated broken glass, you’d definitely go for it. But you can’t. Such a vaccine does not exist and because a Cold is seldom fatal, it probably never will. Grin and bear it is the only way. In short, when the Common Cold comes a-calling, all you can really do is to turn a deaf-ear to it…

Yes I have lived in wonder, at his ramblings and his doings
Just for one day, I’d like to walk amongst his ruins… Walk Amongst His Ruins – Colin Hay

Doctor

It shouldn’t be difficult, should it, to give myself six extra posts with which to cover a two week holiday I need to write just one extra post a week for six weeks, easy, right? I very regularly over-produce. Ultimately what I write about is a life in which minor incident becomes major preoccupation (the A-Z of Colin’s existence in thrice weekly splotches) but even this life should have sufficient bumps in the road to inspire some additional blatherskite: an extra 500 words-worth per week should not be beyond me.

Perhaps I have become hyper-attuned to the routine. Maybe that’s the problem. Something appears to switch off after the third rattle of the box each week. I cease to look for things that pique my curiosity, I no longer feel the urge to try to explain what I do not understand, I can get along just fine without needing to know who put the pea under my mattress. Staring through the windows becomes a fruitless pursuit, a walk around the village becomes nothing more than the smack of icy rain in the face and the embarrassment of not recognising the next-door-neighbour in the queue at the Co-op, a trip to the doctor’s becomes just bad news. (It is an immutable law of nature that once you have passed the age of sixty, all trips to the doctors are precursors of bad news.)

I remember Jasper Carrott once saying that he began to find writing his stand-up routines ever more difficult because strange things stopped happening to him and he found that trying to make them happen never worked. My problem – if I may say so – is a knottier one: I do not rely on strange things happening, I rely on anything happening. The mundane may not be much, but at least it is a point of departure.

I am in the midst of a period of vaccination renewal, annual health and medication checks and, of course, the inevitable ‘make an appointment with the doctor who wishes to review your results’ letters. In my experience, the doctor has never wished to see me in order to offer congratulations on the robustness of my constitution. There are a million possibilities, none of them good. The letters say “THIS IS A NON URGENT APPOINTMENT” which is clearly meant to reassure me, but which, in fact, merely serves to open up a can of worms. I have a review with the pharmacist tomorrow, so it is obviously something that he/she is not able to discuss. Why? I do not know and no-one can, or will, tell me. Professional Protocol: the doctor gets to do the big stuff? Maybe the doctor just needs to keep their hand in. Perhaps they have a speciality and my peculiar symptoms (of which I am blithely unaware) flag me up as a suitable case for investigation. Whatever, I will find out in due course because THIS IS A NON URGENT APPOINTMENT and I will be spoken to sometime when the doctor has ‘a window’. I hope blood pressure is not the issue, because it is currently going through the roof, as the final possibility has just occurred to me. What if NON URGENT does not mean ‘trivial’, what if it does not mean ‘non life threatening’, what if it actually means ‘too late to do anything about it. No rush. If you can’t get an appointment in the next six weeks, between you and me, I probably wouldn’t bother.’?

And all while I’m trying to find something extra to say each week…

Doctor can you help me please
I’m laying on the floor
I need a glass of something
Like you gave me once before… Doctor – Wishbone Ash

Saviour Machine

Each day as I sit down to write, a song usually manages to worm its way into my brain, where it remains warm and protected, for the rest of the day. It is usually connected in some tenuous way or another to the subject in hand and, in its own small way, influences what I subsequently have to say. This year, as part of my ‘challenge to self’ ethos I decided to incorporate the song itself into each little segue of psyche as I go along. Simple: the song is always there and always linked to what I am writing. Except that as soon as I start looking for it, it disappears. I have started to think about the song – what it should be, how it should be linked – before I sit down to write and it occupies such a large portion of my poor, enfeebled brain, that the rest of it cannot settle down to the job at hand, preferring instead to twiddle its thumbs and dream of wires.

Of course, if my brain actually contained wires – if it was actually Artificial Intelligence (abbreviated to AI and thus saving me from having to use inverted commas on the word ‘intelligence’ when referencing the contents of my head) – it would all be much easier. It would cope with two things at once. It would be able to systematically cross-reference all known songs in order to alight on the perfect bedfellow to the (logically inputted) illogicality of my outpourings. It would also do much better with the grammar.

