History of the World (part 239)

1. There was no room at the Inn.

2. In a small, cob-webby garage in the town of Scunthorpe, Mrs Mary Smith lay on a mouldy canvas camp-bed, giving birth to a son. Her eyes were heavy and swollen and a bump on her forehead glowed angry in the meagre candle light. Her husband was an angry man. He just would not listen.

3. Granted, it must have been a bit hard for him, coming home from a year spent brick-laying in the Saudi Arabian sunshine to find his wife decidedly pregnant. He wouldn’t listen.

4. Bleedin’ visitation by a wossname spirit? What you take me for? Milkman more like. With gin maybe. Son of GOD? Do you expect the blokes down the boozer to believe that? You’ve made me a bleedin’ laughing stock, an object held up for ridicule, narmean?

5. In his anger he smote her.

6. But now he was kindness itself. True, she would have preferred a bed in a maternity hospital, but he had assured her: Do as you are bleedin’ well told. Don’t want people talking now, do we? Pointing the wossname finger. Anyway, he had read the books and she had to admit it was very clean, as garages go.

7. She screamed again, and all around her the ferrets paced their cages.

8. Later she held the boy child and sighing, lay back, banging her head on the bumper of the old Ford Cortina he was doing up to help with the rent.

9. Day passed into night and the musky smell of nappies hung, humid in the frost-sharp air. It was then that the first of three wise men arrived bearing an unsolicited gift.

10. He was called Ted and he had travelled for what seemed like forty days and forty nights on the Inter-City from London. He was Customs and Excise and none could stop him entering.

11. He spake: What we got here then, where’s the grass? Come on, don’t play innocent with me, we’ve had a tip off. I know your sort, hippies, all junkies. ‘Ere, that baby looks high. You breast feeding are you? We can tell you know, run tests. Better off if you own up now, save a lot of bother. We could talk to the judge, you know, young mother, educationally sub-normal, very helpful, that sort of thing. That’s best. Otherwise we turn this place inside out.

12. I don’t know what you’re talking about. You can’t do that.

13. Oh yes I can, I got the gift of this ‘ere piece of paper from the DPP. I can impound the baby if I feel like it. And so saying, he began to search the alimentary canals of seventeen severely disgruntled ferrets.

14. The second wise man was called Tom, he was from the Inland revenue.

15. He spake: I come bearing a gift. Fill in this form and sign it at the bottom. Don’t lie, because we always get you in the end. You’re not putting the baby down as your secretary are you? Get a lot of that we do, but we got tests, we can tell. I’ll ask him to take down some notes in shorthand to prove that he can do it, like.

16. He’s not my secretary, he’s my dependant. I’m claiming Family Allowance. It is my right.

17. The Tax Inspector turned puce. The Tax Inspector ground his dental implants to dust. The Tax Inspector wiped his spectacles with a grubby handkerchief. The Tax Inspector broke his Government Issue pen. He spake: Another bloody loop-hole! There’s no bloody fun in this job anymore.

18. The Tax Inspector stamped away from the garage, squashing a snail between his thumb and forefinger.

19. The third wise man was, in fact, a wise woman. It was unusual to see a woman in such a position, but she was, of course, paid less than the two wise men. Still, that’s life, isn’t it? Also, she had bad breath and an embarrassing skin condition causing her to squint and peel on her superiors. That is not life, that is type-casting.

20. Her name was Hermione.

21. She spake: Sign this.

22. What is it? Asked Mary.

23. Questions, questions, questions: always bloody questions these days. Nobody ever signs without asking stupid bloody questions. Dear me! I used to commit fourteen old ladies in a single morning not so long ago. All of ‘em signed straight away. No problem. Had ‘em in the van before they could reach for the bath chair brakes.

24. What is it you want me to sign? she asked, wiping sump oil from her forehead.

25. Educationally subnormal, wrote the wise woman on her notepad. She spake: just sign will you stupid, before I phone for ‘the boys’.

26. But what’s it for?

27. For? For? What is anything for? Why was paper invented? Why do you suppose some bright spark invented the biro? It’s for our files.

28. Look, you can’t tell me that it’s right bringing a baby up like this. One of my sources tells me that you actually gave birth in here without a midwife being present. That’s against the law for a kick-off. And where’s your husband, eh?

29. A tear swelled in Mary’s eye. He’s out at work.

30. Oh, absentee father eh? look, you don’t stand a chance. Just sign the bloody form, I’ll take the baby and that’s the end of it. It will all go through the courts and he’ll be legally adopted within the week. Now won’t that be a weight off your mind?

31. You’ve come to take my baby?

32. Yes, we don’t hang about, you know.

33.But he’s my flesh and blood, he grew inside me. I’ve fed him at my breast, not to mention changed his mucky nappies and wiped his important little places. You can’t do this.

34. Of course I can. Come on, just sign, it’s only to say that I’ve taken delivery. It doesn’t really matter, I’ll take him anyway.

