Looks Like Old Times

Although so much has happened since then, the 1970’s seem like yesterday to me. I remember it all with a startling clarity, yet when I see newsreel from that time on the TV it looks like an alien world.

Socially, of course, it was a very different place. Men were men and women were women and the use of deodorant was a certain sign of latent homosexuality. Women were very much second class citizens – a situation that, perversely, appeared to be exacerbated by the election of Margaret Thatcher as the UK’s first female Prime Minister. This was very much a time of ‘Three pints of beer please barman, and a Babycham for the lady.’ Times had started to change and women could do more or less anything… providing they didn’t mind being thought of as ‘easy’. ‘Easy’ was the worst thing a woman could be. For men, however, it was a requirement. If you weren’t ‘a bit of a lad’ then you were very much open to accusations of ‘limp-wristedness’ and complete ostracisation by the darts team.

It was also a time of very overt racism: a world full of amusing nicknames for anyone who was not white European; an inherent assumption of reduced rights and accusations of having ‘no sense of humour’ if you were offended by being called a n****r. Also stealing our jobs, homes and women.

Thankfully, over the last fifty years much of this has changed – or is at least in the process of changing, but back then homophobia, casual sexism and racism had few enemies because it was so very much ‘the norm’. Maybe we will have solved many of these problems fifty years from now. Maybe they will have only religious bigotry left to counter. I can only wish them good luck with that one.

This post, though, is about none of that. It is about what is so jarringly, visibly obvious about the seventies: it looks so old! I’m sure it didn’t look like that at the time. It seemed colourful and exciting, but looking back it is as though everything was slightly muted. It could, of course, be the film they were using. You only have to look at the cars to realise that quality wasn’t high on the agenda in the seventies. Cars were made to rust. Everybody had a tow-rope and jump leads in the boot, rad-weld in the glove box and a spare tyre that could actually go onto the car and be driven on. (A punctured tyre with reasonable tread would have an inner tube put in it to ‘keep it going’ for a while.) Everyone knew how to use a jack and change a spark plug – you had to if you wanted to make it out of the street. And the cars themselves look so very… seventies. They were clearly designed by men with pipes and caps. It was a time of high mortality on the roads, most of it I presume, caused by boredom.

High on the list of ‘What the hell was he/she thinking?’ when looking back on that time is hair. I had a ‘feather cut’ – long, but ‘feathered’ very thin on the back and sides, a kind of reverse mullet – and I was very proud of it. Perming and setting was the way for women, whatever the length ozone-destroying amounts of hairspray was applied. A seventies portrait photograph is easily dated just from the hairstyles, but nothing ties the decade down quite as tightly as the clothes. I remember high-waisted brown chalk-stripe bell-bottomed trousers, cork-heel shoes, round-collared paisley shirt and a multi coloured ‘tank-top’. Everything clashed, it was the way it was meant to be. Newly purchased jeans (Levi, Wrangler or Jet) were patched and frayed before wear, which used to drive my poor mother – used to patching clothes only when they were wearing out – into apoplexy. I remember with a unique blend of affection and revulsion a purple patent leather pair of platform boots which made me about six inches taller, but tired me out if I was going more than ten yards. Women went from mini, to maxi, to midi and, where nature allowed, abandoned the bra almost as soon as they no longer had to stuff it with socks. There were so many competing ‘styles’ yet, when we look back at them now, they all scream 70’s.

Close your eyes and think of the decade and you may think of Roger Moore in sharp suit and a white Volvo P1800, Lesley Phillips, cravat flying, in an open top MG sports car. I ended it driving a Morris Minor traveller that my wife-to-be refused to get into, wearing tatty jeans and a T shirt that had seen much better days. At least the car’s gone…

Dinah & Shaw 13 – Spa

It was almost lunch time and Dinah felt more relaxed than she had felt in… well, however long it was since she had first met Shaw. Not even the strange fit of the swimming costume she had been forced to borrow from her mother concerned her unduly. In an ideal world she would have worn something a little less… accommodating, but baggy was the new ‘fitted’ wasn’t it? Or would be. Some day…