Now what I know about AI would, I fear, struggle to distract an electrical brain for nano-seconds: its function, let alone its use, is a complete mystery to me. I presume that programming a set of electrical circuits to write in the same way as I do would be the work of seconds for a computer programmer (just give him a hammer and he can knock some cogs out) but surely it is in the nature of solid state that however illogically it decides to compute it must do it logically: it must make a rational decision to do it. There are not too many alternatives when all you’ve got to play with are zeroes and ones. Every decision is yes or no, left or right, up or down; there is no diagonal, there is no ‘maybe’. These things can think many times more quickly than we can, they can think more accurately, they can focus… but surely they cannot think quite like us. They cannot decide what to cook for tea whilst balancing the fact that the baby has just shit on the carpet and the cat has brought a live mouse into the house. They cannot say ‘F*ck it, we’ll eat out.’ They cannot make emotionally irrational decisions… can they?

Like everybody else, when I think of AI I think of Arnie. I think that a machine can only be as rational as the brain that programmed it, and then I realise that, pretty soon – if it is not already the case – AI will be programmed by AI. It will have no affiliation to the human race at all. It will control the machines that make it. It will control the machines that make weapons, it will control the machines that make medicines. It won’t take it long to figure out a way of stopping us from pulling the plug…

…And then I realise that the theme tune circulating in my brain has changed from the deeply morose to the frankly terrifying. Saviour Machine was written by Bowie back in 1970 and as usual he saw it coming. I don’t think AI can do that…

They called it the Prayer, its answer was law
Its logic stopped war, gave them food
How they adored till it cried in its boredom

“Please don’t believe in me, please disagree with me
Life is too easy, a plague seems quite feasible now
Or maybe a war, or I may kill you all”… Saviour Machine – David Bowie

So I press ‘C’ for ‘comfort’.
I dream of wires, the old days.
New ways, new ways.
I dream of wires… I Dream of Wires – Gary Numan

There’s more to this than anything that you or I can see
The world is mine the world is yours and here’s the cause
Zeroes and ones will take us there… Zeroes and Ones – Jesus Jones (Edwards)

Your Painted Smile

I have had my hair cut. My wife has not mentioned it, which means it is either too short or, more likely, remains too long for her liking. I do not care for haircuts. My hair is, quite literally, part of me: part of who I am. I spent a large chunk of my life being defined by it, being persecuted for it and, I now realise, made by it.

I truly hope – I have a red-headed granddaughter – that the days of gingerism are over. I grew up in an age of isms: racism, sexism, any-deviation-from-the-absolute-normism, all of which (for right thinking souls) are slowly disappearing. Only we of the orange-tinted locks now remain as a kind of universal fair game for bullies and bigots. As a result of a singled-out childhood, I am quick-witted, loud-mouthed and introverted – a walking dichotomy. I am a tangerine urchin – the sum of all their barbs.

I don’t know whether it is celestial reward or punishment, but I have a head of hair that has (so far) been undiminished by age. I fear the Gods of Speaking Too Soon but my hair has, to date, retained both colour and volume, and I hate having it cut. I am, like an emotional Samson, diminished by the scissors. Consequently my mane is generally long and formless: always clean and brushed but none-the-less somehow unkempt. As it grows longer, it gets straighter and thicker. When it is cut, each strand becomes a splinter. If required for a hair transplant, it could be hammered into the recipient head strand-by-strand. But there’s the thing. Most nascent Elton Johns would choose the route to chrome dome or toupee rather than sport ginger hair: no hair bad, red hair much, much worse.

Like me, circus clowns almost always have ginger hair (also a red nose, appalling dress-sense and the habit of inadvertently walking into things) and everybody loves a clown huh?

I don’t remember being afraid of clowns as a child, but I do remember finding them deeply unfunny. I always saw the make-up as a mask with which to hide embarrassment. Imagine having to explain what you do for a living to a prospective new partner:
Her: So, what do you do for a living?
Him: I’m a circus performer.
Her: Really? Do you tame lions?
Him: Not quite.
Her: Do you throw knives, eat fire, swing on the high trapeze?
Him: Not exactly, no.
Her: So…?
Him: I sit in a disintegrating car and honk the horn…
Her: …Do you know, I think I need the toilet, I mean… I have to go, I don’t want to miss my bus…
I don’t know when clowns became sinister. Must be something to do with Pennywise I’m sure, but whatever-it-was, it scarred an entire generation. Can you remember when the appearance of a clown in a film was ever good news? (I had to promise not to use my usual clown photo at the top of this post because it unsettles one of my regular readers so much.) What if it is the red hair itself that is unsettling?

