The first cut is the deepest…

…or, more usually in my experience, in the wrong place. Measuring repeatedly ought to help, but I seldom get the same measurement twice. It probably doesn’t help that I flit between imperial and metric units dependent upon which is nearest to a whole number. There is an established pattern to my work with wood: first cut is too long and doesn’t fit into the opening, second cut is too short and breaks something precious when it falls through the gap. I’m sure that millimetres were not so important in the past. I take two millimetres off a length that is fractionally too long and the resulting piece of wood is six inches too short. How does that happen? Attempts to nail the end back on are seldom successful and, in my experience, Superglue only ever sticks to what you don’t want it to, so, inevitably, I have to start again and the second attempt rarely offers any improvement as, inevitably, I mistakenly use the original measurements.

I am somewhat of an expert in first time failure overall. Even with tasks at which I should be reasonably proficient, I have an unrivalled leaning towards the disastrous. I am drawn inexorably towards catastrophe like a toddler to dog shit. I am master of the first-attempt cock-up and I have written more discarded first drafts than you can shake a metaphorical stick at: some are binned because they are simply not funny, some because they are too stupid – I am fatally drawn to the infantile – and some simply veer off in a direction from which I just cannot find my way back.

I am one of those idiots who sets off on a long and perilous journey with only the vaguest of ideas of where I am going and none at all of how to get there. I am wearing shorts and flip-flops. I am carrying nothing more than a wilting Mars Bar, a tube of anti-fungal cream and a plastic water bottle containing a severely pissed-off woodlouse. I could weave words like macramé around a brightly coloured plant pot, but it wouldn’t stop the plant dying. When it comes to the intricacies of plot, I am uniquely brown-fingered. If I think of something that amuses me, I use it even if it drives me into an end so dead that even Donald Trump would be unable to put a hat on it and call it Foreign Policy. The only way I can ever make the introductory paragraph have any relevance to what follows is to write it at the end.

Or maybe that’s what everybody does?

We are all victims of fate. We start out with infinite possibilities which slowly get thinned out through mischance until we plough headlong into the, what by then appears, inevitable conclusion.

But nothing – except, perhaps, the desire to wee as soon as you get on a bus – is inevitable. Life is full of ‘Sliding Doors’ moments: a million milliseconds of opportunity, a million little forks in the road. A million million different turns to take, a million million different ways to stray from the pre-destined path, a trillion reasons to re-write the opening paragraph. Anyone who has been to a funeral – and as you get to my age you find that they take up an increasing percentage of your time – will know that that is exactly what eulogies are: introductory paragraphs rewritten; a life retold as if its path was predetermined, that the dearly beloved was always going to be the thoroughly good egg they became. Except it’s never really like that, is it? We all have so many choices to make that resolve themselves as ‘do the right thing’ or ‘do the easy thing’. Show me anyone who is convinced they have always done the former and I will show you someone who has been in a coma for fifty years. I think that Hell is reviewing everything you got wrong as your life ebbs away. Heaven is probably finding out that the local greengrocer knows how to give CPR.

I don’t know about Original Sin, but I do know that I have never looked into the eyes of a newborn and seen anything but innocence. I’m sure that not even that nice Mrs Schikelgruber looked into her newborn baby’s eyes and thought “I’ll call him Adolf. Not a pretty name, but it suits him. He looks to me like he’s going to grow up to be a complete bastard.” We are born as putty and moulded by life. Which is not to say that predisposition is not there: I cannot imagine a set of circumstances that would lead me to make the life-choices of Hitler. An abusive father, an unwell mother, a sibling that filled my nose with plastecine as I slept: I do not believe that combined they would make me think “I know, I’ll insinuate myself into a position of complete power, kill tens of millions of innocent people and still find the time to grow a comedy moustache.” The path to being a vegetarian and a butcher had to be implanted in him from birth.

Life wounds us all. If the first cut really is the deepest then surely everything else becomes less painful as the years wind on and, hopefully, the next time I cut a shelf, it might just reach the brackets at both ends…

A change is as good as a rest…

66 years of age: you think I would have realised before now that nobody gives a tuppeny cuss about what I think. I have opinions – of course I do – but most of the time I have sufficient common sense to keep them to myself. Nothing good ever comes from me speaking out. My views are unlikely to surprise. I am Middle Man: I sit with one leg to either side of the fence, one testicle to the left and one to the right, and nothing worthy of mention going on in between. It is a small joy that, being my own editor these days, I can publish what I like – it really doesn’t matter because hardly anybody ever reads it – so I just plough my own furrow. I am a one man band yet, somehow, I still manage to be Ringo Starr.

I’ll level with you, when I was young I had total confidence that I would make a comfortable living from writing, but it never really happened. I planned to feed the world, but I became a subsistence farmer. Never mind, it is the process of writing that is actually important to me: it gives me purpose, it clears my head and you get the snotty tissues twice a week.