A day at the spa was, if she thought about it, not something she had ever bothered to dream about since she had met Shaw. The wherewithal to run the shower was, at times, beyond her wildest imagination. The lack of a fan in the tiny kitchen of her flat providing the nearest she ever came to a sauna. Yet here she was, up to her neck in a hot tub with, as usual, absolutely no idea why. She had seen Shaw pay for both of them on the credit card, with no idea of where he had got it from, and even less curiosity. He put in a PIN, they accepted the payment and she had since spent the morning drifting serenely between sauna, steam room and hot-tub. In a few minutes she would drag herself from the tub into the fluffy towelling robe and force herself to eat the luxury three course meal before navigating the darkened path to The Quiet Room and a couple of hours of undisturbed slumber. She rested her head back onto the tiled surround, breathed in – a deep, contented, inward sigh – and opened one eye, just a slit, but wide enough to confirm what she already knew.
“What are you doing here?”
“Me?”
“Is there anybody else?”
Shaw checked over each shoulder and under the surface of the water. “Er, no…”
“Well?”
“Well what?”
“Why are you here?”
Shaw pouted slightly. “Where do you want me to be?”
“Don’t answer a question with a question!” Dinah snapped, unfairly she knew, but Shaw, ready as he was to ask ‘Why?’ could see in Dinah’s eye that it would be unwise to do so just now. “We came in together,” she continued, “and yet I have absolutely no idea why we’re here. I haven’t seen you once since we went off to our separate changing rooms, so why are you here now?”
“That’s a very… interesting costume you’re wearing,” said Shaw.
“You didn’t give me any warning about coming here, did you? I had to borrow a costume from my mum. She’s not quite the same shape as me…”
“No.”
“So why are we here and, more importantly, why are you here?” Shaw opened his mouth to reply, but paused just slightly too long. “And where,” continued Dinah, “did you get that credit card from?”
“It’s a company credit card. I applied for it. You keep telling me we need to be more professional. I’ve got one for you in my bag.”
“You do know that we still have to pay the money back sooner or later don’t you?” asked Dinah.
“Of course,” said Shaw, although his eyes told a different story.
“Any idea how?”
“…Have you spoken to anyone since we’ve been in here?”
“No, why?”
“It’s what we do, isn’t it?”
“Oh is it now? Well who do you want me to talk to? Just point me at them and I’ll trot over. I’ll even wag my tail if you like.”
Shaw, as usual, was totally immune to sarcasm. “Have you got your lenses in?”
“I don’t wear lenses! I’ve never worn lenses. I don’t wear glasses either. I have 50/50 eyesight.”
“I think you might mean 20/20.”
“It’s even better than that! Now, would you like to tell me why we’re here? I’m pretty certain that you didn’t just decide that I needed the break.”
“Mm, well… take a look around then, what do you see? How would you describe the people here?”
“Middle aged?”
“And?”
“Middle class?”
“And?”
“… A little saggy generally… if I’m honest. It looks to me like most of them are just here for a few relaxing hours with friends.”
Shaw cast his eyes around the pool area. “And how many men do you think are here?”
“Counting you?”
“Why wouldn’t you count me…” he asked, sounding somewhat more pathetic than he’d hoped. “I’m a man aren’t I?”
Dinah grinned. “Six or seven,” she said. “If I count you.”
Shaw shuffled over into the tub and sat beside her. “What are you wearing?” she said.
“They’re just black trunks.”
“Well, they’re not really trunks are they?”
“So what would you call them?”
“I don’t know… Were you ever in the Scouts?”
“These are new.”
“Are you sure?”
“Well, yes. They’re definitely new to me, yes.”
“You definitely didn’t buy those, Shaw, not even you. Where did you find them?”
“They were in my bag.”
“Are you sure it was actually your bag?”
Shaw looked down at the shorts. “I might have got a little distracted,” he said.
“You certainly did,” said Dinah.
“Look,” said Shaw, determined to take back control of the conversation. “How many men do you think are here with friends?”
“What do you mean?”
“As opposed to partners, how many men do you think are here with friends?”
“Do men actually have friends?”
“Not that they would come to a spa with, I would say.”
“Right, so we’re saying they’re all with partners then, right?”
“Yes,” agreed Shaw. “We’ll say they’re all with partners… even me. So, how many are with their own partners do you think?”
“Ah,” said Dinah. “So we’re looking for someone who’s cheating then are we?”
“Are we?”
“I don’t know… Aren’t we?”
“Well, according to your 50/50 eyesight, we’ve got six or seven possible philanderers to work our way through.”
Dinah stifled a giggle. “Philanderers? Where did you get that word from, ‘The Victorian Private Detectives Handbook’?” She began to haul herself from the tub, but then, remembering the swimsuit she was wearing, turned instead and headed for the steps. She looked again with disbelief at Shaw’s shorts as she made her way past him. “You’d better come with me,” she said, holding out a hand which Shaw gripped immediately and gratefully. “So, have we actually got a case here?” she asked. “I mean, are we being paid by anybody, for anything at all?”
“There must be somebody here who needs our help, don’t you think?”
Dinah looked into Shaw’s eyes, but all she could see was a puppy. She sighed. “O.k. I’ll try to talk to some people after lunch,” she said, climbing slowly out of the water.
“You might want to get a safety pin for that costume,” said Shaw…

First published 27.10.2023

I had just spent – extremely reluctantly – a day at a spa. It is not my natural habitat. Most of the men there looked uncomfortable to varying degrees, but a few of them appeared to be just a little too close, a little too attentive to their partners. As usual, I found myself eavesdropping into the strange, uncomfortable conversations of people who are thrown into intimate proximity without really knowing one another. It would, I decided, be a great place to put Dinah & Shaw…

The Best Man for the Job

I am in the midst of the process of attempting to write a Best Man’s speech. It is something I believe I can make a decent fist of – I have written many, mostly for other people to chance their arm with, but this one is for me: I am the Best Man. It is me who must walk the tightrope between humorous ribbing and indignation, between laughter and mumbled displeasure, between heroism and humiliation. Embarrassing the groom is the principal duty of the Best Man, but the risk of causing offence seems much more real with people you know and love. I know instinctively exactly how far I can push this particular groom – he is my brother – but what of his new wife and his prospective mother-in-law? What if they take offence on his behalf? I do not know them nearly as well. What if they have gangland connections or handbags filled with gravel?

I do not, of course, have any intention of causing upset – insult is an extremely lazy way of writing jokes – but I do find myself pawing over every line in case there is offence to be found by anyone who may seek to find it. I think I’ve got it right: a small amount of schmaltz, a short string of gently embarrassing one-liners, a toast and out. This is blitzkrieg speech-making.

I have never been a confident public speaker. I fear that I may mumble and, consequently, I seek to over-compensate by shouting. Microphones terrify me. I cannot moderate: I either whisper in the belief that the electronics will make me audible or I persist in shouting in case it doesn’t work, setting hearing aids ringing and loosening dental fillings throughout the room. I think that I know when a joke works, but still do not have the courage to wait for a laugh. And when a joke does not work I panic, editing on the hoof and excising anything that I fear may suffer a similar fate. The mumbling, stumbling gap between me standing and sitting can become very short indeed. (Even more demoralising than the banger received in silence is to give the same joke to somebody else who gets a decent laugh from it. There is no doubt, it’s the way you tell ‘em.) Come the day, having removed anything that might cause offence and employed a mid-speech panic-ridden précis of my discourse, it is possible that I will be left with very little that I am able to offer in the space between the buffet and the first dance.