35. Come on, sign. I’ve had a hard day. I was up at seven repossessing my mother’s walking frame. Crafty old cow got up at six and tried to run off with it. She’s nearly reached the gate by the time I caught her. I told her, you should have kept up your payments, a contract’s a contract. That’s what contracts is for. ‘Course, she turned on the tears, but that don’t work anymore, on account of how I caught her practicing in front of the mirror. It took me ages to make her sign and then, when I got back to the office, I found she’d written ‘Micky Moose’. I’ll give her what for when I get home, silly cow. She’d better have my tea ready, that’s all. Now, just sign will you?

36. My baby, she sobbed.

37. Don’t you start, she spake, it makes the ink run. A signature’s no good when the ink’s run. It messes up the computer. Here, use this ballpoint.

38. My baby, she sobbed.

39. Oh come on love, she spake, putting her arm around Mary’s shoulder and steadying her signing arm. You know that’s not true. That nice Mr Jehovah paid you £1,000 to have the baby for him. You can’t go back on your agreement now. It’s the law. Sign here.

40. With a sigh, Mary signed the paper and took the cheque for one thousand pounds on delivery.

41. The wise woman took the baby. They’re going to call him Nigel, she spake.

A slight diversion from the usual Sunday repeat today because this story has never appeared on this platform before. I wrote it over forty years ago (and reproduce it here verbatim) and, as far as I can see, is probably the first magazine piece that I was ever paid for. I found it during the house move and thought it was interesting. It doesn’t seem to have aged too badly – except perhaps for the sum of £1,000 – but I’ll leave you to decide how much my view of the world might have changed since way back then…

Happy Place

Well, here I am again: same spot, but in a much better place. The house still seems to be losing its pants around us, but we’re finding ways to hold them up – mostly with paint. In a few days time we should at least have a handle on what is necessary to resolve the electrical problems and then, like kids with Lego, we start to knock it all down and build it up as something else – almost certainly wonky.

Decorating, decision making, electricians, plumbers, builders all lay ahead of us but for some reason upon which I am unable to put a finger, I feel relatively happy. It is not like me. Morose is my middle name. I am King of morosity – now that I know that it’s a real word (and probably a nearly-hit for a 1980’s band of brothers) however, today I am bordering on sanguine and I have no idea why. If I had, I’d probably do it more often.

Odd, isn’t it, how being happy makes you happy. I am sixty-six years of age now and it has happened to me… mmm, well, I’ll be honest, this could just be the first time. Don’t get me wrong, I don’t mean that I have spent my entire life miserable… maybe the last few weeks… It’s normal. There are so many metaphors for ‘unhappy’: ‘down in the dumps’; ‘heavy hearted’; ‘got a face like a wet weekend’; ‘lost a pound and found a penny’; ‘has the weight of the world on his shoulders’, ‘somebody’s pissed on his matches’, but only one for someone who is happy all the time: ‘the man’s a f*cking nightmare!’ Moderation in all things is the way forward: it’s ok to be happy, but only when you’re eating chocolate. People who smile all the time will quickly find that they are kept away from children. Those who smile in the face of adversity probably need to get a dictionary: they almost certainly do not understand the concept of ‘adversity’. Catastrophe, like a Roy ‘Chubby’ Brown concert, is no laughing matter.

There are many historical instances of people facing impending disaster with a grin: it never helped; the disaster still happened and the grinners simply appeared deranged. With wailing and gnashing of teeth is the only sane way to face disaster. Life, for most people is little more than a gentle slide into calamity. A permanent smile simply points to rigor. No rational person smiles in the face of okra.

I must have been a bit of a smiler myself as a boy because my school day memories are filled with instances of incandescent tutors (we were not allowed to call them ‘teachers’) sneeringly enquiring “What are you grinning at, McQueen? Do you find Shakespeare amusing?” “Only the comedies, sir.” I seem to remember I was sniggering because Hymen had just appeared in ‘As You Like It’. A furious, red faced tutor, bellowing cheese and onion fumes into my face, should have wiped the smile off it, but I do have, I must confess, the unfortunate tendency to laugh uncontrollably when under duress. The vast majority of my laughter occurs in inappropriate circumstances: when being lectured by people in authority; when I feel certain that my house is being burgled; every time I go to a funeral. Sadly, as a lifelong fan of sit-com, I can tell you that there is very little to laugh at these days, yet in reality I must confess that I am actually one of those excruciatingly annoying cheerful souls I so despise.

Despite a tendency to worry at length about anything and everything, my life is generally one of joy. I am on constant whistle watch. Whistling while I work is, if not exactly my biggest flaw, a fairly considerable one and bloody annoying to all around me, so I try my very hardest not to do it. In my head I hear a tune, but I’m fully aware that, to everyone around me, there is no tune, just a mind numbingly monotonous shriek and I’ve begun to realise that ‘mind numbing shriek’ is how I see myself. If I had to be around me, I think I would rather do it when I’m mardy and therefore not whistling. I think a droning moan is probably less off-putting than mindlessly cheerful shrieking.

A happy man is almost always an inane oasis in a desert filled with dehydrated haters who would rather die than go near it.