I have written many times before about how these little nosegays actually develop from a bundle of scraps – bubbles waiting to burst on release, but sinking without trace. Well, for the next few weeks it is all going to change because I have come to realise that potential readers actually decide what to read with little more than a title to guide them and so that is where I plan to start for a while, with just a title to guide me. We’ll see where it goes. A change is as good as a rest they say (who says?) unless, of course, you’re recovering from running a marathon in which case, bugger ‘change’ – a rest is the only thing that is truly as good as a rest – so, in a spirit of adventure, so rare for me that not even a cat would eat it, I am ready to give it go…

Mind you, I have to be honest, it has not been much of a leap today, as the whole idea came along with today’s title, but going forward… we’ll just have to see. In the grand scheme of things it’s not much of a challenge and, for a man in his mid-sixties, far sterner ones lay ahead, but it’s something…

Since we moved to the new house I have started to tootle my ancient body about on my aging bicycle, but lately I have been dismayed to find that, far from getting easier, the short incline to our house is becoming increasingly energy sapping. I mean, it’s not the north face of the Eiger, and the bike does have gears –although I do not have the brains to use them, but today, as I free-wheeled down the hill at the start of my jaunt, I ground to a halt half way down and realised, for the first time that my front brake was firmly stuck on, where I think it probably must have been since we moved house, leaving me pedalling like one of the exercise bike idiots at the gym who is unable to decide which way is ‘turn clockwise to reduce resistance’ because their fitness tracker is digital. All I have to do now is to find out how to free the brake and I will feel immediately fitter. In the past, that would have been easy: find a little screw somewhere roughly adjacent to the brake cable and loosen it, but not now. This thing has a disc brake and more callipers than an obesity clinic. Loosen the wrong one and the seat might fall off…

…At which point my butterfly brain flits onto Monty Python’s Flying Circus and the Bicycle Repairman sketch (If you watch it on YouTube, try to find the slightly longer clip that morphs into a short John Cleese ‘I hate communists’ skit delivered by a very proto-Basil Fawlty.) and I am lost to the real world for a few minutes. Why can I remember a fifty years-old comedy sketch with striking clarity while the details of today’s breakfast menu completely evade me? Many years ago, when the world was young and Donald Trump was little more than a gleam in his father’s wallet, an early reader to my infant blog contacted me to congratulate me on the way I was coping with my dementia. I felt really bad having to tell her that, despite all contrary appearances, I did not have dementia, just a slightly eccentric brain and, sadly, she ‘unfollowed’ me the very same day, which was doubly troubling because, firstly it meant that I had lost a fellow traveller so very early in ‘the journey’ and secondly it had planted a little seed in my brain – what if she knew something I did not? Was it possible that she was actually a dementia specialist who, having stumbled across the obvious symptoms of the condition in my inane ramblings, was embarrassed to have broken the news to me in such a clumsy fashion? Or maybe she had just grown bored with it all. The truth is, fittingly, that I will never know the answer.

Not that it makes any great difference. What I have to offer is what I have to offer: not much, but mine own. And that is where things have changed over the years. At the start of this blog, I was very capable of picking over pieces for days, raising threads and patching in jokes like the invisible menders of my youth whose painstaking work was always slightly marred by the fact that the darn was never actually invisible and the suit was never worth the mending in the first place. I very deliberately worked at arm’s length to what I was writing; trying very hard to work on the ‘gag per line’ principal of the great Eddie Braben, and even if the jokes weren’t great, I usually managed to get them in there (like a Carry On script finished by Jung because Freud was having one of his turns). These days I go over things two or three times – as opposed to the hundreds of the past – mostly trying to make sense of my fractured grammar and correcting a frightening tendency I have to start on a new line of thought before the old one has reached any kind of conclusion. Current posts are far more me, far less funny.

Which is where I find myself in real life these days: no less socially inept than ever I was, but far less likely to try and cover it up with a non-stop stream of jokes. I have no idea of whether I am better or worse company, but I’m certainly less tiring.

Mind you, should you know anyone who needs a stream of senseless gags, I can still do it – and remarkably quickly it turns out – with the right incentive (money, chocolate and whisky) and a deadline to ignore. I am also very cheap. Sometimes a change is as good as a rest, but sometimes things just never really change…