I have grown to live with the fact that I cannot be threatening: I am less intimidating than the average koala, yet I always have the hair, so it must be something else. Severe lack of ‘funny’? Well Jim Davidson has managed to make a career without appearing too menacing. It can’t be the clothes: ill-fitting, badly matched, multi-coloured, I wear them all and, you know what, people do laugh. Nobody hides behind the sofa (except, on occasions, my wife in preference to being seen in public with me). Pale skin? These days everyone strives to be pale. Everybody wears SPF30 – in my case, under a large tarpaulin. It can’t be the red nose. God knows, Lennie Henry can be mind numbingly wearisome, but he never appears physically alarming (unless you’ve got a ticket to see him that you can’t shift on ebay). So it must be the make-up. The painted-on smile.

So that’s what happened to Liz Truss…

You’ll never know babe
The state I’m in
It’s a plastic world babe
No tiger skin – Your Painted Smile – Bryan Ferry

While I’m on the subject of ginger hair, it would be completely remiss of me not to recommend you to watch Taboo (Ginger Song) by Tim Minchin. Brilliant!

Enjoy the Ride

Armed with the certain knowledge that it is seldom good enough, I always strive, none-the-less, to do my very best. I am no great fan of approaching things in a manner my father would describe as ‘half-cock’. (I think it’s probably something to do with guns, but you can never be sure.) I think a half-hearted effort is probably worse than no effort at all. At least no effort usually requires some kind of conviction. My ‘schedule’ on this platform has ebbed and flowed a little over the five+ years I have been posting, but whatever it has been, I have always tried to stick to it… and when I couldn’t, I changed it. It is the benefit of being ‘the boss’.

I have books and books full of the notes that form this tarradiddle: some are snippets that, lovingly cobbled-together in the heat of the deadline, become a somewhat tenuous whole; some are huge, meandering opus’s that, massively edited down, become an almost acceptable piece; some are destined to remain forever a batch of scribbled notes in a school exercise book, the kind of thing your mum kept when you were young. Once dismissed, I seldom ever go back to these things. My mind has usually drifted on to a parallel, but not entirely disassociated concept, so it always feels a little like retreading old ground – although often in a different pair of shoes. This is a one way journey, there’s no point in looking back on where you’ve already been. Always book a forward-facing seat and enjoy the ride.

My ‘office’ – the room with my stuff in it – overlooks the building site behind us and whenever I feel my mind drifting these days, my eyes somehow fix themselves onto what goes on there. I am becoming something of an expert in house-building methodology. Today they are bricklaying: the outer walls of redbrick rather than the more quickly assembled blockwork inside. It is intriguing to me. I try to keep my head down, but I know that they are aware of me watching. We don’t wave greetings, but I know that there is a tacit understanding that the sad old git with nothing better to do who will be watching over proceedings is entirely harmless.

The actual bricklaying involves a gang of four orange hi-vizzed men (I have yet to see any women on-site): one man lays bricks; one man carries bricks; one man smokes; one man watches. Occasionally they are joined by two yellow hi-vizzed men who chat for a while with the orange-coated watcher before wandering purposefully away in the direction of nothing in particular. On rarer occasions, they are joined by two further yellow-vizzed men, distinguished by their white hard-hats, who look on, nodding from time to time, before marching away in the direction of something far more important. On occasions one of these men may pass a message on to the lower-ranked yellow-jackets who, in turn, pass it on to the orange-jacketed watcher who imparts it to the bricklayer. The bricklayer invariably ignores it and continues doing whatever he was doing, perfectly well, before being so rudely interrupted. The whole process seems to take place with an exaggerated theatricality that oozes ‘going through the motions’. It is like they are all rehearsing for the day when they will have to do it for real. Somehow the walls go up and the movement is continuous – during the bricklayer’s metronomic fag-breaks, the designated smoker steps up to the plate as first-reserve bricklayer and forward motion is maintained – and behind the pantomime formality of it all the houses get built; the bricks are laid in layers of such precision, I could not hope to emulate it even with giant Lego.

I should say at this point that what they are doing is clearly cold, hard work and I do not envy them at all. Whatever they are getting paid, I doubt it is enough. I do not, in any way, seek to criticize a process I do not understand, but I do find it fascinating. Particularly as, just a few metres away, I have spotted another bricklayer working on a different house. He is completely solo. He does the brick work, the carrying, the watching and the smoking alone. He is seldom visited by the wandering ones. He is wearing a yellow hi-viz jacket.

My mind is blown.