So here I sit, still on the sofa with the netbook on my knee, but around me various problems are beginning to resolve, mostly in a happy way and a move into my little office sanctuary grows ever closer. This little house may yet become my happy place. I may soon have a desk to rest my keyboard on – away from the distractions of house and TV – and a window to stare out of and that prospect fills me with joy. Happy being happy, that’s me…

Mea Culpa

I feel that I should apologize.

Not for any particular reason, just… well, you know.

First on my mind, I feel that I should apologize for the distinct lack of refinement in some of my most recent posts. Life is doing what it can to overwhelm me. I feel that I need to face up to it, and I am working on it, but I am such a sad creature of habit. I need to be back in surroundings that I understand. Work on my ‘office’ has found itself at the bottom of a very large ‘things to do’ list and so I continue to write with a laptop perched atop my knee. I have recently ‘recommissioned’ an old netbook (eg turned it on and allowed it to update itself over a period of what feels like about six months) which is much more convenient for knee-perching. Everything is written as always was, but I cannot find the time for my usual, edit, edit, edit routine. You are getting it between the eyes, twice weekly, exactly as it emerges from my head. It is reaching you very much ‘in the rough’. You are seeing my actual double chin rather than the chiselled James Bond jaw that I try to persuade you is mine. These are my usual turds, but I do not currently have the time to polish them.

And then, I feel I should apologize for being such an arse. I know that nothing has changed there – I remain exactly the same pain in one as I have always been. I would love to be the person that I would love to be, but I am not. I am not the person that anyone would want me to be. I’m a trier, I’ll give me that, but I am also trying and the trouble with trying is that, in my experience, failing is always lurking just around the corner. I can’t stop myself getting older, I expected it, but I had no idea that it came along with being more stupid. I have discovered that whatever it is, my foot is always in it.

When I was a child my mum always told me, ‘Just apologize. It doesn’t matter why. Apologize, it always makes things better,’ and it works to a point except an apology always comes with an implicit admission of guilt and, in practice, as churlish as it might seem, it is often best not to apologize unless there is a fair certainty that you are actually to blame (e.g. a man). There are professions (politicians, surgeons, snake-oil sellers) for which the principal of worm-can opening ensures that no apology will ever be forthcoming. Mea Culpa becomes Aliquis est Culpa (Look it up. I did.) it is in the rules. Sadly, never being to blame, can lead to some pretty unpleasant character traits. Does anyone ever remember hearing Donald Trump saying sorry? Of course not, he has nothing to be sorry about…

I, on the other hand, have lots. I have opinions when they are not required and nothing but equivocation when I should really be quivocating. And I can only apologize for it…

A Little Fiction – The Custodian of Time

The Custodian of Time sat, open-legged on the heavily brocaded settle, smoothing the creases from his satin pyjama trousers and picking the loose threads from the cushion on which he rested his arm. His movements were leisurely, but his eyes skipped around the room and he spoke as if time was of the very essence, which, of course, for its Custodian, it was.
“I suppose he wants more does he; they all do?” The words jettisoned from his mouth without warning or prevarication, in a way that would have caused his attendant to leap from his skin – if only he had some.
The acolyte was, in fact, a small ectoplasmic fog, slightly purple in colour – lilac possibly – and nervous to the point of dissipation. It was his/her’s (we’ll assume her for ease) very first day on duty and her first time alone in the presence of the Custodian. She had been told, “Pass on the request. Wait for the reply. Leave.” Simple. She hadn’t been led to expect a question. She hoped it was rhetorical.
“Well?” said the Custodian. Obviously it was not.
The attendant’s stress-level passed critical. She was aware that she was starting to precipitate. She coughed nervously (as only a lilac ectoplasmic cloud can). “Erm… that is… well… I think so. Actually no, not really. No. It’s more of an assurance he’s after I think, not more time, just an assurance that he won’t get less.”
“Less than what?”
“Well, less than he expects, I think.”
The Custodian picked at his teeth with the corner of the written request (parts 2 and 3). His eyes betrayed no clue to the activity that whirred behind them. Eventually, with a sigh, he removed the paper from his mouth, flicked an errant sesame seed from it, before smoothing it out across his lap.
“He understands, does he, that what I give to one I must take from another?”
“I don’t know,” said the blob, emboldened by the hesitation he detected in the Custodian. “I don’t think that he wants more anyway. He just, as I understand it, would like an assurance. He was led to believe, from birth, that he could expect to live to one hundred years of age, and he just wants to be assured that that is what he will get. He doesn’t smoke, he’s a moderate drinker, fit and well. He just wants some certainty.”
“Has he told you what he plans to do with this certainty?”
“I’m sorry, I…” The gossamer orb was in full-fluster once again.
“When he knows that after Wednesday he no longer has anything to lose…”
“Wednesday?”
“Wednesday? Did I say ‘Wednesday’? Just a slip of the tongue – probably. Not at all the kind of assurance he was looking for, huh? Tell him ‘Carpe Diem’ baby; tell him ‘Seize the day’. Tell him only one person knows what time has in store for him and, for every good reason, he is keeping that knowledge to himself.”
“But, what if he wants to do good things?”
“Then nobody’s stopping him,” said the Custodian and, with a wave of his podgy little fingers, he dismissed the cloud, which hesitantly turned (I think) to go.
“Come on,” barked the Custodian impatiently. “Tempus Fugit, baby. Get a move on. Time waits for no amorphous entity.” And with an audible ‘Pop!’ the attendant disappeared.
“Wednesday,” chuckled the Custodian. “Wednesday. I’m such a wag… Now, where’s the cloud with my supper?”