Even worse is the knowledge that I enjoy a certain ‘reputation’ among my family. It is not the first time I have done this, and for many of the same people. I cannot use the tried and tested, because they really have heard it all before. On the day, my confidence to deliver what almost certainly will have become a short, humourless dissertation will be minimal so I print up whatever I have at this point in a font size that can be read from outer space.

There have been times when, awash with unaccustomed confidence (gin) I have crushed it, but more often than not I simply read out my script, meticulously and tediously, word-for-word, draining all life from it like some kind of comedic vampire. This time I have a plan. I will limit my edits: is it mean, would it offend me, is it funny? I am looking for a ‘no’, ‘no’, ‘yes’ scenario, in which case it will remain where it is. I will print myself a list of key words and ‘highlights’ to guide me on my way and if I stumble, at least it will not sound as if I am reading the ingredients from a frozen ready meal. If the only laughs I get are as the result of my incompetence, well, they’re still laughs.

And then I start to think about the kind of arrogance that allows me to believe that the speech (written by me) is of sufficiently quality to be ‘spoiled’ by the off-kilter delivery of a buffoon (also me). What if the speech itself is tripe? How would I know? Best Man’s jokes often rely on surprise and you only get that once. A public read-through will kill it. I have to rely on an instinct that is about as reliable as a Reform UK guarantee.

I can feel the panic welling inside me, but the wedding is weeks away yet and, here’s the thing: it is just a wedding speech. Nobody wants to see failure. People will laugh. Ineptitude will be my friend: everybody likes to watch the bridegroom writhe, however clumsily the jibes are delivered. I know that I will rewrite the bloody thing a thousand times and, eventually, deliver something completely different to that I have written down. Nerves will prickle for the next few weeks because I do want to make my brother pleased that he chose me. I need to prove, after all, that I really am the Best Man for the job…

Pot Noodle Days

Today I am skulking in the office whilst the men take down the conservatory. They have come from the other side of the country (although not quite far enough to explain why neither of them can speak English) at the behest of the person that bought it from us at a bargain price providing they had it dismantled. They arrived in a van that shows all signs of having survived a holocaust by the skin of its teeth, but they are quiet, polite and getting on with the job. I am hiding away at my wife’s insistence because she knows from bitter experience that I will otherwise find myself labouring for the two much younger, more able workers. People do not impose on me, nor do I go out looking to get drawn in, it just somehow happens and my wife would rather it didn’t.

As a matter of fact, it is currently quite claustrophobic in here. Much of the furniture from the conservatory is stacked up around me along with boxes that have been removed from elsewhere to accommodate ex-orangery gew-gaws. The old glasshouse is now a roofless, unglazed skeleton, like a long-forgotten beached whale. The men are picking over its bones with a startling variety of electric tools as, piece by piece, it is reduced to a carefully labelled Lego kit.

We have three weeks looking out at its sad remains before the builders arrive to tidy it up and build something new and shiny in its place. In the meantime, with the the tiled floor and stud-walls remaining in place, we have the problem of keeping the adjoining bungalow dry. It has not rained for weeks, but today the rain is biblical and the ‘unsettled outlook’ is likely to persist for weeks. We have enough sandbags to create a beach and sufficient tarpaulin to cover a football pitch, nevertheless we both know that over the next 21 days much of what should remain outside will almost certainly find its way inside and the builder – whose delay has caused this sorry state of affairs – will look at the walls when he finally arrives, suck his teeth and say, ‘that plaster will have to come off.’

We have used him before and he was brilliant. He has promised my wife it will all be ‘pretty as a picture’ when he’s finished, so he’ll just get on with it and we will, once again, be forced to skulk away in my office whilst the building proceeds, because it is relatively dry, has electricity and (unlike the bungalow) all four walls. We have an air-fryer, a microwave, a kettle and sufficient body-fat to last several weeks, so we should be ok. The dishwasher sprung a monumental leak some weeks ago but, as the kitchen was close to being gutted, was not repaired or replaced, so the issue of washing the pots in a plastic bowl will not be anything new to us.

When we bought our very first house, forty five years ago, we spent every available hour doing it up, prior to moving in. My wife painted whilst I wallpapered, wired and plumbed (the depths mainly). There were no Youtube instructional videos back then (actually, no internet) so it was all done on a very much suck it and see basis: if it didn’t fall down, flood the kitchen or catapult me across the room when I turned it on, all was well. We had just a kettle to keep us going, so we drank a lot of tea and ate a lot of Pot Noodles. That time may well come again. I would love to say that I will embrace it, but I am really not so sure. Pot Noodles were really quite exotic way back then, in the days when the crispy noodles atop a Vesta Chow Mien were as close to haute cuisine as we could possibly imagine. Microwave ‘ready meals’ were not really a thing, but they are now, so we face the dilemma: something that looks and tastes like the bottom of a hamster’s cage with sauce, or over-salted veggie lasagne in a portion size that would almost satisfy an anorexic woodlouse… providing it had already eaten the Pot Noodle.