Dinah & Shaw 5 – Train of Thought

“…Why do they even put backwards-facing seats into railway carriages?” asked Shaw. “Nobody likes them.”
“Well, I don’t think they are backwards all the time are they? I mean, when they get to where they are going, they don’t actually turn them around to come back, do they? They just pull them from the other end….”
“No, of course not. I know that,” snapped Shaw, who felt that he had to say something, but really just wanted to concentrate on the fact that he was distinctly unhappy at having to watch where he had just been slip silently away into the distance. Knowing that his future was looming up, unseen, behind him made him anxious and, as everyone that knew him would testify, an anxious Shaw was a spiky Shaw. For the moment, he occupied himself by staring malignantly into the distance, but Dinah recognised the signs, some kind of irrational outburst was just around the corner. “Would you like a coffee?” she asked, all smoothing oil on troubled waters.
“I would,” said Shaw, “but that’s another thing: no buffet car. A two hour journey and no buffet car. What do they expect you to do, drink the sweat from your own brow?”
Dinah recognised the warning: a troubled sea fanned by a full-on anxiety storm. “I’ve brought a flask,” she said.
“A what?”
“A flask. I’ve brought a flask of coffee.” She unscrewed the little metal cup and poured the black steaming liquid, watching as Shaw’s bottom lip began, petulantly to protrude. He opened his mouth to speak, but Dinah was ready for him. “Milk and sugar are in the bag,” she said. Shaw’s mouth made the slightest twitch towards complaint. “And biscuits,” added Dinah.
“What kind?”
Dinah allowed herself the faintest of smiles. “Bourbon, of course.”
Shaw looked into Dinah’s smiling eyes as passed the cup towards him and he felt the tension leave him in an instant, tingling away from the nape of his neck, although he was in no mood to admit that yet.
“So, do you mind telling me where we are going – and why?”
“There’s something we’ve got to see,” he said.
“What?”
“I’m not sure.”
“Well, where then?” persisted Dinah.
“There’s the thing…”
Dinah sighed deeply. “You don’t know do you?”
“Not exactly, no, but I think I’ll know when we get there.”
“How? How will you know?”
“The man in the tartan hat,” Shaw nodded, indicating the man on the seat behind him. “He’ll be getting off there.”
“How do you know?”
“Well, he has to get off somewhere, hasn’t he?”
“I suppose so, but why him? Why are we following him?”
“To see where he gets off, of course.” Shaw sipped his coffee, indicating that, as far as he was concerned, the matter was closed.
Dinah, as ever, absorbed and understood, but ploughed on anyway. “I mean, you must have some reason to want to know why he, in particular, is going to get off the train, wherever he might choose to do so. And you said that this was a two hour journey. How can you possibly know that if you don’t know where we’re going?”
“Did I say that I didn’t know where we are going?”
Dinah tried to remember, but being with Shaw always played games with her memory. “No,” she said at last. “Do you?”
“Do I what?”
“Know where we’re going?”
“Of course.”
“Where then?”
“I told you, wherever he does.”
“But…” Dinah floundered. She knew that she would get nowhere other than where Shaw thought that they might need to be, so she decided to let it all go, but refused to allow her face to inform Shaw, who drank his coffee ever more slowly, eeking out the silence as long as he could, hoping that the man in the hat would save him further interrogation by making a move. Finally, his cup empty, he sighed resignedly – determined not to have to explain the motives he did not have – and said, “So, do you think we should be following somebody else then?”
“Well, no,” Dinah stuttered. “That is…”
“Good,” said Shaw, settling back in his seat and revelling in his moment of triumph. “That’s settled then. We’ll stick with my original plan.”
Despite a billion reservations bouncing around in her head, like a zero-gravity hailstorm, she decided that the time had come to just go along with the flow and enjoy the day out. She would have said ‘watching the world go by’, but she had to agree with Shaw, there was little fun in watching a world that had already gone by.
Slowly, imperceptibly, she surrendered to the steady sway of the train, and her head sagged steadily towards Shaw’s shoulder. She drifted off into a soft, dreamless sleep, unaware of the gentle rhythmic snoring of Shaw in her ear…

…They both awoke in the otherwise empty carriage to the first lurch of the return journey. Outside the carriage, the world was impenetrably dark. “Typical,” said Shaw. “We’re facing the right way, and now there’s nothing to see…”
“But what about the suspect?”
“Suspect?” Shaw looked deeply puzzled. “There’s nobody else here… Have you got any of that coffee left?”

First published 19.09.2020 as ‘A Little Fiction – Train of Thought’

I usually leave these reposted fictions alone, but I have toyed with this one a little bit. I remember thinking when I originally wrote it that Dinah & Shaw might get more readers if the stories were shorter and more concise, but I was wrong. I really liked the concept of this episode and I felt that the characters became a little more real – even in a surreal situation – because of the slight tetchiness between them. I have now smoothed over one or two cracks, but I really wish I had given them more time here…

A Matter of Little Consequence…

It took me many weeks to pluck up the courage to ask my History teacher what the “NWM” I repeatedly found scrawled across my essays actually meant. Judging from my marks, I was fairly certain that it wasn’t praise (and he certainly was not the kind of teacher to use an acronym for ‘No Way Man’ – he had leather elbow patches on his short-sleeved shirts) but I felt as though I was entitled to some kind of explanation. “Not Worthy of Mention,” he said when I finally cornered him. “It might not be wrong, but it is of no consequence whatsoever. Much like your essays in general McQueen.” Sometimes you’re better off just not knowing.