First published 07.07.2019

I don’t know. Perhaps I’d been eating cheese…

Tomorrow Never Comes (When You Want It)

Bond shot an immaculate starched cuff. The button flew off, pinged across the toecap of his patent leather dress shoes and rolled behind the commode. He turned a wry, rheumy eye to the red, digital countdown clock and wondered what he should do with the five minutes that he and the rest of the world had left. He had by now totally given up on trying to find the tiny pozidrive screwdriver that had dropped from his arthritic fingers and impaled a stray contact lens – such a shame that it belonged to his one good eye – and he had taken the battery out of his bomb diffusing watch because it interfered with his hearing aid.

He knew, of course, that this day was always going to come: the day that SPECTRE well and truly pissed on his Get Out of Jail Free card. Finding the right solution with just a snap of some hapless buggers spine had always been his forte, but he knew that these days he would be lucky to snap a digestive biscuit without putting his back out. Was the day he would have spent these three hundred seconds shooting miscreants with barely a glance whilst solving the kind of fiendish puzzle that would have GCHQ throwing itself on the traps. Nowadays all he could think about was making it through without needing a wee. He considered – of course he did – peeing on the bloody clock, but he knew with the certainty of age that all he would actually do would be to dribble down his trousers and drip onto the rush matting. It had become a race: which would pop its bolt first, the nuclear bomb or his prostate? He knew he was going to die, he just hoped it would be with a dry crotch.

Life had brought 007 many changes: arch-enemy Blofeld, twenty years his senior, had been sitting in his urn next to three of his incinerated cats for nigh on thirty years now; Scaramanga had breathed his last in a bizarre supernumerary nipple piercing incident, and Jaws had found himself a bigger boat. Even Q had moved on from exploding watches to fleece-lined trusses and M was almost old enough to be the President of the United States. It all gave a different perspective on life.

Even in his long-distant heyday, Bond slept with only one woman at a time. These days he could sleep with a whole roomful, especially if the heating was on and he had a blanket. His days of fighting against impossible odds were long gone. These days he spent most of his life fighting his pyjama cord. His powers of deduction were mostly used up in deciding where the wet patch came from.

He held an elegantly manicured hand up to his good eye and focussed on the timer. It read ‘90’. Ninety seconds to go to the end of everything. He thought of all the things he used to be able to do in a minute and a half, and then he considered his current options, but he got no further than ‘fart’ and even that took him down to sixty seconds – not even sufficient time to defrost a curry for one. If only he could focus on the problem before him. Forty five seconds to… what did he have to do now? “Focus. Come on, focus Bond. You’ve got thirty seconds to… God that ticking clock is bloody annoying… clock? Fifteen seconds? Oh Lord…” Back in the day Bond would not have given up, not even with one second to go, but let’s be honest, there was so little left worth fighting for since Moneypenny had cashed in her Lidl loyalty card…

Bond tensed, the clock ticked from three, to two, to one and… ‘Beep, beep, beep!’ “Bugger it,” he thought, opening the microwave door. “I’ve overdone the wheat bag again…”

Everything I Know About Scotland

Photo by Wender Junior Souza Vieira on Pexels.com

A little time ago I published a visitor guide for Cleckheaton despite the fact that I had never been there and for no better reason than I really liked the name of the place. Now here I am, on the way back from my house-move-imposed publishing interlude and ready to spread my wings. Today you get a country, next year the stars. I am not going to try and tell you that I am a Scotland expert. Despite my name, I am not. But I am interested, it is a magnificently beautiful country, and I am happy to tell you all I know about it because that’s just the way I am: give, give, give.

Scotland is a relatively small country tagged onto the north of England having come here in the far distant past from the coast of America for the good of its health. The subsequent collision of transient country and intransigent landmass threw up a mountain range between the two which the Scots hoped would keep the English out, but it never quite worked. Scotland is a verdant country – it is a green land, so much so that Donald Trump is attempting to occupy it one golf course at a time – everything is green, largely because it NEVER STOPS RAINING. It is colder than the rest of the UK and the rain only ever lessens when it can’t stop itself from turning to snow. In between periods of rain and snow, it sleets. Sleet can find its way through any amount of clothing. It is impossible to be warm in sleet unless you are on the outside of the water of life… (Uisge beath – Gaelic for ‘water of life – became shortened to Uisge – pronounced oosh gae and eventually ‘whisky’. There is no ‘e’ in Scottish Whisky (Scotch) because it is not American, Irish or Japanese – there is no other reason. Whisky is Scotland’s gift to the world, but don’t run away with the idea that all Scots drink it. We once spent a wonderful couple of weeks on holiday with a Scottish family who were the best company and, more importantly, introduced us to The Girder: vodka and Irn Bru – the true national drink of Scotland – which is impossible to put down until you fall down.