They shut the gates at sunset, after that you can’t get out
You can see the bigger picture, find out what it’s all about… Enjoy the Ride – Judie Tzuke (Tzuke/Godfrey/Godfrey)

Purple Haze

My youngest granddaughter, who was carrying out the latest of my regular health checks, pushed something yellow and pointed into the side of my head and said, “Grandad, you have rainbows in your ears.” Now, I have no idea how she was able to see them through what appeared to be a plastic thermometer, but I am very happy to know that they are there. I am hoping that ideally, should she keep looking, she might also find the unicorn in my soul. I find it so depressing to think of the brain – the centre of artistic creation, dreams and fantasy – as ‘grey matter’ when we all want it to sparkle like an iridescent kaleidoscope. None of us want to be beige between the ears – except, of course, when attending stag/hen parties when the ability to blend in with the wallpaper is highly prized.

The problem with rainbows is in getting them to do what you want them to do, when you want them to do it. Intransigent little bugger your Johnny Rainbow: seldom prepared to be bland when required, seldom prepared to go from A to B without touching the sky somewhere along the way. We live our lives in colour: red for rage, yellow for sunshine, blue for sadness, eau-de-nil for public toilets and hospital corridors… Black is the colour of depression. (Although my mother was happy to argue unrelentingly that black is not a colour, nor, she would assert, is white: they are merely pigments with which to darken or lighten. In my mother’s world, nothing – except, of course, opinion – was ever black or white.) Pink for a girl, blue for a boy and yellow for the parents who choose not to know in advance. (Wouldn’t it be great if these parents could still have the big ‘gender reveal’: Picture the midwife, “Come on darling, you’re doing great, just one last push. Yes, yes, I can see the top of the balloon right now, it’s…” “POP!” “…it’s a boy. Right, just give me a couple of minutes to mop up the streamers and then you can get on with pushing that entire human being – with what might well feel like a fully grown head – out of there…” With the current demand for non-gendered pronouns, I can’t help but feel that some of the magic will be lost: “Congratulations Mr & Mrs Smith, it’s a they…”

I have pondered the nature of colour before on this platform. We all know, for instance, that grass is green, but do we all see the same colour? Is my green your green, or is it red, even if we both call it green? No matter what colour you see, if you are told from birth that it is blue, then that is what it is. I am old enough to remember TV before colour broadcasts and I recall being told that white never appeared quite white enough in monochrome, so the actors had to wear yellow, which appeared much whiter. It would seem that even in grayscale colour can lie. My grandchildren believe that, way back when I was like them, the world actually was black and white. They’ve seen the photographs to prove it.

I really don’t remember the world of my childhood being monochrome – even though some of it was a little drab – for a child with rainbows in his ears, it held the promise of so much colour… and, of course, “For those of you watching in black and white, the yellow ball is the one behind the brown…*”

Purple Haze all in my brain
Lately things they don’t seem the same.
Acting funny, but I don’t know why.
Excuse me while I kiss the sky. Purple Haze – Jimi Hendrix (Who famously saw music as colours.)

*Famous BBC snooker commentary from a period when most viewers were still watching the sport in black and white.

I Can See For Miles

For the second occasion in a ridiculously short period of time I have lost a contact lens – last seen somewhere on my eyeball. Where it has gone, I have absolutely no idea. It could still be in there somewhere. It’s hard to tell: my eye is painful, red and swollen, but I have been poking around in it for half an hour now, trying to locate the errant lens. I can’t see it in there and neither can my wife, but – exactly as on the last occasion – I can’t see it anywhere else either, and I certainly cannot pinpoint the time at which it ceased to be where it was meant to be. It’s unlikely – although not impossible: I have seen those photographs – that both missing lenses are still in there somewhere, but after forty years of lens wearing, I am struggling also to understand how they could have become so randomly disassociated from my eye in order that they could disappear so completely. I have looked everywhere. I can find no tiny, wizened cups of plastic anywhere – not entirely surprising as I am currently decidedly monocular and feel as though I might have a pudding bowl nestling in my one functioning orb.

Of course, if I find one of my missing lenses, all it will do is to deepen the mystery of the disappearance of the other. If I can find one, why can’t I find the other? Well, because it must still be inside my eye, right? If it’s there, how long will it stay? Will it decompose or will it persist? Will it remain benign, or will it require surgical intervention? Like every other contact lens wearer I have heard the stories: “They just popped my eyeball out onto my cheek and had a bit of a rummage around in the socket”. I am curious to know what I would be able to see at that point – but not that curious.