I had always enjoyed History at school despite the fact that I was useless with dates, and names, and pretty much all historical fact if I’m honest, but I always found the past a very productive place in which to allow my imagination to roam. I very clearly remember being taught about how people in the past lit their homes with candles made of animal fat. I would be, I suppose, seven or eight years old and I pestered my parents into giving me access to Sunday’s beef dripping and a length of string from which I made myself a candle to light my bedroom. I insisted it was to be the only light in my room and I stuck with it until the candle spluttered to its death after a couple of days, leaving me, the room and all of my clothes smelling like I had been present at an abattoir fire, but with an imagination sufficiently sated to allow me to behave like a normal human being, if only for a short time. I’m sure my parents were delighted that I didn’t learn about Bazalgette until much later.

The History teacher – lets us call him Mr Wilson, for that was his name – actually managed to destroy my interest in the subject and simultaneously placed a chip on my shoulder that I now realise has taken me fifty years to knock off, because what I included in those essays were what I imagined to be engaging little asides that I fondly thought would bring a little colour into the monochrome life of a teacher whose only source of light relief appeared to be the gleam from his toecap, tired of marking forty identical essays (twenty of them copied from the same swot for two bob a time) without relief. I discovered that he wasn’t interested in being entertained – least of all by me. He didn’t want my ‘colour’, he wanted to get as many of his pupils past GCSE as he could and if bland repetition is what it took, it was a price he was willing to pay. History was not Roman Legionnaires building arrow-straight roads; peasants burning dried-up cow shit because they couldn’t afford firewood; debauched Tudor kings, or diarists burying cheese to avoid it becoming fondue during the Great Fire: it was simply a list of dates to be memorised. He would – he made no secret of it – have been much happier to have lived in a world, or at least a classroom, without me in it. There was not, to his eyes, any benefit in seeing things differently, particular if it wasn’t included in the curriculum.

I have spent most of my years viewing what surrounds me in this way – searching for different – whilst, if I’m honest, my own life seldom moves beyond ‘second-to-last local colour feature’ on the regional news: Peter Levy: (insert your own regional TV kingpin of choice) following on from stories about a pot-hole in Bardney that looks like Arthur Scargill; a new shop in Scunthorpe selling ‘Skegness-fragranced’ candles, and why local doctors are advising against sticking red-hot needles into your eyes, saying “and briefly, in other news tonight…” I would be there only to remind people that they had about thirty seconds to get their notepad ready before the weather forecast. I’m not at all sure of what I would have to do in order to make myself national news, but I’m pretty certain that I wouldn’t want to do it. I can’t help but wonder how often those who seek, and achieve, notoriety are smiled upon by history,

Back in the day we had regional daily newspapers which were bought by just about every household in the country. They were the only source – barring the Post Office queue, Mrs Hutchinson whose husband worked for the council and the barber’s chair – of reliable local news; of births, marriages and deaths; of What’s On; of who did what, to whom and why, and best of all, which of your neighbours had found themselves in court (again) for knocking off a policeman’s helmet on the way back from the football. On Saturday, within minutes of the final whistle they published a special sports edition (The Football Echo) which was printed on blue paper to differentiate it from the normal Saturday paper. I never worked out how it was possible, but you could buy it on the walk back to the bus.

Nothing counted – nothing existed – if it wasn’t in the Echo. I found myself in its pages from time to time, although to be fair, as it was the preferred herald of hatches, matches and dispatches, most people made it onto its pages at least once or twice in a lifetime, and extra copies were always bought and stored on those days to be found decades later, tucked away in the effects of aging parents with a crumbling slice of unidentified wedding cake, a pair of woollen bootees and a used corn plaster that might well have once been used by somebody famous.

The Chronicle (a weekly paper, taken in addition to the Echo by those with money to burn) was the first to disappear, becoming a free paper – paid for by the advertisers who dominated it – delivered to every house in the city and used only by those with pets to clean up after, until its eventual, largely unlamented demise. The Echo, like all such publications became tabloid and then ‘went digital’ before disappearing completely: lost to a world filled with digital gossip. Making the Socials doesn’t have quite the same cachet as finding yourself in the papers, does it?

By and large my life plods along without the intrusion of social media – a fact that I like to think explains the miniscule readership of my blog – and I’ve always had the feeling that if anyone really wants to know about me, they’ll find out. Curiously, hardly anyone ever has.

Now, the point of all this (oh yes, here it comes) is that it has taken me fifty years to wonder at the perspicacity of an ancient (at least he seemed that way back then) history teacher to get my number so very quickly. People normally have to know me for ages before realising that I will amount to nothing.