As well as being the birth place of the water of life, Scotland is also home to the most beautiful city in the world. Edinburgh is lively, peaceful, beautiful, ugly, modern and ancient; obviously wet and cold also, but it’s a place I constantly find myself wanting to get back to. If you live outside Britain well, obviously I am very sorry for you, but should you be able to visit the UK, please allow me to suggest that you forsake the lure of London, London, London for at least a few nights and visit the Scottish capital where you can enjoy the people, the city and especially the whisky after which, if you are assiduous enough in your endeavours, you will enjoy absolutely everything and love absolutely everyone.

As far as food is concerned in Scotland anything goes – as long as it is fried. There are few who would argue that the Scottish diet is the most healthy in the world. Real Scottish people – like all of us – eat a decent balance of foods, but the general perception is that they eat only foodstuffs that have been cooked in hot fat, pies and haggis. The Scots do not eat haggis. Haggis is just a joke against the English. Traditionally accompanied by ‘neeps and tatties (‘neeps’ being an abbreviation of turnips, despite the fact that they are not turnips at all, but actually mashed swede, and ‘tatties’ being mashed potato – together they are like the mush you first feed babies, but with absolutely nothing that would ever convince mini-humans to forsake the nipple) haggis is simply a bagful of all the stuff that can be dredged out of a dead animal that no-one in their right mind would ever eat drenched in sufficient herbs to disguise the flavour of a cadaver’s innards without actually making them in any way palatable. There is not a Scottish person alive that does not find the fact that English people actually believe that they eat haggis hilarious. Even funnier is that they have somehow persuaded the entire population of England that on the 25^th January each year (Burns Night) we should all eat haggis, neeps and tatties prior to coughing our insides out thanks to the unaccustomed snag of whisky on the effete English throat. (NB I have drunk whisky all my life but it took a trip to Scotland for me to learn that it takes a couple of drips of room temperature water to bring whisky to life. Long, long ago I asked for ice in my whisky in an Edinburgh pub and the barman looked askance at me, shook his head slowly and said “Ice? Do you not know what it did to The Titanic?” The conversation went no further.)

Scottish men do not wear kilts – they laugh at the thought of everyone with the most tenuous of associations to Scotland leaping into a thick, woollen skirt at the faintest whiff of a wedding – and nobody, but NOBODY actually listens to bagpipe music for enjoyment. In fact the phrase ‘bagpipe music’ is a total oxymoron. Bagpipes do not produce music, they produce a kind of shrieking death rattle. It is no coincidence that the sound they produce originates through a drone. The image of the lone piper swirling down on the advancing, kilted hordes is the stuff of legend. If it happened at all, it is almost certain that the skirted warriors were just trying to get away from the racket.

And finally, my last ‘Scotland fact’ for this post is that its national animal is the Unicorn which – unless you are a five year old girl you will know – does not actually exist and, therefore, could not possibly wear a kilt. Not even after whisky…

A Little Fiction – Winnie-the-Pooh and a Head Full of Kapok

IMG_2592 (2) — When you realise – too late – that the image you had planned to use is copyright, and you have to draw your own…

Having passed pristine through the hands of Christopher Robin and relatively unscathed through those of his children, Winnie-the-Pooh was now in the hands of the grandchildren and feeling the strain. The daily bump-bump-bump of his head on the stairs was taking its toll. He did not find thinking things through nearly as easy as he used to, and now he thought about it, he had never found it particularly easy in the first place. ‘Perhaps,’ he thought, ‘that’s what comes of having a head stuffed full of kapok.,’ although he had not the faintest idea of what kapok actually was and even less of a clue if that was what a bear of a certain age had stuffed in its head at all. Whatever it was he had stuffed between his ears, he was pretty sure that it was not nearly as densely packed as it used to be. ‘Perhaps that’s why I can’t erhm… can’t… Oh dear, what is it I can’t?’ thought Pooh. ‘Oh dear, I can’t remember. What is it I can’t remember? I can’t remember. Oh dear…’ Pooh sat on the bottom stair to collect himself. ‘Kapok,’ he mused. ‘Was it kapok? Oh dear, I forget. What is kapok?’ To calm himself, Pooh hummed a little hum he had just composed.

What is kapok? Goodness knows!
It must be something I suppose.
Perhaps it fills my head and toes
And possibly my down-belows.

Or is it sawdust in my head
That’s drained down to my feet instead
And trickled out through loosened thread
To join the fur-balls that I shed.

Whatever is inside of me
Is falling out as you can see
And taking consequentially
What little brain there used to be.