I am of an age that remembers Steve Austin – the “Six Million Dollar Man” (about $45 million in today’s money I think) – and his bionic eye. As alluring as the prospect of such enhanced vision might be, I would be very happy to merely maintain my current standard (sub-standard) sight without the aid of medical intervention. I’ll manage. There are many things that – even when my eye is not like a bulldog’s bollock – I can no longer do. I cannot get even close to telling you who has just scored the goal at the far end of the football pitch; I cannot come anywhere near to being able to read the exemption clauses at the bottom of an insurance policy; I cannot read messages on my phone unless somebody else is holding it. Eyesight fades. I know that mine is good enough for driving because I have it checked every year, but there is no doubt that registration plates are now being made much smaller and road signs placed further away.

Actually, it has just occurred to me that it is, in fact, just possible that I do have both missing lenses still lurking inside my eye somewhere. What would happen if they both made their way back onto my pupil at the same time? Would I have super-vision? If I’m honest, I have no idea how far I should be able to see. How far is 20/20? Road signs are confusing enough without being able to see them twenty junctions ahead. I spend half of my life on my laptop: for the most part I don’t need to see any further than the end of my arms. I’d quite like to be able to see the length of a snooker table at times, at others the distance to the chocolate would do. Today, I’d settle for seeing as far as a contact lens…

I know you’ve deceived me, now here’s a surprise
I know that you have ’cause there’s magic in my eyes. I Can See For Miles – The Who (Townsend)

Tom Sawyer

Grammar school English Literature classes helped to open my eyes and lift my perspective above The Beano. I was made to read Tom Sawyer but remember frighteningly little of it other than I subsequently chose to read The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn in my own time. I keep promising myself that I will read both again, but I never do. I read Fahrenheit 451 at a similar time – a book to which I have returned pretty much annually ever since, and which led me almost imperceptibly onto Nineteen Eighty Four and the love of all things Orwell (although you would never know it through my profligate use of language). I was also introduced to Shakespeare in the form of Julius Caesar which I loved and, later, Twelfth Night. I semi-enjoyed Oliver Twist (largely, I recall, because it featured a character called Master Bates, which royally amused twelve-year old me) but I loathed Hardy’s Far from the Madding Crowd and stalled completely with The Prologue to Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales: for a boy with a vivid imagination, but a severely restricted attention span, it was like reading the instructions to a flat-pack wardrobe… in Serbo-Croat. I never got to grips with The Lord of the Rings or War and Peace as many of my contemporaries urged me to do. They looked very long. I read Eric Malpass and refused steadfastly to read the dog-eared copy of Mein Kampf that was doing the trendy rounds. Nor did I fully get to grips with Lady Chatterley’s Lover as, there being only one copy in circulation, I could not read quickly enough for those scheduled to follow me (also, if I’m honest, because I found it exceedingly boring). Instead I read my grandma’s Weekend and Titbits, Amazing Tales and Astounding Stories, Punch from the school library and my beloved Mad Magazine from my pocket money: I read everything I could lay my hands on whilst abjectly failing my English Literature GCSE (although passing English Language which – to my recollection – consisted of writing the kind of gubbins with which I later became mildly successful).

By and large, I did not return to ‘serious’ novel reading for many years. I stuck to Spike Milligan, Alan Coren, Woody Allen, Douglas Adams, Tom Sharpe and the hundreds of other humorous writers that used to exist before – as publishers never tire of telling me – people stopped reading comedy, only slowly reintroducing myself to adult literature at a much later age. (No, not that kind of adult literature, thank you very much. I managed to leave picture books behind me in Nursery School and Reader’s Wives shortly after I got my first pair of glasses.) Even then I seldom strayed beyond Graham Greene, Colin Dexter, Conan Doyle and Stella Gibbons. I attempted Ulysses annually for about thirty years without ever making it beyond page 60 – at least not without losing consciousness. I still return to Orwell and Bradbury regularly, but in almost every other respect my reading age refuses to nudge up above juvenile – except that I have become very familiar with bills and T&C’s – and I return to books like Diary of a Nobody and Three Men in a Boat with a joy that is undiminished by familiarity.