I would like to say that it bothers me, but honestly, it really is of little consequence…

By way of an apology…

There are times – of course there are – when all I can do is hold up my hands and say I’m sorry. Scheduled posts create the impression that I am ‘in the room’ whilst, in reality, I am actually, for a hatful of reasons… indisposed, I suppose. My posts appear with a metronomic regularity (for which I can only offer an auxillary apology) whilst, by and large, I am unable to show even the basic simple courtesy of reading what you – my fellow word-wranglers – have slaved to produce. I can currently do nothing more than apologise for this – which I hereby do.

I always try to respond to comments – not always as fulsomely as they deserve – because I feel that they have required a very particular effort to post, and I am meticulous in my efforts never to merely ‘like’ a post I have not been able to fully read: it just feels like bad manners.

Soon I will be in a place from which I will be able to derive great joy in catching up with my reciprocal duties, and I will have the opportunity to comment more fully on what I have read. My word, you’ll regret having me back by then…

A Grand Day Out

Saturday is football day: the day on which I spend quality grandad* time with my grandson in the company of The Mighty Imps (Lincoln City Football Club since you ask) and whilst I am uncertain that our motivations for being there are the same (for me it is the football, for my grandson it is a trip to the pub followed by a giant hot-dog at the ground) it is a grand day out for both of us. We do hot and cold, wet and dry, windy and still, me in anywhere south of six layers of clothing, he in shorts and a ‘T’ shirt.

It is a ninety minute match that takes up about five hours of Saturday afternoon, during the course of which Alfred (not his real name – obviously) does not stop talking. He has quickly transformed into a real football fan in that he now understands the game better than any coach and certainly with greater clarity than the referee who, he assures me, is ‘a clown’. The opposition are always cheats; contentious decisions should always go our way.

Throughout it all he fiddles with a Rubik’s Cube – his constant companion – and occasionally he imparts some ‘cubist’ knowledge so obscure that all I can do is offer him a mint. Yet Alf (not his real diminutive) loves it all and is always planning his trip to the next match before the current one has finished.

Not that his attention is always totally focussed on the football. Yesterday, as the admittedly drab game dragged on to its inevitable 0-0 conclusion he suddenly said, “Grandad, I think that you would like Leonard Da Vinci even more if he played football.”
“What makes you say that?” I asked.
He looked a little affronted. “What do you mean?”
“What made you think of Leonardo Da Vinci?”
“I don’t know. You like him though don’t you?”
“Well I suppose so, but he’s…”
“Well, there you go then… And you’d definitely like him more if he played football.”
“Do you want a mint?”

I am not being maudlin here when I say that I realise that this time is both precious and limited. I suppose if I am lucky, I might make it through a third of his life. I may meet future great-grandchildren, but I don’t suppose I’ll ever take them to the football. At the present time (I cannot speak for five years hence) all four grandkids enjoy having me around because, shorn of parental responsibility, I am a bigger kid than they are. I have a terrible tendency to say ‘Yes’ without thinking things through. “Let’s roll down the hill grandad,” and off we go, only one of us conscious of the fact that he’s going to wake up in the morning feeling like he’s been involved in a car crash. “Grandad, will you come and see me in my ballet show?”
“Yes.”
“…It’s in Liverpool, it’s three hours long and I’m in it for thirty seconds…”
“Grandad, can I paint your hair blue?”
“Ermh…”
“Please. I have just the right colour.”
“It’s not gloss is it?”

I tried my very hardest to be the very best dad I could possibly be to my two girls and I think I did ok – at least they are both still talking to me without the presence of lawyers – but there is so much pressure in being a parent, and constantly feeling completely out of your depth is so tiring. We are an unusual family: we are close and we constantly draw in ancillary members: in-laws, in-laws’ families, in-laws’ in-laws, friends of in-laws’ in-laws… Less a family and more a cult without all the weird stuff: no need to conform or donate all your worldly wealth direct to the leader’s Swiss bank account. (I think, perhaps, I should make it clear that I do not consider myself to be the leader of this family. I don’t think that I have ever led anything, let alone anything as complex as a family.) We have a single principle: join us if you want to, don’t if you don’t. It’s easy. Mind you nobody’s ever tried to ‘leave’ us yet. When they do, who knows? We may turn into Mafioso, a kiss on the cheek before the long goodbye. Nobody wants to wake up with a motorway junction across the bridge of their nose…

I have grown to realise that the best thing I can do is to be available. It may be vanity to believe that they want to have me about, but as long as they do, I will try to be there for them all. Especially if they want to join me at the football…

*Family spelling which I refuse to change no matter how many times Word tells me that I should…

Dinah & Shaw 4 – Morning is Broken

In Shaw’s long experience, nothing quite matched the pain of toothpaste beneath the contact lens. The eye, it would seem, was no more designed for the absorption of fluoride than his teeth were designed to withstand the Cif with which he had inadvertently cleaned them that morning.