Pooh was very happy with his hum and he would have given it a tune if he hadn’t forgotten the first verse before he hummed the last…

Some time later, Pooh was tramping across what remained of the Hundred Acre wood – a small area of scrubland, bedecked with broken bicycles, burned out cars and soiled and soggy bed mattresses, in the middle of a semi-derelict housing estate – when he bumped into Piglet. ‘Where are you going?’ asked Pooh.
‘Why,’ said Piglet. ‘I’m not sure, but I believe I am going to the same place as you.’
‘In that case,’ said Pooh ‘I shall join you.’
And so Winnie-the-Pooh and Piglet tramped off together to find out where they were going.
‘How do you think we will know when we get there?’ asked Piglet.
‘Well, I suppose that after we get there we will start going back,’ said Pooh. ‘So then we’ll know.’
‘Why of course,’ said Piglet. ‘I would never have thought of that.’

Presently, some time after Winnie-the-Pooh had stopped to pick some dog shit out of his fur with a stick, Owl fluttered down beside the friends. Having lost all of his forebears to poisoned rodents, Owl was attempting to embrace a vegetarian diet – and it was not agreeing with him. ‘In the old days,’ he moaned, ‘I could cough up a pellet the size of a Mars Bar. Full of fur and bone. You really knew I’d been there. Now what do I cough up? Don’t know? I’ll tell you. Seeds! That’s what I cough up now, seeds. Nature’s stealth bomber, that was me. The silent killer. The nation’s favourite raptor. And what am I now? I’ll tell you. A budgie, that’s what I am. A bleedin’ budgie.’ He swivelled his head evilly through 360°. ‘I miss the taste of pulsing flesh, blood and bone,’ he said and licked his beak in a way that only owls can do.
‘I miss honey,’ said Pooh sadly. ‘I’ve written a little poem about it.’
‘Oh Gawd!’ said Owl.
‘Would you like to hear it?’
‘No!’ chorused Owl and Piglet.
‘Very well,’ said Pooh, clearing his throat with a little cough.

Soft and yellow, sweet and sticky
Eating it with paws is tricky.
After just a jar or two
I would be stuck up like glue

Long ago, in times that’s been
I would lick my paws quite clean,
But now everything I eat is
Governed by my diabetes.

‘I hate flippin’ porridge’ said Pooh with a distant look in his beady glass eyes. ‘And I really miss honey.’
‘And I,’ grumbled Eeyore, who had been following them quietly for some time. ‘I miss my tail.’
‘Eeyore,’ said Pooh. ‘I didn’t know you were there.’
‘It would seem to me,’ said Eeyore morosely, ‘that that is the story of my life.’
‘What is?’ asked Piglet, who had been momentarily distracted by an earwig under his vest.
‘Nobody knows I’m here,’ groaned Eeyore. ‘Or cares…’
‘I care,’ said Pooh. ‘You still owe me a fiver.’

Owl had fluttered around to the rear-end of Eeyore and was examining his rump closely. The button that had once held Eeyore’s tail in place was long-gone, leaving just a stub of severed threads. The tail itself, it was said, lay amongst various bags of assorted household effluvia at the local landfill. A small open seam close to its original location was held together with a rusting safety pin.
‘Perhaps,’ said Owl, ‘we could pin you a new tail there.’
‘Oh could you?’ said Eeyore. ‘That would make me so…’
‘Happy?’ suggested Winnie-the-Pooh.
‘Happy,’ said Eeyore. ‘Whatever that might be.’

So, whilst Eeyore stood beside a rusting shopping trolley contemplating his posterior, Winnie-the-Pooh, Owl and Piglet began to search for something that would make Eeyore a new tail.
‘It’s a shame Tigger can’t be here to help,’ said Piglet.
‘He seldom leaves his house,’ said Pooh. ‘His top is still made of rubber, but it’s lost all its bounce. His bottom has no spring…’
‘We should go and cheer him up later,’ said Piglet.
Too late,’ said Owl, looking at a watch he kept tucked under his wing (God knows how). ‘He’ll be on the outside of a bottle of Scotch by now and sleeping it off under a tree as usual. We could try tomorrow.’
‘Perhaps I could hum him a cheerful hum,’ said Pooh.
‘No,’ chorused Eeyore, Piglet and Owl, just a little too quickly for Pooh’s liking.
‘I think he just needs rest,’ said Owl.
‘But…’ began Pooh, when Piglet interrupted him excitedly.
‘I’ve found just the thing,’ he cried, holding up a short length of frayed, orange nylon rope. ‘It doesn’t quite match the rest of you, Eeyore, but it will hang down just like a tail.’
Eeyore almost smiled. ‘Do you think anyone will notice that it isn’t really a tail,’ he asked. ‘Me being grey and it being orange and nylon and all. Will it make me look younger? Will it turn back the sands of time? Will it make me more desirable to other donkeys?’
Owl polished the thick, bottle-glass lenses of his spectacles, rested them back on his beak and looked earnestly at Eeyore. ‘It will look,’ he said ‘just like it had never fallen off… in an orange, nylon kind of a way. And at a fraction of the price of a transplant.’

First Published 05.09.2019

I love these little parodies, but they only work when they keep as close to the original in style as possible. Winnie the Pooh was my go-to book right through childhood and I wanted this to be an affectionate piece, but I was aware that time had moved on…

The Poor Workman

I have recently staggered past my 66^th birthday, making me – in this country at least – officially a pensioner and so moving into a bungalow seems to be both natural progression and dauntingly ageing.