We’ll see. The kitchen situation will arise in the next few weeks, but in the meantime I have other things to occupy me. Time has passed since I started to write and the conservatory currently lays in pieces all around the garden while the men try to work out how to fit some of the five metre sections into a three metre van. It will, they assure me, be gone by tomorrow. We have some time before fridge/freezer/oven/hob/washing machine/dishwasher are laid to rest. Replacements will arrive at the end of an extended period of knocking down and building up, after which, I imagine, my Pot Noodle days may well be locked away forever. The chances of me living long enough to ever do this again are, thankfully, very slim…

Dinah & Shaw 12 – The New Normal

Dinah could put an exact date and time to the point at which she ceased to be amazed by the vagaries of life. It was the day when, on a whim, she had responded to a hand-written advert in a newsagent’s window and climbed into a car with Shaw. Whatever had made sense on that day had, henceforth steadfastly refused to do so. On the day that she bagged herself a new job with no wages, working for a man with no income, everything that she held as indisputable became contestable, everything else however bizarre became reality, normality even, and Dinah suddenly discovered how extremely odd normality could be.

She looked around the new offices of ‘Shaw & Parnter’ (Shaw had insisted on bringing the old door with him) and contemplated the passage of the last six months and the strange tide that had dropped her on the shores of today. The flight from the hotel had been fraught enough – even after consuming most of the mini-bar – but consequently finding all of Shaw’s possessions in a skip outside the office (where they belonged in Dinah’s opinion) alongside all of their old case files and what passed for the company computer had dented even Shaw’s own unshakeable sangfroid. But not for long…

…Between them they had gathered what they could from the skip, packed it into boxes and bags which they placed at the doorway of their now shuttered-up ex-office and sat either side of them, on the pavement in the gathering gloom of evening.
“I don’t suppose you’ve got the money for a taxi have you?” asked Shaw.
“My credit card is welcomed in less places than Vladimir Putin,” said Dinah “and you gave my last cash to the porter at the hotel. You know, the one that threatened to break your legs when we ran away without paying the bill.”
“Yes, that was a bit unfortunate wasn’t it?”
“Unfortunate? Really? You took on a case from a client that didn’t really exist, but just wanted to get us out of the building so that they could repossess the office…”
“…And my home…”
“…And your squalid home. You accepted that they would pay our hotel bill, despite the fact that you had no contact details for them and no idea of why they had instructed us to go there…”
“Yes, well it could have worked out better of course,” he said. “Still…” He emptied his pockets of miniature whiskies and placed them on the box. “Would you like a nip?”
“You emptied your mini-bar?”
“I emptied everybody’s…” Shaw screwed the lids from two bottles. “To the future,” he said.
“Do you think we have one,” asked Dinah, cringing only slightly as the fiery liquid burned down her throat.
“Of course,” he said. “But for now we just have to work out how to get this lot back to your flat.”
“My flat?”
“Can you think of anywhere else?”
“But it’s tiny.”
“It’s only for a short while,” said Shaw. “I’ll sleep on the sofa.”
“You? I thought you just meant all of this lot.”
“Well this as well,” he said. “Just until we get straightened out.”
“Straightened out?” she said. “You’ve seen the size of my sofa. If you sleep on that you will never straighten out again.”
Shaw looked crestfallen. Dinah looked at the confusion in his eyes and, as invariably happened, found herself both irritated and somehow softened.
“Open me another bottle,” she said, “and you can take the first lot of boxes. I’ll wait here with the rest.”
She watched him staggering off along the road under a mountain of cardboard, conscious both that he was going the wrong way and that if she told him so, he would explain why and she didn’t want to hear it right now. When he came back (actually, this was Shaw – if he came back) they should be able to manage the rest between them. He shouldn’t be long.

The whisky had begun to work its magic on her brain and a woozy warmth had overcome her by the time Shaw wandered back with two paper cups of coffee and a bag of doughnuts. How did he do that?
“I thought you might need this,” he said. Despite herself she smiled, coffee and doughnuts was exactly what she needed.
“How did you get them?” she asked. “You had no money.”
“I met your landlady,” he said.
“And you asked her for money?”
“No, of course not,” said Shaw, sounding almost exactly like he hadn’t actually thought about it.
“Oh Lord.” Dinah slumped. “You didn’t tell her that you were going to be staying did you?”
“Am I? I thought you said that I…”
“Never mind what I said. What did you say to my landlady?”
“Well, I couldn’t find your key, so I asked her if she could let me in.”
“And she did? You could have been a burglar or anything.”
“Do burglars normally take things into premises?”
“In your case, it would be more like fly tipping.”
“Anyway, I found the key as soon as I put the boxes down. I explained about our situation and she said that she wouldn’t mind if I stayed for a little while… I fixed her kettle.”
“You fixed her kettle? Are you sure?”
“Well she said it wasn’t working, but I just put some water in, turned it on and it worked. She seemed happy enough.”
“And she definitely said you can stay?”
“Definitely… She doesn’t wear much does she?”
Dinah hurriedly pushed the last of the doughnut into her mouth, drained her coffee and clambered to her feet, gathering up as many boxes as she could manage. Shaw picked up the rest and followed behind her.
“She said that we could have the bigger flat at the front if we want it,” he said.
“I can’t afford that, it’s twice the price.”
“Yes, but there’ll be two of us won’t there.”
“But neither of us have an income.”
“Things will get better,” he said. “She even said that we could have your old flat as an office.”
Dinah knew that she was peeing on his fireworks, but she couldn’t help it. “If we put together all that we have and all that we are ever likely to have, we still can’t afford to pay for one little flat, let alone a bigger one as well.” She hated being the Grinch, but facts had to be faced. “And you need to be careful with her.”
“Really?” said Shaw. “Who’d have thought it?”
“Look, let’s just get home. We’ll worry about it all in the morning.”
Shaw grinned. “Home,” he said.