He had not had a good start to the day. His alarm at waking in an unfamiliar room had been of such magnitude that the hotel staff had alerted the management who, in turn, had despatched Security to handle the situation. By the time the man in uniform arrived at his door, Shaw had recovered some equilibrium with fast returning Tarantino-style flashbacks of an over-indulgent night in the hotel bar, but his own renewed calm was not matched by that of the generously proportioned man in the over-tight suit who blocked out the light in his doorway. Indeed, Shaw’s own mood was darkened further when the be-suited Neanderthal pushed past him and insisted on looking around as ‘there had been reports of something that sounded like animal abuse,’ from the room. Shaw did not care for the pointed remarks about his lack of luggage, nor the persistent bone-headed references to ‘people of your kind’.

Eventually, satisfied that the room had not been the scene of some bestial ritual sacrifice or perverted sexual practice, the shaven-headed behemoth returned to his dot-to-dot book and Shaw sat heavily on his bed to think.

He had been doing this ‘job’ for many years now and had, during that time, woken in many places far more alien than a hotel bedroom, but never in the state of agitated disorientation in which he had awoken on that morning. He felt around his body, searching for signs of injury or attack but, save for the extreme discomfort of a severely over-extended bladder, all was as usual. Of course, there was the issue of the hotel bedroom itself. Shaw presumed that it must have been paid for, but he had no recollection of how. He, himself, never carried more than a few pounds in cash – it was a matter of principal – and the only credit card he had ever possessed had been eaten by an iguana in 1999. He claimed ‘eaten’ – it had actually fallen into the animal’s terrarium (or ‘lair’ as he insisted on calling it) and Shaw, having witnessed the lizard’s scaly little swivelling eyes in action, was too freaked out to retrieve it. Even when the friend had returned the card to him, he refused to keep it and posted it instead, back to the bank in an envelope marked ‘Sanitisation Department’. The bank, for their part, seized the opportunity to withdraw the card from the man who had run up an overspend somewhat in excess of a developing nation and who possessed more aliases than a Sicilian telephone directory. He had never had a credit card since.

He rifled through the detritus from his trouser pockets and attempted to assemble some sort of coherent chronology to the previous night’s affairs from the crumpled papers he retrieved. There was a name and address he did not recognise, several old bus tickets and a National Lottery ticket from almost a decade before, but no sign of a receipt for the room. It was not until he found the neatly folded slip of paper in his shoe (he always took special care with Dinah’s phone number) that he realised he had also lost his phone. Dinah would know how to handle the situation in a manner that he was unable to fathom – e.g. without causing an incident that required the presence of police from three different counties – but there it was; she was not available to him. ‘Just goes to show,’ he thought bitterly. ‘You just can’t rely on anybody.’

He couldn’t pick up the phone in the room and ask reception to put a call through for him: he just knew that the ape of a security guard would be there right that second, uncovering the fact that the room had never been paid for: polishing his knuckles and devising his excuses. Dinah would have to wait for now – although he made a mental note to speak to her about unreliability – while he considered how he could extricate himself from his current predicament.

He could, have course have crept downstairs and made a run for it as soon as he reached the hotel lobby, but he remembered, with some pain, the consequences of his last attempt at such an exit, when the revolving doors had spun him straight back into the room and deposited him at the feet of the receptionist who had gripped him in an arm-lock so severe that he had suffered from pins and needles for months afterwards and before dousing his face in the depilatory spray that she had mistakenly put in her pocket in place of mace. It worked just as well. He certainly wouldn’t be able to talk himself out of the situation as he had done back then – the face that had launched a thousand ships looked as if it had done them all with a head-butt this morning – and not even a protagonist of more advanced years would ever find her head being turned by a man who had absolutely no idea why he was wearing odd shoes. Besides, he feared the only head-turning to take place would be his own, at the behest of the muscle-bound troglodyte at the door.

No, it was clear now. He knew what he had to do. Stealthily he traversed the wall, past the still un-noticed partition door – on the other side of which an ear-plugged Dinah slept soundly with both of their phones and her credit card beside her – past the ceiling CCTV (actually a long-disabled smoke alarm) and to the sanctuary of the curtain, from the shelter of which he deftly slipped the catch and opened the window. Good, only three floors up. All he needed to do now was to reach the drainpipe…

First published 15.08.2020 as ‘A Little Fiction – Morning is Broken’

Having exposed some of Dinah’s vulnerabilities in episode 3, I thought it only fair to take a look at Shaw in episode 4 and I began to realise that these two could only properly operate as one…

A welcome break from the general pattern of my life through interruptions and distractions

My life is full of interruptions and distractions which are almost always welcomed as a break from my incessant but definitely not Herculean labours…

…It was almost as though Alexa (the Smart Speaker which announces that someone has pressed our doorbell) was unwilling to tell me. “There is somebody at the door,” she whispered, so huskily that I feared she may have been having an asthma attack. I’m sure that, if she could have found the breath, she would have added, “Of course, you don’t have to answer it.” Nevertheless, I did… They came with an attempt to capture all souls and, I presume, the entire demographic (or at least fifty percent of it) with a very young and attractive woman accompanied by a truly ancient one (no less attractive in her day, I’m sure) who appeared to be on the point of collapse throughout our entire – admittedly short – conversation. She smiled – a lot – I think (although it could have been some kind of rigor) but did not speak. All conversation was conducted by the younger woman who congratulated me because she came bearing an invitation to ‘a party’ at The Meeting House with ‘no cost and no obligation’ to myself. “Well, that sounds like fun,” I thought. I might even have been tempted to go if they’d had a bar. Instead I politely accepted the gracious offer of a free leaflet and watched them leave, the more able of the duo virtually carrying her elder along the driveway. I always knew that Methuselah must have had a mother, but it came as a shock to me to find that she’d outlived him.