The move comes with a plethora of ‘jobs’ far better suited to a much younger and better man than I but, you know what it’s like, you have to at least try before you fail. By and large I am barred from all but the most elementary electrical repairs and my wife would much sooner drown than let me within a spanner’s length of plumbing, but pretty much everything else is up for grabs. I have lived in an old, traditionally built house for forty-plus years, I know all about hanging shelves in those, but dry-lined walls present me with a whole new challenge. Drill a long narrow hole and hammer a long, fat plug into it seems to be the way, but the non-tightening screw scenario has become the norm; the small plug within a large one my extremely amateur solution. I spend my life asking ‘do you think that shelf is sagging?’ and attempting to work out exactly what it is strong enough to support. Anything with a weight above ethereal must sit directly over the bracket and not in a position where the inevitable collapse would lead to the decapitation of a grandchild.

I have never encountered a building with so much buried metal: cables that are not where they should be; pipes that run from nowhere to nowhere; unidentified ferric lumps wherever I try to drill. I fear that this house may well have been originally built from Meccano. My drill bits have a near-fatal attraction to it. Mirror/photo/picture hanging, at least, features only a hammer and, in some form or another, a nail. The resulting damage is equally catastrophic, but at least it’s all over quickly…

And now I’m looking down the wrong end of a paint brush and a lifetime of painting and decorating. I am filling the hundreds of redundant holes I have drilled and sanding down with abandon (I’ve run out of sandpaper). On the TV this process leaves an unblemished surface. In my house it appears as if the walls have tumours. I don’t use textured pain on inside walls, it just looks like it. At least my emulsion skills are not as meagre as my glossing capabilities. I can turn a perfectly flat expanse of wood into a ploughed field with a single stroke of my rapidly balding brush. The paint does not so much dry as coagulate. What I am left with is basically a shiny scab – that’s when the paint bothers to dry at all. Often it just sits there like a disconsolate teenager, belligerently refusing to submit to its chemical imperative, clinging onto the very last vestiges of oleaginous existence. No door in my house can be shoved without sticking to it, none can be closed without fusing it shut. All vertical surfaces carry drips that can be seen from space.

And I defy anyone to blame lack of effort on my part: I really do try. Sheer incompetence lies at the root of my glossing woes. I have tried ‘taking my time’, watching the paint bond the brush to the door mid-stroke; I have tried to increase my speed and consequently splashed onto every solid surface between the doorframe and Jupiter. My attempts to improve the domestic environment seldom raise me above Genghis Khan.

I must admit that my toolkit probably leaves much to be desired. I have been known to use my trusty spirit level when installing curtain rails only to find that they are at such an angle as to render the curtains self-closing. I fear I must have a faulty bubble. I have a mitre block with which I can cut any angle between 45 and 90 degrees, but seldom twice. I have a dozen different types of screwdriver, but never the one I need to fit the screw. I have more hammers than you can shake a broken stick at. I am not the poor workman, but the tool that blames him…

Back Again

My new office not yet being in service I am writing this with my laptop on my knee in the lounge as my wife watches ‘Call the Midwife’ on TV, but contrary to commonly held opinion my-self absorption does have some limits and so, prior to dropping this onto the blog and plunging back into the world of all about me I hope to catch up with everything you have been doing before this appears in all its (vain)glory. You will, by now, know if I have managed to do it.

I will therefore begin this post by apologizing for my prolonged absence. Told at 2pm on 11^th December that the house move would definitely not happen until mid-January, we actually moved on Friday 13^th December in the kind of rush normally associated with free fries at MacDonalds. We spent the next couple of weeks falling apart and are only just beginning to pull ourselves together. Hopefully, barring electrocution, drowning or insipient madness, I will return to whatever passes for normal around here very soon.

It’s not that I have stopped writing in the weeks since the move, I have actually written dozens of posts, all ready to go as soon as I was back online, but having read them through I found that they were all about exactly the same thing: the new house (problems therewith), so I’ve binned them all. I want to start the New Year with at least some degree of optimism.

We are surrounded by boxes that we currently have no inclination to unpack. My lovely new office is packed to the door with what is to be the content of the new attic which is itself currently inaccessible – hence the knee tapping. I have spent two weeks attempting to find a way to persuade the might of Mr Branson’s empire to get me back online. I have spent that time traipsing around the homes of everyone I know in a bid to hi-jack their internet. I am sleep-deprived, anxious and (thanks to an unaccustomed acquaintance with various knives and other DIY accoutrements) my hands are home to more cuts than a Conservative Party Manifesto.

I have, God knows, a great many failings but I have always felt assured somehow that my head is, at least to a great extent, perpendicular: that is that my eyes run in the same general latitude as my shoulders. I do not know what misfortune has befallen the previous DIY practitioner at this house but nothing is horizontal, everything is cock-eyed. There is not a single electric socket that follows the grout line, there is not a single cupboard that does not lean at an angle similar to the Archbishop of Canterbury’s approach to pastoral care. Whomever DIY’d before me clearly had more screwdrivers than spirit levels.