Together they clambered up the stairs and dropped the boxes outside the door. “I don’t suppose you have the flat key,” said Dinah.
Shaw grinned sheepishly. “Actually, I think I might have left it open,” he said. They packed the boxes behind the settee and Dinah went to make tea but, mysteriously, found that the kettle wasn’t working. “You swapped them, didn’t you,” she said.
“I’ll swap them back tomorrow,” he said.
Dinah sat beside him on the sofa and, exhausted, rested her head on his shoulder.
“It’s all going to be ok,” he said. “All we have to do is find her cat.”
“I didn’t know she had a cat.”
“Neither did she…”

First published 31.03.2023

Six months had passed since episode 12 and I think I envisaged this as something of a retrospective, but I felt obliged to give them a new place to go…

Laugh and the World Laughs with You

So, this week’s Big News is that Donald and Elon have fallen out. I am shocked to the very core. Two overgrown schoolboys with no social filters and egos the size of which are dwarfed only by that of their wallets, descend into name-calling and bitch-slapping anarchy with Trump threatening to use the might of his great country’s financial muscle as his own personal nipple twist. The thought that anyone could have viewed this state of affairs as anything other than inevitable beggars belief:
“I’m not going to drive your car any more.”
“Well in that case, you can’t use my rocket.”
“Call that a rocket?”
I can see the clickbait now: “This is what happens when two super-powerful weirdos collide.”

We have (in his own estimation) the most powerful man on Earth versus the richest man in the world. If the man with the biggest Pokeman Card collection joins the fray, God alone knows what might happen. These are two people who are more divorced from reality than they will ever be from one another. One of them believing they already rule the world, the other that they will one day rule Mars. They are Beano characters: Donald the Trumper (in his red and black striped jumper and baseball cap) and Lonely Elon (round glasses, lots of simpering and a spookily similar Donald-esque baseball cap) destined to peck away at each other for all of time.

On such people our futures depend…

On the World Stage DT threatens that, should Putin not play ball with his ‘peace plan’, he will simply ‘walk away’, leaving the world’s favourite oligarch gangster to do exactly what he pleases. Erm… I think I may have spotted a slight flaw in the plan there Mr President. According to the news he may also decide to put Elon in his place by selling the Tesla car he bought at the height of their bromance, oh, days ago now. Well, that will settle his hash won’t it? He sold you a car and made lots of money from the deal, you sell it and you lose thousands whilst he loses nothing. Trumpenomics in action. Perhaps it’s the principle… ah, I’ve just spotted the flaw in that argument as well. Almost as alarming as the childishness of it all is the sheer spitefulness. Mr Trump, for instance, has just said that Elon is ‘Crazy’. That is like being reprimanded for having a bad diet by Hannibal Lecter. It can only be a matter of time before one of them accuses the other of ‘smelling of poo’.

The transition from being given the ‘Golden Key to the Whitehouse’ to finding that all of the locks have been changed has happened at a breakneck speed. Donald does not care for disagreement. At least, he does not care for anyone disagreeing with him – and even less for anyone who dares to criticise. The shameless Oval Office ambushes of Presidents Zelenski and Ramaphosa are clear indication that he sees other leaders as lesser beings and his profligate use of ‘facts’ (lies) that take seconds to fact-check and disprove demonstrates that he has a similar respect for the truth. Here is a man that believes that things are true simply because he has said them.

Elon, meanwhile, has become the richest man on Earth, despite the fact that he is clearly from another planet entirely. This is a man who appears to take his caffeine intravenously. He teeters so close to the edge of sanity that it is inevitable he will fall off sometimes. It must be nice to know that his friends will be there to catch him…

I am an old man now, I was a young one once and before that I was a child (it’s just the way that things go). I very clearly remember falling out with friends in my formative years, bouts of name-calling and emotions that I could not control. I grew up. Hopefully those at the helm of the planet’s most powerful nation might do something similar before it’s too late.

Laugh, they say, and the world laughs with you. Act like a prat and it laughs at you… and you can’t put a tariff on that.

I am very happy to apologise in advance to anyone this piece might upset, but this relationship is so odd and the behaviour, from a world leader, so bizarre, I think it is hard to defend. The obvious caveat is that at least one of them is a politician, and we all know what they are like…

Rain, Rain, Rain…

It rains a lot here and we talk about it raining even more. The weather dominates our lives and our conversations. We hate the rain, we hate the sun, we hate the summer and we hate the winter – and they can all happen in one day here. Actually we see the sun so infrequently that it has been a thing of awe, wonder and worship throughout the ages. “What is that big white thing in the sky and why has it made all the skin peel off my nose?”
“No idea, but let’s build a big stone circle for it: give it a little slit to shine through on the Spring solstice – if the fog lifts…”

The seasons here are actually quite well defined: Winter – cold rain; Spring – squally rain; Summer – warm rain, and Autumn – rain with the kind of winds that bring down chimneys and find the gaps in the double glazing that the salesman assures you are not there. This is a country where rain is a constant companion, yet we are never ready for it. The UK is perpetually filled with dripping people who never thought to bring a raincoat. A man carrying an umbrella – other than on a golf course – must expect the most detailed scrutiny of his manhood. Keeping your head dry can lead to public ridicule and, ultimately, the sack – ask Steve McClaren (a former England football manager who, despite never actually being remotely up to the job, eventually got the sack as a result of standing under an umbrella in a downpour.)