My wife’s phone rings constantly, but never when she is able to answer it. The pattern is invariable:
1. Me: ‘Your phone is ringing.’
2. Wife: no reply.
3. Attempt to find location of missing wife’s missing phone knowing only that it is never where I found it last time.
4. Answer phone.
5. ‘Yes, I am Mr McQueen. Yes, you can speak to Mrs McQueen… if I can find her.’
6. Find missing wife who is never where she was last time I found her.
7. Await further instructions.
8. On completion of phone call carry out ‘Two-minute job’ for wife as instructed.
9. Return to previous task-in-hand forty five minutes later to find stiffened brush locked to side of paint pot and paint drip on wall that would look more at home in the Carlsbad Caverns.
10. Phone rings.
11. Me: ‘Your phone is ringing.’
12. Wife: no reply…

I do not need to say ‘Open Sesame’ to open my garage door (although I do need to find the missing key) but it is rather like I imagine Ali Baba’s cave would have been if the forty thieves had collected shit. It has a place for everything, in which I find everything else. If ever I ask where something is, my wife will answer ‘In the garage’ and I know that I will never find it. A four hour search in there would be more likely to turn up David Livingstone than whatever it is I need. Amazingly it does not appear to have mice: I think that they are being eaten by Japanese soldiers who are unaware that the war is over.

…And being male and old… and alive I now find myself with the most persistent interrupter of all: the over-inflated prostate gland. Want to enjoy a meal, a film, an uninterrupted night’s sleep? Well, in that case you have, it would appear, three options: impotency, incontinence or womanhood. And don’t get me wrong here, I’m not trying to claim that life is a bed of roses for women wee-wee wise – I know that I have never had to squeeze a mini human being through my nunny – it’s just that women don’t find themselves peeing on their own slippers anything like so often. I myself have spent longer staring at the urinal wall whilst people either side of me came and went in watery relief than I would care to mention. Nervous Bladder I used to think: the inability to pee in close proximity to other urinating men, but I now realise that it is down to the eccentricity of this normally walnut-sized gland, which is now approaching that of a belligerent watermelon. In truth, most of the time I barely notice that it is there – except when it is inconvenient for it to be so. Half way through a meal, a concert, a film or, most annoying of all, two minutes after my last toilet visit. Most testingly the prostate likes to do half a job before reminding me forcefully that it is now in urgent need of finishing what it so reluctantly started just two minutes earlier.

The only blessing – if I’m honest, I actually have many, but let us say for now that it is singular – is my unmatched ability to distract myself. I am almost permanently distracted. My brain is so seldom engaged in the same task as my body that they are virtual strangers. Actual physical distractions serve only to bring me back to a place that I should have been in the first instance and, in the great scheme of things, ensure that, eventually, I get back on with the stuff I was meant to be getting on with and that – providing it doesn’t disturb me – can only be a good thing…

Looking Out Through Another Window

It is the pattern of things these days that each new post starts its life as a handful of often disassociated scrawlings in my tatty notebook, jotted down whilst my physical body – such as it is – is employed in some menial DIY task of which it is clearly not capable. At such times, far from finding heightened concentration, I tend to find that my mind has taken flight and is preparing to land on an airstrip somewhere just south of stupid. As far as ‘the creative process’ goes, I am often a spectator, looking in from out, wondering whether the householder realises that you can see through net curtains when the lights are on.

Today my body is carrying out general filling, touching up and making good duties subsequent to a bout of joinery that will leave a great deal to be desired, so there is much space into which my brain can wander. Some kind of muscle memory takes control of the task du jour whilst my brain buggers off skiing in Zermatt. (My body, incidentally, will never ski for any one of a million reasons: knackered knees, hatred of being cold, dislike of the kind of people who ski…) I fear, in any case, that I would be about as welcome in a trendy ski resort as a Mexican golfer on the White House Pitch and Putt. I am not made of the right stuff: I do not own a Tesla; we have only one bathroom per person (2); I do not own a bolt-hole in the Caribbean; my life has not been shaped by ritualised private school flogging… Also, my body is not a temple: I do not drink turmeric infusions; I do not practice Tai Chi on the beach at 3am. My body is more of an ancient monument: a warning to the young.