There are so many things in a house that you do not notice until after you have moved in: the electrics here are a Gordian knot of hope and betrayed expectation, the plumbing dispenses water with an abandon seldom witnessed since the Red Sea got it back together. Even the bloody house number is falling off the wall. I am uncertain exactly how many ‘snags’ can be contained within a single property, but I begin to realise that ‘snagging’ must be a very secure profession indeed.

My wife is much more efficient than me at unpacking: when things are in her way she simply moves them so that they are in my way instead. Life is like a giant game of Ludo. Everything is moving round and round. Each box is opened, scrutinized and then moved elsewhere. Mostly they are sent back to the Start, but eventually I hope that some of them will begin to make it Home. I’ll let you know…

‘Twas the Night Before Christmas (with abject apologies to Clement Clarke Moore)

‘Twas the night before Christmas, when all through the house
Not a creature was stirring, not even a mouse;
It should have been squeaking away at its wheel
Not laying face down and stiff in its meal.

There’ll be tears in the morn’ when she comes with his bread
And your dear little daughter discovers him dead,
But still, do not worry, she will not stay sad
When she spots, through the wrapping, that she’s got an i-pad.

The stockings we hung by the chimney with strings,
Were not for all the extravagant things:
For those they have hanging, at the end of their beds
Two giant sacks with their names on instead.

The children were nestled all snug in their beds,
Whilst visions of smart phones danced in their heads
And mummy and I, with an hour to kill,
Were fearfully reading the credit card bill.

When out in the street arose such a din,
‘Cos the people next door were trying to get in,
But the key they were trying was turning no more,
Which wasn’t surprising – it wasn’t their door.

‘If you hadn’t guzzled that last Famous Grouse,
You’d have known straight away that it wasn’t our house.’
Said the wobbling wife as she stumbled for home
And was sick down the back of a small plastic gnome.

‘It’s four in the morning,’ an angry voice cried.
‘Just shut up your racket or I’m coming outside.’
Then all became silent, except, from afar
The sound of a key down the side of their car.

As dry leaves start falling from autumnal trees,
So snow began drifting along on the breeze
And high in the sky at the reins of his sled,
A white bearded man with a hat on his head.

‘Now Dasher, now Dancer, now Prancer and Vixen.
On Comet, on Cupid, on Donner and Blitzen!’
He cried to the reindeer in tones slurred and merry,
Having just swallowed his ten thousandth sherry.

And then, for a moment, I heard from the roof
An outburst of language that seemed most uncouth,
Then a flash by the window – a red and white blur
Of fat man and white beard; of red felt and fur.

He knocked on the door when he’d climbed to his feet
And adjusted his cloak ‘gainst the cold blinding sleet.
‘Just give me five minutes to sit by your fire
And I’ll see that your children get all they desire.’

We gave him some tea and both patiently sat
As he talked about this and he talked about that
And then, having eaten the last hot mince pie
He rose and he slapped on his red-trousered thigh.

He yawned – ‘I must return to my duty
My sled is still packed with a mountain of booty.’
And then, as he turned to the door with a wave
We reminded him of the promise he gave.

‘Of course, yes,’ he laughed, his jolly face beaming.
‘But quick now, while the kids are still dreaming.
Here, look at this dolly with glass-beaded eyes
And this wig and some glasses to make a disguise.’

‘A car made of tin and a train made of wood.
This big Snakes & Ladders is really quite good.
An orange, some nuts and a new, shiny penny.’
But electrical goods he hadn’t got any.

‘You conman,’ we cried. ‘You are not Santa Claus.
If we’d known it we would have left you outdoors.
The real Father Christmas would not carry such tat.
We want top class products – and brand names at that.’

‘Our kids will go mad if we give them this shite:
There are no soddin’ batteries and no gigabytes.
They don’t give a monkeys about innocence lost;
Just leave them a bill so they know what stuff costs.’

He turned to us now and his eyes filled with tears,
‘These presents have kept children happy for years.’
We looked at the list of the rubbish he’d got.
‘You silly old fool, you are losing the plot.’

He sprang to his sleigh crying ‘Sod this, I’m beat!’
And they all flew away to their Lapland retreat,
But I heard him exclaim ‘They are never content.
Now the thought doesn’t count – just the money you’ve spent.’

And so Christmas morning descended with gloom.
The children both rose and they looked round the room
At the i-phones, the i-pads, the Xbox and games
And they pulled at the labels and picked out their names.

Then at last they had finished, all presents unwrapped,
And we sat down for breakfast all energy sapped.
‘This is lame,’ they exclaimed. ‘This day is a bore.’
‘We’ve only got what we asked Santa Claus for.’

Then they saw on the floor where the old man had stood
A doll made of cloth and a train made of wood
And happily, low-tech, they played all the day
Whilst we packed all of their i-stuff away.

First published 22.12.2018

I have re-published this today for three reasons, 1) tonight is the night before christmas, 2) it is the first Christmas post I ever published on this platform and 3) six years on, I still rather like it.

Merry Christmas everyone.