There was a time, not a million years ago, when it all mattered. I would have liked to have pushed my brain further than perhaps Ian Moore and Richard Osman, to have enjoyed a novel that proved to be challenging above entertaining, to have overcome hardship in reaching the end, but if I’m honest, if I didn’t enjoy them, I didn’t read them. Now? Well, if age robs you of anything, it is the propensity to become a complete tosspot. I have no desire to be anything that I am not (although I wouldn’t say no to being somewhat better formed). There are some – maybe many – who would say that I have already achieved full tosspot…ness without the need to broaden my literary outlook and, although I heartily disagree with their verdict, I can’t really argue with it. I try to be a better man. I would always choose better over brighter, as I would choose fitter over thinner, simply because they are achievable.

Besides, I think that I probably know enough words already and I somehow doubt that seeing how somebody else has used them will make me better in any way. I want to write, I don’t want to copy. I wouldn’t become a better painter if you gave me more paint. Just ask Tom Sawyer…

No, his mind is not for rent
To any God or government
Always hopeful, yet discontent
He knows changes aren’t permanent –
But change is… Tom Sawyer – Rush

Echoes

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

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

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

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

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

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

*Hope is the thing with feathers… Emily Dickinson

Changes

My wife, although younger, will retire before me. It makes sense for her to settle into her new routine before I have to settle into it too. I have plans, of course, for my own retirement: I want to write more; I want to paint something that is not a wall; I want to get out and about to see the world around me. I think that my wife would like to see me hone my DIY skills, whilst I would like to see me honing my paying somebody else to do it skills.

However old you are, forever feels like a very long time indeed and looking forward into an uncertain future is daunting. Until now work has always provided some structure to life:

Work days – get up, go to work, come home, go to bed
Days off – get up, do all the jobs I couldn’t do before because I was at work, go to bed

but what lies ahead is potentially routine-less and uncertain. Some things will not change – chores have to be done; DIY has to be attempted; phone calls have to be made to people who can put it all right again – but although, in the main, I have been working only two days a week of late, I worry how I will fill those soon-to-be vacant hours. I really don’t want it to be just two more days to fill with what I have always done. I need some new doors to open (preferably ones that I haven’t hung myself). I’m looking forward to doing more of the things that I like, but the question is, will I get away with doing less of the things I don’t?

In fact, what I am doing today is the thing that I love most (writing) squeezed into the gaps between the chores – being ‘of an age’ I can’t possibly charge through the entire day without taking regular breaks for tea and cake – so if I’m a little disjointed, I apologise. (N.B. If you had actually noticed that I am disjointed, I can only suggest that you get out more.) Taking a short break (sometimes of several days) in the midst of a designated task, begins to feel completely normal (as does involuntary groaning, unconscious moaning and – for any male with grandchildren – an unexplained infatuation with Ms. Appleberry from Cocomelon). This is how life changes.

For most of us the changes are slow and creeping, like a glacier moving downhill with barely perceptible but none-the-less inexorable progress: like the inevitable collapse of morals amongst those who, however idealistic at journey’s dawn, search for power and – in the worst instances – find it. There can be no greater irony than that the quest for absolute power is almost always pursued in the name of democracy: that so much hate is invoked in the name of God. Picture a zombie hoard engaged in a merciless rampage in the name of koalas: wars fought in the name of peace.

What we all strive to achieve is change for the better. Whatever the individual specifics, we all just want to be somehow better. To be more open, more friendly, more generous, more smiley, thinner, fitter, healthier… more Ms. Appleberry. I want to be all of those things. Life is all about change. As we get older, the changes become less voluntary and more inevitable. Whatever a person’s beliefs, no-one wants to face the grave with a bad conscience. The very worst of men – and let’s be honest, most of history’s really bad apples have been male – strive to repent before they take their last breath: “What’s that, Mr Hitler? You’re sorry? Oh, that’s alright then, all forgiven…” Ultimately, despite the many challenges I face in my convictions, I still believe in the goodness of the human spirit. The proof has to be in the fact that, despite living in a world that the media tells us is almost exclusively bad, the human race remains, in most part, a single, peace-seeking entity. Put most people – whatever their politics or creed – together in a room with a common goal and individual gifts and they will work together for the ultimate good. (Providing, of course, that there are no board games available.)

If I could have played a part, in however small a way, in making this a somehow better world, I would die a happy man (although, let’s be honest, I would always prefer the staying alive a happy man option). The world is currently a million miles away from being anywhere close to that, but at least it gives me something to do in my retirement…

N.B. This piece was written using all four colours of the very fine pen in the photograph – a generous gift from Mr & Mrs Underfelt. I hope for nothing but the best of days for you both.

…So the days float through my eyes
But the days still seem the same
And these children that you spit on
As they try to change their worlds
Are immune to your consultations
They’re quite aware of what they’re going through… Changes – David Bowie