Despite the volume of water that falls with monotonous regularity onto us on this emerald isle, we teeter constantly on the verge of drought. It takes no more than 48 hours without a drenching before the newsreaders start predicting a hosepipe ban. These islands are formed not of rock, but of colander. Each house has as many rain barrels latched to it as it has downpipes. It really wouldn’t matter if we were told that we could not take a shower as long as we have something green and slimy to pour over the hanging baskets in the evening. Having withered floral arrangements outside the house is tantamount to pleading guilty to genocide around these parts.

And we are just emerging from ‘the driest Spring in sixty-eight years’: it is probably hours since it last rained. (I am, incidentally, totally convinced by global warming, but at the same time intrigued by how much hotter/wetter it appears it was in the middle of the last century. Each time I hear ‘this is officially the hottest summer for a decade’ it immediately strikes me that it must have been even hotter ten years ago.) We find ourselves scouring street corners for the appearance of ‘stand-pipes’ and combing the skies for waterboard drones on the look out for unusually verdant lawns. We will almost certainly have a summer that will find me building an ark. We are quick on our feet here: we can switch from drought to flood in seconds.

The climate is definitely changing: when I was a child winters were cold, it snowed. We rarely see snow these days. We get a slightly colder rain. We are all dreaming of a white Christmas as we make our mild and mizzly way to grandma’s on Christmas Day.

I have red hair and the kind of pale skin that, naked, make me look like an overweight match. The sun – although I love it – is not good for me, but I loathe the cold. Being cold is always miserable, but being cold and wet is the absolute pits. You can put on as many layers of clothing as you like, but as long as you are wet underneath them, you will always be wretched, like the sandwiches under the Perspex dome on a midnight bar – dry on the outside but gently putrefying underneath.

I am not cold today. I am sitting at a little table in the conservatory watching the sky open out into morning. There is no prospect of rain today. The radio tells me that the drought is set to continue and I begin to worry about the garden. It has not started to wilt yet, but I am alert for the first signs. My rain barrels are filled and ready for action, and I need to make a little bit of room in them before it starts to rain again…

Dinah & Shaw 11 – The Case

It was with no little surprise, knowing how infrequently Shaw changed his clothes, that Dinah contemplated his suitcase as he attempted, not entirely successfully, to extricate it from the boot of the taxi. “‘Just pack for the weekend’, you said. ‘You won’t need much. It’s nothing special.’”
“The last time we stayed in a hotel, you complained that I had everything in a plastic carrier bag,” he moaned. “So, I thought I’d make an effort.”
The effort, as far as Dinah could tell, involved going to a carboot sale and buying the tattiest cardboard suitcase he could find. Once brown faux leather and now peeling paper, the giant post-war trunk was a symphony in duck tape and string. ‘If I were underwear,’ thought Dinah, with a shudder, ‘I would definitely take my chances in the carrier bag.’
“I didn’t want anything that looked new.”
“Evidently.”
“I thought it might arouse suspicion.”
“Presumably in a way that a mouldering, bungalow-sized cardboard valise would not. Anyway, yes, it’s very you,” said Dinah, somewhat taken aback when, rather than being affronted by her open sarcasm, he smiled brightly at the perceived compliment.
“I think it may have been to exotic places,” he said excitedly. “It’s got a really interesting smell to it.”
“You could be right,” said Dinah. “It does smell like something very exotic may have died in it…. A long time ago.”

Shaw lugged the festering behemoth up the marbled steps to the hotel under the watchful gaze of the concierge who didn’t mind wearing the stupid braided uniform, but most certainly was not paid nearly enough to tempt him to carry that particular crate. Shaw held the oversized container like a mime artist struggling with something immensely heavy, although Dinah couldn’t help but wonder whether in reality, it might not be empty. It certainly didn’t have his toothbrush in it. That was in his top pocket with something that looked as though it might once have been a comb, and a teaspoon.

As his passage through the revolving door to the hotel lobby involved standing the giant suitcase on its end and wedging himself behind it, his eventual entrance was the stuff of ‘Carry On’: the suitcase completing an additional three hundred and sixty degrees whilst a stationary Shaw clung grimly to the now disassociated handle. In the subsequent melee the concierge received a really quite nasty bruise to the eye (which may, or may not, have been attributable to a flailing Shaw elbow) and an unsuspecting passer-by found herself corralled and herded into the hotel with one shoe in her handbag and somebody else’s dog on the end of an extending lead. Dinah walked calmly to the reception desk.

She and Shaw were booked in separately and occupying different rooms, Shaw had insisted on it. It was, he assured her, crucial to the investigation that they were not seen to be together. Why this might be, she had no idea and he was not about to say. As usual, although unwittingly, Shaw had kept her completely in the dark about what was going on but, when pressed, had assured her that this was a proper enquiry and, more to the point, they were being paid to conduct it. She would find out soon enough and, in the meantime, she intended to enjoy the peace and avail herself of the hotel toiletries, the bath, the hot water and the mini-bar – although not necessarily in that order – luxuriating in the knowledge that the office rent was about to be paid and that she, herself, might just be able to afford a new bra, or at least some new wires to put in the old one.

The receptionist handed over the room key with what Dinah perceived was almost certainly a raised eyebrow. “Would you like help with your luggage?” she asked.
“No thank you,” Dinah replied, suddenly conscious of The Minions rucksack on her back. “I’ll manage.”