My task, when I sit down at my desk in the early evening hours is to splash the water into the whisky, pour the peanuts into a bowl and collate the day’s assembled guff into something semi-coherent, and this normally requires a mental re-run of the day in order to try and remember what was leaping from synapse to synapse, bent on logic avoidance, in the ever growing portion of my mind set aside for fantasy. Each day is a fast unravelling sweater. Each post is a record of me trying to catch the thread before it rewinds itself into a ball.

Interestingly – like everybody else who ever starts a sentence with that word, I am aware that I have nothing of any consequence to relay – the notebook today is empty. My memory is full of ready-mixed all-purpose filler, masking tape, fiendishly shaped knives and a million reasons why it was not my fault, but no consciousness, streamed or otherwise. I face two possibilities: either I have retained the subservient services of my peanut brain throughout my labours today, or it has started to keep secrets. It is flying solo.

I don’t suppose I can begrudge it a little time to itself now and then – God knows, it has more than enough on its plate most of the time – but I think it only right that I know what it is up to when it is not around. If it can’t just leave me a little note, it’s a poor show I think.

And the reason why I have nothing to say today…

Dinah & Shaw 3 – About Shaw

Typical! It was one of those rare days when Dinah found herself with time to think and she could think of nothing at all with which to occupy her mind. Since meeting Shaw she had become used to finding her head full of the kind of clutter that resembled his life, but today it was full of the kind of void that she always imagined lurked between his ears… No, that wasn’t fair. He had more going on in his head than anybody she had ever met. It was just that none of it ever made any sense. Every time she thought she had started to get the hang of him; thought that she might guess where he would go next, he would lithely side-step her, leaving her stranded, like a cataleptic jelly fish abandoned on the ebbing tide. His quantum leaps of illogic were, at times, truly stunning. His arrival at a point of resolution confounded all reason; even he only seemed to know he had reached it after he arrived there. Right through his haphazard progress, whatever that might be, he proceeded in a manner that suggested total conviction of purpose. He never showed doubt. Even when people shouted at him, ‘But that’s not what I paid you to do!’ he would look them straight in the eye and say. ‘But it is what you wanted me to do.’ Heated argument often ensued, bills were often ripped-up and tossed into the air, but Shaw simply smiled, took a step backwards and waited for the anger to subside. ‘You have my number,’ he would say, ‘if you change your mind.’ That’s another thing that Dinah had never got used to; the way that cheques would turn up in the post, days, weeks or even months later, generally with no explanation, just, more often than not, a simple ‘Thank you’ paper-clipped to them. Whatever Shaw had found for them, it obviously took them some time to discover it for themselves.

It wasn’t strange that she’d never met anybody else quite like him – she wasn’t certain that such a person actually existed. Even physically he was perplexing. He was thin to the point of an Estate Agent’s morals and, although barely taller than Dinah herself, he always appeared to tower above her; permanently bewildered. He had a face that actively discouraged ageing – his features flitted between old man and schoolboy. He was always heavy-eyed; giving the appearance of someone who most certainly could do with more sleep. He had a small room behind the office that appeared to be his home, but she didn’t recall ever having seen a bed in it. She wondered if he slept, like a bat, hanging from the light fitting. More often than not, he actually slept in her chair, at the desk – most often with his head across her painstakingly sorted paperwork. When he was awake, he was always on the move. He always had something that had to be done, but he was never quite sure what. His pace alternated between laid-back and languid. She had only ever seen him agitated once, and that was when he was looking for a pencil because he had developed a buzzing in his ear – which he feared might be a bee. He was terrified of bees. She’d spent hours trying to educate him about them: their sociability, their vital importance in propagation; their reluctance to sting, when he eventually looked up at her from darkly hooded eyes and said, ‘Earwigs, I meant earwigs’ and terminated the conversation with an airy wave of his hand, before sensing her annoyance and announcing, ‘Cake. Let me buy you cake… Do you have any money?’

What most annoyed her about Shaw was that he did what he said: he helped people find things – even if they did not know they were missing. Mostly, she had to reflect, what they found was themselves. In Shaw, Dinah had found what was missing in herself, although even now, she was unable to quantify it. She did not know what she had found, only that it was missing before she found it. You know when you try so hard to be one of those girls at school that everybody likes, only to find out that that is exactly why nobody likes you? Well, she’d stopped that now. She’d realised it was no way to get friends. She’d realised that might be why she didn’t have any. For the moment she had Shaw and today, she had to admit, she had never been so pleased to see anyone in her life. ‘Yes, yes,’ she had said in feigned annoyance when she first saw his lopsided quizzical smile. ‘That’s fine. Laugh now, but then go and find ladder to get me out of this tree…’

First Published 27.06.2020 as Little Fiction – Another Return

I like this episode, it makes me smile because I think it’s the first time I managed to put a little flesh on Shaw’s bones – even though he isn’t in it until the very last line…