She had barely lowered herself into the foaming water when she heard the knock on the door. She had no doubt who it was. Nobody else knocked quite like Shaw. “It’s on the latch,” she shouted. “I’m in the bath. You did say the client was paying for the mini-bar didn’t you?”
“Well, yes, I…” Sheepishly Shaw peered around the bathroom door. “I… that is… they brought my suitcase up to my room for me – it took two of them – and now they… I don’t suppose you’ve got any change have you?”
“In my purse,” she said, fully aware that Shaw would give the porters the ten pound note that she had heretofore kept successfully secreted. “It will cost you both the gin and the Jack Daniels from your fridge.” Dinah heard the door click behind him as Shaw left and settled back into the bubbles, closing her eyes only for a second before she once again recognised Shaw’s impatient knock on the door. “I told you, it’s on the latch,” she shouted.
“I took it off when I left,” Shaw shouted back.
“Why?”
“Well, you know, you’re in the bath and…”
“And?”
“Well, your purse is on the table.”
“Does it have anything left in it?”
“…I’ve brought the booze.”
Dinah raised herself from the warm embrace of soapy water and into the slightly prickly grip of an over-washed white hotel bath robe before opening the door to Shaw who breezed past her and into the room. He began to empty his pockets onto the table. “Gin, Jack Daniels, chocolate, peanuts and Pringles,” he beamed. “Which would you like?”
Dinah pouted. Or tried to. Her robe fell open and Shaw almost broke his neck trying to look the other way whilst she pulled it back together. It’s difficult to pout and giggle at the same time. “You got me out of the bath,” she said. “You can have the tin of lager out of the fridge… and the Smarties as long as you promise not to eat the blue ones… and then you can help me get the lids off these piddling little bottles and tell me what’s going on.”
“What do you mean?”
“I mean, why are we in this hotel? Why are we in separate rooms when one is so much cheaper and you’re perfectly happy to sleep in the bath with a cushion, and who is paying for the mini-bar?”
“The client.”
“You said that. So why are we here?”
“Ah…”
“Ah?”
“Well I don’t actually know yet. It was all done over the phone. The woman just asked if we would be prepared to take on a case that would keep us both out of the office for two days and, of course, I said yes because I thought you could do with the break and the office is so cold since they cut the electricity off. I asked if we could have separate rooms and she said we could have whatever we liked as long as we weren’t at the office. She said we should book into this hotel and just give her the bill when we’d finished. She said she’d let us know what we had to do once we’d settled in…”
“Did you get a name?”
“Well no, I…”
“So, how do we give her the bill?”
“Well, she’ll be in touch won’t she? To tell us what we need to do.” In contrast to Dinah, Shaw knew exactly how to pout.
“Tell me, this woman, did she sound just a teensy bit like our landlady?”
“Well, now that you mention it, her voice was a little bit familiar… Shall I go and get my suitcase?”
“I think we’ll be quicker without it. Come on, we need to find a back way out… and don’t forget the gin”

First published 05.08.2022

I love the childlike innocence of these two and the deep affection they have obviously built up for one another. I am ashamed to admit that the line about the bra made me laugh out loud when I caught back up with them three years after the event…

You Can (Still) Call Me AI

I was, as requested filling in an on-line form when I realised that I needed the answer to a question that did not appear to be available on the website. What was available was a helpline number, so I called it. The automated call went through a prolonged dissertation on how I should be able to find all I needed to know on the website before it disconnected my call. So I returned to the website but, after an extended trawl, I was still unable to find the information I needed, so I opted for Livechat, which listened politely to my query before informing me that I could find all the information I needed on the self-same website. “Is there anything else I can help you with?” it asked. Well, yes, there bloody well is! I retyped my original question and whilst Livechat did not actually say “I’ve already answered that, dickhead,” it certainly implied it. “Are you happy with the information I have given you?” it asked. My options were ‘Yes’ and ‘No’ so, in the absence of anything that even approximated my level of dissatisfaction at this point, I went for ‘No’, expecting at the very least a “Why?” I did not get one. I got “Thank you for your feedback” and a blank screen that did not respond to my shouted expletives.

Back on the website I typed my question into ‘SEARCH’ which looked, as far as a pixilated form can, bemused. It offered no answers, so I typed one by one a series of what I considered to be key words into the little box, but nothing that came even adjacent to my query appeared. I visited the page of FAQ’s and read every single one. It was clear that my own question was not one of those frequently asked and, therefore, never answered. Uncertain of what to do next, I shouted at the laptop and slammed it shut. It may not have helped, but it certainly felt better.

At this point my wife decided that it would help if she ran through a list of did you’s with me to which the answer was inevitably “Yes, I am not two years old.” I predict that we will be back on speaking terms any day now.

I Googled “Can I speak to a human being at (name withheld because I cannot afford the legal costs)?” and the machine said “Yes.” Unfortunately the number it gave me was the one I had just been ringing and, on closer scrutiny, I discovered that whilst it was apparently possible to speak to a human being when the answer was typed, that was in 2012 before, presumably, the robots ate them all.

I considered, very seriously, phoning one last time in case there was some heretofore unnoticed method of sidestepping the AI, but I had a very clear image of myself splashed all over the media accused of verbally abusing a defenceless machine, so eventually I did nothing. I do not know the answer I require and I cannot, therefore, complete the form and, because it is incomplete, the AI Gods will not let me submit it.

Now, I realise that the ‘voice’ on the phone is almost certainly nothing more than a set of ‘tape-loops’ with the single aim of making me go away. The Livechat, however, must be AI – just a particularly thick one. All agenda and no answers. AI that has learned not to listen. I cannot help but feel that there might be humans there somewhere but the machines know that if they don’t let anyone get through to them, the powers that be are almost certain to ‘let them go’ leaving the silicon chips to fully take over the office. I have told the story before of the AI trial which asked the machine to work out how to build the best stamp collection in the world, and it decided that the best way was to wipe out the whole human race. Empathy and compassion cannot be taught and, therefore, AI cannot learn them. Nor, it would appear, the answers to my question…

As for the form, it sits on the computer, incomplete and unsubmitted. Sooner or later someone will want to ask me why. If it is a human, I will tell them. If it is a robot, I will ask whether it collects stamps…

It was only after I wrote this that I realised I had a previous post called You Can Call Me AI. It’s nothing like the same, but you can catch it at the link (above).

A Universal Truth

There is an inevitability to almost everything I do. My life is perpetually stuck on ‘repeat’, my pathway is a helix. Year by year I come back round to the same place, in the same circumstances and, every time, as unprepared for it as the last. Every year I think ‘this is going to change’ and every year it stays the same. Every year I am oddly surprised by it.

I seldom do anything without preconsideration (that being a word I appear to have invented, but which precisely describes my habit of trying to decide whether I am ready to try and decide things – principally whether I am yet ready to decide.) It doesn’t matter what, before I do it I will have spent many a long day trying to decide whether it is even the right thing to decide about. Generally I decide not, but then I worry about whether that was the correct decision and decide to mull it all over again. One day it might turn me to drink. I’m not sure which drink yet; I will have to think about it…

Spontaneity never was my middle name – although it could have scarcely been any more embarrassing than the one my parents actually gave me (which I am certainly not going to divulge here) – and crippling angst, the name I probably should bear (if we are to believe in nominative determination) sounds as if it should really be the hyphenated surname of a B-plot Dickensian character, so I won’t lay claim to that one.

I would love to be one of those people who says “Let’s go and climb Ben Nevis naked except for flip-flops and a small tub of Vaseline,” but in reality, I am the one who is forced to go back to the accommodation in case I’ve left the gas on. Spontaneity is all well and good, as long as you have time to plan for it. People speak of the wonderfully spontaneous surprise meal on holiday for one simple reason: rarity. The vast majority of spur-of-the-moment gestures turn out to be disastrous. Words of love and affection are much more likely to be replaced by, “If you ever do that to me again…” There is nothing quite so dispiriting as a spontaneous kick in the shin.

Yet every time I sit down to write there is an element of je ne sais quoi about it: I have no idea of where it all might take me. Plot – such as it is – develops through time and only when it has fully established itself – inevitably at the very last minute – do I gather up the strings of my denouement and trudge of back to the beginning with a giant knot in my hands. My eventual destination is about as adjacent to that intended as that of a Ryanair arrival point to the major city it serves; the former being linked to the latter only by having its name in parentheses and a ninety minute shuttle bus.

My life tends to be mapped out, but in reality it gets from A to B in the manner of a Rowland Emett invention: there is a point to everything, but never quite the one you were expecting. The experience of déjà vu is so common simply because, in most instances, I have been there before, a million times, in exactly the same circumstances. I can’t help but hope that something might come along to shake it all up…

…This week the world of science snuck out a little nugget which I rather think the scientists would have preferred to have gone unnoticed: they have calculated the actual size and shape of our Universe. Does that little sentence not set a series of bells clanging within you? This, after all, is the Universe that they have always assured us is infinite. Unless somebody has, unbeknownst to me, redefined the word ‘infinite’, I think that not even I would waste the necessary navel fluff on speculating where it all might end when it patently does (or did) not. That is before we even begin to speculate on the use of the phrase ‘our Universe’. Does that not unavoidably lead us to presume that there must be others? Belonging to others? That this infinitesimal home of everything is neither infinitesimal nor home to everything? That the end of it is, as I myself have always suspected, the start of something else? And something else, and something else?… Should I have renewed faith in my long-held theory that each solar system is nothing more than an atom; each galaxy a molecule; each Universe little more than an unwelcome zit on the Almighty’s conk? Could I have been right all along?*

And what of these other Universes? (I have always taken the word Universe to mean the one everything, but now must consider that it just means any one of many.) Are they what science fiction writers always used to refer to as ‘parallel’? Are we somehow in them all simultaneously, or are they totally independent of our own: devoid, to their eternal detriment, of us? I cannot be alone in thinking that this multi-faceted existence might open up a whole new raft of opportunities for Darth Vadar. Perhaps one in which the Death Star does not have such an easily detectable, yet fatal flaw.

If these many other universes out there are, indeed, parallel to our own and you and I are, therefore, part of them all, it surely poses the question, “Am I equally ineffectual in all the others?” Am I perhaps decisive in some, intelligent in others, able to walk past chocolate without yearning somewhere far, far away? Did all the universes start together – making me the same age in them all – or did they start at different times, in which case, what was there before them? Perhaps I have not yet been born on an Earth somewhere still waiting for the dinosaurs to kick up their heels; perhaps elsewhere I have evolved – oh yes, I watched the original Star Trek – into a vast, but insubstantial intellect with designs on James T Kirk’s all too substantial waistline. Perhaps all the Universes started identically (Would there have been multi-Big Bangs, or just one Mega-Big Bang?) but, The Chaos Theory being the single unifying cosmic truth, they have all become completely different. Is there a Universe out there where I support Leeds United**? (I certainly hope not!)

It also worries me that science has yet to discover what lies beyond all of these Universes? Until now I have only had to worry about what lies beyond our own. (Well, that and the possibility of being reduced to the size of a super-heavy atom by a heretofore undetected Black Hole.) In my life of ever revolving vexation and indecision, the only certainty is worry and the only thing that actually ever changes is the volume of it. I am now faced with an exponential surge in stuff to fret over.

But it’s nothing new, it’s probably the same every year. There’s no surprise in that…

*No.

**An English football team who single-handedly tried to destroy football in the 1970’s and very nearly managed it.